Politics & Power Quote by Jurgen Habermas

Habermas is doing what he’s always done best: yanking a moral panic back into the realm of institutions, incentives, and power. The sentence looks like a calm clarification, but it’s a rebuke. It pushes against the lazy habit of treating “religious fanaticism” as a kind of anthropological weather pattern - irrational, timeless, and therefore beyond politics. For Habermas, that’s precisely the mistake that lets states, movements, and opportunists operate with impunity. If fundamentalism is framed as pure theology, then the response becomes either cultural contempt or security spectacle. If it’s read as political camouflage, the harder questions return: who benefits, what grievances are being metabolized, what failures of governance are being converted into sacred language?

The phrasing “cover for political motifs” is deliberately clinical, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. He refuses the intoxicating drama of civilizational clash in favor of something more embarrassing: strategic action dressed up as ultimate truth. The word “motifs” matters too - not “causes” or “reasons,” but recurring themes, suggesting patterns across cases rather than a single origin story. He’s cautioning against both naivete (taking the theology at face value) and reductionism (explaining religion away as nothing but politics). The warning is methodological: don’t let the sacred vocabulary obscure the earthly mechanisms.

Contextually, this sits in Habermas’s post-9/11 era work on religion in the public sphere and the “post-secular” condition. He’s trying to keep liberal democracies from responding to religious violence with either blanket stigmatization or a depoliticized fatalism. Read properly, it’s less about Islam as an essence and more about how modern conflicts recruit religious identity as a powerful, portable legitimacy machine.