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I was reading a novel, and I couldn’t continue reading it, so instead I turned to the Danish translation of Amartya Sen’s book “Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny”

I am still only half-through with the book, but so far I must say that I really like it. In a non-pretensious language, but with a tendency to repeat his main points over and over in the different chapters, Amartya Sen lays forth an individualistic view of people that really hits home with my own views. To me, it is absolutely horrendous to speak of a “Clash of Civilizations”, a term that Samuel Huntington coined some years ago with his book. As such, Amartya Sens book can be seen as a direct response to Huntington, but it is also much more than that.

There are quite a few questions that arise while reading the book, and one of them was well put forward by Andrew G. Burridge, a reviewer on amazon.co.uk:

What it doesn’t solve, for me, is what we do when people *do* chose a single identity. Or more that, while we accept that people are free to ascribe different important to their complex and contradictory identities - some identities do have a basic ‘core’ that may be positive, or negative. Being a football fan will tend to involve taking an interest in football. In this, how do we criticise those aspects of faith which appear to have a negative impact? A muslim may not declare jihad every time he goes to the post office, but is that because he isn’t being a very good muslim?

To me, religion is like fire: It can be used for good, or for bad, but it is neither good or evil in itself. One of the points of the book by Amartya Sen is that by giving the religious aspect of people’s identity a far bigger importance than it perhaps deserves, we are doing a disservice to the “integration” we wish so well to achieve. Surely, there are Muslims who are very Muslim in their daily life, just like there are Christians who take things much further than church once a week and the prayer before food at the table, but can we assume that a group of people - hundreds of million of people - can be put into neat boxes based on their religion? Also, how do we effectively meet the threat that religious fanaticism does pose to the world?

I will write more about this book once I have finished it. In the meantime, I was happy to find that Dr. Moira Gunn from ITConversations had an interview with Amartya Sen that you can listen to here.