Does religion cause war in the Middle East?

Answer 1

Yes, but it is one type of cause amidst others (political, economic, social, etc.)

1. Religion as a Direct Cause
The first and most prominent way that religion leads to war in the Middle East is the rise of Islamism and Jihadism. To clarify terms, Islam is a religion and Jihad is a religious concept within Islam. Islamism and Jihadism, however, are political ideologies whose goal is to bring the religious tenets of Islam into the daily functioning of a government and its laws. Jihadism not only wishes a particularly repressive version of Islamic Law to be instituted (Islamism), but believes that violence in defense of the faith is the preferred way to do this. Jihadism, like Islamism, is a political ideology rooted in Islamic religious concepts, but distorted. The distortion here is that there are many ways to advocate on behalf of Islam and the choice to exclusively use violence is a misinterpretation of the doctrine. There are a number of Jihadist militant groups in the Middle East, the most prominent being the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Because they have incorporated Islamic Law so firmly into their governing apparatus and their world view, their inspiration for outward violence is primarily religious.

2. Religion as a Secondary Inflammatory
The second way that religion will manifest in Middle Eastern conflict is as an inflammatory to cultural humiliations, economic or military failures, and other non-religious grievances, because religion will attach an eschatological or supernatural view on these events. This also makes negotiation or practical solutions useless because the actual issue (the supernatural one) cannot be adequately resolved. A perfect example of this is how the Iranian government, which supports both Hezbollah and Hamas (Jihadist militant organizations that attack Israel primarily), categorizes Israel as the Dajjal (the Islamic equivalent of the Anti-Christ), citing the awful treatment of the Palestinians under military occupation as the evidence of this claim. However, making the claim that Israel is supernaturally evil effectively means that the Israeli government and people cannot provide any solution that would work for Iran because Israel is inherently and inexorably evil and must be defeated for the end of the world (apparently a positive thing) to come.

3. Religion as an Ethnic Identifier
The third way is that, in many Middle Eastern state with large minorities, the conflicts between these groups break out along religious lines since the religions serve as good ethnic identifiers. This means that a person's religion is more or less akin to a different ethnicity rather than "simply a personal choice". This may be more familiar to a European context if Catholic and Anglican Irishmen are considered. In many cases both religious groups speak same language, eat the same foods, and live in mixed communities and mixed provinces. What is key to note, though, is that in these cases, religion is not used in the "dogmatic" or "excommunicatory" sense, which is to say that one religious group does not targeted because of its blasphemous beliefs, but because of the ethnic identities that are aligned by the religious groupings. The Lebanese Civil War and its continuing aftermath pitted Maronite Christians against Sunni Muslims against Shiite Muslims. The Iraqi Insurgency pitted a unified government with Kurdish Peshmerga allies against Shiite Extremists and Sunni Extremists. Just as in the Jugoslav case, these groups do not attack each other on account of their religious differences, but use the different religions to identify what part of society or which group each person belongs to.