The streets of Ayodhya, India in March 2024, two months after the installation of the idol in the Ram Temple. Photo by Dinesh Khanna.
The Unfinished Business of Partition
The Partition of British India in August 1947 yielded two decolonized nations: India, a secular democracy, and Pakistan, a new homeland for the Muslims of South Asia. At 14–15% of the population of independent India, Muslims, numbering a little over 200 million, constitute a minority so large as to rival the populations of Muslim-majority Pakistan and Indonesia.
For the first 50 years after partition and independence, Indians voted consistently to retain the multi-religious plurality of their state, with equal rights for all citizens, and special protections for minorities. But the last quarter century or so since the mid–late 1990s has seen the rise of Hindu nationalist ideology, which seeks to rebuild India as a nation of Hindus. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has led the movement towards majoritarianism, targeting Muslims with a view toward rendering illegitimate their equal claim to Indian citizenship secured in India’s liberal Constitution of 1950.
Today the BJP has been in power for a decade, winning two consecutive national elections in 2014 and 2019, under the leadership of a populist strongman, Narendra Modi. He and his party are expected to win a third term, as India—the world’s largest democracy—goes to the polls in April and May this year, with almost 970 million registered voters and 2,660 registered political parties contesting elections.
The BJP started out in 1980 as a partisan outfit representing a fringe section of Hindus who were politically rightwing and socially conservative, believed that religious identity should be the basis of nationality, and wanted to carry forward what they perceived as the “unfinished business” of Partition, making India a Hindu counterpart to Muslim Pakistan. They had never bought into the central values of India’s struggle for freedom from British colonialism, principally non-violence and self-rule advocated for by Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, and secularism and pluralism enshrined in the Constitution and practiced by Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s immensely loved and universally respected first prime minister from 1947 to 1964.
Such was the resentment among Hindu nationalists about the creation of Pakistan that on January 30, 1948, scarcely six months after independence, a far-right terrorist named Nathuram Godse along with his associates assassinated Mahatma Gandhi at his regular evening prayer meeting. This one act of ideological extremism, while intended to repudiate the Gandhian character of the nationalist movement and brand Pakistan as India’s permanent existential enemy, ironically proved to be suicidal as well. It was enough to send the Hindu Right into the political wilderness for the next 30–35 years.
Starting in 1980 when it was founded, the BJP, in a little over four decades, has built itself up as a behemoth, a seemingly unstoppable force, that now dominates India’s multi-party democracy. In the 2019 election, the BJP captured less than 40% of the vote share but won enough votes to hold 293 out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament (and it controls even more seats in alliance with its supporters and subordinates). The goal of the BJP is to redefine the Republic of India as a Hindu Rashtra or Hindu Nation—something that should have happened straight away in 1947, from the Hindu Right’s perspective.
People’s Nation or Ram’s Kingdom?
The BJP’s ascent to occupy centerstage in India has been built around a campaign to spread its core ideology of Hindu nationalism, called Hindutva, which projects Hindus as the original and rightful Indians, and Muslims as the descendants of invaders and proselytizers. Its most potent symbol has been the Hindu deity Ram, an avatar of the god Vishnu. In his human form as the heroic warrior-king of the kingdom of Ayodhya, Ram is the protagonist of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, authored by the poet Valmiki and popular in different versions across the Indian subcontinent for at least 2000 years.
While the Ramayana as an epic poem has enjoyed a complex and multi-lingual literary career over the past two millennia, reaching every part of India, the BJP has sought to “make Ayodhya great again” so to speak, in a very targeted manner. Ayodhya, Ram’s mythic capital, has been since independence a rather sleepy little town in northern India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, on the banks of the river Sarayu. While it is considered a holy place of pilgrimage for Hindus, it was never as well-known as the much larger and older city of Varanasi (also called Kashi or Benaras), some 250 kms further south and east down the river Ganga. Ayodhya is associated with the god Ram; Varanasi with the god Shiva.
Varanasi, newly built steps and gateway leading from the Ganga river to the Temple of Shiva, Kashi Vishwanath, March 2024. Photo by Dinesh Khanna.
At the end of the 1980s the BJP began to mobilize public sentiment against a small, historically obscure and architecturally insignificant mosque in Ayodhya, called the Babri Masjid, dated roughly to the reign of Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530 CE). Babur was a Chagatai Turk descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, who established the Mughal Empire in India 500 years ago (r. 1526–30 CE). He ruled from Agra, which is about 500 km west of Ayodhya; it wasn’t until the reign of the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal at Agra, that the capital was moved to Delhi (in 1638 CE).
Hindu nationalists claimed that the Babri mosque in Ayodhya stood exactly where there used to be a temple marking the very birthplace (janma-bhoomi) of Ram in his human form, thousands of years ago, as told in the epic. They demanded the removal of the mosque and its replacement by a temple for Ram (Ram Mandir), with the infant Ram (Ram Lalla) installed therein as the idol for Hindus to worship.
Starting in September 1990, Hindutva leaders mounted a nationwide campaign that culminated in the razing of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 by a mob of several hundred vandals and militants, who literally stormed the building and broke it down. The demolition triggered violence across the country, leaving a trail of destruction, and putting India’s Muslims on notice, though it wasn’t clear at that time what eventual fate awaited them in the future.
The next episode of mass violence against Muslims, much of it gruesome, took place 10 years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, in Gujarat, in February 2002. At that time the Chief Minister of Gujarat, a large and prosperous state in western India, was Narendra Modi. Gujarat has several important ports on the Arabian Sea to the west of peninsular India, which gave it a flourishing culture of trade and commerce with the Mediterranean world, the Gulf, and East Africa from ancient times.
Historically, many of Gujarat’s wealthy maritime and business communities are composed of Muslims of different denominations. In 2002 the Modi administration appeared to aid and abet what many called a pogrom that left over 1000 dead and more than 2500 injured (according to government figures— actual numbers were much higher), the casualties overwhelmingly Muslim.
The BJP was voted out of power in the 2004 general election; it would take another decade for Modi to come to power as the head of the national government in New Delhi, in May 2014. Modi chose Varanasi as his electoral constituency, since it is the holiest city for Hindus, but he had his sights set on Ayodhya.
Ayodhya, 1992–2024
On January 22, 2024, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi performed a brief ritual at a new temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, intended to install and infuse with life an idol of the deity Ram, represented as a 5-year-old human child carved out of black granite sourced from the southern state of Karnataka.
In Hindu practice, idols of deities must be ritually “awakened” or “enlivened” before they become active as objects of worship, theologically efficacious and interactively responsive to the prayers of their devotees. As an idol-maker in Tamil Nadu explained to the writer William Dalrymple, it is faith that transforms a mere sculpture into a sacred idol. Crucial in this passage from a lifeless representation to an embodiment of divinity, is the consecration of the idol and the opening of its eyes, which allows not only worshippers to see their god, but more importantly, the living deity to return their gaze. The opportunity for a precious moment of mutual beholding, darshan, is what draws Hindu believers to temples.
The new Ram Temple in Ayodhya which is still under construction as of March 2024. Photo by Dinesh Khanna.
The story of Ram’s career on earth, the rama-katha, finds its definitive source in the Sanskrit epic by the classical poet Valmiki, the Ramayana. Ram the prince of Ayodhya goes into a 14 year-long exile on account of a succession struggle in his father’s kingdom, orchestrated by one of his stepmothers who wants her own son to be king. While Ram is wandering in the forest with his beautiful wife Sita and his loyal younger brother Lakshman, the powerful demon Ravan, king of Lanka, abducts Sita and imprisons her in his magnificent fortified capital.
Ram and Lakshman must find her and win her back. To do so requires Ram to wage war against Ravan. He is unfairly positioned relative to his powerful adversary, since he is in exile, but nevertheless he manages to gather an army of supporters—human as well as animal—recruited over the course of his quest. He goes forth bravely into enemy territory to fight a terrible battle and slay the demon-king.
Thereafter the trio return victorious to Ayodhya. But Ram’s deference to public opinion and his moral righteousness make him subject his beloved queen to a fire ordeal to prove that her virtue is intact despite her long captivity in Ravan’s palace. Only after Sita comes through the fire unscathed does he ascend the throne that was always rightfully his, to establish the perfect kingdom (Ram Rajya).
This tale travels all over the subcontinent and beyond, to Southeast Asia; it is told across languages and historical periods; it is attested for over two millennia in a number of versions and variations. Temples dedicated to Ram, as well as depictions of scenes from the Ramayana in temples for other gods like Shiva, have arisen over the centuries, and can be found today almost everywhere in India and overseas where there are Hindus. Ram appears in poetry and painting, music and dance, sculpture and architecture, prayer and pilgrimage, philosophy and theology coming down to us from ancient times.
The idol in Ayodhya is of an innocent Ram Lalla. The child form is key to the significance of the inaugural ritual on January 22, 2024. The temple in which Ram Lalla has been enshrined is supposed to mark the precise birthplace, janma-bhoomi, where the supreme god Vishnu was incarnated as the avatar Ram, prince and eventually sovereign of the kingdom of Ayodhya, in an earlier age of the world.
What distinguishes recent events at Ayodhya in the new Ram Mandir (temple for Ram that is still under construction), with the child deity, called Ram Lalla? What sets the January 22 ritual apart from the temples, idols, narratives and communities of the devout that have been such an integral part of popular faith, literary culture, and sacred architecture for the greater part of India’s recorded history?
In part 2 of this essay, I will explore the ramifications of the history described so far for the political present.
Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is the author of the award winning book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India(Harvard University Press, 2012) and a co-editor of two volumes, Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Minorities and Populism: Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe (Springer, 2020). She writes widely on politics, arts and ideas for newspapers and magazines in India and internationally. She has published in Foreign Affairs, New York Times, The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, New Statesman and World Policy Journal, among other venues. She has recently been a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University and a Charles Wallace Fellow at CRASSH, Cambridge, and is currently a Research Consultant on the Nilgiri Archeological Project at the University of Ghent, Belgium. She was invited to teach at CM's Madrasa Discourses intensive in Nepal in July 2022. At present she is finishing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit, and has a long-term project on the life and ideas of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.
Jean-Loup Vithien-Gerard portrait of Albert Camus. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the 1947 novel The Plague, his great allegory of the struggle against fascism during the Second World War, French Algerian Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote, “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky” (35). As the razing of Gaza continues, we can learn from thinkers like Camus who confronted the realities of terror in his time with resolute commitment to human equality.
Camus’s context was French rule in Algeria, a North African colony and later part of France until its 1962 independence. Conflict erupted between the pieds-noirs, French Algerian citizens of European descent, and Indigenous Arab and Berber populations who, despite their overwhelming majority, were denied political and civil rights. Despite being a colon, or “settler,” Camus’s lifelong anti-colonialist activism confronted systemic injustice and sought a “fair Algeria, where both peoples can and must live in peace and equality.” He stood athwart an Arab nationalist insurgency that targeted and killed many civilians, led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and state counterterror and settler vigilantism. Amid death threats, Camus insisted that nothing strips human beings of their right not to be murdered.
The Camusian argument to follow is that the wrongness of murder is obvious, straightforward, and sets a normative limit on how one may wage or justify resistance to violence or oppression; and that ignoring this is wrong, not least because it hinders shared recognition of responsibility for harms and blocks solidarity in seeking peace with truth and justice.
Against Executioners
The term “executioner” fills Camus’s writings, reflecting his passionate opposition to capital punishment. His revulsion at what he called “the most premeditated of murders” can be felt in his 1942 novel The Stranger, published in Nazi-occupied Paris where he lived and secretly worked as a journalist and editor-in-chief of Combat, a banned Resistance newsmagazine. And it’s central to The Plague, where Tarrou, Camus’s mouthpiece in the fable of resistance against occupation and oppression, declares, “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences” (236).
I believe that standing against executioners is twofold: we must identify, and avoid identifying with, those who commit or excuse murder. Moreover, we have a special responsibility for wrongful acts we help others do.
We clearly help others harm by materially supporting their efforts. But we also help the harmful when they credibly act in our name or by our authority. If I am in a power-sharing relationship with another, their acts bear my imprint, marking my character. In a way, we act together, which is the basic meaning of “complicity.”
These are plain facts about sharing moral responsibility for what others do. Their truth rests on common sense and experience, not fancy theories. They mean my personal involvement in a crisis has the greatest relevance to what I should say or do about it. Grand narratives and intellectual frameworks deserve a subordinate, defeasible role.
Discourse about Israel/Palestine revolves around concepts like “Zionism,” “apartheid,” and “a nation’s right to exist.” These evoke important realities. In The Plague, Camus has the redoubtable Dr. Rieux, who distrusts sweeping ideals, admit that “when the abstraction is trying to kill you, you have to pay attention to it” (93). But abstractions cannot simply dictate how I should respond to crisis. I must know who I am in relation to it, whether harm is done with my help or in my name.
Against Abstraction
In The Rebel, Camus confronts the tendency to prioritize abstractions over lives. Devotees of stories about historical purity or theories of utopian progress readily find reasons for eliminating real people who appear as obstacles. Venerating ideas risks devaluing individuals. Such “redemptive politics” wears many guises: capitalist imperialism, totalitarian communism, colonialist domination, revolutionary terror. No monopoly exists on this perverse idolatry of the ideal.
Redemptive politics also inspires moral perversions on the far left, as recently illustrated by victim-blaming statements issued by progressive organizations like the Democratic Socialistsof America. Ethically, nothing makes anyone more murderable. Yet blaming terror on its victims is a longstanding moral blind spot on the left. Camus’s contemporaries John-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon theorized that the source of all violence in anticolonial struggles are colonial systems and settler populations, which are therefore “entirely responsible” for it. Some on today’s left inherit these ideas, twisted fictions of agency that reduce human beings to conduits of abstractly described structural forces. This is how an otherwise normal person comes to believe that a grand historical process or myriad institutions, not an angry man aiming a loaded gun at a child he views as a colonizer, is responsible for pulling the trigger.
None of this entails a broad equivalence between far-right demagogues who weaponize antisemitic accusations to justify Israeli atrocities and far-left actors who blame October 7 on its victims. The Camusian lesson is rather that ideology must not be used to justify atrocity any more than to block legitimate resistance to oppression.
“Humanity Isn’t an Idea”
Standing against executioners while keeping abstraction in its place means recognizing our relations to the realities of murder. Two points help: all civilian life matters equally and we are responsible for the destruction of life to which we contribute.
These operations have killed over 33,000 Palestinians, of whom three-quarters are women, children, and elderly. The U.N. Secretary General describes Gaza, one of the most densely populated regions in the world, as a “graveyard for children.” At half of Gaza’s population, children constitute over 13,000 of those so far killed by Israel. This amounts to roughly twelve times as many children slain by Israeli forces as all Israelis killed on October 7. A human-centered ethic means nothing if not solidarity with every child.
This carnage constitutes unjustified killing for two reasons.
Anyone like me, in whose name an ideology or identity is used to justify carnage, must “venture into a no-man’s-land between hostile armies.” The Plague’s Dr. Rieux addresses us too when he reminds his colleague, Rambert, who lapses into abstraction amid crisis, that “Humanity isn’t an idea” (175).
For “A Civilian Truce”
On January 22, 1956, Camus delivered a violently protested speech in Algiers. In a desperate plea to pieds-noirs and Arab nationalists, he begged both to refrain from murder. The foremost reason was “one of simple humanity,” that “no cause justifies the death of the innocent.” He later dispatched over 150 letters to French authorities urging mercy for Arab militants facing execution or imprisonment, some of whom Camus believed had committed atrocities. Some letters spared lives. But Camus’s antiracist appeal for a civilian truce failed. His public voice lapsed into “Sophoclean silence.”
My Sisyphean appeal joins many others’. Jewish Voice for Peace’s declaration, “Not in our name!”, acknowledges a heightened obligation to oppose murder when one’s authority is used to justify it—even illegitimately or indirectly. This is the tragic side of responsibility. When others speak or act on my behalf, they pose, and would answer, the question of who I should be taken to be. They put a choice before me: to define myself or let them do it for me.
Camus understood that withdrawal from a violent world may tempt us but isn’t possible. The effort makes us bystanders, if not strangers, to ourselves. “By our silence or by the stand we take,” he reminds us, “we too shall enter the fray.”
Christian M. Golden is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. He is an ethicist specializing in the impact of identity and difference on relationships of authority, intimacy, and trust. His research explores the normative and psychological dimensions of agency, the character and limits of subjectivity, and the place and value of conflict in human affairs. His latest work examines commitment and citizenship by investigating the nature and scope of virtues like civility, humility, integrity, and justice. He received the 2020 Tropaia Outstanding Faculty Award for Georgetown University’s Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies Program.
Nelson Maldonado Torres speaks to students, staff, and faculty during his visit to Notre Dame’s campus on March 8, 2023. (Photo by Matt Cashore).
Introduction
At a time when decolonization has become a buzzword across the university and wider social discourse—especially under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—clarity about what decolonization entails is required. On March 7 and 8 of 2023 Nelson Maldonado-Torres joined Contending Modernities to present a lecture and to sit for an interview to outline his approach to decolonization. Maldonado-Torres carefully distinguished the decolonial project from piecemeal reforms that do little more than chip around the edges of the status-quo, whether from liberal politicians or university leaders. Drawing on his own activist and scholarly work, Maldonado-Torres outlined a decolonial politics and epistemology rooted in a radical notion of love. In conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and others, he challenged both conservative and liberal posturing that would prioritize law and order (sometimes under the guise of “justice”) that seeks to maintain a status quo that is predicated on the preservation of Whiteness. The result of Maldonado-Torres’ exposition is a radical notion of what decoloniality entails: the reorganization of the university as we know it and the reimagining of what is entailed in radical politics. It is here where religious practices, such as prayer, offer ways of understanding ourselves and relations to others in profoundly revolutionary ways.
Lecture
On March 7, 2023 Maldonado-Torres presented a lecture for the Contending Modernities research initiative titled “Countering the Coloniality of Peace and Justice.” The recording of this lecture, along with timestamps highlighting the various chapters of the lecture, are below.
Interview
Atalia Omer (AO): In your talk and in your work, you are critical of various uses of the terms decolonization and decoloniality in the academy, arguing instead that decolonization entails a careful consideration of abolition and reparations that is typically missing in academic calls for decolonization. So, what is the relation between decolonization and concepts and praxes of abolitions and reparation?
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (NMT): In recent years, different movements/organizations of activists have been making important connections between decolonization and abolition. In the US, for example, decolonization is very much linked to the Indigenous Land Back movement, and abolition has been primarily associated with the abolition of slavery as well as with the abolition of the prison industrial complex. And so there have been increasing efforts to explore the connections and synergies between these concepts and projects. The growing consensus is that abolition is part of the process of decolonization and vice versa. For me, coming from the Caribbean context, the mutual implication of decolonization and abolition is very clear, perhaps most notably, because of their entanglement during the Haitian Revolution. Haiti became independent from France while also abolishing slavery, and so therefore in the Haitian case it was clear that decolonization involves political, aesthetic, spiritual, and epistemic liberation as well as the abolition of slavery and related structures of dehumanization. In short, how I understand decoloniality combines decolonization and abolition, and I trace this back to the Haitian revolution, among similar revolts in what the Zapatistas have referred to as the long night of 500 years. I have described in my work the Haitian revolution as the first major moment of the decolonial turn, and when you take the Haitian revolution as a reference, then, decolonization and abolition are organically connected. It is important today, for a number of reasons, to continue to work in that direction. Haiti is also a very important case because Haiti was made to pay reparations to France because of their losses. So this is the audacity when of course—
AO: When you have the Eiffel Tower!
NMT: When of course, what was due was reparations to the Haitian people, an imperative that remains relevant today. So, clearly in the context of massive forms of colonization, independence is not enough. You need to abolish the institutions that are serving as mechanisms of domination—different forms of domination in your society—and the former colonial powers need to not only pay reparations, but also engage in reparations. It’s kind of a threefold project and demand: decolonization, abolition, reparations as part of decoloniality. By decoloniality I mean both the undoing of coloniality in all its forms and expressions as well as the cultivation of existing and new forms of communality, forms of subjectivity, and forms of sociality that emerge out of the very process of organizing to counter colonization. In the case of the Haitian revolution, it is in the very process of engaging in the revolution, and before that in the process of the formation of what Jean Casimir calls the “counter-plantation system” that provide an anchor of sorts in the unfolding of combative decoloniality.
You need to abolish the institutions that are serving as mechanisms of domination—different forms of domination in your society—and the former colonial powers need to not only pay reparations, but also engage in reparations.
In the counter-plantation system, you find the seeds of a new order, but for that order to happen you need abolition, and you also need reparations. So decolonization cannot work without abolition and it cannot work without reparations. If we take it from there and we think about places like the university, then whenever we talk about decolonization we need to talk about abolition and reparations. If we are not talking about abolition and reparations, then we are not really talking about decolonization. And it is interesting that many of these recent efforts or projects to pay attention to decolonization, they ultimately make decolonization collapse into projects of diversity and inclusion that reject the grammar of reparation. So, we have to be very careful about this academic commodification of decolonization and decoloniality within a liberal grammar that does not admit the question of reparations or that sees it as something completely different from what we are supposed to be asking and doing now.
AO: Perfect! Maybe you can tell us more about why you are thinking specifically about the need to abolish the humanities?
NMT: Abolish the humanities. Yes. As I see it, decoloniality opens up a horizon of multiple imperatives for change, including reparations, different forms of creolization, and abolition. There is no decolonization or decoloniality without engaging in the abolition of the logic of coloniality, which might involve the abolition of whatever it is that one is decolonizing. This prevents us from approaching decolonization as a project that recentralizes practices that need to morph and in some cases disappear in the very process of coming together to combat coloniality. This is at the crux of what the Frantz Fanon Foundation, which I co-chair, has proposed as combative decoloniality.
In that sense, decolonization entails abolition as a necessary step, or as a permanent possibility. Today, more and more in academia, one finds that decolonization tends to collapse into a call for minimal transformation, preserving the position of the scholar as expert, and doing away with the ideas/imperatives of abolition and reparations. At most, these are forms of decoloniality-lite that facilitate a certain commodification of the decolonial in liberal settings. This commodification is at work in calls to decolonize the humanities, when this call serves to recentralize the humanities rather than to consider the potential need for its abolition, and the abolition of the knowledge apparatus that makes the humanities, as an area within the liberal arts and sciences, possible. The humanities are often glorified, conceived as an effective antidote against the prevalence of technocratic and neoliberal imperatives in industrial and post-industrial societies. However, they remain part of what Sadri Khiari and Houria Boutledja have referred to as the immune system of Whiteness, and particularly so, of the White academic field. This means that the space of the humanities invites oppositions to neoliberalism as much as it also foments oppositions to decoloniality and abolition. The humanities open small spaces for scholars of color, but they truly are, first and foremost, a refuge for liberal Whiteness, which is why the humanities often militate against decolonial knowledge formations that resist accommodation within the established 19th century epistemology that dominates in the globalized modern/colonial university. That is why I believe that the time has come to explicitly engage in the effort to abolish them and, through that effort, engage in the process of supporting other ways of conceiving of education and of knowledge creation. We need not despair. The humanities were invented, and so we can invent something else building from everything at our disposal, including the critical analysis and strategic use of concepts and methods fostered in the humanities and the sciences, and recognizing the many spaces that have always already existed beyond the scope of the liberal arts and the humanities. Of these, of particular relevance are those that have participated and/or participate in the struggle against coloniality and for the restoration of the intersubjective bonds that have been severely undermined under the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality. At the core of this activity might be the cultivation of combative decolonial attitudes (rather than liberal and modern/colonial attitudes) that seek to prepare subjects and communities to engage in decolonial and abolitionist struggle. This struggle involves fostering a pluriverse of decolonizing practices and ideas grounded in those practices, with particular attention to those found in decolonial, abolitionist, and similar combative collectives, and facilitate their interaction and mutual enrichment, always respecting and following the lead of the practitioners/thinkers themselves. At stake is the possibility for the damné to emerge as a co-combatant, and not merely as a professional, presumed expert, or scholar. As Sylvia Wynter has warned us, though, humanities scholars would tend to resist this impulse as much or more as scholars of Scholasticism rejected the humanities when they first emerged. The humanities were born in a particular time, institutionalized during a particular time, and grounded on specific philosophies the premises of which have been challenged or changed since then.
AO: We can think specifically about Kant or…
NMT: Yes, we can think of Enlightenment thinkers and figures like Immanuel Kant who served as reference and as inspiration for how to conceive the modern research university. We also need to consider how in the last two centuries other things have happened in the university that were not anticipated for most of its history. For me one of the most important things that has happened is the emergence of Black studies and ethnic studies fields, all of which defy the division of knowledge in terms of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences. However, since these forms of “studies” are expected to be incorporated within the established horizon of the liberal arts and sciences—because no other horizon is considered to be possible—they are forced to exist in a context that constantly militates against their decolonial dimensions and that seeks to make them work in the mode of pursuing incessant struggles for recognition and accommodation. At best, the humanities and the social sciences open relative spaces for these areas, while keeping their most combative decolonial dimensions, grounded on movement-based epistemic and aesthetic formations, in check.
AO: But you are not against studying literature?
NMT: Exactly. I’m referring to the humanities as a general framework within which different activities that are sometimes labeled as humanities activities are accommodated. My point is that they are better identified, they are better-affirmed—these activities like thinking, writing, interpretation—when conceived in a different kind of paradigm, not the paradigm of the humanities and social sciences, but a much more plural and dynamic paradigm that is deeply and intrinsically linked with anti-racism and decoloniality.
For me one of the most important things that has happened is the emergence of Black studies and ethnic studies fields, all of which defy the division of knowledge in terms of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences.
The humanities have become—and this is the other reason why I think that it is time to firmly proceed with their abolition—not only some stumbling block for other forms of knowledge, but also a refuge for liberal Whiteness, as I already mentioned. They have served as a refuge for liberal Whiteness—focused on the abstract principles of liberty, equality, tolerance, free speech, and more recently diversity and inclusion—in its opposition to conservative Whiteness—focused on the perceived integrity of the nation, based on what is understood as its core—, and neoliberal Whiteness—focused on perceived efficiency in the service of unending growth. In the academy, now more than 50 years after the formation of the first ethnic study programs, it is time for us to demand further transformations and to take away these refuges that liberal Whiteness has created for itself.
Joshua Lupo (JSL): To get back to your discussion of justice during your talk, there you were saying that when the right wing proposes something outrageous that they’re going to do, President Biden responds by saying, “we’re going to stand for justice.” It sounds like there’s a similar idea you are exploring here in the sense that Governor Ron DeSantis says that Florida is going to get rid of African American studies—or even African American history—and only do “American history,” to which the liberal humanist replies, “No, no, no. We need these things.” Then the question is: What exactly are we protecting when we respond to right–wing talking points in this way? What do we want the alternative to be? Is it just that we’re studying Shakespeare for our own personal edification, or is it something more? Do you see those two as linked?
NMT: Yes, certainly. While conservatives embrace the rhetoric of “law and order,” liberals respond with the accent on justice, by which they mean justice as conceived by the modern/colonial liberal nation-state. Similarly, in the context of the struggle for education in the university, you find some sectors that call for justice. They will say that we need to stand up for justice as a topic, as a thematic, in academia. But as I pointed out, the concept of justice has already been mobilized to undermine the claims of anti-racist knowledge formations in the university, so justice-talk has also been compromised and it has always had its limits. Liberals come closer to an actual defense of Black, Indigenous, and ethnic studies when they question the conservative attack on Critical Race Theory, which has become the label to refer to all of these knowledges.
AO: They don’t know what it means.
NMT: Exactly. They don’t know what it means. The Republicans don’t know what it means and they criticize it. And the liberals don’t have any other way to define it, whatever it is. But I think that ultimately, they mean something like diversity and inclusion.
AO: Yeah. I mean, we see it here, too.
JSL: We don’t know what to do, but we need to do something for the public.
NMT: Yes, exactly, the little that exists of CRT has been gained through struggle and pushes so that the liberal system has had to make concessions. But when the liberal system makes concessions, it also doesn’t do so passively; it takes these concepts over and recodifies them, right? So, it opens, appropriates, and then turns what it incorporates into a subset of something else that it controls.
AO: It multiplies and you see it over and over again.
NMT: Exactly. That’s the cycle. And so, ideas like justice, the humanities—I mean we should all be tired of seeing the same project every now and again in the name of justice, the humanities, the humans, and so forth. Ultimately, using those as tools to say, on the one hand that “we are so progressive,” and, on the other, that “everyone should be grateful to us that we are so progressive, benevolent, and you know.” But then what you are really doing is stopping the possibility of further, more radical, anti-racist and decolonial forms of thinking and action. And then you are providing refuge for liberal Whites to counter the other forms of Whiteness, that of conservatives and agents of neo-liberalism, but also counter the pressure that comes from the movements from below. So, the liberal engages in at least two forms of countering at once while appearing benevolent, progressive, and rational. It’s quite a rhetorical trick, and that’s why I think that we should resist confronting right-wing attacks by celebration or endorsements of liberal projects and visions such as what typically takes place in calls to defend the humanities. Because already, time has gone by and we know that we’re going to be singing the same song for the next 100 years. We need to somehow at least tell White liberals: “we know what you are doing and we’re not going to play your game,” right? And we need to enter into the space and reconceptualize the questions. You can enter there and begin to change the pieces, but the liberals don’t want you to change the grammar. They will say: “You need to defend justice and you need to defend the humanities.”
AO: And you need to use the existing grammar.
NMT: Exactly. Ultimately, at the end of the day, this ties to settler colonialism because all of this is a function of baptizing as legitimate the order that has emerged and been built on this land and so on. So, all of that will go without question. You don’t question possession of the land. You don’t question anything else. You take an entire array of matters as presuppositions: calling for the constant defense of the humanities while simultaneously naturalizing a colonial order of things and suppressing decolonial knowledge formations that cannot be possibly encapsulated within the province of the humanities or the liberal arts and sciences.
AO: This is where it also ties to the reparations, because that approach is so myopic and suffers from profound amnesia, right? It doesn’t want to interrogate and engage and own up to its history.
NMT: It is the humanities, and so it is compatible with the individualism that doesn’t recognize the weight of historical responsibility.
AO: Yeah, yeah. Responsibility, which is at the heart of reparation.
NMT: Exactly, yeah because “I was not my grandfather,” “I did not own any slaves,” right? “So why do I need to—”
AO: Right. Right.
NMT: I think it’s not only you, so to speak. It’s a government which you picked that is the one that is responsible to change the entire social setting for you and everyone. But that is something else.
AO: And perhaps at this point, maybe we can turn to a final question. In your work, you interrogate and you are also partly grounded in the critical study of religion. You engage with how the construction of the secular relates to the story of modernity, coloniality, the history of modern coloniality; and you use them and you engage with theological categories and questions of ontology and epistemology. Do you see a role for theology in the vision and the praxis of decoloniality, decolonization? Especially since theology (and specifically Christian theology) was so complicit in modernity, coloniality; what’s its role in abolishing it?
NMT: Well for me, since I was much younger, I resisted the separation between the secular and the religious. For me it was clear that they were mutually implicated, that that line was artificial in multiple ways, that it was a problematic line, and it was foundational in the assertion of philosophy as a secular enterprise. As a young person being introduced to philosophy, I was educated to presuppose the demarcation between the philosophical and the religious, and I should leave everything that was based on “faith” outside. But then when I was reading philosophers and so on, it was clear that they were drawing from some of these categories that came from particular religious traditions. So that was dubious. Also, there were questions—let’s say, metaphysical questions—that go beyond the limits of logical positivism and certain forms of investigation that I think invite the kind of speculation and reflection that sometimes is found in something like theology. And while it is true that theology and religious ideas, Christian and otherwise, have been used to dominate and colonize peoples, they have also been instrumental in resisting colonization, in defying slavery and other forms of domination, right? And, for me in particular, I come from a context where liberation theology had already existed and I was acquainted with it, so I knew that there was more to theology and to religious ideas than their connection with empire, with the nation-state, with powerful institutions.
While it is true that theology and religious ideas, Christian and otherwise, have been used to dominate and colonize peoples, they have also been instrumental in resisting colonization, in defying slavery and other forms of domination.
So I knew that there is not one Christianity, that there are multiple Christianities—and the same thing is true with Islam with other so-called religions. So, I was well prepared to traffic in the exchange between, across, and beyond the secular and the religious, but of course when looking at those so-called theological and religious ideas, particularly paying important attention to the ones that seem to play a role in the struggle for emancipation and liberation. From there, those struggles provided the hermeneutical key, if you wish, about how to then interpret other categories like prayer, for example, and like the gift, or love, which I explore in my writings.
AO: Maybe you can talk about prayer and love. That would be really helpful.
NMT: I began to take love particularly seriously when reading Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed shortly after it was published. In this text, she introduces and develops the concept of decolonial love, which is central in accounting for the richness and complexity of the methodology of the oppressed. At that time, I was also reading Fanon and Levinas very intensely. All of these thinkers combined, persuaded me that there was something to think about with regard to love. And then, in Against War, I presented an interpretation of Fanon as a philosopher of love in that vein, as well as a postsecular philosopher, if you will. Love, in Fanon, has to do with connection and relation. Love makes possible what is impossible from a strictly logical point of view: it accounts for the possibility of building communities of deeply wounded and vulnerable subjects who have been dehumanized. Love is the answer to the question, what is it in the human being that can allow for the possibility of connecting with someone else, particularly with someone else that you have been taught not to value? How does one become an agent of connection and not assimilation, subordination, and self-hate. That is, since many of us have been taught not to value ourselves and not to value people in our communities, how do we overcome that? I think the Fanonian answer is that there is something, that which we call love, some kind of dimension of the human, that would make it possible for us to go beyond that condition of separation and division and get there. And this love can be so powerful that it can bring people together and lead to a process of self- and collective healing. Love can turn destructive and problematic in so many ways, but this does not mean that, in its most basic forms, it seems to be, as Sandoval suggests, something like a force and the very possibility of deep connection. For lack of a better word, decolonial love is about the possibility of connection (and relation) when connection seems completely impossible, because you are supposed to eliminate yourself and you’re supposed to not care about another person. So, when you reach out to another slave and connect, that’s where love appears, or rather, this connection is made possible by virtue of love. Love is the very condition of possibility for this connection to take place. But, you know, this idea of subjects in isolation, in this self-annihilative mood, to reach out to another when the other is not there because the other has also been educated not to look out for you (you don’t know if they are there), that’s where prayer comes in because it’s the attempt at a connection even when the other is not immediately present.
AO: And this is a prayer and also an ethics, the underside of modernity, right?
NMT: Yes. Prayer is about connection, and ethics is a discourse and logic of connection. Both acquire particularly important dimensions in contexts that are premised on separations that sustain dehumanizing hierarchies.
AO: Maybe if you can clarify, what’s the distinction between colonial love and decolonial love?
NMT: What is colonial love? Love that kills us.
AO: Or consumes.
NMT: I mean I think that there can be so many multiple forms of love.
JSL: Or is colonial love, love. Or is it distorted?
AO: Think of missionaries.
NMT: It is paternalism, a very supreme paternalistic love, self-serving love. Paternalistic, but all of that is—
AO: “Saving you! Because God loves you! You know, my God loves you!”
NMT: Yes, exactly. Love as a tool to impose civilization, “because I love you so much that I want you to be civilized.” This is “love” in the service of civilization, of colonization; “love” as a form of imposition. This utterly self-centered “love” also finds expression in the delegitimization of combative movements: it is “love” as a call for an apparent peace that preserves multiple forms of structural violence. But in these cases what we call love is not really love, as Joshua was suggesting, and certainly not decolonial love. Love is about connection, a connection that maintains, respects, and celebrates singularity while calling for the exercise of respons(e)ability. Romantic love, when it is really love, affirms these two dimensions, and so forth with other forms of love. Decolonial love, in particular, takes place when the impulse for connection/relation and respons(e)ability finds expression within and against the hierarchies that sustain dehumanizing hierarchies and differences. Decolonial love accounts principally for the movements from dehumanized selves to dehumanized others, leading to the formation of collectives of the condemned which seek to end the world as we know it. Along with rage, decolonial love inspires opposition to the structures, values, principles, and ideas that sustain coloniality. Decolonial love also allows for the possibility of substantive (as opposed to superficial) coalition building and for the generation and enrichment of relations of conviviality that supersede the social contract of the modern/colonial state.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Anti-colonialist queer feminists demonstration on March 8, 2024 in Paris, France. Photo credit: Jeanne Menjoulet. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
The Muslim community and LGBT community are not separate; we mourn together. I am Muslim, I am queer and I exist.
–Sonj Basha, speaker at a vigil in Seattle following the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016
This [queer Palestinian protest in Haifa in 2019] is the first-ever protest of the queer Palestinian movement, based on the principles of an intersectional struggle between queer-Palestinian struggles and struggles against the occupation… The protest represents a voice calling for liberation without restraints—not of the occupiers, and not of the patriarchy. It’s important to show support for all LGBT Palestinians.
–Rula Khalaileh, organizer with the Palestinian “Women Against Violence” organization
We were a part of the mainstream society before the British criminalised our existence through laws such as the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Transphobia is a colonial legacy… We will continue our struggle. We aim to raise our voice for our rights so loudly that it reaches those in power and echoes in the chambers of the parliament.
–Hina Baloch, political convener and organizer of the Sindh Moorat march in Pakistan in 2022
There’s nothing new about being trans. Only, we didn’t have the language for it back then… Even here in Kenya, in previous generations they had gay men. They introduced those laws against homosexuality which indicates that it happened, because you can’t put laws on something that’s not existing or unknown… God knows where it comes from. So, whenever I’m preaching the gospel in our community, I tell them to look up to the Lord; he knows why you were created that way; when you get to know yourself, you will get peace.
–Keeya, gay Christian pastor and Ugandan refugee interviewed in 2019 for Adriaan van Klinken and Johanna Stiebert’s Sacred Queer Stories
Dominant discourses globally assert that queerness and transness are White/western impositions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They tell us that queer Muslim and Palestinian positionalities are impossible. The stories shared by the activists and ministers quoted above—along with scholarship from queer of color critique and decolonial and postcolonial studies—show these discourses to be a lie. They also challenge the notion that queerness and transness are White/western impositions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These stories participate in traditions of critical queer, decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist thought that examine questions of gender and sexuality by considering the relationship among racialization, coloniality, and heteronormativity.
Heteronormativity involves the idealizing and societal privileging of a strict gender binary, “opposite sex” romantic and sexual desires, heterosexual marriages, and the raising of children in nuclear families. It results in cisgender-heterosexual existence occupying default representational and socio-politico-economic spaces in many contexts, and in doing so, upholds compulsory heterosexuality. The term “compulsory heterosexuality” first appeared in lesbian feminist theorist Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” where it was used to critique the societal forces that push women into heterosexual marriages and constrain them from imagining or pursuing life paths centered around relationships (romantic/sexual or otherwise) with other women.
Expanding upon this foundational work, queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes that compulsory heterosexuality—which she (re)defines as the societal assumption and enforcement of heterosexuality which is “the accumulative effect of the repetition of the narrative of heterosexuality as an ideal coupling” (423)—shapes the ways that bodies orient themselves in space. Repetitions of the heterosexual couple form through music, advertising, wedding traditions, and other cultural productions cause a “heterosexualization” of public spaces. This heterosexualization naturalizes and idealizes heteronormative existence, framing men and women as “opposites” and reinforcing “opposite sex”-oriented desires and life paths. Heteronormativity, then, is sustained through the visible repetition and intergenerational transmission of norms and ways of living that are marked as legitimate. Heteronormative standards of legitimacy reinforce compulsory heterosexuality by associating heterosexual couplings with life, culture, civilization, and the reproduction of familial lineage while marking queerness (divergence from these prescribed pathways involving binary gender norms, desire for one’s “opposite sex,” and participation in familial reproduction) as a failure. While many heterosexual subjects experience comfort and ease “in line” with the desires promoted by a heteronormative society, subjects who fail to “orient” themselves towards idealized sexual objects and accepted life paths are read as queer threats to the social order.
Decolonial feminist scholar María Lugones argues that the heterosexualist patriarchy and the binary, hierarchical, and heteronormative conception of gender upon which it rests are rooted in colonialism. Lugones’s framework draws heavily from decolonial theorist Aníbal Quijano’s understanding of the coloniality of power, which accounts for “modernity” by focusing on the new modes of social classification and domination that emerged as European colonialism expanded and Eurocentered global capitalism developed. Quijano uses the term modernity/ coloniality to emphasize that modernity cannot be thought apart from coloniality or from the hierarchical categories of “race” and notions of “rationality/irrationality” that have provided its structure. By focusing on issues of gender and sexuality, Lugones builds upon Quijano’s work regarding colonialism, capitalism, and racialization and critiques what she calls the colonial/modern gender system. Under this system, White bourgeois men and women have been ordered through biological dimorphism (the idea of “biological sex” as stable, binary, and innate), heterosexualism, and patriarchy, while persons on “the dark side” of the colonial divide have suffered labor exploitation, sexual violence, and dehumanization. Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter similarly emphasizes this colonial divide in her decolonial analysis of western colonialism, racialization, and gender categorization: “At the beginning of the modern world, the only women were white and Western. … you had true women on one side, the women of the settler population [in the Caribbean and the Americas], and on the other you had Indianwomen and Negrowomen.” Wynter argues that “from the very origin of the modern world, of the western world system, there were never simply ‘men’ and ‘women’” (174) but that western colonial expansion resulted in the intertwined production of hierarchical categories of race and gender with European Christian/post-Christian “Man” in a position of dominance and superiority.
The colonial/modern gender system presents its ordering of human relations as natural and immutable, and one must go outside of it in order to examine that which it has rendered invisible and unimaginable. Turning to the decolonial scholarship of Oyéronké Oyewumí and Paula Gunn Allen, Lugones writes that many societies recognized intersex and third gender individuals before colonization, that binary/hierarchical gender was used as a western tool of domination over Yoruba societies, and that colonizers attacked gynocracies that had existed within certain Indigenous North American societies. Gender itself is a colonial imposition, she argues, but one might develop decolonial feminism by attending to those “who resist the coloniality of gender from the ‘colonial difference’” (746). In other words, just as “modernity” cannot be thought apart from “coloniality,” “coloniality” cannot be thought apart from the hierarchical categories of “race” and “gender” that developed to justify and maintain structures of Eurocentered power. As writers, artists, and activists examining the intertwined histories of colonialism and heteronormativity have emphasized, however, attention to historical and ongoing modes of thinking about gender and sex which resist and/or go beyond the constraints of the colonial/modern gender system can provide a means of honoring Indigenous knowledges, finding a present-day sense of belonging, and healing from traumas rooted in colonial oppression.
When analyzing and challenging the colonial/modern gender system, however, it is important to avoid reductively aligning heteronormative identities with coloniality and LGBTQ+ identities with decoloniality or anti-oppressive politics. For instance, in her scholarship on homonationalism and pinkwashing, queer theorist Jasbir Puar has discussed the ways that nationalistic liberal politics tenuously incorporate certain queer subjects while constructing Orientalized terrorist others. That is, nations such as the United States have advanced imperialistic agendas and justified international military aggression by contrasting their presumably exceptional inclusion of LGBTQ+ subjects against “Muslim homophobia.” Additionally, Cathy J. Cohen’s work of queer of color critique has challenged both assimilationist LGBTQ+ politics that seek incorporation into dominant societal structures and radical queer politics that assume an overly-simplistic heterosexual/queer binary. By attending intersectionally to race, gender, and class, Cohen writes that not all “heterosexual” subjects benefit equally from heteronormativity (for instance, she notes that women of color who are on welfare “fit into the category of heterosexual but [their] sexual choices are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy of state support” [26]) and calls for more nuanced and expansive forms of queer analysis that can challenge structures of marginalization and domination.
This educational module attends to questions of coloniality and decoloniality in its exploration of how queerness and gender are navigated across religious, political, and geographic contexts. The essays gathered for this module offer an array of perspectives from Contending Modernities authors and have been grouped into three overarching themes: (1) gender, religion, and politics; (2) heteronormativity, religion, and politics; and (3) decolonial perspectives on gender, sexuality, and religion. These essays analyze the ways that various forms of nationalistic and religious discourses have promoted and reinforced particular norms for gender and sexuality, as well as the ways that non-normative configurations of gender and sexuality have offered means of resisting nationalism and coloniality. The essays provide intersectional approaches that affirm the existence and validity of worlds that resist the colonial/modern gender system’s dictates around gender and sexuality.
Theme 1: Gender, Religion, and Politics
The essays gathered under this theme address the constructed-ness of gender and highlight the ways that women from various religious and political contexts have mobilized to critique religious nationalism, patriarchy, colonialist stereotypes, and state violence. Julia Kowalski’s essay discusses how Muslim women protestors have invoked the language of family and home to counter patriarchal Hindu nationalism in India. Saadia Yacoob’s piece reflects critically and constructively on the role of gender in the classical Islamic ethical tradition and makes proposals for Muslim feminist ethics. Brenna Moore’s post critiques the antifeminist and antigay activism of the global Roman Catholic right and turns to the example of twentieth-century Catholic theologians who resist the right’s theology as a resource for combatting oppression in the present. Lastly, Laura S. Grillo’s post discusses expressions of “female genital power” in West African traditions that push back against “masculinized modernity” and confront the violence of postcolonial nation-states. Together, these essays offer perspectives grounded in a variety of religious traditions, political issues, and geographies. They reveal the constructedness of gender by showing how ideas about gender (and womanhood, in particular) are advanced differently across contexts, as well as the diverse ways that possibilities for resistance and contestation take shape.
Wooden model of a house explaining the Constitution created by activists in Ahmedabad, India. Photo courtesy of RAJEEV KHANNA/TheCitizen.in. Used with permission.
Julia Kowalski argues that the protests that have taken place in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood of Delhi are not only displays of resistance against the combined effects of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), but also acts of subversion that challenge stereotypes held by the ruling party in India about Islam, gender, and the family. (For more information about the CAA and NRC, see this post by Susan Ostermann.) As Kowalski notes, many protesters were middle-class, middle-aged-or-older “housewives” who wore hijab. She argues that the protests “are innovative not because of the gendered identity of the protesters, but because of how protesters have mobilized that identity to contest powerful scripts of citizenship, religion, family, and nation.” Muslim women protesters deploy representations of female kinship and home in order to promote a secular, inclusive democracy and to invoke a new language of national belonging—one that does not rely upon “documentary evidence of property ownership and descent from male kin.” In doing so, these women subvert narratives of Muslim women’s oppression by Muslim men (an Islamophobic discourse that has justified British “civilizing” missions in India and continues to justify western imperialism) and narratives of Muslim non-belonging in a presumably “Hindu” nation.
Kowalski’s focus on Muslim women protesters illuminates the ways that invocations of female kinship have provided a means of contesting religious nationalism and patriarchy—specifically, right-wing Hindu nationalism—in India. As deployed by these protesters, the language of family and home troubles the boundaries of public and private/domestic while subverting sexist and Islamophobic representations of Muslim women.
This illustration depicts the ruler Tumanba Khan, an ancestor of Genghis Khan, with his wife and nine sons, interwoven with the texts of Chingiznama, which records this account. Photo Credit: The Met Museum.
This post by Saadia Yacoob is part of a book symposium on Zahra Ayubi’s Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, which critically engages texts from the classical Islamic ethical tradition and offers constructive proposals for the building of a feminist Islamic ethics. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) Considering the applicability of Islamic ethical discourses to women, Yacoob notes that gendered divisions of household labor (which impact both Muslim and non-Muslim women) hinder Muslim women from being able to dedicate time to ritual worship and the acquisition of religious knowledge. Responses by religious scholars that assure women that childcare is itself an act of worship—while perhaps well-intentioned—are not adequate for addressing the exclusion of women (especially mothers) from Islamic ideals of virtuous and ethical living.
Yacoob discusses a tension charted by Ayubi in her examination of texts from the classical Islamic ethical tradition: there is an egalitarian understanding of human creation and the androgynous nafs (soul) that each person possesses, but also an emphasis on “rational capacity in ethical refinement” which “not only gendered the nafs male but also authorized an intellectual hierarchy in which only elite men possessed full rational capacity.” In her response to Ayubi’s work, Yacoob highlights the emphasis on social relationships and interdependence in classical Islamic ethics and suggests that, although one must critique the hierarchical positioning of elite men above women and non-elite men, one might carry the understanding of human interconnectedness forward in feminist ways that promote equality and flourishing. Importantly, both Ayubi and Yacoob critique patriarchal interpretations from classical Islamic ethical discourse while avoiding rejecting the tradition entirely; rather, both scholars imagine possibilities of critically “thinking with this discourse to develop a Muslim feminist ethic that centers the flourishing of all humans.”
Mural at the Hippie Kitchen is based on woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg. Photo credit: Flickr user Laurie Avocado. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
In this post, Brenna Moore discusses the role of Roman Catholicism in right-wing populist movements around the world and points to resources from the Catholic theological tradition that might aid in the development of a resistant, compassionate, leftist social politics. First, Moore writes that although right-wing populism might appear to draw upon a Christian logic of inversion (in which God chooses those who are lowly and reviled, not those in established positions of worldly power), figures who appeal to right-wing populist Catholics—such as Trump—violate this logic of inversion by using an “antiestablishment mockery of the elites” to in fact “[mock] the vulnerable,” including disabled people, Muslims, and women. Turning to an example from another context, Moore notes that right-wing Catholic populists in France tend to protest against gay marriage and liberal gender norms by framing them as an American invasion: “This keeps the antifeminist and antigay activism still seemingly tethered to a respectable anti-elitism and anti-hegemony.”
In response to these false logics of inversion, Moore offers several examples of resistant Catholic theologians of twentieth-century France to show how the insights they’ve contributed might act as resources in undoing the “repulsion that so many white Catholics feel toward Muslim refugees, gay families, the poor, African Americans, and women who control their reproductive lives” and advancing concrete goals such as childcare, access to contraception, combating poverty, and protecting those who are marginalized. Moore demonstrates that the antifeminist and antigay activism of the Catholic right, which draws upon heteronormative notions of gender and sexuality, can be countered by connecting with liberative theological resources from the Catholic tradition.
Makhuwa women in Mozambique. Photo Credit: Steve Evans. CC By 2.0.
This post by Laura S. Grillo is part of a book symposium on Faith in Flux, in which Devaka Premawardhana examines practices of religious conversion among the rural Makhuwa people of northern Mozambique. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) In this post, Grillo compares the matricentric mobility, flexibility, and pluralistic disposition of the Makhuwa with her own work on the performance of female genital power in West African traditions. Grillo argues that, although valuable, Faith in Flux does not sufficiently consider Makhuwa matricentricity; therefore, the book fails to “convincingly portray a fluid retention or cyclical movement of return to the “‘Mother’ religions’ that Premawardhana suggests are the essence of local ontology.” Through her critiques, Grillo pushes Premawardhana to question the gendered assumptions of the conceptual apparatus he employs to theorize Makhuwa practices, which seem to centralize male religious culture and “reinforce[] the stereotype of women’s natural profaneness.” Grillo proposes a focus on the ways that various Indigenous African rituals, performances, and matricentric conceptions of gender offer means of resisting postcolonial state violence and policies that reinforce the “external pressures of masculinizing modernity.”
Theme 2: Heteronormativity, Religion, and Politics
The posts included within this theme focus on the salience of heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia in contemporary politics and explore the ways that religious notions of gender and sexuality shape such politics. Jason Springs’s essay examines the conservative sexual politics of White evangelical ethnoreligious nationalists in the United States and discusses the interconnected histories of twentieth-century anti-miscegenation laws and present-day heteronormative ideologies. Michael Vicente Pérez’s essay considers the roles of homophobia and Islamophobia in societal responses to the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre and critiques homonationalist framings of the United States that construct Muslims as especially homophobic threats. The essay by Halah Abdelhadi focuses on the growing movement for LGBTQ+ rights in Palestine and argues that there is a need for “a mediating lexicon” that engages religious discourses to combat homophobic violence and the exclusion of queer Palestinians from religious modes of belonging. Ali Altaf Mian’s essay reveals the ways that heteronormative ideologies—particularly the assumption of a gender binary between men and women—reinforce transphobia and have hindered efforts by Muslim leaders to combat discrimination against transgender people in Pakistan. Together, these essays point to the ways that heteronormative ideologies shape religious nationalism and reinforce homophobic and transphobic violence. The essays also advance possibilities for solidarity, allyship, and religious engagement that push back against heteronormativity and its varied interconnections with racism, militarism, and Islamophobia.
Rainbow colors on the White House celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriages in every state of the Union. White House photo. Photo Credit: GPA Photo Archive. Via Flickr.
In the blog series “Zombie Nationalism: Apocalypse, Race, and the Sexual Politics of White Evangelical Christian Nationalism,” Jason Springs introduces the concept of “zombie nationalism” in his analysis of White evangelical political and religious ideology in the United States. This concept describes a persistently recurring and reanimating dynamic, pattern, and logic that explains “the socio-political processes by which White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism has asserted and reasserted itself across recent decades.” Springs contends that this phenomenon is driven not only by religion (modern evangelical theology) and race (as manifested through White ethno-religious nationalism) but also by conservative sexual politics. Springs clarifies that “sexual politics” refers to “the ways that gender norms, operations of power related to sexual identities, and policing of sexuality all function to legitimate and perpetuate ideologies, and are used to advance political agendas.” He argues that it is crucial to attend to the ways that heteronormative ideologies of gender and sexuality both motivate and are reinforced by White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism.
In this post from the series, Jason Springs contends that White Christian evangelicals’ current justification of their opposition to same-sex marriage relies on an extension of the same logic that they had once used to support anti-miscegenation laws. Thus, White evangelical support for Trump is not an isolated reaction against marriage equality, but participates in a longer history of White evangelical sexual politics centered around the so-called “sanctity of marriage.” Here, White Christian nationalism relies upon the upholding of a rigid, heteronormative gender binary in ways rooted in particular notions of Whiteness, Christian theology, and western civilization.
Vigil in support of the victims of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, Toronto, Canada. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Michael Vicente Pérez’s essay discusses Islamophobia, homophobia, and the cultural politics of fear in the wake of the 2016 mass killing at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Drawing from work by Sara Ahmed and Jasbir Puar, Pérez analyzes the mobilization of an affective politics of fear-as-threat (that is, fear as “an affective link experienced as threats to some group from some group”) in the production of the Muslim as threatening Other following the Orlando massacre. This politics of fear serves to construct LGBTQ+ inclusion as an essential part of American identity—despite the persistence of anti-LGBTQ+ violence in America—and produce Muslim difference in terms of terrorism and hatred. As Pérez further explains, “the narrative incorporation of Orlando’s victims [into the American national body] resignified the murder as an act of terrorism in which the violence of Muslim sexual intolerance not only underscored the moral superiority of America but also proved the necessity of American empire.” In contrast, turning to Sonj Basha’s affirmation of (her own and others’) queer Muslim existence in her speech at a widely attended Seattle vigil following the massacre, Pérez writes that shared grief and mourning can momentarily disrupt the affective unities/divisions created by fear and gesture to “the possibility of a ‘we’ that refuses the politics of fear.”
Whereas Jason Springs’s essay focused on the ways that White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism reinforces and is dependent upon a heteronormative notion of the “sanctity of marriage,” Pérez’s essay alternatively examines the ways that homonationalist framings of the United States as an exceptionally inclusive haven for LGBTQ+ people serve to uphold U.S. militarism and imperialism and reductive, Islamophobic constructions of Muslim people. Thus, while sexual politics in the United States frequently draw upon notions of a gender binary and idealize heteronormative relationships between men and women, Jasbir Puar’s theorization of homonationalism shows that ideas of LGBTQ+ inclusion have also been mobilized towards ethno-religious nationalist ends.
Palestinian flag at Brighton, England Pride celebration. Photo Credit: Flickr User Daniel Hadley. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED.
This piece by Halah Abdelhadi reflects on the movement for LGBTQ+ rights in Palestine. Abdelhadi contextualizes the increased visibility of LGBTQ+ issues among Palestinian citizens of Israel—which have become one of the most controversial political topics in Palestinian society—by discussing the first queer Palestinian protest that occurred in 2019 in response to an act of homophobic violence. She contends that there are three primary positions on LGBTQ+ rights in Palestinian society: pro-queer (held mainly by activists), neutral (held by self-identified “secular progressives”), and antagonistic (the position of those who weaponize religion to justify homophobic violence). Overcoming the homophobia of the antagonistic position, she claims, requires novel interpretations of religious meaning. Given the increased visibility of the queer Palestinian community, Abdelhadi identifies a need for inclusion, the use of precise (rather than vague or neutral) language to denounce homophobic violence, and the building of “a mediating lexicon” that allows for conversations with spiritual and religious leaders to challenge the ways that queer Palestinians have been “alienated from their national and religious modes of belonging to Palestinian society.”
A Pakistani hijra at a protest between two hijra groups from Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In this piece, Ali Altaf Mian discusses a 2016 endorsement of a fatwa on transgender marriage which takes important steps towards combating discrimination against transgender people in Pakistan, yet nonetheless operates based on heteronormative assumptions. The fatwa, which was endorsed in a statement crafted by the Pakistani clerics of Tanzim-I Ittihad-i Ummat and signed by about fifty other local Muslim jurists and theologians, argued that Islamic law should be interpreted as extending marriage and other rights to transgender people. Importantly, Mian writes, this fatwa and its endorsement condemned discrimination in places of “the home, the street, the graveyard, and the brothel—where members of the hijra [transgender] community viscerally experience the brunt of a hyper-masculinist and heteronormative social order.”
At the same time, the logic of heteronormativity that supports transphobia still underlies this fatwa, which employs language such as “unambiguous signs of a single-sex” and “bodily signs of both sexes” when describing the bodies for whom certain rights do or do not apply. As Mian reveals, the fatwa continues to impose a gender binary even when acknowledging transgender bodies, and it accords social recognition to trans people in ways dependent on their bodies’ presumed approximation to this gender binary. To truly act as allies in fighting transphobia, he argues, Muslim jurists and theologians should question the ways that culturally constructed notions of maleness and femaleness shape ideas about biology, law, and ethics; study the complexity of human bodies by “cultivating a flexible and creative mode of engagement with local knowledge traditions where [they] will encounter both reifications and disruptions of the gender binary”; and from those encounters, discern when to retain, reconfigure, or renounce traditions “in order to make sense of and to appreciate shifting embodiments of sex, gender, and sexuality in the contemporary world.”
Theme 3: Decolonial Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality, and Religion
This final theme focuses explicitly on the role of colonialism in shaping gender and sexual norms and on efforts to decolonize discourses around gender, sexuality, and religion. The essay by Sa’ed Atshan engages with Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer and scholarship on other contexts shaped by colonial legacies in order to advance proposals for decolonizing queer studies and addressing Christianity’s relationship to colonialism and sexuality. Ebenezer Obadare also engages van Klinken’s text but emphasizes that the existence of homophobia in Africa cannot be reduced to a colonial or Christian product and argues that van Klinken’s perception of the condition of being queer in Africa is overly optimistic. Ludovic Lado’s essay turns to the construction of gender employed by the state in Côte d’Ivoire in its efforts to combat gender-based inequality and discrimination and shows that the state’s assumption of a male/female binary hinders it from recognizing and addressing violence against the LGBTQ community. Nisa Goksel focuses on resistant movements of Kurdish women in Türkiye and Syria, who—in ways that depart from stereotypical representations of Middle Eastern women—seek a non-colonial modernity. Lastly, Jacqueline Hidalgo discusses the name change of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán, a U.S. Latine student-led organization) which removed the terms “Chicanx” and “Aztlán,” noting the long histories of contestation within the Chicano movement, particularly around issues of gender, sexuality, race and indigeneity, and decoloniality. Together, these essays provide an explicit engagement with the interconnections among colonialism, religion, gender, and sexuality and offer examples of decolonial theories and movements that have contended with these interconnections across contexts.
Raised fist with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.
This essay is a part of a book symposium on Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa, which engages works of art and activism to explore the ways that various LGBTQ+ Christians in Kenya reimagine their identities, faith, and lives. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) In his essay, Sa’ed Atshan draws on van Klinken’s monograph to think more broadly about what it means to decolonize queer studies. He does so by first comparing and contrasting van Klinken’s work with George Paul Meiu’s recent work on Kenyan sex workers in Ethno-erotic Economies. Both authors address connections between colonialism and religion in Kenya, and both engage the connections between colonialism and sexuality—with van Klinken’s work registering the cognizance “of British colonial homophobia that significantly departed from indigenous Kenyan queer tolerant attitudes.” Whereas van Klinken primarily focuses on queer-identified, middle-class, urban subjects who “can forge solidarity with their queer counterparts in the west,” however, Meiu offers a more in-depth analysis of ethnic categorization and class, as well as a broader conceptualization of queerness that explores the ways that rural, poorer, heterosexual subjects “are mired in racialized/otherized/fetishized relationships with western tourists.”
Next, Atshan reflects on his own work on queerness in Palestine, drawing attention to the importance of engaging multiple colonial and postcolonial venues. He proposes that the decolonization of queer studies be advanced through attention to South-South epistemologies and solidarities. For instance, analytical vantage points from Kenyan contexts might be brought into dialogue with the contexts of other places formerly colonized by the British Empire, such as Palestine, India, and Pakistan. Atshan notes that queer Palestinian Christians, like queer Christians in Kenya, face legacies of British colonial homophobia, and can experience Christianity as both a source of imperial violence and anti-imperial empowerment.
Praying hands with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.
This piece is also part of a book symposium on Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer. Ebenezer Obadare writes that van Klinken challenges simplistic narratives of “African homophobia” and of the African continent “lagging behind” the rest of the world (especially the United States) in matters related to gender and sexuality. On the other hand, Obadare emphasizes that Africa should not be imagined as having had complete sexual tolerance prior to European colonization and the influence of American conservative Christianity; rather, homophobia in the continent is “propelled by a wide range of local and external cultural, social, and political forces.”
Obadare highlights the novelty of van Klinken’s emphasis on the positive role of Christianity in the lives of Kenyan queer people; however, he notes that he does not fully share van Klinken’s optimism about the condition of being queer in Africa. He links this skepticism in part to his experience as a Nigerian who has witnessed the homophobia that exists in his own country. He also critiques van Klinken for not focusing enough attention on the Kenyan state. Overall, Obadare commends van Klinken’s groundbreaking approach to queer life in Kenya, but provides an important reminder that colonialism and Christianity are not the only forces that have operated to reinforce homophobia in Africa.
Photo Credit: Global Partnership for Education. 5th grader in class in Mamakoffikro, Côte d’Ivoire, December 2015.
In this essay, Ludovic Lado discusses the uses and limitations of the state construction of gender in Côte d’Ivoire. Lado points to the argument that “in pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Africa, gender differentiation and hierarchies were less rigid and therefore more flexible than those inherited from Islam, Christianity, and colonial legal systems that current gender reforms seek to correct.” He writes that while Africa still has much work to do in combating gender-based injustices, inequalities, and discrimination, many African countries are closing the gender gap faster than western countries.
He writes that although steps have been made to increase women’s literacy rates and empower women economically in Côte d’Ivoire, the framework taken up by Ivorian state gender policy seeks women’s equality with men while failing to consider the LGBTQ community. According to Lado, “heterosexuality remains the norm both institutionally and in collective representation” in Côte d’Ivoire and other African contexts. Regardless of whether or not homosexuality existed (and was met with acceptance) in pre-colonial Africa—a topic that Lado writes is highly debated—LGBTQ Ivorians are marginalized and subjected to violence in the present. In response, Lado suggests that movement away from a male/female binary opposition will allow the Ivorian state construction of gender to acknowledge the specificity of LGBTQ people and address discrimination.
Photo Credit: Nisa Goksel. The Peace Mothers at the 8th of March 2014 (International Women’s Day) demonstration in Diyarbakır.
This piece by Nisa Goksel contributes to studies of women and gender in the Middle East by exploring the resistance movements of Kurdish women. Informed by an awareness of the interrelatedness of modernity and colonialism, Goksel’s framework for the topic challenges monolithic representations of women in the Middle East which assume these women to be the “victims of ‘oppressive’ Middle Eastern men; of colonialism; and/or of religious, traditional, and national powers.” Goksel also challenges the perception of Islam as the key determining factor in Middle Eastern women’s lives, particularly the idea that Islam traps these women in a “yet-to-be-modern” patriarchal existence. Adding the role of recent wars in the Middle East to her analysis, Goksel argues that these wars reveal the connections between modernity and colonialism and have been “crucial to the formation of alternative women’s movements and groups as well as to the alternative imaginations of modernity.”
Next, Goksel elaborates on two examples of alternative Kurdish women’s movements: Peace Mothers pursuing an end to the war between the Turkish state and PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas, and Kurdish women resistance fighters in Syria who seek decolonization and a women’s revolution. Goksel argues that while these alternative women’s movements may appear as opposites within a colonialist gaze (one peaceful, and one that uses weapons), they both have the goal of creating a non-colonial modernity that is truly democratic and peaceful. Thus, both movements challenge particular Orientalized, Islamophobic, and sexist representations of women—as did the Muslim women protestors in India discussed by Julia Kowalski—while also resisting colonialism and its legacies.
Art Heals mural in Los Angeles, California. Photo Credit: Author.
This essay by Jacqueline Hidalgo discusses the 2019 decision of student leaders from MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán) U.S. Latin/o/a/x organizations across the country to remove the terms “Chicanx” and “Aztlán” from the organization’s name, arguing that such a move does not erase history, but rather participates in a long history of contestation over those terms. Hidalgo traces the history of MEChA and writes that in the 1960s when students mobilized to resist dominant modern European thought, terms such as “Chicano” and “Aztlán” allowed ethnically Mexican activists to counter the derogatory names that had been forced upon them, claim an ancestral connection to lands that are now considered part of the United States, and “[invoke] both a pre-Columbian past and a future where colonial sufferings have ended.”
Hidalgo notes that not all ethnically Mexican activists had been in agreement about the use of the terms, however, and identifies several lines of contestation that arose. For instance, the use of “Chicano” and “Aztlán” as decolonial terms is complicated by an awareness that the Aztecs and Indigenous Mexica peoples colonized and oppressed a variety of other Indigenous peoples prior to Spanish colonization, and that 1920s Mexican nationalist appeals to mestizaje (from which these terms emerged) valued “mixture” while “oppos[ing] indigenous rights and eras[ing] Mexicans of Asian and African descent.” Additionally, the 1970s Chicano movement frequently centered cisgender heterosexual mestizo men and patriarchal familial language, creating a need for Chicana feminists to create their own organizations and for LGBTQ activists to construct their own visions of queer Chicano/x/a familia in resistance to machismo.
In 2019, student leaders considered the new acronym MEPA (Movimiento Estudiantil Progressive Action) but ultimately decided to adopt the name Mecha (meaning “fuse”) for the organization rather than continue with an acronym-based approach. They also revised the constitution to intentionally center “Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, Non-binary, and Femme people.” Hidalgo writes that students’ contemporary efforts to change the name of their collective echo the drive towards self-determination that motivated MEChA’s founders and create space for the movement to continue and transform with future generations.
Conclusion and Discussion Questions
This educational module has assembled works by Contending Modernities contributors and theorists who analyze gender, sexuality, and politics with attention to religion, race, and modernity/coloniality. The three themes have focused on social constructions of gender and womanhood, heteronormativity and sexual politics, and decolonial approaches to gender, sexuality, and religion. The questions below are designed to provoke continued discussions regarding the relationship of religious discourses, nationalism, and colonialism to gender and sexuality and to invite constructive decolonial responses to the colonial/modern gender system.
Intersections of Religion, Gender, and Sexuality
How does religion impact the negotiation of gender and queerness? How does the interrelationship among religion, gender, and sexuality vary across contexts? What possibilities exist within different religious discourses (e.g., Catholic, evangelical Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and/or African traditional religious discourses) for heteronormative and non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality to be represented, affirmed, naturalized, or reinforced?
Nationalism and Queerness
In what ways might nationalism relate to sexual politics? How can nationalism affect questions of gender and sexuality, either by prescribing and reinforcing particular gender and sexual norms or by tenuously incorporating other gender and sexual identities (as in homonationalism)? Alternatively, how might the presence of non-normative configurations of gender and queerness resist or disrupt nationalism?
Gender, Colonialism, and the Nation
How might religious nationalism, in particular, draw upon certain configurations of gender and sexuality while disavowing others? How do religious discourses influence the shape that nationalism takes within a particular context, and the ways that particular notions of gender and sexuality are deployed in support of nationalism? How have the histories and ongoing legacies of colonialism—and the impact of colonialism on gender and sexuality—influenced various formations of religious nationalism?
Beyond The Module
What concrete examples—from or beyond the posts assembled for this educational module—could illustrate the impact of colonialism and its legacies on discussions around gender and sexuality? How might a decolonized approach to gender, sexuality, and queerness be constructed?
Trauma and Collective Healing
Trauma is defined as a physiological and emotional response to an imminently dangerous event. Collective trauma “refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affect an entire society … collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events, and is remembered by group members that may be far removed from the traumatic events in time and space.” How could a decolonized approach to gender, sexuality, and queerness be a catalyst for collective trauma healing?
Bibliography and Further Reading
Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Feelings.” In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, 422-441. Edited by Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986/1992.
Baloch, Shah Meer. “‘We Deserve to Be Treated Equally’: Pakistan’s Trans Community Steps Out of the Shadows.” The Guardian, November 20, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/20/pakistan-trans-community-steps-out-of-shadows.
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 437-465.
Elnaiem, Mohammed. “The ‘Deviant’ African Genders That Colonialism Condemned.” JSTOR Daily. April 29, 2021. https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/.
Escobar, Trinidad. “Decolonizing Queerness in the Philippines.” The Nib. November 15, 2019. https://thenib.com/decolonizing-queerness-in-the-philippines/
Hirschberger, Gilad. “Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (August 2018). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01441.
Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 186-209.
Ngu, Kai. “In Search of Queer Ancestors: Pauline Park, Myles Markham, and Xoài Pham on the Queer Historical Figures across Asia That Have Inspired in Them a Sense of Belonging.” The Margins. Asian American Writers’ Workshop. December 4, 2019. https://aaww.org/queer-ancestors-sarah-ngu/.
Puar, Jasbir K. “Rethinking Homonationalism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (May 2013): 336-339.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Van Klinken, Adriaan, and Johanna Stiebert, with Brian Sebyala and Fredrick Hudson. Sacred Queer Stories: Ugandan LGBTQ+ Refugee Lives and the Bible. Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
Wynter, Sylvia. “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” By David Scott. Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 119-207. ISSN 0799-0537.
Ziv, Oren. “Queer Palestinian Community Holds ‘Historic’ Protest against LGBT Violence.” +972 Magazine, August 2, 2019. https://www.972mag.com/queer-palestinian-protest-lgbt-violence/.
Victoria Basug Slabinski is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, with a graduate certificate in American studies. Her work draws Christian theology into conversation with decolonial thought and explores constructive Filipino American theologies, focusing especially on questions of memory, ancestrality, narrative, and aesthetics. Her research interests include decolonial and postcolonial thought, Christian liberation theologies and eschatology, gender and sexuality studies, and constructive readings of literature and the arts.
Nicola is a graduate of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, with a degree in Governance and Policy, and a Minor in peace studies. Nicola’s focus in the program was on human rights, trauma informed conflict resolution, and peace-tech. Professionally, Nicola has over 8 years of experience working in development and emergency settings, specifically on social and human protection, development, and diversity and inclusion work. Nicola have actively contributed to humanitarian efforts addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, collaborating with multiple humanitarian organizations in the SWANA region. Nicola’s expertise encompasses gender equity, social inclusion, child and youth development, human rights, livelihood programming, and mental health support. Nicola's work focuses on shaping inclusive and equitable global mental health and diversity and inclusion policies and programs.
Palestinians march among the ruins of buildings in October 2023 following the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Positionality
I have served as Imam of Claremont Main Road Mosque, located in Cape Town, South Africa, for close to four decades. In this capacity, I have and continue to play a leading role in the vibrant interfaith solidarity movement against apartheid. In the wake of the assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, we established a South African Interfaith Forum for Palestinian Solidarity, which is made up of anti-apartheid Christian leaders, South African Jews for a Free Palestine, Muslims, Hindus, people of other faiths, and people who are not religious. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, this interfaith group has been playing a leading role in the grassroots Palestinian solidarity protests that these events elicited. One of the inspirational interfaith solidarity events is a weekly Friday evening Shabbos for Gaza services which is convened by the South African Jews for a Free Palestine. On Friday December 8, 2023, the Claremont Main Road Mosque hosted one of these Shabbat services, which also coincided with the second of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. The strong interfaith dimension of the South African Palestine Solidarity movement counters the false narrative that seeks to frame the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinians into a “religious conflict” between Muslims and Jews. Moreover, it is my considered view that the bold move by the South African government to charge Israel with the crime of Genocide in its war on Gaza at the International Court of Justice was not prompted by a cabinet decision on its own, but rather came in response to the unprecedented South African Palestine Solidarity movement that has emerged at the grassroots and civil society level. These reflections on Ramadan and Eid in Gaza arise amidst this background of grassroots organizing and solidarity with Palestinians facing daily and relentless violence.
Ramadan Amidst Famine
The gruesome consequences of what the International Criminal Court of Justice, on January 26, 2024, described as a plausible case of Genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip are defiling the devotion, compassion, and serenity that are the hallmarks of the sacred month of Ramadan. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar and holds great religious significance and spiritual benefits for Muslims worldwide. It is a time of fasting—i.e., abstaining from food, drink, and sexual intimacy—from dawn to sunset. Fasting during daylight hours is accompanied by intensified prayer, alms giving, and self-reflection. One of the purposes of the Muslim fast is to experience how it feels to be hungry and thirsty, and thus gain an appreciation for the needs of the poor.
Observing these sublime virtues of Ramadan in 2024 has been challenging for the war-ravaged Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the taking of over 200 Israeli hostages, the Israeli army has been relentlessly bombing the Gaza Strip. The result of its campaign has been, at the time of this writing. the killing of over 32,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and the injuring of over 70,000 others. The dire plight of the people of Gaza is ironically being mercilessly exacerbated during Ramadan (aka the month of rahma i.e., mercy) by more than five months of severe restrictions on the free flow of humanitarian aid to the area by Israel’s military. The Israeli blockade has led to serious shortages of food, medical, and other essential supplies. As a result, many families in Gaza are currently struggling to access an adequate and nutritious diet, leading to severe malnutrition and food insecurity.
The dire plight of the people of Gaza is ironically being mercilessly exacerbated during Ramadan (aka the month of rahma, i.e., mercy) by more than five months of severe restrictions on the free flow of humanitarian aid to the area by Israel’s military.
A few days before Ramadan began, at sunset on Sunday March 10, 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Health estimated that thus far more than 20 people, mostly children and elderly persons, have died of malnutrition and dehydration in Gaza. A United Nations agency for children (UNICEF) report, also released at the onset of Ramadan in early March 2024, found that famine is reaching devasting levels in the Gaza Strip due to the wide-reaching impacts of the five-month-old war. Nutrition screenings conducted by UNICEF have found that 28 percent of children under 2 years old living in shelters and refugee camps in Khan Younis suffer from acute malnutrition, and more than 10 percent have severe wasting.
Ironically, even Israel’s closest ally, the United States of America, acknowledged prior to Ramadan that the humanitarian situation faced by the people of Gaza was catastrophic. As a result of its feeble attempts to persuade the Israeli regime to conform to international humanitarian Law, just days before Ramadan the US joined a few other countries in resorting to air dropping aid over the sky of Gaza. Tragically a US humanitarian aid airdrop killed 5 people in Gaza after a parachute failed to open up. Further, the food drops do not change the fact that bombs sold by the US to Israel are also falling down from the sky.
As famine continues to stalk the Gaza Strip, the US is now planning to deliver humanitarian aid via a sea route by constructing a temporary pier on the shores of northern Gaza. Aid groups, however, argue that the airdrops and sea shipments are far less efficient than trucks in delivering the massive amounts of food and essentials desperately needed by the suffering people of Gaza.
A report released by Forensic Architecture revealed that the Israeli military has repeatedly abused the humanitarian measures of evacuation orders, “safe routes,” and “safe zones,” and failed to comply with the laws governing their application within a wartime context. According to the report “these patterns of systematic violence and destruction have forced Palestinian civilians from one unsafe area to the next, confirming the conclusion echoed across civiliantestimonies, media reports, and assessments by theUN and other humanitarian aid organizations, that ‘there is no safe place in Gaza.’”
Notwithstanding their precarious reality, Gazans are finding some solace, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in observing Ramadan as best they can under the circumstances. Media reports reveal that many Gazans are commencing and completing their daylight hour fasts with lemon soup, canned foods, and some are even forced to break their fast with grass. After breaking their fast at sunset, every evening, despite almost all mosques having been destroyed by Israeli bombing, many Gazans continue to perform special Ramadan prayers known as tarawih, the prayer of rests, in open air congregations. One of these open-air congregational prayers is taking place outside the ruins of a mosque in Rafah that has been bombed. This nightly congregational prayer meeting has encouraged a great sense of solidarity amongst the suffering Gazans.
Layla al-Qadr and the Final 10 Days of Ramadan
During the last ten days of Ramadan, Muslims are encouraged to dedicate themselves completely to God. Throughout these most sacred days, conscientious believers increase their spiritual devotions in anticipation of layla al-qadr, i.e., the most important night of the year. On this night Muslims believe that their sacred scripture, the Qur’an, was revealed. Some may even choose to go into a spiritual retreat (i’tikaf), where they will emulate the example of prophet Muhammad, who dedicated the last third of Ramadan to spending all of his days fasting and his nights in seclusion performing prayers and supplications. In addition to these intensified dedications, Palestinians have also added a special religio-cultural tradition of praying the final jumu`ah congregational service and bidding farewell to Ramadan in al-Masjid al-Aqsa, the third holiest place of worship in Islam. This year the final jumu`ah service occurs on Friday April 5, 2024.
Notwithstanding their precarious reality, Gazans are finding some solace, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in observing Ramadan as best they can under the circumstances
Because of the increased number of Muslim devotions at the al-Aqsa mosque during the last 10 days of Ramadan it has been a long-standing policy to restrict Jewish visitation to the holy site during these days due to “security concerns.” This Ramadan, however, because of the ongoing war on Gaza, the situation at al-Masjid al-Aqsa is going to be particularly tense. We have already heard calls from Jewish extremists groups, led by the Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, urging Jews to visit the holy site during the last 10 days of Ramadan. Such a scenario will inflame the already volatile situation in Jerusalem and the West Bank and will no doubt negatively impact the festival of the ending of the fasting month of Ramadan known as Eid al-Fitr.
Eid al-Fitr Amidst Famine
All predictions are that the 2024 Eid al-Fitr festival in the Gaza Strip, which is anticipated to occur on Wednesday April 10, will be a scaled down event compared to that of previous years. Eid al-Fitr in Gaza, this year, will be taking place under the shadow of daily Israeli bombing and slow death caused by famine and starvation. It will be difficult if not impossible for many Gazans to discharge the end of Ramadan alms given their dire plight. They will without a doubt share whatever meagre belongings they do have with each other to mark the blessed occasion of Eid al-Fitr. Even if a ceasefire agreement is reached before the end of Ramadan the lasting effects of the war and the blocking of humanitarian aid will be felt for a long time to come. Despite the challenges posed by Gaza’s precarious situation, the people of Gaza will come together to celebrate Eid al-Fitr with resilience and solidarity. They will exchange Eid greetings and find much needed joy and comfort in their shared traditions and faith commitment, albeit in a more subdued manner.
A. Rashied Omar earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an M.A. in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he is now a core faculty member. Omar’s research and teaching focus on the roots of religious violence and the potential of religion for constructive social engagement and interreligious peacebuilding. He is co-author with David Chidester et al. of Religion in Public Education: Options for a New South Africa (UCT Press, 1994), a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015), and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (Macmillan Reference USA, 2016). In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as Imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and an advisory board member for Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa.
Secretary-General António Guterres (center) meets with a delegation of North American Rabbis. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe. Used with permission.
On January 25, 2023, I, along with 9 other rabbis, representing another 265 rabbis from around the globe and every imaginable denomination, met with Secretary General António Guterres at the United Nations headquarters. You might think that we went to tell him what most Jews are presumed to believe, namely that the UN has it out for Israel and always treats the Jewish state unfairly. Nothing could have been farther from our minds. Rather, we went to thank him and the UN’s agencies for courageously calling out Israel for the humanitarian crimes they are committing in Gaza and to promote our cause: Ceasefire Now!
For me it was a powerful moment on a long journey. When I was a fourth grader in Brooklyn in the 1950s, my beloved teacher, Evelyn Farrar, taught us about the United Nations. We memorized the lyrics to “United Nations on the March,” because the idea of “a hymn to a new world at birth,” a “free new world” achieved by diplomacy, encapsulated her hopes and dreams for what the United Nations could be. We visited the sacred site of the UN Headquarters itself and learned about the peacemaking accomplished by the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld. Her lessons worked: as a child I fervently believed that the UN could bring about a world without war.
When I was in high school, I returned to the UN. On June 5, 1967, I joined other young Jews in a rally to encourage the US to help Israel just as the ’67 war between Israel and the neighboring Arab nations of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan was beginning. The new Secretary General, U Thant, had just withdrawn UN peacekeeping forces from Gaza and the Sinai at Egypt’s demand, and American Jews were worried about Israel’s safety. Attending that rally led me to spend time in Israel two years later and soon thereafter to become one of the first women ordained as a rabbi.
Dag Hammarskjöld outside the UN building in 1953. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the fifty-seven years since my last trip to the UN, I have struggled to come to terms with the results of the ’67 war. In spite of what I believed in my youth, I see now that it led to Israel’s continuous occupation of Palestinian lands and unwillingness to grant Palestinians freedom in the land they share. But I never imagined that the current crisis would lead me back to the United Nations, hoping, once again, that they could help bring about an end to war.
As an active member of Rabbis for Ceasefire, I am honored to have been part of the delegation that met with the current Secretary General, António Guterres to discuss the terrible destruction Hamas wrought on October 7, 2023 as well as the unfathomably disproportionate destruction that Israel has committed in response.
Our meeting took place a few days after the Secretary General’s bold speech at the opening of a summit of the G77+China that met in Uganda. In that speech, he condemned Israel’s “unprecedented” and “wholesale” destruction of Gaza that has claimed the lives of 152 UN staff members among the 27,000 dead. The Secretary General pointed to the daily dangers survivors endure, not only bombs and bullets but damaged roads, communication blackouts, disease, and famine. He called the conflict “a threat to global peace and security” that must come to an end. That speech was a resounding echo of what the 275 Rabbis for Ceasefire are demanding: Ceasefire Now.
We met with him both to thank him for his courageous words and to find out how we could help add a Jewish moral voice to the UN’s efforts: to stop the threat to global peace and security, end the current attacks that are destroying Gaza and its inhabitants, and hold Israel accountable.
His answer was clear: continue to work for a reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Help them understand that for the security of all they must learn to live together in peace. Keep up your efforts, he recommended. Likewise, he promised us that he would work toward a ceasefire and, to the best of his ability, carry out the provisional judgments of the International Court of Justice that, although they fell short of demanding an end to hostilities, recognized the critical need to end Israel’s assault on Gaza’s civilian population, cultural institutions, and infrastructure and allow humanitarian aid to enter unimpeded.
Our conversation moved us beyond words, for this Secretary General follows in the path set by Hammarskjöld and the other men who preceded him as rodfei shalom, seekers of peace. A deeply faithful Catholic himself, he clearly understood the importance of the religious faith that brought us to work for justice in Israel/Palestine. We left feeling seen and heard by him; believing that he would, with grace and humility, continue to work toward our common goal of a lasting peace.
His answer was clear: continue to work for a reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Help them understand that for the security of all they must learn to live together in peace.
We closed by offering him the ancient priestly blessing in the book of Numbers: “May the Holy One bless and protect you. May the Holy One shine upon you and be gracious to you. May you feel empowered to work for peace, shalom.” A hush fell over the room, and some of us found ourselves close to tears. The Secretary General told us that he’d sleep better having met us today. And we knew we would as well.
Little did we know that the day following the ICJ ruling, which will result in a long investigation of South Africa’s charges of genocide against Israel, Israel would react by claiming that 12 of the 13,000 UN workers for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) took part in the October 7, 2023 massacre. The UNRWA leadership responded swiftly and decisively, condemning the acts, firing nine of the workers (two are dead and one yet to be identified), and beginning an investigation into the claims. Despite this resolution and with no regard for the impassioned plea of the Secretary General, the US and many of its allies have temporarily suspended funding UNRWA. When funds run out at the end of February, the humanitarian crisis that exists in Gaza that was the focus of the Court’s mandate will become even more devastating. UNRWA is the only agency that makes medicine, food, and shelter available to the 1.5 million displaced residents of Gaza. The tragedy worsens and worsens.
We left the meeting with new hopes and now new fears, so we continue to pray: that the leaders of our country understand the gift that is the United Nations and its Secretary General. That they and their allies restore the funding to UNRWA and not become responsible for more death. That they heed the words of all of us who demand a permanent ceasefire now. That they stop using their veto to keep the UN Security Council from doing what it was created to do, as I learned in that song so many years ago, to bring into being “a new world at birth.” A world, as the song also says, “where our children (and all children) shall live proud and free.” And may it be so.
‘Peace For All’ sculpture by Derek A. Fitz Simons, Aghalane, Co. Fermanagh, erected 1999. Located at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, at the south side of the Senator George Mitchell Peace Bridge. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Almost everyone who studies religion, conflict, and peace has tried to understand Northern Ireland, so I was thrilled by the invitation from colleagues at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice to attend a workshop in Belfast.
I approached our shared task—to analyze “religious turbulence” and imagine “alternative futures”—as a historian of US religion associated with Peace Studies who has ancestors on both sides of the island’s troubled sectarian past. While more branches of my family tree include Catholics from the south, the Tweed branch descends from Protestants who were part of the seventeenth-century Scottish Plantation, settling on farmland in County Antrim and attending Presbyterian churches. While my direct ancestors left for America in 1848, during the Famine, those who stayed in the north went on to take sides during the Home-Rule debate, the Partition, and the Troubles. In other words, I have ancestral ties to the colonial past my Irish Catholic relatives lament and to the twentieth-century Troubles almost everyone laments, including those in my ancestor’s Presbyterian congregation who signed the 1974 “Witness for Peace” statement and who welcomed me warmly when I visited the day before the Belfast workshop.
I had not planned to visit those relatives or ponder my family history when I began preparing for our scholarly collaboration, but Northern Ireland religious leaders and US Peace Studies specialists reminded me that personal disclosures can help. Clergy in the north have recommended including “personal narrative in public discussions,” and Peace Studies specialists have said those hoping to cultivate the moral imagination required for “constructive social change in settings of deep-rooted conflict” must overcome the academic impulse to “eliminate the personal.”[1]
I tried to overcome that impulse as I considered what I might contribute as an outsider with distant ties to combatants on both sides of the sectarian conflict. I decided it might help if I took a step back and reflected on the most useful analytic frames, guiding metaphors, and interpretive terms for the analysis of religion and conflict in post-Brexit Northern Ireland. In particular, considering my research on the US and engaging scholarship about the island, I wondered how we might interpret both “specific trigger events” and “longer-term context,” or what others have called “short-term shocks” (Famine, Partition, and Brexit) and “long-term trends” (colonialism, urbanization, and industrialization)?[2] Almost all international, national, and local peacebuilding documents suggest islanders must confront the legacy of the past as they articulate a shared vision of the future, but polarization often sets in as soon as the stories start.
Maybe new frames, metaphors, and terms can help.
Frames, Metaphors, and Terms
The Peace Wall, Cupar Way, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Scholars who write about the island have made helpful proposals. Brendan Murtagh has compared post-partition Belfast to political zones like Cold War Berlin and the Korean DMZ and argued the city is best understood as a “border landscape.” Others describe post-Reformation Irish religious space as a “theological palimpsest” and chronicle how the devout have inscribed competing notions of religious authenticity and collective belonging on the landscape.[3] Some highlight residential and activity segregation, suggesting that Belfast’s distinct communities can be understood as “ethnic enclosures,” or, analyzing local perceptions, they note that the barriers, flags, and murals that mark bounded space produce “landscapes of menace” and “landscapes of exclusion” (see, for example, F. W. Boal and Madeline Leonard). An ecocritic imagined the “Eden of the future” by foregrounding Belfast’s river-systems and figuring the city as a “riparian zone,” a transition area between fully terrestrial and fully aquatic systems (see Katherine M. Huber on this point). That analogical language is suggestive since just as riparian zones are prone to flooding, Belfast’s landscape has been the site of periodic deluges of sectarian hostility, and, as Ciaran Carson suggested in Belfast Confetti, the Farset, the city’s hidden river, follows “the line of the Peace-Line, this thirty-foot-high wall of graffiticized corrugated iron” (49).
The Comparative Gaze
While these interpretive vocabularies illumine some aspects of the conflict, I think terminology from the natural sciences, especially niche theory and sustainability studies, might help to reframe the conversation about the island by highlighting lifeway transitions, eco-cultural niches, and sustainability crises. That’s the approach I take as I analyze the history of religion in the lands that became America, where religion both escalated and eased crises of sustainability.[4] It inspired both status-reinforcing devotion and popular revitalization movements in stressed cornfield cultures between 1100 and 1350, when weather changed, crops failed, devotees clashed, and violence spiked. During the colonial exchange of biota, competing religious empires triggered demographic decimation, environmental stress, social inequality, and psychic trauma between 1565 and 1776 as settlers displaced Native Peoples and introduced the slave plantation. An urban industrial crisis intensified between 1873 and 1920, when fossil-fuel dependency increased pollution, and income inequality and health disparity in crowded northern cities signaled a wider decline in well-being. The global environmental effects of industrialization and urbanization peaked during the 1950s “Great Acceleration,” the onset of the time when human intervention in natural systems became predominant. The abrupt rise in carbon dioxide, methane, and ice-bound nitrates in polar ice levels signaled significant and long-term global ecological damage. That damage, in turn, threatened dramatic social and economic disruptions, from climate migrations to food scarcity, and presented new challenges to religious communities, which struggled to respond to deepening economic inequalities and mounting cultural polarization.
Descendants of the thirteenth-century cornfield cultures eventually confronted their difficulties, but the unresolved Colonial and Industrial Era crises were passed on to future generations. Americans now face the legacy of those social problems, including racial and economic inequality, while they also confront the unprecedented challenges of a global environmental crisis.
Reimagining the Island’s Past and Future
Can this framework help to reimagine the island of Ireland’s past as a series of resolved and unresolved sustainability crises? There was a medieval crisis as the climate-induced Great Famine (1315-1322) and the microorganism-caused Black Death (1347-1351) stressed farming and grazing niches in the fourteenth century. Were there lasting legacies of those crises that would shape the later sectarian conflict? Can we talk about a colonial crisis on the island? If so, when did it start and end? Was there a colonial exchange of biota, and a breaking of ancestral traditions, including spiritual practices focused on sacred sites, as with the veneration at holy wells? How did the displaced reimagine pilgrimage and recreate devotion in the new stressed niche? Was there an inequitable planation niche, as there was in the US South, and was it sacralized by a form of planter piety? If so, how did local revitalization movements use spiritual resources to challenge it? Specialists (for example here and here) have highlighted industrial Belfast, but does it also help to talk about an industrial crisis on the island, or at least in its northeastern corner, between about 1870 and 1920? Simon Purdue has documented ecological degradation in urban Belfast and demonstrated a decline in well-being, economic stability, and food security among mill workers. Most relevant for understanding the later conflict, Industrial Era employers constructed housing that would become the scene of post-1969 sectarian conflict, as Colm Heatley has argued.[5] During the Troubles, fatalities occurred disproportionately in the poorer, religiously segregated, working-class neighborhoods that had formed as grimy industrial niches. To what extent, then, can we see later religious conflict as the product of an unresolved colonial crisis and the legacy of an unresolved industrial crisis?
Demolition of Ewart’s mill in 1990. Belfast, Northern Ireland. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Does this analytic frame and interpretive vocabulary help? I’m not sure. But using sustainability and well-being has practical advantages because those terms have informed local and global thinking about possible futures. Similar language appears, for instance, not just in the UN Sustainable Development Goals but in The Belfast Agenda, the City Council’s vision for 2035. As I learned when I tried out the idea with my relatives in that North Antrim congregation, reframing those aims as the conditions for transgenerational sustainability and avoiding any mention of Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists might open some participants to reimagining the troubled past as a series of shared sustainability crises and to envisioning future-focused deliberations as collective efforts to repair Belfast’s socially and ecologically stressed eco-cultural niche.
[3] Anna Gritching, “Introduction: Social Ecologies and Borderlands,” in The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes, 2, 5, 9; Gregory, et al., Troubled Geographies, 1.
[4] Thomas A. Tweed, Religion in the Lands That Became America: From the Ice Age to the Information Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
Walls of Derry, Derry/Londonderry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Near New Gate Bastion: Mural of the main characters from the TV show Derry Girls. Via Wikimedia Commons.
What can we learn from the hit show, Derry Girls? (If you have not seen this, run off and start watching now!) Derry Girls is an Emmy-winning comedic coming-of-age series set in Northern Ireland. The show follows spirited teenagers navigating adolescence amidst a backdrop of political conflict. The show is set in the 1990s, before the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement that brought an “official” end to the Troubles. Today, Northern Ireland experiences a fragile peace. Yet, many themes behind the comedy still hold true for teens in Northern Ireland today.
Like the show, adolescents in Northern Ireland navigate history, culture, and the complex interplay between tradition and modernity. Our research team[1] is currently exploring how these teens learn and share their “truths,” which often are polarized by ethno-religious identity (Catholic/Protestant). We argue that a holistic approach is needed to study how polarized information is transmitted through traditional, structurally embedded narratives and systems that intersect with new information sources and modern values. We discuss novel methods that can begin to embrace these complexities, as now more than ever, information (and misinformation) are readily available literally at teens’ fingertips.
There is a large field of research in developmental psychology focussed on how young people learn information from others. We know that young people exhibit epistemic vigilance; that is, they are motivated to seek reliable information and bridge gaps in their knowledge. However, young people (like all people) also exhibit biases in their information seeking and sharing. As early as infancy, children prefer to learn from members of their own social or cultural groups, and take group membership into account when deciding with whom to share information. Children absorb and transmit information that aligns with the values of their community. This important area of study sheds light on the cognitive and social processes involved in children’s early understanding of information reliability at the individual-level.
A figure showing Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory of Development. Via Wikimedia Commons.
However, these findings currently lack perspective on how influences outside the individual, such as families, peers, schools, public policies, and cultural values, can combine to create a complex web of biases that shape the narratives young people construct about their communities. The socio-ecological framework (see, for example, Bronfenbrenner 1977) is a way of thinking about how different aspects of young people’s lives, from personal to societal to cultural, influence each other. The framework considers how individuals are shaped by their relationships, communities, and the larger society, as well as how they, in turn, can impact these environments. Using this framework, we can begin to elucidate how the push and pull of traditional post-conflict narratives and societal structures intersect with young people’s modernizing identities and values.
So, what can we learn from Derry Girls?
In episode 1 of season 2, the Derry girls participate in an attempt to mix their Catholic, all-girls school classroom with a classroom from a neighboring school of Protestant boys. A well-meaning but not-so-competent priest attempts to demonstrate overarching humanity through a brainstorming session of similarities across the mixed-background group. But alas, the failed exercise results in a full blackboard of “differences” between Catholics and Protestants, and an empty blackboard of “similarities.”
Re-created blackboard from Derry Girls for National Museums NI by Anna Mcaughtry, prop master on the show. Photo courtesy of Susan Dautel. Used with permission of Hat Trick Productions.
This replica of the now famous blackboard is on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The show presented these stereotypes in a light-hearted, comedic way, but unfortunately, stereotypes of Catholic and Protestant identity contribute to polarized narratives still today. To highlight the necessity of investigating the development of polarization and epistemic vigilance within young people’s broader ecological frameworks, we provide two examples from this episode of Derry Girls. These examples demonstrate how societal processes seemingly interact with individual-level social cognitive processes.
Intergroup Competition
One “difference” suggested by the teens on the above blackboard is “Protestants are rich and Catholics are poor.” This common yet polarizing cultural narrative demonstrates the impact of a long history of zero-sum conflict and power dynamics across the island of Ireland. Historic narratives may enter into present day interactions with the “other.” For instance, in this episode Michelle, a Derry girl, says, “…I don’t see why we have to get them [Protestants] a present? I mean they already have all the land, all the jobs, and all the f***in’ rights.” This macro-level narrative of competition is upheld by contested symbols (like the “Free Derry” mural in the backdrop of many scenes in the show) in teens’ local communities, a micro-level influence. Take another micro-level example—when the Derry girls and “their” Protestants get into conflict, the dialogue immediately escalates into a polarizing narrative, e.g. “because all Protestants are the same.” Such intergroup competition across the ecological system may disrupt teens from seeking reliable epistemic cues, further fostering a preference for ingroup information, even when that information is likely unreliable. (How many Protestants actually keep toasters in the cupboard?)
Segregation
“Why is everyone so desperate for them to mix? I think we should keep them separate,” says the headmistress from the Londonderry Boys School in the show. Over 90% of schools are “separate” in Northern Ireland, still today. Some teens attend Catholic Maintained schools and other teens attend state-controlled (often majority Protestant) schools. Our research, so far, finds that not only do young people attend different schools, but they may be taught completely different content in different types of schools. In a sample of secondary schools, 96% of Catholic schools teach a class/module on the history of “The Troubles,” compared to only 46% of state-controlled (often majority Protestant background) schools. In a representative survey of young people, a whopping 33% of teens say they were not taught (or did not know if they were taught) about the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in school. Religious education is also taught as part of the national school curriculum in Northern Ireland, but varies by school type. Studies of the two dominant school types during the Troubles found that they differed in time spent on religious education, rituals, symbols, and general ethos, but more current investigations are needed. Segregation also goes beyond schools into most layers of society. Teens often live in separate neighborhoods or towns, may attend church (Protestant) versus chapel (Catholic), have different hobbies, and read/watch different media. This separation within young people’s microsystems, i.e. their schools, classrooms, and local communities, can create false consensuses that reinforce ingroup perspectives and hinder the potential for cross-pollination and information sharing across group lines.
What may have changed for today’s teens in Northern Ireland since the 1990’s Derry Girls?
Anti Irish Sea border banner. Sandy Row, March 2021. Via Wikimedia Commons
A pessimist might say, not much. For instance, the “Protestants are British and Catholics are Irish” narrative on the Derry Girls differences blackboard features prominently in macro-level political discourse today. In the aftermath of Brexit, banners featuring polarized narratives around politics and national identity, like these, are frequent. Such macro-level narratives continue to intersect with micro-level structures, such as what young people learn in school and see in their local communities, leading to divided “truths” or knowledge structures at the individual-level.
“A United Ireland is for Everyone” poster via Sinn Fein. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
But thankfully, we are optimists. Now 25 years post the peace agreement, teens in Northern Ireland have been born into relative peace. Teens are motivated to move forward and continue to correct misinformation transmitted by previous generations: “Macaulay Culkin isn’t a Protestant, Ma!” (Erin, Derry Girls season 1, episode 1). Identities are shifting away from traditional dichotomous categories of Catholic and Protestant. Northern Ireland is secularizing—though it is important to note, not to the same extent as the Republic of Ireland or the rest of the United Kingdom. Teens are more likely to report having “no religion” or being “other” religion, as well as report being “neither” Unionist nor Nationalist. Churches, schools, and youth organizations are contributing to peacebuilding efforts through interfaith dialogue, cross-community initiatives, and integrated and shared education. What we still know less about is how and when young people today are motivated and able to seek out and share reliable information across group boundaries and beyond the limits of traditionally divided societal structures.
Call to Action: A Holistic Lens to Inform Effective Interventions
To navigate the intricate web of old and new, and micro- to macro-level influences on the development of polarization and/or epistemic vigilance in young people, we need innovative methodologies. Here are a few ideas that our team is working on (but we’d love to hear yours too, please comment below!):
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) emerge as powerful tools to analyze diverse texts, uncovering recurring themes and sentiments that occur in narratives across micro, meso, and macrosystems. This provides a nuanced understanding of the narratives influencing polarization. For instance, what were the Derry Girls learning about history and religion at Our Lady Immaculate College? Based on our current explorations, we have to assume a different history than their counterparts at the primarily Protestant background school down the road. Our team will use NLP to analyze pedagogical resources to understand polarization in history and religion education across Northern Irish classrooms.
Peer influence is a prominent theme in Derry Girls, pulling at times both towards (e.g., Erin tells her truth, “You can’t marry an Orangeman, Michelle!” Season 1, Episode 5) and away from polarization. Social Network Analysis expands beyond dyadic interactions, exploring naturally occurring social networks within settings like classrooms, local communities, or even more modern-day influences of social media. This approach helps decipher patterns of segregation, intergroup competition, and socialization practices, shedding light on the contextual factors influencing polarized (mis)information.
Diffusion paradigms, or experimental versions of the game of “telephone,” offer a real-time perspective on information transmission, allowing researchers to track how narratives, both polarizing and unifying, spread across groups. This method opens avenues to study the passing of stories and beliefs across peers, or across generations, contributing to our understanding of the perpetuation or amelioration of intergroup conflict.
Religion has influenced the narratives and perspectives of young people in Northern Ireland through community identity and belonging, education, rituals and commemorations, and moral and ethical interpretations of what is “true.” Employing interdisciplinary, mixed-method research is necessary to holistically explore how truth is defined and produced, how it is evaluated and transmitted at different levels of society, and how to increase epistemic vigilance. By synthesizing findings from various disciplines and methodological approaches, research can inform the development of targeted and effective interventions. These interventions, rooted in a deep understanding of the complexities highlighted in Derry Girls, can empower young people to enhance their epistemic vigilance. Ultimately, the goal is to equip young people with the critical thinking skills needed to catalyze positive social change, fostering healthier, more peaceful, and equitable societies, not only within Northern Ireland but also resonating beyond its borders.
[1] Our research team consists of Jocelyn Dautel (Queen’s University Belfast), Bethany Corbett (Ulster University), Kathleen Corriveau (Boston University), Emma Flynn (Warwick University), Eva Grew (Queen’s University Belfast), Mariah Kornbluh (University of Oregon), Caitlin McShane (Queen’s University Belfast), Jennifer Watling Neal (Michigan State University), Lara Wood (Abertay University), Christin Schulz (University of Amsterdam), and Jing Xu (University of Washington Seattle), funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation.
Dr. Jocelyn Dautel is a developmental psychologist researching how young people navigate their social worlds, especially when they are divided. She is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology, Director of the Kids in Context research lab, and Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. She leads on global research collaborations, such as Communicating Truth and the Developing Belief Network, researching children’s religious identity and beliefs across 30 field sites with over 50 international research collaborators. Through global education, research, and service, she contributes leadership in debates about unique and universal processes in social cognitive development with an aim towards reducing inequalities and promoting peacebuilding.
Dr. Bethany Corbett is a developmental psychologist and lecturer in the School of Psychology, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Her research has examined factors contributing towards children's prosocial choices (for example, to help and share), including experiences of minoritization within settings of conflict. Her research informs strategies to reduce inequalities and increase cooperation, from the interpersonal (the formation of positive relationships) through to the macro-level (support for dismantling the status quo). Other research interests include how young people learn about historical - and particularly, contested - information. Understanding these processes contributes to strategies designed to increase young people’s critical thinking skills, and reduce their susceptibility to misinformation
Enrique Dussel in 2013. Image via Flickr User Secretaría de Cultura de la Cuidad de México. CC-BY-SA 2.0.
Since the 1980s, Enrique Dussel has been regarded as the most important scholar in the fields of philosophy and theology in Latin America. An early contributor to liberation theology (teología de la liberación), a pioneering leader in the concurrent field of liberation philosophy (filosofía de la liberación), all the while being a highly respected historian of the Catholic Church in his own right, Dussel’s work spanned fields, geographies, and world history in an effort to dismantle the Eurocentric and colonialist pretensions of modernity. His contributions to these academic fields are simply too numerous to begin to list here. Without a doubt, the epistemicdecolonialization of these fields is at the front and center of his scholarship. However, the full potential of his work would be deficient if its reception were limited to a disciplinarily decadent interpretation that refused to cross boundaries. I argue that one of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye toward epistemic decolonization. The relation between history and philosophy and the relation between history and theology are good examples of this interdisciplinarity.
The fact that Dussel was a contributor to the emergence of both liberation theology and liberation philosophy has often resulted in a misguided, if not outright dismissive, reception of his work from the fields of theology and philosophy. On one hand, some theologians argue that his liberation theology is not properly theological due to the strong influence of Marxism on its development. They argue that this influence leads his theological work to be a merely Marxist secular philosophy in disguise. On the other hand, some philosophers argue that his brand of liberation philosophy is not philosophical enough due to its close historical and theoretical relationship with liberation theology. Ofelia Schutte argues, for example, that if his philosophical work is not simply a theology in disguise, then at least it is a secular imitation of liberation theology (174). This is the case even though Dussel himself never sought to blur the boundary between philosophy and theology. Instead, he kept a strict distinction between the two discourses based on a division between faith and reason. For him, whereas philosophy is geared toward a universal secular community of reason, theology is geared toward a particular religious community of faith.
One of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye toward epistemic decolonization.
Nevertheless, such formal distinction did not prevent creative and critical explorations of the ways in which the theological and the philosophical come together. In my view, these explorations are some of the most fertile moments in Dussel’s work. We see this in Dussel’s politico-philosophical study of Paul the Apostle. Here, a formal distinction between philosophy and theology is maintained in a way that seeks to overcome philosophy’s Enlightened secularism.
Picture of books in Spanish written by Enrique Dussel. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Without stepping into the ecclesiastical domain of theology, the philosopher can examine texts or topics that have traditionally been taken up in theology in the interests of determining a potential universal rationality. To be clear, this move is not the methodological discovery of a “philosophical theology” (which applies philosophical methods to elucidate theological frameworks) nor a “political theology” (which more narrowly analyzes the political field from the sectarian perspective of a religious tradition). As I have argued elsewhere, this move instead denotes the development of a dialectically postsecular philosophy that is invested in overcoming the ways in which the modern secular/religious divide has been falsely universalized through the coloniality of knowledge.
A more intricate instance of this exploration between the theological and the philosophical can be seen in Dussel’s The Theological Metaphors of Marx, a text that will be published for the first time in English translation in 2024. This text reconstructs Marx’s critique of theology as a critique of politics in a way that re-fashions political philosophy as an “anti-fetishist” philosophy of religion, where profane sacralization is diagnosed to be the root cause of political domination. While Dussel would write this text intermittently over a 20-year period parallel to the historical development of liberation theology, his argument largely stands on postsecularist philosophical grounds rather than theological ones. In this regard, it is similar to another heretically Marxist text: Ernst Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity, in which the German philosopher aims to establish a conversation between Marxism and religion “purged of ideology” (in the case of the latter) and “purged of taboo” (in the case of the former) (51). Interpreters who miss this methodological nuance end up all-too-quickly diagnosing the failure of The Theological Metaphors of Marx as a forced theologization of secular concerns. But this conclusion misses the entire point of the text, which is to rescue the critical value of theological metaphors as a critique of politics–which is to say, to probe the theological as the unspoken infrastructure of the politico-economic. It is in this way that The Theological Metaphors of Marx philosophically uncovers Marx’s own “proto-theology” or “implicit theology” made possible by the conceptual labor of a metaphorical language (18).
At the crossroads of the theological and the philosophical, the task of the decolonial postsecular philosopher is to diagnose the fetishisms or “false names,” which is to say, the false gods of the modern/colonial world that demand worship. This is why an atheist “anti-fetishism” is the very “first thesis” of liberation philosophy: it is an atheism of the fetish. And that secularism is one of these fetishes that plague modern philosophy is why a postsecularist impetus is important for the purposes of epistemic decolonization.
This is not to say, however, that all “dialectics of secularization” are absolutely doomed to culminate in irredeemably colonialist and fetishistic dynamics, as the ideology of secularism has done in modernity. This is why there remains, after all, a distinction between philosophy and theology, itself based on a division between faith and reason. If one can diagnose the irrational fetishisms of modernity, it is because somewhere a critically emancipatory and universal kernel of rationality remains alive. “There is no liberation without rationality,” Dussel claims, “but there is no critical rationality without accepting the interpellation of the excluded, or this would inadvertently be only the rationality of domination” (36). Accordingly, epistemic decolonization can be recognized as the interpellation of the excluded that calls out the fetishisms of a colonialist modernity. Evidently, this is not a crude call for the abandonment of modernity, nor simply a reaction against it. It is, rather, a creatively dialectical critique that goes through modernity itself. In Dussel’s terms, it is a “transmodern,” project, rather than an anti-modern or a postmodern one.
Decolonizing the relation between philosophy and theology is likewise not simply a matter of just blurring or undoing the boundaries between them. The lesson from Dussel’s work is to embrace the creative dialectics of decolonization which demands a new transmodern way of thinking about the points of mutual correspondence between philosophy and theology in a way that allows for liberatory interpretations of the world, beyond the fetishisms of modernity (such as secularism). At least this will be but one of the many legacies that his work will allow future generations to explore.
Rafael Vizcaíno is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. His work employs decolonial approaches to examine the intersections between race, religion, politics, and secularization. In 2020, he earned the American Philosophical Association’s Essay Prize in Latin American Thought. His first book (in final stages of revision) recounts the modern dialectics of secularization from the perspective of Latin American and Caribbean thought. His second book (in development) will examine the relation between philosophy of religion and political theology in the context of epistemic decolonization.
End of the World, Blue hour in Dirranbandi, Queensland, 2021. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In January 2017, newly elected president Donald Trump instituted Executive Order 13769, ostensibly to “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals entering the United States.” The order, in effect, limited immigrants, refugees, and visa-holding foreign nationals from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the US. It marked Trump’s delivery on his campaign promise during the 2016 presidential election to ban Muslims from entering the US. Behind the scenes, numerous reports indicated that it was Trump’s former campaign manager and presidential advisor, Steve Bannon, who orchestrated the planning and execution of this ban.
What was Bannon’s motivation for crafting such a ban? While Bannon’s nationalism and “America First” political ideology are no doubt linked to modern American White Christian nationalism, in this post I’ll suggest that another important influence on him is an esoteric intellectual movement called Traditionalism, which has its roots in the anti-modern perennial philosophy of René Guénon (d. 1951). More specifically I’ll suggest that Bannon’s political theology—a concept I ascribe to Traditionalism because of its assumption that spiritual and political realms are one and the same—is rooted in the cyclical notion of time laid out in Guénon’s work. This notion of time, I argue, helps us better comprehend the chaos of the early Trump days, the speed and alacrity with which the Muslim ban was implemented, and an alternative political theology of the Far Right. With different points of emphasis than mine, authors such as Benjamin Teitelbaum and Joshua Green have also documented the influence of Traditionalism on Bannon, even in the implementation of policies like the Muslim ban. I aim to deepen this account by showing its presence not only in his work on the Trump campaign but in the longer arch of Bannon’s career, specifically in his documentary films. Bannon, I contend, is not a fully-fledged Traditionalist in the vein of Italian theorist Julius Evola, or more recently the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. However, Bannon does often make use of Traditionalism in his work, and it is thus important to grapple with this form of thinking if we are to better understand its influence on contemporary far-right politics.
There is always a risk in devoting increased attention to a figure like Bannon, who has been a driver of an increasingly authoritarian and oppressive turn in US politics. My aim here, however, is to take him seriously so as to better understand his place within a tradition of right-wing thinking that is not new, despite its treatment as such oftentimes in the media. When we do so we are reminded of the consequences of implementing this philosophy in the past and developing strategies for countering it in the present.
Guénonian Traditionalism
Guénonian-inspired antimodern Traditionalism has been on the rise around the world, in such places as the US, Brazil (via the late Olavo de Carvalho), Russia (via Alexander Dugin), and Great Britain (via King Charles III). As his failed attempt to build right-wing nationalist movements in Europe following his firing from the White House shows, Bannon himself perceived the US as but one manifestation of a wider global struggle to be fought against the forces of modernity.
Guénon argued that there is a primordial tradition from which all the various other traditions branch. This tradition no longer exists in its pure form, but its vestiges are present in the various traditions we commonly call “world religions.” To be a Traditionalist, as Mark Sedgwickhas shown, is to believe that one must be initiated into one of the world’s living religious traditions to partake in the primordial tradition. One has to commit to a particular religion in order to take part in the universal. This is what it means to participate in the primordial tradition in the present. For Guénon and others, it was in the traditions of the “East” that the primordial tradition was closest to being preserved. And it was in an elite vanguard that tradition could be carried forward. In the west, Traditionalists saw the onslaught of the characteristic modern values of materialism and individualism as adversaries.
From his earliest years in the Navy to the present, Bannon has engaged with Traditionalist thought. What is counterintuitive about Bannon’s use of this political theology is not only the fact that several of its most significant thinkers practiced Islam (to varying degrees of seriousness), but also that this vision of tradition assumes that communal exclusivism is an expression of a more foundational inclusive vision of the global political community. What is less counterintuitive is that several of the thinkers associated with Traditionalism were more than happy to test their ideas via the fascist politics of Europe during the early twentieth century. While Traditionalism itself was not by any stretch of the imagination the only (or most significant) source for fascist political philosophy, the fact that several of its leading proponents saw in fascism a potential political home for their more esoteric spiritual beliefs draws our attention to its potential to act as a violent and racist ideology.
Cyclical Time and the End of Days
For Guénon, time is cyclical rather than teleological. As he lays out in The Crisis of the Modern World (1946), it is a cyclical notion of time that the primordial tradition teaches, and this is most clearly preserved in Hinduism. Drawing on his interpretation of the Hindu doctrine of Manvantara, he contends that time moves from a Golden, to a Silver, then Bronze, and finally Iron age.[1] The final age is a “dark age,” or Kali-Yuga. We have been in this age for 6,000 years, according to Guénon, and are reaching a point at which the world as we know it is ending. Modernity, with its rampant materialism, is for him the culmination of this descent into darkness. Our descent into the Kali-Yuga has meant that we have moved further and further away from this original tradition. We can only see glimmers of it in the “west,” mostly in the Catholic Church. Given time’s cyclical nature, however, Guenon admonishes us not to despair, “for . . . the end of the old world will also be the beginning of a new one” (18).
While Traditionalism itself was not by any stretch of the imagination the only (or most significant) source for fascist political philosophy, the fact that several of its leading proponents saw in fascism a potential political home for their more esoteric spiritual beliefs draws our attention to its potential to act as a violent and racist ideology.
Among the more specific signs that Guénon argues are indicative of a decline into the Dark Age include the rise of individualism and the falling away of caste distinctions. For Guénon and other Traditionalists, a caste system that placed a spiritual elite at the top and manual workers at the bottom was the natural order of human society. The increase in an individualist ethos, especially one that treats all humans as equal because of their status as consumers, erodes the caste system in the “west.” In tandem with the falling away of caste and the rise of individualism is the ascendance of the value of equality and its attendant institutionalized political form in democracy. Over and against such a vision of society Guénon promoted a hierarchical social order rooted in a primordial tradition, where people know their place, and because they know their place (whether as a cook, blacksmith, mother, or father) had a clear meaning and purpose in their lives. This political theology sought to preserve hierarchy, suppress the individual, and enforce conformity to an ideal only known by a select few.
Bannon’s Traditionalist Political Theology
Bannon expresses his arguments in “documentary” films and in interviews. His films evince the drama that one would expect from a person who believes that we are in the midst of a dark age. This is especially clear in his documentary Generation Zero (Citizens United, 2010). The film adopts a cyclical view of American history, citing William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning—An American Prophecy, which itself dabbles in Traditionalist approaches to temporality. Importantly, like Guénon, they see the 4th cycle in American history much like the Kali-Yuga. The cosmic nature of Bannon’s own view—and his adoption of a Traditionalist account of temporality—is clear in the way he depicts the cycles of time in the documentary. The first image in a section in the film on cyclical conceptions of time is an image of a sundial, which is then followed by the movement of gears inside of a gold-plated clock, a depiction of the Big Bang, the formation of the planet Earth, life itself in its cellular form, a butterfly appearing from a cocoon, and so forth. What all this is meant to imply is that the decline we are experiencing in the US is not simply a story of one nation’s decline, but the story of decline on cosmic proportions. Further, this story of decline is one that calls for urgent action because we, along with the rest of the world, are at risk of falling into an abyss if we do not “do something” soon. In this case, doing something means preserving the hierarchical order of tradition over and against the forces of modernity. Given this doom-laden view which characterizes our current dark age, it is unsurprising that one would rush to implement policies like the Muslim Ban that lack pragmatism and strip individuals of rights in the name of so-called unity. Whether or not implementing these policies stave off a descent into chaos, or merely preserve a hierarchy that will take over after the current age passes, is not fully explained by Bannon. For Guénon, however, it is clear that in preserving the hierarchical order as best we can now, we hold out the chance of shaping a new order in this form when it has to be reconstituted in the future.
There are recurring images in Bannon’s work that also mark a decline in particularly Traditionalist ways. In both his movie on Ronald Reagan, In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed (Bannon Films, 2004) and Generation Zero, the decline is almost always represented by the disintegration of gender roles and the rise of sexual liberation, both of which require the proliferation of individualism that Traditionalists abhor. Images of minorities are rare in his films, but when they are pictured, it is typically of African Americans with afros, wearing sunglasses, and giving speeches about revolutionary action. Here, the image is meant to evoke fear in the minds of his mostly White conservative audience. These films convey a “cautionary” representation of heedlessness and rejection of authority that is deeply resonant with Traditionalism. Only by preserving the “proper roles” of men and women and a racialized caste system could a proper social order be maintained. Bannon did not adopt all of Guénon’s or other Traditionalists’ arguments—he differs from them in his evaluation of Islam and his belief in the “working class” as the people who will save us from modernity’s corruptions—but he does seem to have accepted a notion of cyclical time and the urgency to act that our descent into the dark age calls for.
Running Out of Time
Since his departure from the White House and his failure to launch a European-wide populist movement, Bannon has fallen from the mainstream media spotlight. This is in no small part due to his indictment on charges of defrauding donors through his We Build the Wall organization. While continuing to deal with these legal troubles, Bannon also hosts a podcast called Steve Bannon’s War Room where he takes on the persona of a right-wing radio host, commenting on the daily headlines, promoting anti-vaccine theories, and putting forward political conspiracies about the 2020 US presidential election.[2] Despite this, attention to Bannon’s political theology of Traditionalism remains necessary as the forces that gave rise to Trump and made a space for someone like Bannon to gain proximity to power have not gone away. Trump’s decisive win in the 2024 Iowa caucuses is just one indicator that these forces remain potent. It is perhaps an overstatement to claim that Bannon himself is a full-fledged Traditionalist. Yet, in his political decisions, his documentaries, and his speeches, there is clear evidence that he finds aspects of the movement appealing and is even willing to implement them within the halls of power. For that reason, it is important that we continue to pay attention to this political theology and those who draw on it.
[1] A close engagement with Guénon’s use of Hindu texts and sources remains beyond the scope of this post. It should be noted, however, that like other Orientalists, he saw the “East” writ large as harboring spiritual resources lost to the west. For a recent, more sympathetic, reappraisal of Guénon’s Orientalist legacy, see Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge.
[2] For a compelling analysis of the War Room podcast and the wider media ecosystem in which it operates, see Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), esp. chap. 6.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Jewish Italian writer Primo Levi (1919–1987) in his later years. Photo Via Wikimedia Commons.
To us, we Jews who live safe in our warm houses, consider:
On October 7, 2023, when unspeakable acts of brutality were carried out in southern Israel, our political differences, for the most part, melted away and we reacted with horror and shock. We mourned the victims, wept with the bereaved, and shuddered at the thought of the terror and dread felt by those who were taken captive. We were filled with outrage against the perpetrators. What sort of people would we be if we had not reacted this way? If we had muttered “it’s so tragic” or “how awful,” and left it at that?
But that is how many of us, if not most, respond to the unspeakable suffering and loss experienced by the people of Gaza at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). We read that over 90% of the population has been forcibly displaced from their homes, with nowhere to go. We see images of total devastation on a gigantic scale. We hear reports of masses of people with little or no food or water; of horrendous injuries and countless deaths caused by relentless Israeli bombardment. And what do we do? We shake our heads solemnly, uttering phrases like “yes, it’s dreadful,” and then quickly move on. The right of Israel to defend itself is blithely invoked. One way or the other, we do not look the victims in the eye.
“You who live safe / in your warm houses, / You who find, returning in the evening, / Hot food and friendly faces: / Consider if this is a man / Who works in the mud/ Who does not know peace / Who fights for a scrap of bread …” “Consider if this is a woman, / Without hair and without name / With no more strength to remember, / Her eyes empty and her womb cold / Like a frog in winter.” These lines are from “Shema” (“Hear”), the poem Primo Levi wrote shortly after being liberated from Auschwitz.
Consider: Levi’s lines tell us that the abject beings he describes are human individuals. He tells us nothing more about them. Nothing about their identity or where they come from. He speaks only of what they have been reduced to in the camps: something less than what they are: a woman and a man. It’s as if there is nothing more we need to know. As if this were the essence of what he wants us to hear.
What he wants us to hear is timeless. So, reflecting on the wasteland called Gaza: Consider if this is a child, who sits amid the ruins of his home, who is inconsolable with grief at the death of his parents, who fights for a scrap of bread. Consider if this is a mother, robbed of her slain daughters and sons, with no more strength to bear her unborn baby, her face wracked with pain and loss.
“Meditate that this came about,” Levi writes in “Shema,” after his harrowing description of the man and the woman stripped of their humanity. “I commend these words to you. / Carve them in your hearts/ At home, in the street, / Going to bed, rising …” Perhaps you notice that these lines inflect the text of the biblical Shema, the summons “Hear, O Israel!,” after which his poem is named. If, confronted with the hell unleashed on the people of Gaza in our name, we could do as Levi says, and carve his words in our hearts, then we would not efface the humanity of the children, women, and men of Gaza. Then our hearts would be broken. We would not rush to justify what Israel is doing, day after day after day, to this people. We might instead exclaim: “Hear, O Israel!”
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity(2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
“Bombing Kids Is Not Self Defense” by Becker1999, Flickr.com, CC BY 2.0 DEED.
In the following statement, over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence deplore the atrocity crimes against civilians committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 7 October and by Israeli forces since then. The starvation, mass killing, and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders. Israeli President Isaac Herzog used particularly loaded language in an interview on MSNBC just a few days ago, on 5 December: “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilization. … We are attacked by [a] Jihadist network, an empire of evil. … and this empire wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.” Herzog builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s association of Israel’s attack on Gaza with the Biblical evil of Amalek, but he places it on a modern scale as the last stand against global apocalypse and the demise of “western civilization.” Both Herzog and Netanyahu are secular Jews. Their use of religious language and symbolism in this case reflects a dangerous intersection in the case of Israel of the exclusionary modern nation state with a settler colonial project in a place infused with multiple religious histories and meanings. The scholars who have signed the statement are signaling their alarm about the mass violence underway in Gaza and the inflammatory language that threatens to escalate it further. They call for urgent action to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza and to work towards a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
***
Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October
December 9, 2023
We, scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence, feel compelled to warn of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza. We also note that, should the Israeli attack continue and escalate, Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well.
We are deeply saddened and concerned by the mass murder of over 1,200 Israelis and migrant workers by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and others on 7 October, with more than 830 civilians among them. We also note the evidence of gender-based and sexual violence during the attack, the wounding of thousands of Israelis, the destruction of Israeli kibbutzim and towns, and the abduction of more than 240 hostages into the Gaza Strip. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. We recognize that violence in Israel and Palestine did not begin on 7 October. If we are to try to understand the mass murder of 7 October, we should place it within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Israeli military occupation violence against Palestinians since 1967, the sixteen-year siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the rise to power in Israel in the last year of a government made up of politicians who speak proudly about Jewish supremacy and exclusionary nationalism. Explaining is not justifying, and this context in no way excuses the targeting of Israeli civilians and migrant workers by Palestinians on 7 October.
We are also deeply saddened and concerned by the Israeli attack on Gaza in response to the Hamas attack. Israel’s assault has caused death and destruction on an unprecedented level, according to a New York Times article on 26 November. In two months, the Israeli assault has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians (with thousands more buried under the rubble)—nearly half of them children and youth, with a Palestinian child killed every ten minutes on average before the ceasefire—and wounded over 40,000. Considering that the total population of Gaza stands at 2.3 million people, the killing rate so far is about 0.7 percent in less than two months. The killing rate of civilians in Russia’s bombing and invasion of Ukraine in the areas most affected by the violence are probably similar—but over a longer period of time. A number of experts have therefore described Israel’s attack on Gaza as the most intense and deadliest of its kind since World War II, but while Russia’s attack on Ukraine has, for very good reason, prompted western leaders to support the people under attack, the same western leaders now support the violence of the Israeli state rather than the Palestinians under attack.
Israel has also forcibly displaced more than 1.8 million Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, while destroying almost half of all buildings and leaving the northern part of the Strip an “uninhabitable moonscape.” Indeed, the Israeli army has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since 7 October, which is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs, and according to Human Rights Watch, deployed white phosphorous bombs. It has systematically targeted hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, and agricultural fields. The state has also killed many essential professionals, including more than 220 healthcare workers, over 100 UN personnel, and dozens of journalists. The forced displacement has, furthermore, created in the southern part of the Strip severe overcrowding, with the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases, exacerbated by shortages of food, clean water, fuel, and medical supplies, due to Israel’s “total siege” measures since 7 October.
The unprecedented level of destruction and killing points to large-scale war crimes in Israel’s attack on Gaza. There is also evidence of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as a crime against humanity. Moreover, dozens of statements of Israeli leaders, ministers in the war cabinet, and senior army officers since 7 October—that is, people with command authority—suggest an “intent to destroy” Palestinians “as such,” in the language of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The statements include depictions of all Palestinians in Gaza as responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October and therefore legitimate military targets, as expressed by Israeli President Herzog on 13 October and by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he invoked, on 29 October, the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, just as Israel began its ground invasion. Casting an entire civilian population as enemies marks the history of modern genocide, with the Armenian genocide (1915-1918) and the Rwanda genocide (1994) as well-known examples. The statements also include dehumanizing language, such as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s reference to “human animals” when he proclaimed “total siege” on Gaza on 9 October. The slippage between seeing Hamas as “human animals” to seeing all Palestinians in Gaza in this way is evident in what Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian promised to people in Gaza the next day: “Hamas has turned into ISIS, and the residents of Gaza, instead of being appalled, are celebrating. … Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
These expressions of intent need to be understood also in relation to the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli media since 7 October. Israeli journalist David Mizrachi Wertheim, for instance, wrote on social media on 7 October that “If all the captives are not returned immediately, then turn the [Gaza] Strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate all norms on the way to victory.” He also added, “we are facing human animals.” Four days later, another Israeli journalist, Roy Sharon, commented on social media “that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas, including Sinwar and Deif, we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.” Annihilatory language now also appears in public spaces, such as banners on bridges in Tel Aviv that call “to annihilate Gaza” and explain that “the picture of triumph is 0 people in Gaza.” There are dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media, which recalls the incitement to genocide in Rwanda as genocide was unfolding there in 1994.
This incitement points to the grave danger that Palestinians everywhere under Israeli rule now face. Israeli army and settler violence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has intensified markedly from the beginning of 2023, has entered a new stage of brutality after 7 October. Sixteen Palestinian communities—over a thousand people—have been forcibly displaced in their entirety, continuing the policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Area C that comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Israeli soldiers and settlers have furthermore killed more than 220 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, while arresting thousands. The violence against Palestinians also includes acts of torture.
Palestinian citizens of Israel—almost 2 million people—are also facing a state assault against them, with hundreds of arrests since 7 October for any expression of identification with Palestinians in Gaza. There is widespread intimidation and silencing of Palestinian students, faculty, and staff in Israeli universities, and the Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai threatened to expel to Gaza Israeli Palestinians identifying with Palestinians in Gaza. These alarming developments and measures build on a view of Palestinian citizens of Israel as potential enemies that stretches back to the military rule imposed on the 156,000 Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained within the territory that became Israel in 1948. This iteration of military rule lasted until 1966, but the image of Israeli Palestinians as a threat has persisted. In May 2021, as many Israeli Palestinians came out to protest an attack on Palestinians in East Jerusalem and another attack on Gaza, the Israeli police responded with massive repression and violence, arresting hundreds. The situation deteriorated quickly, as Jewish and Palestinian citizens clashed across Israel—in some places, as in Haifa, with Jewish citizens attacking Palestinian citizens on the streets and breaking into houses of Palestinian citizens. And now, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right settler who serves as Israeli minister of national security, has put Israeli Palestinians in even more danger by the distribution of thousands of weapons to Israeli civilians who have formed hundreds of self-defense units after 7 October.
The escalating violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the exclusion and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel are particularly worrying in the context of calls in Israel after 7 October for a “second Nakba.” The reference is to the massacres and “ethnic cleansing” of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages and towns by Israeli forces in the 1948 war, when Israel was established. The language that member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) Ariel Kallner from the ruling Likud party used in a social media post on 7 October is instructive: “Nakba to the enemy now. … Now, only one goal: Nakba! Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to whoever dares to join [them].” We know that genocide is a process, and we recognize that the stage is thus set for violence more severe than the Nakba and not spatially limited to Gaza.
Thus, the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now. We call on governments to uphold their legal obligations under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to intervene and prevent genocide (Article 1) by (1) implementing an arms embargo on Israel; (2) working to end Israel’s military assault on Gaza; (3) pressuring the Israeli government to stop immediately the intensifying army and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which constitute clear violations of international law; (4) demanding the continued release of all hostages held in Gaza and all Palestinians imprisoned unlawfully in Israel, without charges or trial; (5) calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate and issue arrest warrants against all perpetrators of mass violence on 7 October and since then, both Palestinians and Israelis; and (6) initiating a political process in Israel and Palestine based on a truthful reckoning with Israeli mass violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba and a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
We also call on businesses and labor unions to ensure that they do not aid and abet Israeli mass violence, but rather follow the example of workers in Belgium transport unions who refused in late October to handle flights that ship arms to Israel.
Finally, we call on scholars, programs, centers, and institutes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies to take a clear stance against Israeli mass violence and join us in efforts to stop it and prevent its further escalation.
Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town
Taner Akçam, Director, Armenian Genocide Research Program, The Promise Armenian Institute, UCLA
Ayhan Aktar, Professor of Sociology (Retired), Istanbul Bilgi University
Yassin Al Haj Saleh, Syrian Writer, Berlin
Sebouh David Aslanian, Professor of History and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, UCLA
Karyn Ball, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Cathie Carmichael, Professor Emerita, School of History, University of East Anglia
Daniele Conversi, Professor, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country
Catherine Coquio, Professeure de littérature comparée à Université Paris Cité, France
John Cox, Associate Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of the West of England
Ann Curthoys, Honorary Professor, School of Humanities, The University of Sydney
Sarah K. Danielsson, Professor of History, Queensborough, CUNY
John Docker, Sydney, Australia
John Duncan, affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study
Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University, UK
Shannon Fyfe, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, George Mason University; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy
William Gallois, Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean, University of Exeter
Fatma Muge Gocek, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Svenja Goltermann, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich
Andrei Gómez-Suarez, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace, University of Winchester
Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London
John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta
Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany
Anna Holian, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Arizona State University
Rachel Ibreck, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London
Adam Jones, Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan
Rachel Killean, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Law School
Brian Klug, Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Hon. Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton
Mill Lake, Associate Professor, International Relations Department, London School of Economics
Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, University of Southampton
Yosefa Loshitzky, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Thomas MacManus, Senior Lecturer in State Crime, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Zachariah Mampilly, Professor, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Benjamin Meiches, Associate Professor of Security Studies and Conflict Resolution, University of Washington-Tacoma
Dirk Moses, Professor of International Relations, City College of New York, CUNY
Eva Nanopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London
Jeffrey Ostler, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oregon
Thomas Earl Porter, Professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC
Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA
Colin Samson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex
Victoria Sanford, Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University
Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies, Clark University
Martin Shaw, University of Sussex/Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals
Damien Short, Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium and Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
Adam Sutcliffe, Professor of European History, King’s College London
Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University
Enzo Traverso, Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University
Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School, New York
Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics, University of Notre Dame
Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University
Pauline Wakeham, Associate Professor, Department of English, Western University (Canada)
Keith David Watenpaugh, Professor and Director, Human Rights Studies, University of California, Davis
Louise Wise, Lecturer in International Security, University of Sussex
Andrew Woolford, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba
Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.
Image of interlocking chains in a fence in the city of Hebron. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The followingstatement, originally published on Tikkun, has been signed by Professor Atalia Omer, Co-Director of the Contending Modernities Research Initiative. Below the statement is a summary report of a conversation that took place on Thursday, October 12 at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies among experts in peace studies and international law.
Solidarity with Israel/Palestine
This statement is written and signed by Palestinians, Jews, and others who are committed to holding complex truths and striving to overcome polarization. We feel the pain of our people, identify with their pain, and need to work together to uplift our shared humanity.
The unfolding horror in Israel and Gaza is an escalation of decades of state-sanctioned violence by Israel against Palestinians. We condemn the horrific actions of Hamas against Israeli civilians. We likewise condemn Israel’s unbridled bombing and cutting off access to all basic needs, including food, water, electricity, and medical care. Attacks on Palestinian and Israeli civilians are repugnant.
Israeli violence against Palestinians has been intentionally hidden, slow, and steady. Contrary to what the media is reporting, this attack was not unprovoked. The Israeli and American governments have worked together to suppress and deny the inhumane acts against Palestinians that have led to this moment. There are Palestinians and Jews who have been raising red flags and warning about this inevitable outcome for decades, only to be dismissed and ignored.
The world’s failure to challenge Israel’s ongoing occupation, apartheid, and unbridled violence by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank provides the context for what is happening now. The recent Israeli government’s escalation of violence, encroachment of Al Aqsa Mosque, and its 16-year siege of Gaza has led to the current explosion.
We repeat: the brutality of Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians is unjustified.
As we watch the violent attacks and rallying of xenophobia on both sides, we are brokenhearted. Although it feels like a time to stand with “our people,” we know this is a time to come together. This is a time of great suffering for all; a time of painful emotions. It is only by recognizing our shared fears and our shared tears that we will find our way through this nightmare. It is a struggle we need to undertake jointly.
When we fall back into our separate and distinct identities we risk becoming part of the problem, not the solution. Both peoples suffer from ongoing trauma. We are all on high alert. The fear is palpable. And it is easy for us to objectify the ‘other.’
We seek a third path that neither perpetuates a xenophobic response nor sustains an unjust status quo. This moment calls us to slow down, sit with the pain and complexity, and grapple with our discomfort. It is a moment for digging deep, seeing across differences, and remembering our deep yearning for peace and justice. It is only through compassion and empathy that we will find a different way.
We recognize and uplift the humanity of all peoples in Israel/Palestine.
We call for an immediate ceasefire from Hamas and Israel.
We demand that basic needs be provided to Gazans.
We demand that the United States provide only humanitarian support to Israel and Gaza.
We support the creation of a movement that recognizes and affirms the humanity, dignity, and desire of both peoples to live in peace through reconciliation and justice.
****
On Thursday October 12, The Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies held a teach-in with faculty, staff, and students from around the University of Notre Dame community. The panel was moderated by CM Co-Director Ebrahim Moosa and panelists included Notre Dame doctoral candidate in Theology Daniel Bannoura, CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, and Notre Dame Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor of International Peace Studies Mary Ellen O’Connell. Given the mainstream English news media amnesia in covering this event, the aim of this conversation was to provide a broader context for the violence.
Following introductions of the speakers and a reading of the University of Notre Dame’s Land Acknowledgement, Kroc Institute Executive Director Erin Corcoran handed off the discussion to the panel.
Professor Ebrahim Moosa began by laying out the complex background of Israel/Palestine in light of the current events. He drew particular attention to the different ways that Israelis and Palestinians perceive the political context in which they find themselves. For Palestinians, he noted, the state of Israel is a settler colonial power. For Israelis, on the other hand, Israel is a home that represents an emancipation from centuries of experiencing oppression and violence in Europe and elsewhere.
In her opening remarks, Professor Atalia Omer outlined her personal connections to and scholarly focus on Israel and Palestine, as well as her own Israeli citizenship, roots, and Jewish identity. She urged recognizing the humanity of Palestinians and Israelis and that a failure to mourn victims of horrendous violence, whoever they are, is a failure of one’s humanity. She noted that she herself was hurting because of the loss of friends in Saturday’s atrocious attacks carried out by the Hamas movement. She argued that it is important to contextualize the violence so as to challenge binary and ahistorical narratives and the discourse of genocidal revenge and collective punishment that have been perpetuated in its wake. For her, this means contextualizing 100 years or more of the displacement of Palestinians and the international community’s complicit role in the Israeli occupation. The Gaza Strip, an integral part of the Palestinian landscape, has been fenced in since the Oslo “peace process” in the mid-1990s. During that time, Gaza was fragmented from the rest of Palestine. But Gaza has remained, despite this policy of fragmentation, at the heart of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. The war for Israeli independence in 1948 was the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” for Palestinians who have continued to experience for 75 years a variety of events and mechanisms of control, displacement, restrictions of movement, oppression, and destruction. This includes demolition, dispossession of land, and the denial of the history and experiences of Palestinians often through the weaponization of antisemitism. She noted that the leading human rights groups, including the Israeli B’tselem, have argued that Israel is perpetuating apartheid against the Palestinians through a principle of sovereignty B’tselem terms “Jewish supremacy.”
She described how she was horrified and in pain on Saturday, but, tragically, not surprised, noting that structural violence has been perpetuated in Palestinian territories for many years. She argued that the story of revenge is not one we should embrace. Redressing the underlying root causes of the escalating violence, Omer underscored, cannot be accomplished by the military through the commitment of war crimes and the violating humanitarian laws, but ought to be attained through diplomatic and political tools. Unfortunately, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has said that the US is going to have Israel’s back in its collective punishment of Gazans. But there is a need to recognize everyone’s humanity and pain. We need to understand the history of Palestinian displacement since 1948 (and before, going back to the momentous Balfour Declaration of 1917) and the continued discrepancy in power, which is exemplified in how Israel was able to cut off food, water, and electricity to Gaza. The majority of the residents of Gaza are refugees, uprooted during the Nakba.
Daniel Bannoura began by sharing his story as a Palestinian who grew up near Bethlehem. The West Bank, he noted, is also a prison in which members of his family still live. So far 1,600 Palestinians, including 450 children and babies, have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli occupation forces [see updated numbers in the editorial introduction]. Half of those who have died are women and children. White phosphorus has been dumped on Gazans in contravention to international law. He noted that around 300 Christian families in Gaza lost their homes and are now without food and sheltering at a church. Rather than a prison, he sees Gaza as a concentration camp because a prison implies that those in it are guilty of committing a crime. The only crime of the people of the Gaza Strip is that they were born there.
He noted that so many are in attendance at the panel today, rather than at past panels, because we don’t think Palestinians are fully human. The difference this time is the number of Israelis who have died. He argued that it was necessary to condemn Hamas, but that it was also necessary to condemn the Israeli government’s actions, the latter of which US citizens are also complicit in because their tax dollars go to support Israel. In our media, he laid out, White supremacy leads us to paint Israelis as White and Palestinians as non-White. He argued that apartheid language is only the beginning of the conversation, and we need to focus on the ramifications and impact of settler colonialism, legal and military procedures, US foreign policy, and the role of religion in whitewashing injustice in the region.
Daniel also noted that we need to recognize the humanity of both peoples. White supremacist ideologies frame Israel and Palestine as well in terms of who is viewed as having humanity and who is not. All of us in the room, he noted, are inheritors of a violence of domination and colonization, whether historical colonization, antisemitism, or the denial of the Palestinian people of the right to exist. Daniel further observed the role of Western Christianity in maintaining the system of oppression against the Palestinians through theological formulations, whether through Protestant zionism or Catholic zionism, that justify the colonization of Palestine and continue to exclude and erase Palestinians from their analysis. He argued that we need to see that the Shoah is tied to the Nakba, that the suffering of innocents in the past is tied to the suffering of innocents now. He ended by noting that he hoped a just peace and human rights would inform how we move ahead from this tragedy.
Professor Ebrahim Moosa recognized that many in the audience were in pain after an interruption from an audience member. He noted that he was South African and that every South African cleric, civil rights activist, and politician who visited Israel/Palestine said that the oppression faced by the Palestinians was far worse than what Blacks faced in South Africa. He suggested that a carnage was about to happen in Gaza, and that because of this he wrote a letter to President Bident and to his Senator, and encouraged others to do the same.
Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell argued that this is a moment to speak with unity. We need to give heart to the amount of suffering. She spoke of a way forward if we use what past generations offered us to unite us and that is our common international law—a concept we around the world built together. She briefly addressed the three categories of law relevant to the crisis: (1) law on resort to armed force; (2) law on the conduct of armed conflict; and (3) human rights law. On initial resort to force she argued that any right of self-defense or to resist occupation that may exist for the Palestinian people (and that is a complicated issue), there is emphatically no justification for the violent measures undertaken by Hamas. Hamas had no hope of removing Israeli authorities from occupied territory by killing civilians. Hamas used violence with only one aim—to intimidate for political ends—that is the definition of terrorism. She explained that even a party with a right to resort to force is restricted from exercising that right where there is no reasonable chance of success.
Concerning law and conduct during armed conflict, she emphasized there is no right to intentionally target civilians or ever take hostages. She said that it is unclear to what extent Israel can lawfully respond to terrorism with war. It is clear that Israel has a duty to withdraw from territory it occupies. Israel’s use of force also violates the principle of necessity. Its interventions in the past have never accomplished a lawful military objective. Further, any resort to armed force must comply with four fundamental principles: distinction, necessity, proportionality, and humanity. Israel is violating all of these right now. Cutting off food, medicine, and water to a civilian population is never acceptable. Hamas must also release hostages and cease violent attacks on Israel. The US has a responsibility to restore international law and reverse its own actions in violation of the prohibition on the use of force. She advocated for the US to lead in international law to aid those suffering in all war-torn nations—Myanmar, in Ethiopia, and in Sudan.
Following these initial remarks, a Q&A period was opened up. One audience member suggested that it would be beneficial for the US and UN to invade Gaza and free the Palestinians from Hamas. Another attendee reflected on the fact that the Israeli occupation had prevented them from returning to their home. Still another wondered what role the UN security council might play in the dispute and what was being said by the Palestinian leadership about the conflict.
Kibbutz Kfar Aza with Gaza seen on the horizon. Image credit: Max Nathans. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED.
ProfessorMary Ellen O’Connell began the panelists’ responses by mentioning, as the other panelists had before their remarks, her own faith, Roman Catholicism, and her Irish heritage. She is the granddaughter of people who fled oppression and genocidal famine. She has devoted her life in line with the great teaching of the Catholic Church to Pacem in Terris. International law offers the most effective tool to work for the goal that she knows of. In response to the question about the UN invading and freeing people from Hamas she argued based on extensive experience and data that the attempt to use military force to create good governance will fail. Classical peacekeeping, which succeeded consistently in ending violence when all parties consented, had been abandoned with the end of the Cold War and the rise of a hegemonic US devoted to realist-militarist policy. The belief in military solutions bred by realism is at the root of conflict today. Yet, military force is no solution to terrorism and other social challenges.
In response to the question about the United Nations Security Council, she dismissed the Council’s relevance today, given the Permanent Members’ disregard for the UN Charter and international law generally. A dynamic UN Secretary General with real leadership potential can do more for peace now as can an immediate shift of US policy from defying international law to compliance—end targeted killing with drones, renounce unlawful military force like the invasion of Iraq 2003, and cease military support of Israel.
Daniel Bannoura noted that the Palestinian president committed himself to nonviolence and condemned the killing of innocent civilians. He also reiterated that we need Israelis to see that their security is connected to Palestinian security. Israel has built a fortress on the lands and bones of Palestinians, he argued. The suffering is connected when we see that a Palestinian cannot return home. Palestinians want a free Palestine from apartheid and oppression so that Hamas and other actors of violence lose their credibility. Hamas has only been around 30 years. Palestinians have been suffering since 1948.
ProfessorAtalia Omer argued that it is critical to think of the question of Israeli and Palestinian suffering together. Because of the binary framing, she noted, it is difficult both to mourn the people she lost [in Israel] and recognize the crimes committed against them while also recognizing the Palestinian story and the ongoing violent reality Palestinains have endured, albeit differently in 1948 territories or “Israel proper,” the West Bank, occupied East Jerusalem, and in the Gaza Strip (and various diasporas and refugee camps in the region). This issue did not begin on Saturday, October 7 and it is important to bring the root cause to the foreground in order to de-escalate and redress politically the aspirations of Palestinians for freedom and historical justice. She suggested that the dehumanizing rhetoric from the US President and Secretary of State that claimed that Hamas’ sole purpose for existing is “to kill Jews” collapses the distinction between Israelis and Jews in an unhelpful way. It also abstracts and decontextualizes the realities of prolonged structural violence in Palestine/Israel and the ideology that sustains them as noted in the B’tselem report.
She ended her response by noting that she grew up in Israel, and the first time she heard about the Nakba was when she came to the US. What is at the center of this is the denial of history, the denial of narrative, and the denial of humanity.
In another round of questions, one audience member asked how they could support Palestinians without being accused of being antisemitic? They also asked how to communicate to the West that Hamas does not represent everyone? Another audience member spoke about their home and neighborhood in Gaza being destroyed, noting that their family is camped in a school and that there was no way out of the city. She argued that Israel is committing war crimes and no one is covering it. Hamas is the only form of resistance that Gazans have, she said. Another audience member asked what duty toward Palestine Jordanians, Iraqis, Lebanese and others have and how the Israelis might be brought to the negotiating table? They also pointedly asked: What do you do when non-violence does not work?
Daniel Bannoura responded to the question about antisemitism and support for Palestinians. The Palestinian struggle for freedom, he argued, is tied to the struggle against antisemitism. It is the same demand that the struggles are after. Because you are fighting against antisemitism you are fighting for Palestinians. Generally, Western discourse on the situation in Palestine and Israel consistently formulates the Palestinian cause as contingent or insignificant. He suggested that Palestinians are paying for the sins of Christians in Europe and their historic antisemitism. We have to understand that this is a messy conflict, and we have to move away from the colonial framing of it.
A two-state solution will not work, he said. The community’s history and culture are too intertwined. We need to think in new and creative ways that insure the security and freedom of both peoples.
ProfessorAtalia Omer noted that the two-state framework is based on homogeneous ethnoreligious conceptions of identity that inspire White nationalism in the US and that alternatives are needed. She stressed the need for a political imagination that goes beyond the current framework.
Professor Ebrahim Moosa concluded the panel by suggesting that each side in the conflict is now framing this moment as “a state of exception” from the normal rule of law and that this is an extremely dangerous moment. Indeed, the US claimed a state of exception after 9/11 and dire consequences followed, including years of violence and death in Afghanistan and in other places around the world where the “war on terror” was enacted.
In Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria, Ebenezer Obadare asks a seemingly simple question: “How is it that in contemporary Nigeria (and indeed in many other African countries where Pentecostal Christianity exercises an outsize influence) the pastor has come to occupy such a central place in the social imaginary, to such an extent that medical and other forms of professional judgment must defer to him?” (3). What this ostensibly straightforward question opens up, however, is a complex socio-historical phenomenon that reveals much about the changing nature of authority and power in post-colonial Nigeria and in other similar contexts where Pentecostalism is on the rise.
In the early days of post-independence Nigeria, Obadare contends, authority was more often wielded by intellectuals, whom Obadare refers to as the “Man of Letters” (as opposed to the Pentecostal “Man of God”). The gendering of the intellectual and pastor in this case is intentional, as in the Nigerian context the shift from one form of authority in social and political space to another is merely a shifting of patriarchal power to a different realm. Obadare’s contention is that the shift in authority is explained by the vacuum opened up by the failures of the state (and the intellectuals who supported it) to manage economic turmoil and everyday government functionality. This failure, due in no small part to problems inherited from colonial rule, has made space into which the Pentecostal pastor, with his charismatic authority, has been able to enter. This pastor does not “run” the state, as Obadare makes clear, but in his social, political, and erotic power he is able to wield authority and influence the people and by extension the government.
Obadare is also unabashed in his criticism of this model of authority. While he understands the historical and political conditions that have given rise to it, he worries about the undemocratic ends to which such power can be put. Pentecostal pastors practice a “rule by prodigy” wherein they claim to have special access to truths from the divine concerning social, political, and economic matters. Such rule by prodigy short circuits the need for democratic debate and reform and opens up the path to authoritarianism.
The contributors to this symposium take up both the normative and descriptive claims that make up Obadare’s text. Abimola A. Adelakun asks to what degree the pastor’s authority is now under threat from the forces of the digital age. Pundits, social media influences, and others have begun to question the authority of the Pentecostal pastor, thus raising the question of whether the “Man of God” might go the same way of the “Man of Letters” in the recent past that Obadare documents. Adeshina Afolayan also wonders if Obadare has overstated the influence of the Pentecostal pastor. In conversation with other scholars of Pentecostalism in Africa like Ruth Marshall and Nimi Wariboko, she argues that Obadare’s anti-clericalism leads him to this overstatement and also leads him to ignore the potential positive impact that Pentecostalism might have on Nigerian society. By ignoring such potentialities, Afolayan argues that Obadare’s book betrays a secular bias that underestimates the potential constructive aspects of religion.
Where Adelakun and Afolayan worry that the pastor’s influence has been overstated, Adriaan Van Klinken conversely worries that the continued relevance of the intelligentsia has been understated in Obadare’s portrait. Drawing on literary critiques of the pastor in Nigerian culture, Van Klinken contends that there are deep roots in African literature for critiquing the role of Christianity in politics and society. While not contending that literary figures are likely to overtake the pastor anytime soon in terms of popularity, Van Klinken reminds us that they continue to act as a “thorn in the side” of the pastor and wider movement that he represents. Karen Lauterbach also wonders to what degree we find remnants of the intellectual still present in African societies today. But rather than see the “Man of Letters” as a form distinct from the “Man of God,” she sees them as partaking in similar literary techniques and drawing on similar traditions, albeit towards different ends. For her, this raises wider questions about how spiritual and earthly authorities interact with seemingly secular liberal democratic structures.
What Obadare’s book and the contributors to this symposium encourage us to reflect on is how authority is maintained, challenged, and revoked in the modern world, and especially in postcolonial settings.
Finally, Devaka Premawardhana poses two concerns for Obadare: first, he asks if the fall from prominence of the “Man of Letters” can be causally linked to the rise of the Pentecostal pastor, and second, he wonders if Obadare places too much of the blame on Pentecostal pastors for the socio-political issues facing Nigerians today. Still, Premawardhana finds in Obadare’s work a potential spark that might ignite resistance among those who find the dogmatism linked to the “Man of God” to be problematic. In his response to all the contributors, Obadare takes up the theme of anti-anti-intellectualism as the normative impulse behind the book.
What Obadare’s book and the contributors to this symposium encourage us to reflect on is how authority is maintained, challenged, and revoked in the modern world, and especially in postcolonial settings. This has been a key question of the authority, community, and identity (ACI) research group of Contending Modernities, of which Obadare is a member, and of which this book is a product. This requires that we attend to those who wield both political and spiritual power and that we continue to challenge the idea that such forms of authority have been separated in the era of the liberal nation-state. Indeed, as Obadare demonstrates, regardless of whether we believe the pastor’s claim that his prophetic power is divinely bestowed, the effects of this claim on the socio-political realm will be real, and we ignore them at our own peril.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
This Carmelite sisterhood facility was built around the discovery of an old tablet bearing the traditional ‘Pater Noster’ (‘Our Father’) prayer, in the vicinity of a tomb of a woman ascribed to various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy women. Here is a display of translations of the prayer in Latin, Arabic, and Armenian forms. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I would like to start by thanking all the contributors for their important essays, valuable insights, and scholarly feedback. In this response, I will focus on three areas: claiming agency, exploring colonial tools, and understanding transnational communities, that were picked up bymyfourcolleagues.
Claiming agency
This book is part of several edited volumes of mine which focus on the Christians of the Middle East. All of these volumes tackle numerous aspects of the history, life, and witness of the Christians in our region. Over half of the contributors to them are Middle Eastern scholars of religion, theology, history, and sociology. The main goal of these publications is to raise awareness of the situation of the Christians in the Middle East to a North American and European audience and to provide a platform for Indigenous Christians to tell their stories in their own words. For too long, North American and European scholars have been telling the story of the Christians of the Middle East. Many of them have produced genuine and valuable research that is important. Others, however, have instrumentalized Middle Eastern Christians for their own political ends or conservative religious agendas.
Over the course of the last two centuries, several tools have been developed by European and American scholars that have allowed them to use Middle Eastern Christians to further their colonial interests. One of these is the tool of sectarianianism, which looks at the Middle Eastern region as a conglomerate of religious sects. A topical, historical example of this is the British conceptualization of Jerusalem as a city of four sectarian quarters: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Armenian. This conceptualization took place even though each quarter was housing Palestinians with diverse faiths. The French similarly divided Syrian territory along sectarian lines between Sunni, Alawite, and Druze.
Another tool that was developed in the aftermath of World War I was the concept of minorities in the region. The influence of Christians and other prominent communities was minimized, giving colonial powers an excuse to interfere in the internal policies of the newly “independent” Middle Eastern states.
The latest tool is known as FoRB, “Freedom of Religion or Belief,” a mandate and special focus of the UN. There is genuine concern among many Christians in the Middle East that FoRB will be weaponized as a platform for populism, religious nationalism and colonial interventions, resulting in more violent religious conflicts. Many evangelical organizations are using FoRB as a tool to pressure Muslim countries to allow for Christian missions under Muslims. The more Christian martyrs there are, the better it is for their fundraising efforts in conservative circles. Although FoRB is an important and legitimate right, the narrative ignores many of the region’s other hard-fought victories for human rights. It is imperative to see freedom from within a holistic perspective. It is also crucial to recognize that there have been long struggles for freedom in the Middle East, which include confronting colonialism, occupation, socio-economic marginalization, authoritarianism, and patriarchy.
Understanding Transnational Communities
For the last hundred years, the Middle East has been suffering under European colonialism, Israeli settler colonialism, regional conflicts, militarization, and exploitation. Such difficulties have resulted in civil wars, underdevelopment, and displacement in the region. In this context, many Middle Eastern Christians—especially Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi—have chosen to emigrate, establishing diasporic and transnational communities. Drawing on identity politics rhetoric (Assyrian, Egyptian, Phoenicians versus Arab Muslim), some of those diasporic Christian communities of Iraqi, Egyptian, and Lebanese origin have utilized the discourse of religious persecution in defense of their religious siblings at home. Though their advocacy for their native communities is understandable, it has often proved to be counterproductive as it borrows a sectarian framework. This narrative widens the gap between the Muslims and Christians in the region and subtly calls for foreign political intervention.
There is genuine concern among many Christians in the Middle East that “Freedom of Religious Belief” will be weaponized as a platform for populism, religious nationalism, and colonial interventions, resulting in more violent religious conflicts.
The only hope for Christians in the Middle East is genuine engagement with their communities to build a society that places less emphasis on religion and more emphasis on creating civic space; making diversity an intrinsic value in the region; and reimagining interfaith relations and de-emphasizing identity politics. The region is in dire need for justice, peace, and stability. Without such a political framework, all segments of the Middle Eastern societies, including the Christians, will continue to suffer, migrate, and lose heart. Yet, in all these contexts, the Christians of the Middle East have proved over and over again to be resilient. They “are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair… struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4: 8-9).
Founder and President of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem. Dr. Raheb is a co-founder of Bright Stars of Bethlehem, a not-for-profit 501c3 in the USA. The most widely published Palestinian theologian to date, Dr. Raheb is the author and editor of 40 books including: The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire(Baylor, 2021) The Cross in Contexts: Suffering and Redemption in Palestine (w/Suzanne Watts Henderson, Orbis, 2017); Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes; I am a Palestinian Christian(Orbis, 2014); Bethlehem Besieged (Broadleaf, 2004) . His books and numerous articles have been translated so far into eleven languages. Rev. Raheb served as the senior pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem from June 1987 to May 2017 and as the President of the Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land from 2011–2016. Dr. Raheb was elected in 2018 to the Palestinian National Council and to the Palestinian Central Council. A social entrepreneur, Rev. Raheb has founded several NGO‟s including the Christian Academic Forum for Citizenship in the Arab World (CAFCAW). He is a founding and board member of the National Library of Palestine and a founding member and author of Kairos Palestine.
During the twentieth century and now into the twenty first, White Christian evangelicals have claimed that their standing in the US socio-political landscape is under attack. Even though they have enjoyed political and religious dominance in the US, they believe that they are now the persecuted, and that their persecutors—Blacks, Latina/os, LGBTQI+ persons, and other minorities—are plotting their demise. The perception of Christian persecution is not a new one, as Mitri Raheb demonstrates in his most recent book, The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire, nor is it monolithic. In this monograph Raheb traces the particular histories of Christians in the MENA (Middle East and North African) region who have long served as pawns in the political machinations of empires, including those of White evangelicals in the US. The latter, while more than willing to claim the mantle of persecution for themselves, are far less likely to extend such claims to Palestinian Christians. Who is able to claim the mantle of being persecuted in the Middle East, as Raheb shows, more often has had to do with what suits the interests of European and US powers, rather than the realities of those who live in the region. In the current moment, we find expressions of sympathy (or lack thereof of) for the plight of Middle Eastern Christians still enmeshed in the operations of empire.
What Raheb’s book in particular adds to our understanding of this phenomenon is a deep historical engagement that locates the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in a longer arc of colonial history and the history of empires. Raheb begins his story with the Ottoman Empirem where he gives an account of the treatment of Christians within the millet system. He is not nostalgic for the pre-colonial European Ottoman system, which surely did treat Christians as second-class subjects. But his history is also one that is decolonial, and as such refuses to see in the Ottoman system an imperfect precursor to the liberal nation state system, under which Middle Eastern Christians would arguably fare much worse than under the Ottoman system. In subsequent chapters, Raheb explores the role of European missionary activities in the region and their often symbiotic work with imperial and colonial forces, the effect of the Nakba on Palestinian Christians, and the more recent decisions of US administrations to fly the banner of religious freedom in the Middle East only when it suits their purposes. And it is this latter point that resurfaces again and again in this text. Who is able to claim that they are being persecuted or lacking in freedom, and thus able to reap the benefits of others recognizing that claim, is unevenly distributed and marks not the suffering of those living under oppressive rule, but those with vested interests in marking some as persecuted and others as not, thereby bypassing the need to interrogate political forms of violence defining all Palestinian lives regardless of religion. The latter move, often enough as Raheb shows, acts as a pre-text to further intervention in regions not under colonial political control.
What Raheb’s book in particular adds to our understanding of this phenomenon is a deep historical engagement that locates the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in a longer arc of colonial history and the history of empires.
The contributors to this symposium explore this theme in a variety of ways. Candace Lukasik, for example, takes Raheb’s geopolitical framing of persecution into reflections about her own work with diasporic Coptic Christian communities in the US. What Lukasik finds in doing so is that as communities move from one context to another, their identities as a persecuted minority transform. In this case, Coptics reframe their persecution in Egypt through the US framework of Christian persecution in ways that lift up their Christian identity and downgrade their MENA identity in keeping with US geopolitical framings. Omer likewise takes Raheb’s argument and thinks with it in new contexts. In particular she puts Raheb’s book into conversation with the recent documentary film directed by Maya Zinshtein, Til’ Kingdom Come, which examines the role of Christian Zionists in the US supporting groups who help fund the Israeli military and settlement and annexation projects. This support has been welcomed by some in Israel despite the overt antisemitism expressed by Christian Zionists in the US. Indeed, so-called philo-semitism is antisemitism. The deep irony and tragedy of this story comes in the way that Christian evangelicals fail to see Palestinian Christians as co-religionists and as bearers of human rights and dignity, despite their shared faith. In the film, this is most starkly revealed when a pastor from Kentucky claims, following a conversation with a Lutheran Pastor in Bethlehem, that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Here, recognition fails because of the Christian Zionist lens that constructs “real” Christians as White evangelicals and Christians living under occupation in Israel/Palestine as non-existent. The persecuted Christian again here is tied up with the politics of empire and nation.
In his contribution, Gary Burge also brings in further reflections on the complicity of the west in forms of violence throughout the MENA region. Burge first focuses on the western political violence that has damaged Christian communities in the region before turning to the role of Islamophobia in shaping who are considered victims of religious persecution. He finally turns to a criticism of Raheb, not for his harsh words for Evangelicals in the US, but for his lack of them. Burge worries that Raheb lets American Evangelicals off the hook and calls for an even more strongly prophetic voice to counter their message.
If Omer, Lukasik, and Burge extend Raheb’s critical account of Christian Zionism and Evangelical complicity in the suffering of Christians in the MENA region, Mourad Takawi highlights the moments of hope that surface in Raheb’s text. Takawi finds in even the most horrendous episodes of violence recounted in Raheb’s text moments that illuminate alternative futures for those suffering under the weight of oppression. He delves more deeply into the example of Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883) to illustrate this. Raheb pens a response to these contributors which takes up the central themes analyzed in each of these essays.
This mixture of trenchant critique that is attentive to multiple layers of identity formation—including, but not limited to, religious, ethnic, national, and racial identities—and constructive imagining of ways of forming community beyond those identities is necessary as we confront populist forms of authoritarianism. The latter mobilizes the rhetoric of persecution to further marginalize the most vulnerable in societies around the world. In this symposium the author and contributors alike draw us to the urgency of this analysis and help us chart ways forward beyond our current frameworks.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
“Dead End” trail sign in Fossil Springs, Arizona. Image credit: Flickr User Al_HikesAZ. CC BY-NC 2.0.
What does it mean to treat a piece of land as someone’s home? Can home be reduced to property? Can the sacred be owned? Do conceptualizations of land as wilderness exclude human inhabitants? Does the value of land vary according to whom it “belongs”? Should land be “productive” for human beings, and if so, how should the productive value of land be determined? How should the goods of the land—minerals, foodstuffs, natural materials—be valued, obtained, or preserved? The answers to these questions depend on how we understand land in general, as well as how we understand certain places in particular.
Texts from different disciplines—legal, religious, literary, ethnographic—offer competing theories of land. Land is often rendered as property and commodity, but it can also be protected or preserved as having cultural significance or as wilderness. The term “Mother Earth” suggests a kinship relationship between us humans and the land, and Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ refers to the land as our shared home. Can such divergent theories of land coexist or are they mutually exclusive? If these theories of land are competing and mutually exclusive—some argue the sacred cannot and should not be owned by humans; land that is cultivated as home is not wild anymore—which are most suited to address the ethical and political questions that present environmental crises pose to our collective well-being?
These questions touch on intimately cultural matters, evoking how different communities conceptualize themselves and how such conceptualizations relate to land. These questions are not new. Ancient Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle asked about the essence of the earth, and early modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau grounded their social contract theories in the valorization of agricultural cultivation and its relation to private property. The new politics imagined by Enlightenment thinkers paved the way for European projects of colonialism and capitalism, bringing all land everywhere under the power of possession. Alternatives to and critiques of colonial theories of land abound: from the kinship models of humans in relation to land found among many Indigenous peoples, to the agricultural commune movements of the nineteenth century; from the anti-imperial communisms of the twentieth century to the radical environmentalists of the twenty-first century.
Many contemporary philosophers, scholars, and authors share these concerns and propose scientific, political, and social critiques and solutions to our environmental crisis. These critical discourses and proposed solutions have at their basis a theory of land.
This symposium emerged from a working group funded by the Social Science Research Council. An interdisciplinary group of ten scholars—all interested in religion but also in geography, Indigenous studies, Black studies, Latin American studies, law, and anthropology—got together to discuss theories of land over the course of one year. We read texts of legal theory, environmental humanities, environmental science, political theory, and ethnography, and we discussed the question of what academics who care about land, the natural environment, and ultimately, about environmental justice, can bring to the table when what we do is theorize but what we need, what the land needs, is very practical.
The interdisciplinary collection of authors we have read together each offers a different theory of land. While author Amitav Ghosh argues that our environmental crisis is the result of our colonial view of the land as resource, Red River Métis environmental scientist Max Liboiron reminds us that we treat the land as resource, and that we assume access to Native land, not only when we pollute, but also when we recycle. While ethnographer Keisha-Khan Perry reminds us that it is often Black women who are at the forefront of land rights and racial justice struggles (in Brazil and elsewhere), and that we tend to invisiblize them, political theorist Robert Nichols argues that the notion of land rights is based on a settler colonial understanding of land as property. Geographer Nicolas Howe tells us that if we focus on our relationship with land as landscape, as something that we look at, we can learn as much about ourselves as we will about the land. What we learn will have both legal and religious implications. Ethnographer Marisol de la Cadena pushes us to consider the ethical and political implications of our interdependence with the land. Finally, Indigenous studies scholar Candace Fujikane offers a Kanaka Maoli idea of abundance, a radical approach to land in the face of capitalist notions of scarcity.
Though we came together to discuss theory, our conversations often revolved around method as well. What can religious studies scholars who care about land learn from other disciplines? And how can we learn from other disciplines without being extractive? It turns out that what is true about being in good relations with the land (you should not be extractive, which means that you shouldn’t treat the land as commodity) is also true about knowledge (you shouldn’t read texts only as sources to cite). So, can we learn things from other scholars, especially Indigenous scholars, without extracting knowledge from them? One thing some of us kept insisting on is that it is not theorists who can help make our land relations better; rather, it is communities on the ground who can help us theorize better: Black women fighting for land rights in Colombia, Ohlone peoples fighting for #LandBack in California, first-generation college students. We need to take these communities’ lived experiences into account when we work to decolonize the Catholic Church or the land-grab university. Indeed, we need to listen to the land itself—the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the Sonoran Desert—in order to theorize better, in order to live better.
Dana Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and affiliated faculty at the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. Her first book, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, is forthcoming this fall from University Press of Kansas.
Front page of May 4, 1968 edition of The Black Panther Party community news service. Image Credit: Flickr User Thomas Hawk. CC BY-NC 2.0.
When I teach classes on ethics to my graduate and seminary students, I routinely explain that I want them to include a respectful affirmation of human worth and dignity as a core dimension of the vision for ethical human communities that they espouse. I insistently tell them that such an affirmation should be explicit in the ethical leadership they offer in their professional and ministry settings. Then I usually punctuate my insistence with a slightly overdramatic warning that in actuality I will expect them to develop a much more substantive moral vision for human social relationships and ethical leadership practices than the minimal baseline requirement of a respectful affirmation of human worth and dignity. After reading Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination I have come to realize the wrongheadedness in this warning to my students. Lloyd’s meticulous, in-depth exploration of the ideas and lived politics required for an authentic definition of dignity proves me shamefully mistaken in so dismissively and unilaterally claiming the insufficiency of an ethic that solely attends to human dignity. I am particularly drawn to Lloyd’s analysis of Black love as a crucial contributor to that definition of dignity and how it incorporates the politics of gender and sexuality, although I differ on his deployment of the ideas of Black nationalist Eldridge Cleaver as a useful resource for envisioning Black dignity.
I first want to note how this text startles me over and over again with its skillful art of interpretation of fundamental moral notions that range from benchmark concepts in social and philosophical ethics such as hope, family, and freedom, to its excavation of recent cultural theories of multiculturalism, Afropessimism, and rage. Always in service of illumining the meanings of Black dignity, these concepts are analytically contextualized within Black thought and activism. The conversation between theory and activist practice flows in a synergistic relatedness that demonstrates their complete interdependence and, at times, renders them indistinguishable from each other. A steady unraveling of the meaning of human dignity does not occur in this contextualized Black theory-practice treatment of constituent elements of human dignity. Lloyd veers away from a standard academic mode of engagement to which one might be accustomed. This form of engagement is usually composed of a series of intellectually dismembering critiques that are placed on display. It can leave the reader with the task of trying to knit all of the unraveled concepts back together in order to glimpse the whole of Black dignity as a static social good. Instead, Lloyd creatively reveals Black dignity as social movement work, more precisely, as Black freedom movement work.
The notion of love serves as one example of a core conceptualization that reveals Black dignity. Black love provides evidence of Black dignity, Lloyd argues. I have chosen the example of love because of its ubiquity both in my field of Christian ethics and in the language of activist leaders of several of the contemporary social justice movements I frequent. Declarations about the need for love are often asserted by those leaders as they try to respond to the dire consequences for so many in our communities of proliferating, hate-filled right-wing Christian political agendas. It is difficult to overstate my concern about the ways in which claims of love can function in U.S. public life to diminish attention to abuses of power and sustain a diversity of dangerous Christian hypocrisies, such as in situations of domestic violence, clergy sexual abuse, or idolatrous love of nation used as an excuse to legislatively terrorize transgender children.
In its dynamic reveals of Black dignity, Black love emerges as a struggle for freedom that Lloyd grounds in the message of Martin Luther King, Jr., “a prophet of love” (58), together with ideas from Black power advocates Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson. Although it primarily focuses on these figures, the chapter on love also analyzes other approaches, such as those from Black feminists Audre Lorde and Alice Walker and Black nationalist activist Assata Shakur, as well as Black feminist bell hooks in other sections of the book. The text presents a range of examples from King accompanied by correctives of simplistic readings of him. The discussion of King enables us to focus on the ways in which Black love requires both the necessary constraints of justice and the primacy of struggling for freedom in order to further the process of Black dignity. I experience relief and deep gratitude for Lloyd’s emphasis on how love talk—especially when King is invoked—can drain away any authentic moral meaning and exasperatingly implant a false sense that political injustices are easily resolved if we just love one another. For King, as Lloyd stresses, justice functions as a necessary corrective dimension of love. The contrast between King’s Christian views and the Black power positions of Cleaver and Jackson are narrated as part of a particular historical context rather than represented as a destructive rivalry. For Cleaver and Jackson, “Black love requires a hard break from wrongly ordered loves” (66) that are rooted in anti-Black racist and capitalist domination.
I experience relief and deep gratitude for Lloyd’s emphasis on how love talk—especially when King is invoked—can drain away any authentic moral meaning and exasperatingly implant a false sense that political injustices are easily resolved if we just love one another.
It is the sexual politics of the “wrongly ordered loves” of Cleaver and others in that 1960s Black nationalist movement that I find extremely troubling. Lloyd bravely engages their sexual politics but may underestimate the misogyny there and how it undermines Black dignity. He points out Cleaver’s focus on White women and his love for his White woman attorney that are articulated in Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and written from his prison cell. As Lloyd explains, Cleaver’s confrontation with how his own loves were disordered involved shifting away from advocating the rape of White women as an important political tool against the White man. For me, Lloyd’s understanding of Cleaver’s assaults as disorder or wrongly ordered love is not a fitting description. I am mindful of how at the beginning of Soul on Ice Cleaver admits to perfecting his technique as a rapist by attacking Black women before he moved on to White women. There is also a long allegorical section at the conclusion of the book with admissions of brutality against Black women by an “Accused” Black man. Simultaneously, in this concluding allegorical section, Black women are depicted as culpable in the abuse they receive because of the multiple ways they supposedly provoke it, such as their alleged love of White men and concerted betrayals of Black men.
Although these examples are not included in Lloyd’s account of the ideas about Black love that Cleaver’s Soul on Ice contributes to Black dignity, they are relevant to the issues of gender, sexual politics, and freedom that he invites us to engage. I am deeply appreciative of the subtle yet profound repudiation of the dignity-denying racism of mass incarceration in how Lloyd compels us to think about freedom through the lenses of someone who is in prison. Cleaver’s perspective may exemplify the struggle for freedom from anti-Black racist and capitalist domination. But it also stresses a certain kind of domination of Black women by maintaining a Black androcentric worldview as freeing. While I must reiterate that Cleaver does eventually disavow rape, I find that I cannot stop thinking about the Black women on whom Cleaver practiced his tactics of rape. I am also stuck on my disdain for the idea that a love letter to a White woman lawyer addresses the impact of the rapes he carried out against White women after practicing on Black women. The significance of the misogyny in Soul on Ice lies not merely in what Cleaver fails to express about his impact on the lives of the women he sexually assaulted, or includes in his portrayal of women as blameworthy for intimate abuse. The consequences stretch beyond the words uttered in Cleaver’s gendered, homophobic rantings about “the Black homosexual” in his critiques of Black novelist and activist James Baldwin. The reinforcement of this misogyny must be interrupted because of the wide influence of this Black manifesto within Black political culture, history, and studies. Lloyd’s discussion of it as a resource for understanding how Black love informs Black dignity motivates me even as I strongly differ on this point. It reminds me of the urgency to interrupt the misogyny in certain iconic Black power paradigms that prove how the personal is so very political when the history of Black thought and activism are constructively engaged.
Cleaver’s perspective may exemplify the struggle for freedom from anti-Black racist and capitalist domination. But it also stresses a certain kind of domination of Black women by maintaining a black androcentric worldview as freeing.
Lloyd’s intellectually provocative and complex social analysis of love will not allow me to stop probing and revisiting an understanding of how freedom practices inform Black dignity movement work. How do we count the gender justice costs in the struggles of that movement work? More importantly, when do we identify some of those costs as too high to be included in the process of how Black love constitutes Black human dignity? These questions represent the kinds of opportunities to wrestle with deep and contextualized meanings of human dignity that I am now excited to centralize in my teaching of ethics. Indeed, I look forward to addressing their wide-ranging gender and sexuality implications in my classes, particularly with my Black and Brown students in a state prison for men where I routinely teach. We often discuss moral conceptualizations in Black thought and activism. Undoubtedly, as we do so, there are opportunities to experiment with how freedom from domination might be embodied in our classroom interactions. Honestly, however, I must admit that I am not sure of the precise steps to take to authentically claim Black human dignity as Black freedom movement work at the center of our theory-practice learning in that male prison space. But I know that the students and I are committed to figuring it out, and I am methodologically inspired by Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination in such a pursuit.
Traci C. West is a scholar-activist serving as James W. Pearsall Professor of Christian Social Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School (NJ). Her teaching, research, and activism focus on gender, racial, and sexuality justice, particularly related to gender violence. In addition to many articles and book chapters, she is the author of Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence (2019) and Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter (2006). She has also been appointed to the Professor Extraordinarius program of the Institute for Gender Studies in the College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 1, 2015. Minneapolis students walked out of school and met at Martin Luther King Jr. park for a protest against police killings of black people. Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue. Via Flickr. CC BY-2.0.
Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination theorizes Black Lives Matter intellectual thought as activists’ pursuit of Black dignity and the ending of domination through a commitment to “dignity as struggle.” In this post, I present four observations about the work: (1) my reading of Black Dignity, (2) reflection on some insights and tensions of the book, (3) discussion of struggle as dignity in relation to Black religious consciousness, and (4) a view of the book’s challenge to readers.
I. One Reading of Black Dignity
Lloyd asserts that “struggle against racial domination is the paradigm of struggle—and Black dignity is the paradigm of dignity” (14). He contends that Black struggle is the preeminent form of struggle against domination. The will of Black people to struggle against the persistence of crushing anti-Blackness expresses dignity; and hence Black struggle is Black dignity. The emergence of this view in #BlackLivesMatter brought a new Black politics and a new political vocabulary. The vocabulary—particularly Black Rage, Black Love, Black Family, Black Futures, and Black Magic—reflects contemporary Black passion for freedom and overcomes the neutralizing, distracting language and busy work of “diversity, multiculturalism, racism, and nonviolence” (viii).
Black Dignity analyzes continuities and discontinuities of pre-#BlackLivesMatter activism with the current movement to identify the usefulness of ancestors’ practices. Selectivity in determining what is useful indicates a connection between intellectual thought and activism, revealing a BLM spirituality of reciprocating critical reflection and practice. The spirituality of Black dignity is a way of living; it seeks congruity of the world with BLM’s continually developing inner visions. Selecting the useful also is a signal of BLM activists’ engagement with diverse spiritual and religious traditions, which continues the legacy bricolage work in Afro-Atlantic ancestors’ religiosity.
II. Some Reflections
The approach of analyzing activists’ words and practices to discern their intellectual contributions is an important methodological practice. In addition to presenting a philosophical reading of BLM intellectual perspectives, Black Dignity offers a survey of the variety of ways BLM participants practice dignity as struggle. Accompanying the new intensity are new practices that centralize aesthetics, imagination, and more as activism. Lloyd is weary of identifying specific goals because ontic goals distract from ontological practice, tend toward reform, and may close or distort visions of the final, not yet imagined, although impossible to achieve, future end to all domination.
The spirituality of Black dignity is a way of living; it seeks congruity of the world with BLM’s continually developing inner visions.
Black Dignity notes women’s prominent BLM leadership and parallels that recognition by including Black women scholars to theorize BLM commitments and practice. In addition to others, Black Dignity draws deeply on Audre Lorde to explicate Black rage and to affirm Black family structures that break apart the nuclear family as the norm for familial intimacy and to release legitimate Black family from patriarchy and respectability’s debilitating restrictions. Some themes of Black Dignity—the quasi-eschatological emphasis on ontological struggle toward an impossibility; the comparability of domination throughout the world from the beginning of time with the traditional western conception of sin; the privileging of “creeds” for establishing Black religious norms—may cause some readers to liken Black Dignity’s theoretical constructions to Christian doctrine. In the latter case, Black Dignity’s argument that Black struggle against domination (actions based on political orientation) contradicts its presentation of Black liberation theology: “This tendency to focus on actions and political orientations rather than creeds left Black liberation theology vulnerable to co-optation during the era of multiculturalism.” (125)
III. Struggle as Dignity and Black Religious Consciousness
There is a similarity in the specific spirituality animating BLM struggle and Black religious consciousness. I understand the origin of Black spirituality to be the legacy of enslaved Africans’ identities as persons in communities that made personhood possible, ubuntu. During the Middle Passage, Africans remembered themselves as persons in communities and encountered that memory as a sense of the sacred during unimaginable horrors. In Ellipsis…The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long, Long suggests, in their imaginations, Africans turned toward the sacred as a defining reality other than the total domination of being chained as not-humans at the bottoms of commercial ships.[1] The intellectual labor of remembering and maintaining conceptions of themselves as persons is central to Black religious consciousness, a disposition sustained and enacted in every objection, every form of resistance, every melody, thought, or gesture that expresses Black personality. Religious consciousness is a sense of the self as inviolable and an arbiter of values in the world, including awareness of one’s deep concerns and ultimate affections. Black religious consciousness includes an oppositional disposition and actions related to anti-Black discourses and practices that inhibit being Black persons in the world. Without and within Black religions—in blues lyrics and performances, in Civil Rights Movement organizing, in objection to the back of the bus, in marching through vicious crowds to integrate schools, in the communal rescue of persons needing support, in refusals to be blamed, in wearing braids and beads—Black people enact the personal and communal virtue of Black religious consciousness every day.
Black Lives Matter mural in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Black Dignity’s presentation of enacting dignity now by relying on “divine power…manifesting inside” resonates with the sense of the sacred in everyday Black religious consciousness. Black Dignity’s use of Lorde to emphasize the foretaste of freedom and power experienced during struggle with others in love also resonates with William R. Jones’s humanistic theology that affirms the energy generated through intense collaborative action and with the esprit de corps of the Black religious consciousness that many Black women drew on and cultivated during the Civil Rights Movement. Some womanist theologians and Black feminist scholars theorize this often-overlooked relational work of Black women as invisible dignity and unshouted courage (Katie Cannon), an ethic of intragroup social responsibility (Marcia Riggs), and enslaved Black women’s labor of care (Angela Davis). Some Black women religious scholars draw on Alice Walker’s term womanist (identifying courageous, willful, responsible, in charge, serious behaviors) to name their work. Like Black theologies, womanist and other liberation theologies emerged amidst and after mid-20th century resistance movements across the globe to analyze that resistance work. Similar to Lloyd theorizing BLM intellectual thought, much liberationist scholarship is drawn from activism and offers theoretical insights for living faithfully against the grain of domination.
Black religious consciousness includes an oppositional disposition and actions related to anti-Black discourses and practices that inhibit being Black persons in the world. Without and within Black religions Black people enact the personal and communal virtue of Black religious consciousness every day.
Although sometimes over-determined by Christian traditions, liberation thought of the late mid-20th century also pushed down walls of the dominating Christian orthodoxies that purportedly secularized the world, weaponized syncretism to forbid engaging Indigenous traditions, forbade full human communion with Muslims and persons in other traditions, and required respectability practices. Black women excelled in challenging these orthodoxies. Their religious consciousness in historic and contemporary activism and literature often enacts Black women’s religious consciousness as the living-against-the-grain required to pursue free, full, flourishing human life. Related to the dis-ease of Black religious consciousness with dividing life into sacred and secular realms, some contemporary womanist scholarship rejects separation of flourishing human life from living against the grain of domination. This is Tricia Hersey’s assertion in Rest Is Resistance. There is resonance, again, in Black Dignity’s description of flourishing in struggle.
IV. The Kind of Life One Lives
Black Dignity’s assertion that anti-Black racism “is at the center of everything, for everyone” offers an opening to reflect on the kind of life one lives. At a time when grab-all-you-can by any means available is stridently normalized as exemplary, Black Dignity provides a different view of the exemplary: Dignity is the use of intellectual and physical capacities for an ontological purpose. In a world structured by domination, living purposefully requires intense, conscious action with others fueled by rage, love, and family to imagine the end of domination. Although there is no road map—”the deepest kind of flourishing we can experience … cannot be achieved by following certain moral rules or copying certain moral habits” (159)—Black Dignity’s logical reasoning invites us to adopt its view of living. Identifying struggle as accompanying “the deepest kind of flourishing” possible centralizes a type of human thriving that is purposeful, encourages creativity, affirms being in touch with one’s passions (rage and love), takes account of human embodiment as both frail and a host of divine power, and as something that exists in community. If the proposition is accepted that domination has so colored visions of the world that most human time is spent accommodating domination, a central task of the commitment to being free humans is to change that worldview. Domination’s overwhelming hold means, as Lloyd writes, “To see and act rightly, to realize our humanity, we must believe we will be free and struggle to achieve our freedom” (104). The emphasis on “struggle” clarifies the idea of belief as something other than hope (for pie in the sky), because living a life of struggle is directed by the belief that there can be freedom and the sense of the future as intertwined with passionate pursuit of that to which one is ultimately committed.
[1] See Charles H. Long, Ellipsis…The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long, 280. Long writes: “The Middle Passage—chained enslaved Africans in the holds of several ships of every Atlantic maritime nation—is never forgotten by the Africans, neither during slavery nor in freedom. The watery passage of the Atlantic, that fearsome journey, that cataclysm of modernity, has served as a mnemonic structure, evoking a memory that forms the disjunctive and involuntary presence of these Africans in the Atlantic world. From this perspective, religion is not a cultural system, much less rituals or performance, nor a theological language, but an orientation, a basic turning of the soul toward another defining reality.”
Rosetta E. Ross is a professor of religious studies at Spelman College. She pioneered scholarship on religion and U.S. Black women’s activism and was an early proponent of womanist theology. At Spelman, Ross transformed the study of religion from exclusive focus on Christian theology to a diverse religious studies curriculum. Her research explores religious consciousness in Black women’s social action, and Africana women and religions. Author of Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights, co-author of The Status of Racial and Ethnic Clergywomen in the United Methodist Church (with Jung Ha Kim), co-editor of Unraveling and Reweaving Sacred Canon in Africana Womanhood(with Rose Mary Amenga-Etego), Ross is co-PI (with Monique Moultrie) on the Henry Luce Foundation funded Garden Initiative for Black Women’s Religious Activism. Her current research project is Black Religious Consciousness and Women in the NAACP, 1927 to 1979. Ross is founding editor of the peer-reviewed e-journal Black Women and Religious Cultures.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu in prayer, 2011. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY 2.0.
Desmond Tutu was a contemporary biblical prophet who used his prophetic voice to challenge Israel about its horrific treatment of the Palestinian people. Because he spoke in his own Christian and traditional African theological language, I will translate his message into mine: a Jewish version of our shared moral and religious commitments to peace and justice.
Tutu sometimes compared himself to Jeremiah because he could not keep silent in the face of injustice, and colleagues in South Africa believed he had the prophetic style of a man who acted intuitively, but not always consultatively (312). Like the prophets of old, however, he mixed his message of chastisement (you have woefully mistreated the Palestinian people) with a message of comfort (you too deserve safety and security in this land that you share with them). But Tutu was not always careful with his words, calling out the “powerful American Jewish lobby” for example, or failing to appreciate their adamant views about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and that gave American and Israeli Jewish leaders an excuse to fear and dismiss him. It also gave the right wing the excuse to label him, inaccurately, as an antisemite, to which he replied:
Are you anti-Jewish? Not anti-Semitic. And then, you would have to say the same thing to the biblical prophets—because they were some of the most scathing critics of the Jewish leadership of their day. We don’t criticize Jewish people. We criticize, we will criticize, when they need to be criticized the government of Israel.
And he did so for forty years, from the early 1980s until his death in 2021. Tutu exemplified the patience of a prophet willing to repeat his message as often as necessary, until the government of Israel and its American Jewish supporters listened and changed their ways.
When our people groaned by virtue of the burden of racist oppression, we invoked the God who addressed Moses in the burning bush, we told our people that our God had heard their cry, had seen their anguish, and knew their suffering, and would come down, this great God of exodus, this liberator God as in the past to deliver us as God had delivered Israel from bondage. We told them that God was notoriously biased in favor of those without clout; the poor, the weak, the hungry, the voiceless.
It is that God that, Tutu knew, favored the enslaved over their oppressors, and was therefore also on the side of the Palestinians. Tutu’s theology had no place for the God of the conquest who oversaw the expulsion and destruction of the Indigenous peoples of the land that the Biblical authors claimed they then inhabited and named Israel and Judah, a vision of God that is also rejected by contemporary Jewish liberation theology. It is, unfortunately, the dominant theology of Israel today. This is the starting point of Tutu’s challenge: Israel must recognize the God that is being worshipped in the land today is the God of conquest and not the God of liberation, and that they are not one in the same.
Tutu delivered his message about Palestinian oppression to the Jewish supporters of Israel at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 when he said: “I am myself sad that Israel, with the kind of history and traditions her people have experienced, should make refugees of others. It is totally inconsistent with who she is as a people.” In that speech he critiqued not only the Nakba, but also the Sabra and Shatila massacre (when in 1982 in Beirut Christian phalangists murdered Palestinian inhabitants under the watchful eye of Israel’s Defense Forces who did nothing to stop the atrocities) and the barriers Israel set up between the holy places of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Jerusalem. What Tutu pointed to here foreshadowed the separation wall and the barriers that exist today in Gaza.
In the gentlest of ways, Tutu critiques Jewish American and Israeli leaders for forgetting their own history of suffering, especially during the Holocaust. He contends that these memories should serve as a reminder to not make others suffer in similar ways: making them refugees, being responsible for their murders, creating barriers to their freedom of movement and worship. Translating the message into the language of Jewish ethical tradition, I would rely here on Hillel’s retort to the person who challenged him to explain the Torah while standing on one foot: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another—all the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a). From a Jewish ethical standpoint, I would add a longer list of hateful things that Tutu did not mention in detail:
The seizing and destruction of Palestinian property (whole villages in 1948, houses and olive trees consistently since then), as was done to the Jews most dramatically on Kristallnacht and consistently thereafter.
Intimidation expressed via epithets: “death to the Arabs” / “no dogs or Jews allowed.”
Random acts of cruelty and humiliation perpetrated by soldiers, Israeli and Nazi.
Bureaucratic harassment (identity documents and permits, border crossings delayed or not allowed, passports destroyed).
Encouraging traitors (Palestinian informers and Jewish Capos).
Separation walls and prison-like conditions in Gaza not unlike German work camps.
Golda Meir blaming Arabs for making young Jewish men into killers; Nazis blaming Jews for all of Germany’s problems.
What was hateful to the Jewish people, Israel has done to the Palestinians.
When Tutu made a Christmas pilgrimage to the Holy Land sites in the occupied West Bank in 1989 he also visited Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem), which, according to Roni Arieli is required by Israeli protocol for all diplomats coming to Israel for the first time. He described his response in his book, No Future Without Forgiveness:
I visited the Holy Land over Christmas 1989 and had the privilege during that visit of going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. When the media asked me for my impressions, I told them it was a shattering experience. I added that the Lord whom I served, who was himself a Jew, would have asked, ‘But what about forgiveness?’ That remark set the cat among the pigeons. I was roundly condemned. (267)
Tutu’s prophetic and Christian vision required the next step: forgiveness. This was the key to the Truth and Reconciliation process he oversaw in South Africa and was deeply embedded in the teachings of Jesus (the Lord whom he served) and in the African traditional concept of ubuntu (compassion, humanness rather than victimization or turning the tables). Tutu was willing to allow that Jews were not able to forgive the Nazis, but as a prophet he needed to raise that possibility. And, it appears, except for the likes of Simon Wiesenthal and his followers, Jews (and particularly the Israeli government) have certainly forgiven the Germans.
I understand this through the lens of the Jewish ethical principle of teshuvah, the concept of return and repentance. Teshuvah is the central act performed on Yom Kippur. Jews are instructed to go over the ways they have missed the mark (often mistranslated as sin) and make restitution. If the error was against God, prayer and fasting will clear the record. If the error was against another human, one must ask forgiveness, and, according to tradition, make restitution. For Jews and Germans this has been well accomplished. Germany has apologized, made reparations where possible, financially supported Israel, made antisemitism a crime, and created memorials to the Holocaust in almost every city. It is clear that this history will be remembered. What Germany has not done is pay attention to the fact that they exist in a moral triangle, as Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor point out in their book of that title. For while Germany has modeled teshuvah for Israel, they have not acknowledged the harm that the Holocaust set in motion that was the Nakba. This is a clear limitation on their expression of teshuvah, which in traditional Judaism is only complete when, given the opportunity, one don’t repeat one’s error.
Germany’s teshuvah, despite its limitations, could at least be a starting point for truth and reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. It must begin with Israel ending the occupation so they can begin the act of doing teshuvah: acknowledging the harms they have done to the Palestinian people, making reparations that allow for the literal “teshuvah,” or return of the Palestinians to their land, providing real financial restitution, ending acts and words of hate, correcting the historical record so that it won’t be forgotten, and being open to a different iteration of a one state solution which exists today, as Judith Butler pointed out many years ago, in abject form.
Can Tutu’s prophetic dream of peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians come to be? Can Palestinians forgive if Israel does teshuvah? If violent and non-violent solutions have failed, perhaps what is needed is leadership, on both sides, of men and women with the religious values, moral clarity, and courage of Desmond Tutu to lead the way.
Cathedral of Notre Dame, Bangui, Central African Republic, March 2018. Image courtesy of the author.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Marie-Claire Klassen, Emmanuel Ojeifo, William Orbih, Jason Springs, Cecilia Lynch, and Todd Whitmore for taking the time to read and respond to my Who Are My People?: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa in this book symposium. I am deeply touched and encouraged not only by their responses, but by the many wonderful things they each have said about Who Are My People? They each have made a number of interesting observations about the uniqueness, strengths, and accomplishments of the book. I treasure these very much. The discussants also raise some important critical issues and observations. I treasure these too and take them very seriously. I would have loved to respond to all the issues raised by each of the discussants. However, given the limitations of this forum and space, all I can say is that I will continue to think and reflect on these issues, and hopefully attend to them in some of my future work. Here, however, I can briefly highlight and respond to five key issues—theological portraiture, genre, justice, gender, and the overall structure of the book—that seem to cut across the submissions of the symposium.
Theological Portraiture
The first issue regards the methodology of theological portraiture that I employ in Who Are My People, which has been commented on by all the theologians in the discussion: Klassen, Ojeifo, Orbih, and Whitmore. While noting my debts to Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffmann Davis in developing this methodology, the discussants note the uniqueness, freshness, and effectiveness of this methodology for doing theology. Indeed, Klassen rightly points out that one unique way that I employ this methodology in Who Are My People? is to include a theological portrait of myself. That I do so is not simply the outworking of the “narrative” approach, which Whitmore rightly traces to the important influence of Stanley Hauerwas on my thinking, but also reflects a fundamental theological conviction. In my previous work, Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa, I noted the task of theology is to “give an account of hope” (1 Peter 3:15) and that responding to this invitation requires taking seriously autobiography as an essential aspect of the theological task. Others (e.g. Mclendon, Dickinkson ) have made a similar point coming from a different angle.
Whitmore raises serious critical issues regarding my use of portraiture, which revolves around the dangers of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Is it possible, he asks, “to be at the same time a theologian and a cultural anthropologist?” Whitmore points out that from the point of view of a cultural anthropology and qualitative sociology, the kind of research in Who Are My People cannot be recognized as valid ethnographic research (my claims notwithstanding) because it suffers from inherent “confirmation bias.” For Whitmore that is of course the fundamental aim and primary achievement of the book, namely to turn what cultural anthropologists and sociologists may view as a vice (confirmation bias) into a virtue, and thus offer empirical grounds for hope. My takeaway from Whitmore’s important discussion is that while the theologian should not shy away from employing ethnographical methods and research tools, she should never seek to be, and in any case will never be fully recognized as, a cultural anthropologist. On the other hand, the theologian should never feel that she has to give sociology or cultural anthropology a privileged position. She is a theologian, and theology is itself a form of sociology. Her goal in remaining unapologetically theological even as she learns from and employs social scientific tools and methods, is to develop and articulate a unique, Christian anthropology or sociology. As a unique form of Christian sociology, theology’s goal is, as John Milbank reminds us, to “tell again the Christian mythos, pronounce again the Christian logos, and call again for Christian praxis in a manner that restores their freshness and originality” (381). This is what I try to do in Who Are My People?
The Question of Genre
A second, but closely related issue of methodology is the question of genre. Klassen highlights the significance of closing the book with a sermon. This genre is not one that is typically deployed in academic work. It may of course be that ending the book with a sermon simply confirms my own idiosyncratic identity as a scholar and as a priest (preaching is what priests do, after all). However, as Klassen rightly notes, ending the book in this way is an invitation to consider the issue of identity not only in terms of its sociological dimensions, but also its spiritual and practical dimensions. She also notes how the sermon points to the significance of “friendship” across divides, which is the goal of the journey of identity, i.e. to embrace and expand a new sense of “we” in the world. Beyond this, however, concluding the book with a sermon is in line with the tonality of the entire book, which is homiletic. One reason behind this is that I have come to increasingly understand theology as a form of preaching. This is consistent with the view of the early Fathers of the Church, for whom the sermon was the primary genre of theological exploration. This is because early Fathers of the Church rightly understood theology as an exercise in the imatatio Christi: an invitation to “re-enact and instigate others to re-enact Jesus the Nazarene the Christ.” In this connection, Orbih rightly notes the deep affinity between my work and Whitmore’s Imitating Christ at Magwi). But this is also the reason why “missiology” (as Ojeifo rightly notes) is at the forefront of Who Are My People? as it should be for every theological enterprise.
Emmanuel Katogole with Bernard Kinvi, whose story and work is featured in Chapter 4 of Who Are My People? Image courtesy of the author.
The Issue of Justice
A third critical issue has to do with the question of justice. Springs notes that while the portraits I provide in Who are My People expose the logic of love and suffering, they do not explicitly engage the question of justice. Klassen asks” “How does a theology of justice intersect with an excess of love?” Both wanted to see a more explicit engagement with the question of justice. True, an explicit engagement with the notion of justice could have offered a more robust display of the transforming power of love. Love not only redefines the meaning of justice, but it also heals and restores (in its form as restorative justice) the wounds of violence. That is why the dichotomy between love and justice, or between love and power, or between justice and mercy (forgiveness) is a false dichotomy. Like Martin Luther King Jr. (as cited by Springs), I work with the assumption that the logic of the cross transforms both power and justice, both justice and mercy, into the reconciling love of God. While I did not explicitly state this, I offered portraits that serve as both the argument and evidence of this truth. Take the case of Maggy, whose story is about the power of love to make her both a “rebel” and an “inventor.” It is the “excess of love” that shaped in her the character of what Springs might, following Villa-Vincencio, recognize as Parrhesia, i.e., frank and fearless speech. What the story of Maggy helps to confirm, however, is that more than a form of speech, Parrhesia is a virtuous form of engagement, an ongoing praxis and struggle with and on behalf of wounded humanity. That is what the search for justice looks like.
The Role of Gender
The observation is related to the question of gender. Ojeifo rightly notes that because women are so often the target and victims of violence in Africa, an analysis of gender is necessary for understanding the reality of violence in Africa. Klassen also rightly notes that feminist and womanist theologians (Delores Williams, Shawn Copeland, Dorothee Sölle, and others) would serve as enriching dialogue partners. Not only have they been attentive to the question of suffering, but they have also consistently upheld the image of God as justice (see earlier). Moreover, in their resistance to the structures of injustice in their communities, African women activists confirm that another world, a different Africa, is possible. Lynch raises another important point in relation to African women theologians (Musa Dube, Isabel Phiri, and others), namely their attentiveness to the spirit world, and their willingness to explore other, non-Christian spiritualities, especially the healing and reconciling possibilities within African native spiritualities. All these observations suggest that a gendered perspective and engagement with women scholars would greatly enrich my work. I take this recommendation seriously and will engage more explicitly with some women’s voices from the Circle for Concerned African Women Theologians in my current research project on land and ecology.
The Book’s Structure
A final issue relates to the structure of the book. Whereas many note the compelling structure of the book, Lynch wonders whether the book could not have been better served if the ecological crisis had been foregrounded in it. In this reorganization, the book would begin with the ecological crisis and then move to a discussion of “religion” and “ethnicity,” not the other way around. Doing so, Lynch suggests, would resolve an apparent tension (ambivalence) in the book’s discussion of indigeneity. Whereas Lynch’s point may seem to have some validity, given the autobiographical dimension of the book, it is only more recently (I must confess) that I have started paying attention to issues of land and ecology. Moreover, it is only by doing so that I am rediscovering the deep roots of my own identity in the “soil,” and with this, the rich resources of African native spiritualities in attending to the ecological crisis. As I reflect on these through my work and engagement with Bethany Land Institute, I see more clearly the relation between the ecological crisis and other forms of violence. I am therefore hoping that my current research project, entitled Sowing Hope: Ecology, Integral Human Development and Theological Peacebuilding, will be an opportunity to work out the practical, spiritual, and peacebuilding dimensions of identity that take the issues of land, soil, and community seriously.
I conclude by thanking the co-directors and staff of the Contending Modernities Project at Notre Dame, who sponsored the research of Who are My People (as part of the Authority, Community & Identity in Africa research focus). A special word of thanks to Dania Straughan, the program manager, who organized the book launch, and to Joshua Lupo, the editor of the CM blog, for hosting this symposium.
Katongole, a Catholic priest ordained by the Archdiocese of Kampala, is a core faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Previously, he has served as associate professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke University, where he was the founding co-director of the Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation. He is the author of books on political theology, the Christian social imagination, and Christian approaches to justice, peace, and reconciliation. His most recent book is Who Are My People: Love, Violence and Christianity in Subsaharan Africa (2022).
Father Toussaint Kafahire in audience with Pope Francis in the DRC. He presents a painting to the pope in this image. Courtesy of the author.
This piece is co-published with the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog
Pope Francis’s long-awaited trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan finally occurred from January 31 to February 3, 2023. It had been long in the making. On November 23, 2017, the pope had offered a prayer mass for peace in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The opening words of his homily were: “In prayer, we want to sow seeds of peace in the lands of South Sudan and the DRC, and in all lands devastated by war.” On November 1, 2022, almost five years after that prayer for peace and reconciliation, Pope Francis gathered African youth from different Catholic universities online for an hour and a half synodal encounter. During that conversation, addressing a question by a Congolese student from Goma, Pope Francis laughed at the rumor that he had gotten scared by the war that broke out near Goma, in the eastern province of North Kivu, where he was supposed to stop during his visit. But he confirmed his resolve to visit both the Congo and the South Sudan in late January and February 2023. Visiting these two countries had obviously been on his mind for a long time. So, finally realizing his desire, Pope Francis brought to the Congolese, as well as to the Southern Sudanese, a powerful message of love, peace, and reconciliation.
The Joy of Welcome
Tens of thousands of people cheered as Pope Francis crossed the city of Kinshasa, a distance that Congolese might take three to four hours to cover on normal days, due to heavy traffic jams. It was a unique moment in the history of the DRC. The last time a pope had traveled to the DRC was in 1985. I was 12 years old. Close to forty years later, Pope Francis had made it happen again. Hence, the emotion of the Congolese nation was expressed along the more than 27 kilometers that his papamobile traveled from Ndjili international airport to the Palais de la Nation where President Felix Tshisekedi was waiting for him. Crowds of faithful Catholics came with flags, drums, whistles, banners, and other instruments to express their joy of welcoming Pope Francis to the DRC. The pope had surely heard of the controversial ban issued by the municipality to prohibit ordinary people from displaying their items for sale along the road on the day of his arrival. The majority of the Congolese people sell small, cheap items, anything really to get by on a daily basis. Contrasting the everyday palpable poverty with this circumstantial euphoria, the pope must have been moved, remembering that crowd that moved Jesus for they were like sheep without a shepherd (Mt 9:36). Except that the ambiance was a celebration of something indefinable.
General audience with Pope Francis. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In Goma, however, security conditions had worsened as M23 rebels were fighting for God knows for what. Initially, people believed that this revival of violence in eastern Congo was designed to dissuade the pope from coming. There could be some truth to that. Wars in the DRC are indeed fought at several levels, and the control for the image, the information, and the framing of the issue is something that those with high stakes in the destabilization of the Congo do not intend to lose. Given that the pope’s visit would highlight hard truths about these “fabricated” wars, the resumption of the war in June 2022 was interpreted as a calculated move to bar the pope from traveling to the DRC and by the same token from getting the world to focus on the Congo.
Instead, despite the conflict, the entire Congolese nation was overjoyed when the pope arrived, transcending at least momentarily any differences. He is one of the first global leaders, if not the first, to brave the stereotypes and the danger—imagined or real—of visiting the DRC. The pope’s presence in the Congo was sending the message to the Congolese people that we matter, at least to someone of that importance. Our joy was also an expression of gratitude that someone finally respected us as human beings, treated us as such, and came to visit despite the isolation, bans, and other forms of discrimination that the international community has put on the DRC.
The core message of Pope Francis in the DRC can be summarized in his introductory words in response to Felix Tshisekedi’s welcoming remarks. His audience was composed of members of the government, leaders of the civil society, other religious faiths, as well as diplomatic authorities. He told president Tshisekedi, and through him the Congolese nation, that he had “come to you, in the name of Jesus, as a pilgrim for reconciliation and peace.” Indeed, the motto of his entire trip reads, “All reconciled in Jesus Christ,” which for him, was intended as an expression of love towards all, albeit expressed in Christian terminology, and an indication that his purpose was spiritual and pastoral (rather than political), “I have greatly desired to be here, and now at last I have come to bring you the closeness, the affection and the consolation of the entire Church.” Obviously, Pope Francis understands the role of the “Vicar of Christ” and the mission of the Church as a continuation of Christ’s mission to bring God closer to humanity; that is, to reconcile a sinful and estranged humanity with the Creator. Pope Francis had set out from the Vatican to deliver this message of reconciliation and peace to the Congolese and the South Sudanese whose recent histories have been characterized by wars, violence, and death.
Indeed, since the end of the previous world order characterized by the Cold War and subsequent Cold peace, the Congo has become a theater of neoliberal plunder, where global and regional powers are vying for the control of its vast natural resources. To do so, the sovereignty of the country and its people must be weakened through a ghost army incapable of defending territorial integrity and protecting its own citizens. This state of permanent violence has left many local communities destroyed, millions of women raped, and a nation dazed and confused. Addressing these conditions on a symbolic spiritual level, especially when proposed political solutions have proved ineffective, is also necessary as much scholarship shows.
The Church has to embody the expression of the nearness of God, especially to those who suffer the most, those who are exploited, marginalized, and whose fundamental human dignity is violated and denied. Drawing from the Jesuit outlook since the Second Vatican Council, and the new awareness that ensued in the 1970s about the mission to promote faith that does justice, Pope Francis proclaimed the gospel where it is most needed. The Church in the world ought to take seriously its role of being the “salt of the earth and the light of the world” (Mt 5: 13-16), the yeast that ferments (Mt 13:31-33) the dough of social transformation.
Speaking Historical Truth
Pope Francis had strong words on his arrival, lambasting western powers that continue the colonial regime of plunder and exploitation of natural resources of the Congo at the expense of the Congolese population. In the history of the Congo, the people have been oppressed at different moments by different masters. The Portuguese slave trade in the beginning. Then the late nineteenth century western colonization. And now, a neocolonial system of predation that still operates behind a smokescreen, using proxy Africans who understand very little about how they are not serving the cause of Africa’s emancipation. The Church itself was part, if not the instrument, of this colonial violence. As V. Y. Mudimbe has noted, however, the presence of missionaries also at times helped soften “the harshness of European impact on the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded and exploited” (45–46). The colonial Church was more socially paternalistic and less politically critical of the colonial brutalities in the Congo. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, as an indigenous clergy was coming of age, and as the theology of inculturation sought to articulate the best way of being authentically African and Christian, the African Catholic Church started addressing the lacunae of the missionary theology by denouncing the deviations of power. Where Belgian missionaries failed to denounce colonial brutalities, for the sake of patriotism, Cardinal Malula became vocal against the abusive power by President Mobutu in the 1970s. In line with a powerful and vocal local Catholic clergy, Pope Francis could echo the struggle of the Conference of Catholic Bishops (CENCO), telling the west:
… this country [the DRC] and this continent [Africa] deserve to be respected and listened to; they deserve to find space and receive attention: Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo! Hands off Africa! Stop choking Africa: it is not a mine to be exploited nor a terrain to be plundered. May Africa be the protagonist of its destiny! May the world acknowledge the catastrophic things that were done over the centuries to the detriment of local peoples, and not forget this country and this continent. May Africa, the smile and hope of the world, count for more. May it be spoken of more frequently, and have greater weight and representation among nations!
Pope Francis reminded the Congolese people that our lives are more precious than all the diamonds that can be extracted from our land. He then met with survivors from the war-torn eastern part of the country, and he condemned the massacres, the rapes, and the destruction of villages. Indeed, these first words of Pope Francis on Congolese soil were very moving, very refreshing, and very significant. I do not recall any leader of such stature addressing the Congolese people with such kindness, respect, love, and compassion. Never before had a leader of the world shown that much empathy and consideration toward the Congolese. And more important, no one has acknowledged the efforts of the Congolese people like Pope Francis to pull the nation together, and to dream of a future that is more humane and more dignifying.
A Personal Audience
On the second day of the pope’s visit, after meeting with the youth and catechists at the stadium, he gave a private audience to some 40 young people from the Catholic Universities in the country. He had already met with some of them online on November 1, 2022. During that meeting, the young people handed a memo to the pope in which they requested that he amplify their voice in the international community by asking for a special penal tribunal for the crimes committed in the Congo. They also requested that Pope Francis speak to Congolese authorities to release prisoners whose cases have not received justice.
The author in a personal audience with Pope Francis. Image courtesy of the author.
In turn, the pope told the students some profound truths about what it means to live a meaningful life. “Your life must be rooted in love,” he told them. “Without love, life is meaningless.” He went on to explain the three kinds of love that are absolute and non-negotiable. The first type concerns the love of God, the second the love of one’s own mother, and the third is the love of one’s homeland. Strange! Isn’t it? Pope Francis elevated the love of one’s motherland on a par with the love of God and the love of one’s mother. Obviously, this is a subversive understanding of the Torah, which states the love of God to be first and of the neighbor to be second (see also, Mt 22:37-39). Equally important, adds the pope, is the civic love for one’s motherland, which includes protection of the environment and improvement of social arrangements towards greater justice. Extrapolating the religious and biblical importance of the love of God and of one’s parents (as progeny and identity come through the mother’s role as the one who gives birth and the one who looks after the education of the children), Pope Francis introduces this third element which consists of the love of the motherland. This is extremely symbolic, especially in the context of the Congo, a land that is violated and betrayed even by its own sons and daughters. It was unheard of before that patriotism could match spiritual love.[1]
Now we have a tryptic of love entailing the religious love of God, the cultural love of one’s mother, and the civic love that nurtures the responsibility to fulfill the common good in politics. Indeed, Pope Francis was simply reaffirming what he already said in several places, that though often denigrated, “politics remains a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good. We need to be convinced that charity “is the principle not only of micro-relationships (with friends, with family members or within small groups) but also of macro-relationships (social, economic and political ones). I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor!” (Evangelii Gaudium, para. 205, the emphasis is mine). That tryptic of love is the secret to living a meaningful life with God and the ancestors within one’s homeland. Of course, this love for the homeland cannot be reduced to nationalistic chauvinism that excludes others, especially foreigners.
The author in a personal audience with Pope Francis. Image courtesy of the author.
Pope Francis had, indeed, understood the drama of the Congolese people as the result of a system of plunder, violence, and subjugation that was set in place since the early encounter with the west. But he also reminded the young Catholics in this private and intimate conversation that the Congolese too bear responsibility for what is happening to the country. In fact, letting others get involved either as saviors of your situation (i.e., the East African Community) or the crux of the problem (Rwanda and Uganda) is the first indicator of that national irresponsibility. In other words, the degree of blame for what is happening is shared between the Congolese elite and those foreign predators who have a stranglehold on the Congo’s resources. Selling out and prostituting one’s motherland is as sinful as betraying the “absolute love” of God and of the mother. In other words, genuine love for one’s country can open young people up to political careers, which, if done with love, becomes the highest form of charity.
Congolese Beauty; Congolese Hospitality
Pope Francis had set the tone for his message to the world from Congolese land on the very day of his arrival in Kinshasa. At the Palais de la Nation, he defined the framework within which he sought to relate to the Congolese situation on the ground. Neither a confrontation nor a denunciation, but rather a proclamation. About the beauty of the country. Its ecosystem. It’s natural wealth. Despite being a jewel of the earth, a diamond for the world, the diaphragm of Africa, the history of the Congo has been and still is harsh on its people. As a prophet, the pope reminded the Congolese people to embody the spirit of the national anthem: “to build through hard work . . . a country more beautiful than ever before, and in peace.” The pope reminded these authorities of what he saw. “In the case of this people, one has the impression that the international community has practically resigned itself to the violence devouring it.”
Pope Francis’s effect is an important revival of our way of being Christians in the 21st century. Pope Francis has amazed the world because he has helped us, in the last 10 years of his papacy, to think of religion differently. It’s not a set of moral rules and principles to be observed. Religion—like every form of education for that matter—is about training and reforming consciences. It’s about being present to one’s time and getting involved to change the world. He is aware of the wounds inflicted by the Church on humanity, both during colonization and today. His campaign, therefore, is also to reconcile the Church with its own past, which necessarily calls for humility. Pope Francis, for instance, also surprised the world by stating that the Vatican was willing to return stolen indigenous artifacts to their rightful communities.
As far as his trip and message to the DRC are concerned, I believe he spoke in front of the world to amplify the hushed voices of the marginalized. He noted, “We cannot grow accustomed to the bloodshed that has marked this country for decades, causing millions of deaths that remain mostly unknown elsewhere. What is happening here needs to be known. The current peace processes, which I greatly encourage, need to be sustained by concrete deeds, and commitments should be maintained.” In public opinion and social media, the Congolese people showed that they felt vindicated that someone of that stature, an important international leader, finally spoke the truth about their predicament. They experienced the closeness of a powerful leader who not only denounced the western political hypocrisy but also acknowledged the African human worth and authentic spiritual wisdom.
[1] For many years, indeed, if not millennia, the Pauline theology that our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20) and that we should yearn for and worry about heavenly things is also slowly changing in interpreting social realities. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Pope Francis’s invitation to patriotic love has a closeness in tone with the Weberian argument that the Protestant ethic potentially bolstered Christians to attend to this-worldly business. Nevertheless, Pope Francis’s background in Latin America and liberation theology might explain his attitude towards politics, society, and the love of one’s motherland as a spiritual commitment.
Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula, S.J., PhD, is a Jesuit priest, poet, theologian, social scientist, and certified Executive Coach. A native from the Democratic Republic of Congo, he studied international relations at Loyola University Chicago; ethics and social theories at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, in Berkeley, California; African Theology at Hekima University College in Nairobi (Kenya); and philosophy at the Facultés Saint Pierre Canisius, in Kinshasa (DRC). He is a member of several international associations and serves in leadership position as the Africa Region coordinator of the Catholic Theologians and Ethicists in World Church (CTEWC), Vice President of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), member of the CIHA blog (Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa), and the Pan-African Theology and Pastoral network. He currently lives and teaches political science at the Université Loyola du Congo (ULC) in Kinshasa.
It is tempting to think of telling stories as the opposite of deep philosophical or theological reflection. Stories, after all, deal in the particularities and contingencies of lives, whereas philosophical and theological reflection deal in universals. In Who Are My People: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Emmanuel Katongole claims that “reality is constituted through stories,” which he rightly notes is a metaphysical claim (173). For this reason, we (that is scholars) cannot access peoples’ reality by positing abstract theories about it, but can only do so by listening to the stories they tell about themselves and those around them. We cannot, in other words, act in a top-down manner, explaining the lives of people only with scientific, sociological, or psychological theories. We must plant our feet on the same ground as those we write about if our desire is to truly understand them. This leads Katongole to adopt, borrowing from Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis, a method of analysis called “theological portraiture.” This method, importantly, entails not only “listening to a story,but [also] listening for a story” (Katongole, 7, emphasis in original).
Katongole listens not only to the stories people tell, but listens for the patterns enfolded within them, and the larger tapestry those patterns make up. In doing so, he weaves a story—which is sometimes also autobiographical—about the necessity of Christian love to act as a remedy to the violence in sub-Saharan Africa, a violence which more often than not stems from the earlier violence of European colonialism and modernity. In weaving this story, Katongole does not reject all theory. In the first two chapters of the book, he draws on significant figures in critical research on Africa to demonstrate how racism and colonialism were initiated on the continent by European powers, and how these features remain present even after the era of formal colonialism ended. These theories, however, are used to frame the portraits that Kantongole wants to paint, rather than to act as centerpieces themselves.
Following these opening chapters, Katongole reveals in intimate detail the devastation of violence in sub-Saharan Africa by listening to the stories of others. He recounts narratives from the Rwandan genocide, the political turmoil of the Central African Republic, and the challenges of climate change and ecological violence in Uganda. Katongole finds much to despair about in these contexts where violence has led people to, at times, turn on their own countrymen and countrywomen. Yet, he does not allow himself to be drowned in this despair. Rather, buoyed by the people he encounters who have sought to provide refuge from this violence, he is able to find a message of hope. Katongole’s answer to: Who are my people? is found in overcoming the logic of the national, ethnic, and racial division in favor of a Christian reconfiguration of identity into “God’s new people.” Here the earthly markers of identity are not transcended (in supersessionist fashion). Instead, they are reoriented by love into a “recognizable community, a social body whose unique mission and membership cuts across, not just mystically but concretely and visibly, the boundaries of race, ethnicity, tribe, and nation” (44).
The contributions to the symposium take up Katongole’s book in a variety of ways. Todd Whitmore asks how we should classify the genre of Katongole’s book: Is it an ethnography? A theological treatise? Or a confession? Or some combination of these? And what difference does it make to settle on one (or none) of these? Marie Claire-Klassen likewise explores the genre of the book, focusing especially on its structure in the first half of her response. In the second part of her contribution, Klassen suggests that Katongole’s work would benefit from engagement with feminist and womanist theologians, who draw our attention to the importance of considerations of justice in addition to love. Jason Springs, another contributor to this symposium, is also invested in the concept of justice. Springs places Katongole’s book into conversation with Charles Villa-Vincencio to bring into stronger relief the complementary role of justice in relation to love that is necessary when a society recovers from conflict. Cecelia Lynch, meanwhile, draws on her own experience working in different African contexts to reflect on the history of missionizing work in its countries. She also does so to point to the necessity of prioritizing Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies when confronting the climate crisis in Africa and around the world.
The final two responses focus on identity. In his contribution, William Orbih reminds us that the people’s stories Kantongole recounts in the book are not the stories of saints, but rather the stories of witnesses to the possibility of a Christianity community that is oriented beyond the signifiers of race, ethnicity, and nationality. In doing so, Orbih shows, Katongole reveals “new frontiers” in Christian theological discourse. Emmanuel Ojeifo likewise explores identity, noting that for Kantongole identity is not a theoretical, but a practical matter, one that orients the everyday lives of Africans. Ojeifo, like Klassen, also wonders what a more robust accounting of gender might have added to Katongole’s book.
Across these responses, the contributors engage religion not as part of the private, inner world of beliefs, but rather as part of the public and political work of social practices and narratives. In doing so, they reveal the folly of the secular bias in political theories which would relegate religion to a secondary role in political life. Katongole’s book reminds us why the segregation of religion in our intellectual, political, and social imaginaries not only fails to grasp the reality of the violent situations in which people find themselves, but also cuts us off from imaginaries that might envision new ways beyond them.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Screenshot from Paradise Lost. Used with permission of director.
This conversation was born out of Mara Ahmed and Shirly Bahar’s rapport and friendship over the past 3 years. In November, they were invited by their friend and interlocutor, Santiago Slabodsky, to discuss and show their work at Hofstra University. This is a continuation of that conversation, extending what transpired between them in person and in writing, and further elaborating on their ideas about the links between Palestine, Mizrahi Jews, and the imperial politics of color. The image and concept of the injured body capture these connections.
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Mara Ahmed: As an activist filmmaker, I attempt to spark discussions across differences and boundaries. Whether addressing anti-Muslim racism, the partition of India, or political questions related to the so-called War on Terror, I’ve relied on vox pops to gather public opinions and complicate interviews featured in my documentaries, as well as the dialogue that occurs naturally between film and audience.
In 2017, I gave a Tedx talk about colonial borders, the making of nation-states, and the absurdity of fixed national identities that flatten human multiplicities. The title of my talk, The Edges that Blur, was inspired by Adrienne Rich’s poetry. In Your Native Land, Your Life, she understands pain as a cudgel that maintains divisions but also as a bond that enables reconnection:
remember: the body’s pain and the pain on the streets
are not the same but you can learn
from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges
more than anything watch the edges that blur
I became more invested in this pairing of “the body’s pain” and “the pain on the streets,” as I began work on The Injured Body, a film project activated by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a stunning book of poetry that stitches together narrative prose, art, and politics. As Jonathan Farmer notes in his review, the book traces Black people’s lived, deeply embodied experiences of racial microaggressions and “the ways in which the harm done by language turns to flesh, enduring at an almost cellular level.”
Rankine’s book encouraged me to document racism in America by focusing on microaggressions, what Cathy Park Hong describes as “minor feelings” or “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed” (55).
I interviewed 17 women of color to discuss the cumulative effects of relentless microaggressions and their impact on our bodies and collective breath. The body is central. Since breath is also the gateway to expressivity in movement, I worked closely with Mariko Yamada and Rosalie “Daystar” Jones to choreograph a complementary narrative told through dance.
Unpacking messy entanglements and negotiations of Palestinians and Mizrahim with Zionism and Israel, the documentaries [examined in this book] politicize pain… The documentary performances of Palestinians and Mizrahim convey what Zionism and Israel look like on their skins, scalps, and faces, and sound like in their voices, speeches, and silences, portraying the structures of feeling of their pain. (2-3)
For me as a reader, there were countless such moments of recognition. And so I must start by asking you, Shirly, to tell us the story of how you came to write this incredible book.
Shirly Bahar: Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine is primarily anchored in three watershed moments that shifted how we view and talk about Palestine. The first moment is the early 2000s. In my book, I characterized the wave of documentaries by and about Palestinians and Mizrahim mostly living in 1948 Palestine/Israel that came out during the first decade of the 2000s, especially since 2002. Then, there is the present moment—the moment of the reception of the book. This moment in the making is a time of collective reflection on how representations of Palestine/Israel are in flux: I am thinking especially of the discourse shift we have been seeing since May 2021, when global solidarity with the Palestinian resistance to Israeli attacks outpoured on social media, at times infiltrating mainstream media too. And finally, there was the year 2014, when I wrote much of this book. Non-coincidentally, that moment of heightened awareness about how our movements have been connecting and relating to each other across struggles, and showing solidarity globally for a very long time, inspired my writing.
In the time between 2014 and now, I have been carried by hopeful pulls tightening the theoretical understandings and human bonds between those who are leading struggles for liberation around the world. One such major pull emanated from the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and the official founding of the Black Lives Matter movement. The messages of support and encouragement pouring in from Palestine to Ferguson brought about a reinvigorated examination of the historical ties between US-based and global Black and Palestinian-led movements, and anticolonial, antiracist movements at large, as powerfully articulated by Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill, as well as Angela Davis, and many others. I wrote this book as a Mizrahi Turkish-Israeli scholar. It was driven by my wish to enhance Mizrahi solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return.
As you well know, 2014 also saw the publication of Claudia Rankine’s groundbreaking Citizen: An American Lyric. Citizen is such a special book, right? No wonder it is so highly celebrated. “Yes, and the body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through…” Rankine writes (37); I know that’s one of your favorite quotes too! Because I was deeply inspired by her writing and this quote, I made it the opening epigraph for my book. Following Rankine, and other writers committed to examining the power dynamics as well as the shared fabric of life revealed in human interactions, my book explores the deep relationalities embedded in the representations of oppression and pain of Palestinians and Mizrahim as seen in documentaries: indeed, our living conditions are unequal, yet our realities are interconnected. I love that Citizen inspired our work so much, and especially this quote. It speaks to the power of this book, as well as to how closely connected our work is.
I wrote this book as a Mizrahi Turkish-Israeli scholar. It was driven by my wish to enhance Mizrahi solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return.
In 2014, I also flew to Istanbul to spend my first summer there since I was a child. The access that I have always had to Turkey means the world to me—it is a window into my family’s 500-year history there. That summer, my access to the Turkish language also facilitated my daily encounters with numerous visceral, visualized reports from Gaza in the Turkish media—reports that humanized Palestinian pain. What I found out, and later crafted into my argument, is that reconnecting to my home of Istanbul while sensing excessive rage, agony, and empathy when regarding the pain of others in occupied Jerusalem or in besieged Gaza, did not amount to politicization single-handedly. Rather, it takes perpetual learning and unlearning, and visual and sensorial training in reading cultural texts—it takes endless emotional labor—to try and relate to the pain of others in a deeply personal and politically committed manner.
Mara: Being a filmmaker, I am fascinated by how you use documentary film as a lens to unpack so much. You say that although oppression and racialization have impacted Palestinians and Mizrahim unequally and differently, the documentaries you discuss in the book share a political commitment and performative affinities. They defy the historical removal of the pain of Israel’s marginalized people from public visibility. You discuss how documentary performances of pain by Palestinians and Mizrahim, when seen together, invite us to contest the segregation of pain and consider reconnection. I am particularly interested in the word “performance” as it applies to the documentary form, which is supposed to be objective, an outgrowth of journalism. Could you elaborate on that?
Shirly: I wanted to analyze Palestinian and Mizrahi documentaries side by side and articulate what I thought they had in common, and the framework of “documentary performances” was just right for me to describe the affinities I identified in that corpus of work. What I saw were first-person testimonies of Palestinians’ and Mizrahim’s experiences of pain and oppression in their own words, voices, and bodies, and those were crafted visually, cinematically, as documentary performances. I used the term “documentary performance” to refer to an audio-visualized, mediated, documented, and cinematized appearance of a person in front of a camera and on a screen as part of a cinematic scene. It is a term used by Elizabeth Marquis in “Conceptualizing the Documentary Performance,” where she builds on both sociology and documentary film studies to offer “a framework for understanding and discussing the documentary actor’s work … which takes into account everyday performative activity, the impact of the camera, and the influence of specific documentary film frame-works (45). The book engages an approach mostly drawing on visual culture and performance studies, thinking through a person’s performance as a human medium in constant conversation with the filmmaker, filmmaking apparatus, and mechanisms, and teases out some of the most quintessential questions informing film and documentary studies as a whole—questions about authenticity, mediation, and the construction of reality in representation.
I was interested and wanted to participate in the efforts to revisit the term “performance” by documentary scholars studying reenactments, such as Jonathan Kahana and Bill Nichols. But it is important to note and celebrate—and I do in the book—that the complex, inspiring understandings of “performance” and “performativity” in all of their overlaps, have been theorized by queer and feminist scholars firstly, emerging at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies and critical race studies since the 1990s. Diana Taylor taught us that performance “function[s] as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity,” that operates as part of the overall “aesthetics of everyday life” (2–3) Judith Butler’s landmark theorizations of “performance” and “performativity” heavily drew on J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things with Words. Along similar lines, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Andrew Parker differentiated between the theatrical “performance,” and the linguistic, discursive term of the “performative.” Crucially, Sayidia Hartman illuminated the need to consider performance and performativity together (alongside her theorization of pain as relational): “the interchangeable usage of performance and performativity is intended to be inclusive of displays of power, the punitive and theatrical embodiment of racial norms … the entanglements of dominant and subordinate enunciations … and the difficulty of distinguishing between [them]” (5). This interdisciplinary push is required where documentaries are concerned, and especially in the digital age of accelerated visual popular culture defining our contemporary everyday.
Above all the performative trends that the documentaries share, I found, is their invitation to understand pain as relational through taking in and connecting to the embodied documentary performance we are viewing. As interactive sites of testimony, the documentary performances powerfully politicize pain by shaping it as a relational event that took place between the performing person and the state, and is lingering in the person’s body and ways of speaking, expressing, and representing themselves to this day. The documentary performances are multilayered encounters between bodies, affective states, speeches, and filmic apparatuses, in which the films’ participants return to the past, formative painful experiences that they still embody and endure. The hit of the bullet, the demolished home, the lost carob tree, the dried fountain, the unattainable moon, the imposed mask, the interior of the home, the fence of the camp—are all imagery communicating particular ways of living, hurting, being in, resisting, and becoming through political conditions of oppression. Sharing their told, filmed performances, the participants invite us to feel the trajectories of an oppression that became pain with them, and relate to their experience of living on.
Mara: There is one sentence in your book which hit me hard. It is the commonly held notion that you cite, claiming that “the trauma of witnessing destruction directly harms the usage of language about it” (30). To me this means that the credibility of language (and therefore people’s testimony) is damaged by violence. Consequently, those who are occupied (on whose minds and bodies violence is constantly enacted) are never seen as credible witnesses of their own pain, of their own lived experiences, based on dominant codes of credibility. Many of the women I interviewed for The Injured Body, for example, spoke about gaslighting—microinvalidations which make them second guess themselves and question their own sanity. You take issue with this notion. Could you tell us more?
The documentary performances powerfully politicize pain by shaping it as a relational event that took place between the performing person and the state, and is lingering in the person’s body and ways of speaking, expressing, and representing themselves to this day.
Shirly: You’re absolutely right, I agree that the idea that trauma directly harms expression runs the risk of dismissing and gaslighting those who underwent and/or witnessed it. And I have always been struck with how commonplace it is in Freudian psychoanalysis, and in literary and film theories that employ psychoanalytic frameworks. Critical thinkers, especially in gender and queer studies, such as Lauren Berlant have contested this idea; thinkers such as Sara Ahmed even use the word “pain” rather than trauma to politicize harm and injury—I think intentionally. I follow these thinkers in taking issue with that idea and apply my criticism to film analysis, especially in chapter 1, when I analyze the documentaries Jenin Jenin (Mohammad Bakri, 2002) and Arna’s Children (Juliano Mer Khamis, 2003). There, I show that when testifying to horrors that they have witnessed, the witnesses in the documentaries do not guarantee to posit “what had exactly happened” with any measure of empirical accuracy. Rather, the documentaries’ approach underlines whose pain gets to be filmed and shared depending on the circumstances of power informing the distribution of representation.
Yes, it has been established, the trauma of witnessing destruction directly harms the usage of language about it. But—and that’s a big but—on top of running the risk of unifying and depoliticizing the diversely positioned human experience, the Freudian genealogy of trauma carries harmful legacies of disbelief toward survivors. In this chapter, I harness a politicized view of both the testimony of trauma and of documentary distribution in Palestine/Israel to show that the precise ways in which their testimonies have been performed and cinematized, including the testifiers’ bodily gestures, chosen words, silences, and general edited sequences, provide spectators with poignant clarity regarding how pain hit their bodies when the bullet hit the executed person. Additionally and no less importantly, the testimonies communicate how the conditions of the military occupation that pulled the trigger also made it difficult to communicate the pain of that experience outside the camp, by depriving them of audiovisual means of communication, and painting all the camp residents as unreliable speakers perforce, who were responsible for their own suffering. When testifying in the films, the witnesses’ reenactments of the pain of witnessing destruction politicize their pain, framing it collectively and relationally—as injuring their bodies and mental and affective states, as well as recovering by their very telling of their stories of embodied and psychic pain. In that way, they transform from racialized and potentially targeted innate “terrorists”—whose pain is their own fault—to survivors with agency over their own becomings, personally and collectively.
Mara: I would also like to bring up the constant threat of violence—of the military mainly in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the police within the 1948 boundaries. You talk about documentaries showing Palestinian children experiencing “withheld violence,” and lingering on the threshold of death long before they die. Your words reminded me of Frantz Fanon and the “muscular contraction” of the colonized body. In fact, we shot a dance sequence titled Emancipated Breath (a prelude to The Injured Body) which addresses the policing of bodies, the containment of their breathable atmosphere, and the yearning for release. Could you explain what this implies in the Palestine/Israel context?
Shirly: It is something I observed when analyzing Arna’s Children which I mentioned above. Arna’s Children extends the message that Bakri put out there, of resisting the Israeli silencing and gaslighting of Palestinian pain. This documentary does so especially by delving into the structure of feeling of living with potential death—of a beloved one, or one’s own—throughout life. The documentary follows the wonderfully inspiring children and teenage theater students of the Freedom Theater, run by Arna Mer, Juliano’s mother, and himself. The documentary traces how these young people lived with the encompassing threat of death under military occupation much before many of them died. The formative, horrific experience of knowing the probability of death intimately in life is not only collective, but also one that challenges the temporal understanding of pain: rather than a past event, the pain of living with death is present and constant and projects onto the future, all at the same time.
In a very different way, and while they have access to Jewish privilege and supremacy, Mizrahim have been experiencing the heavy hand of police brutality too. I write about those experiences when analyzing films exploring the massive crackdown on the Mizrahi Black Panthers in Jerusalem in the 1970s—films such as Kaddim Wind (David Ben Chetrit, 2002), Have You Heard of the Black Panthers? (Nissim Mosak, 2002), and The Black Panthers Speak (Sami Shalom Chetrit and Eli Hamo, 2003). Beloved filmmaker David Ben Chetrit died of complications in the aftermath of an atrocious battering by military security forces, in the heart of Tel Aviv. But even before the first Black Panthers’ demonstration, young Mizrahi leaders of this groundbreaking movement have had to deal with police brutality, basically all throughout their upbringing: many of them would get beaten up and/or sent to juvenile prison upon merely entering the public sphere. For young Mizrahim, walking down the streets was prohibited regularly regardless of any crime they might have committed. These beatings mark the criminalization of Mizrahim’s appearance in the highly policed public sphere, thus enforcing and enabling their exclusion from it. The testimonies in the documentaries about the police’s continuous criminalization and repeated public battering paint a larger picture of the state’s racialization that Mizrahi bodies have been enduring ever since they arrived in Palestine/Israel.
Unlike Palestinians, Mizrahim’s access to Jewish privilege generally allows them to dodge the constant threat of death. To earn this privilege and enter the Jewish fold, however, Mizrahim are forced to go through a process of assimilation that involves shedding any connection to Arabness and becoming as “purely” Jewish as possible. Palestinians and Mizrahim were historically differentially positioned in relation to Jewish supremacy, society, and Israel’s system of state security—positions that are further instigated at times of heightened violence, as the films show. Sadly, Mizrahim actively participate and often lead the work of the military and police to enhance violence towards Palestinians. They have been intentionally recruited into the police since the 1950s, not unlike the intentional recruitment of people of color into the police in the US. There have also been rare, yet deeply inspiring, cases of Mizrahi organizing in solidarity with Palestinians. Kaddim Wind follows organizer Oved Abutbul who, as part of his grassroots campaign against the eviction of Mizrahi residents from Mevaseret Tzion in 1997, joined a community of activists who rented a bus to Jericho, in the territory of the Palestinian Authority, to seek asylum. Additionally, the activists sent a letter to the king of Morocco, asking to return there with his blessing.
Mara: I would like to end with something you say in the book, that “more often than not, those who care for the pain of others are found in relative vulnerability themselves—political, physical, mental—thus chancing their becoming further undone” (26). Meaning that many times, those who feel the pain of others most deeply are themselves living precarious lives. I think of the Black Lives Matter movement and its principled support for justice in Palestine. I would love for you to expand on this important point.
Shirly: I thought the same, and it’s at the heart of my writing! As I started saying above, I feel hopeful when I see those who are leading struggles for civility and liberation around the world, express and act in solidarity. After 2014, we saw these connections nourished further over the years, perhaps most notably in 2020, as demonstrations to protest the killing of George Floyd and so many other Black people in the United States throughout history and right now, swept across the world—a world hit by a global pandemic disproportionately harming the most vulnerable and racialized populations. Understanding the interconnectedness of Palestinian struggles and Black movements reaffirms them as core inspiration for many historical anticolonial and antiracist movements around the world, including the Mizrahi struggles in Israel/Palestine, especially those that emerged from the 1970s Black Panthers movement in Jerusalem. Yet, as Mizrahim, we have to reckon with our position of privilege and proactively acknowledge it. In the introduction to the book, I positioned myself in the field as a Turkish Israeli Mizrahi scholar with Jewish privilege in the Jewish state of Israel—where I am from—and with the privilege of visiting Turkey, also where I am from, unlike many of my fellow Arab Jewish Mizrahim. This attempt to transparently explicate my identification and viewpoint from the outset fuels my intersectional intervention of considering interrelated oppressions and relational pain.
In acknowledging our indebtedness to interconnected, anticolonial and antiracist movements, especially Black and Palestinian ones, and in endorsing our solidarity with them, I am encouraging more Mizrahi filmmakers, scholars, and organizers to also step forward. To that end, my book advocates for the transformative power of relating to another fellow human’s mediated vulnerability and taking on the risk of complicating, confusing, and even adding to our immediate experience of our own pain, for the sake of holding space for their humanity in ourselves. That quote from my introduction you mentioned above, comes right before I myself quote Tourmaline, who writes in her preface to the gorgeous new edition of The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions: “If we are to ever make it to the next revolution, it will be through becoming undone, an undoing that touches ourselves and touches each other and all the brokenness we are … to become undone is the greatest gift to ourselves” ( viii). Documentary Cinema from Israel-Palestine hopes to be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand their own feelings of powerlessness as not one with them privately and naturally but, rather, as public, political, relatable, and changeable.
Mara Ahmed is an interdisciplinary artist and activist filmmaker based on Long Island, New York. She was born in Lahore and educated in Belgium, Pakistan, and the US. Mara’s work aims to trespass political, linguistic, and geographic borders and challenges colonial binaries. She has directed and produced three films, including The Muslims I Know (2008), Pakistan One on One (2011), and A Thin Wall (2015). Her films have been broadcast on PBS and screened at international film festivals. She is currently working on The Injured Body, a documentary about racism in America that focuses exclusively on the voices of women of color. Mara’s artwork has been exhibited at galleries in New York and California. She was recently awarded a NYSCA grant for her multimedia project, Return to Sender: Women of color in colonial postcards and the politics of representation. Her websites are www.NeelumFilms.com and www.MaraAhmedStudio.com
Shirly Bahar’s writing and curatorial work explores the relationships between representation, politics, and the body. Shirly’s first book, Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home came out in July 2021 with Bloomsbury/IB Tauris. Shirly has published articles about film, performance art, literature, gender and queer representation from Israel/Palestine, Turkey, and the US. Since 2013, Shirly has been curating art shows, public programs, and community events in New York City and across the US. Shirly earned her PhD from New York University (2017), MA from Brandeis University (2010), and her BFA/Ed from Hamidrasha School of Arts (2006), where she specialized in sculpture and video installation.
View of the walled city of Babylon. Within the city walls are houses, the Hanging Gardens, palaces, and the Tower of Babel. Numbered top left: XXIV, and top right: P. 296. C. The print is part of an album. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Khaled Furani’s Redeeming Anthropology is an incisive, bold, and polemical book which asks anthropologists to re-examine their attempted severing of ties from theology. While aimed primarily at the field of anthropology, the book poses questions that are relevant to the wider humanities. I see Furani’s book as an intervention that will push scholars of religion, literary theorists, theologians, and others to re-examine the fundamental theoretical tools with which they engage their disciplines. Drawing on interviews and archival research, Furani uses anthropologists’ own words to challenge the idea that the field has ever been as distinct from theology as it claims. It has constructed what he calls an “anthropodom” via various metaphorical “panes” and attempted to seal itself off from theology. It has done so primarily by claiming reason as its sovereign guide and culture as the object of its study. This claim, of course, has not gone uncontested. And yet, even those who argue that theological residues or resonances remain in the anthropological project have never seemed to escape the appeal of secular reason as a guidepost.
Drawing on interviews and archival research, Furani uses anthropologists’ own words to challenge the idea that the field has ever been as distinct from theology as it claims.
The book can be divided into roughly two parts. The first deals with how anthropologists have erected and maintained the anthropodom via various strategies. The second deals with how opening anthropology up to theology as a critical tool might prove useful. While the first part of the book proves fascinating in its details and erudite in its scholarship—particularly relevant and interesting for scholars of religion is Furani’s interview with Talal Asad, where the latter reveals the importance of his mother’s religious practice as part of the impetus for his critique of Geertz’s belief-centered approach to religion—I want to focus in this brief post on the second half of the book. Here Furani shows how anthropologists might draw on theology to enable them to dethrone secular reason in favor, if not of theology per se, then a theology inflected vision of the world that is willing to extend itself beyond the modern secular sciences. I’ll argue that this vision of theology is (1) welcome insofar as it breaks down artificial barriers between the humanities, social sciences, and theology; and (2) risky insofar as it does not delimit what kind of theology it might bring into these fields when it does so.
Fallibility and Idolatry
For Furani, it is the concept of idolatry, born out of the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that proves most useful for his purposes. Idolatry is the mistaking of the finite for the infinite; God for an idol; the representation for the real. In the case of anthropology, Furani argues,
To recognize idolatry in anthropodom, constituted as a particular disciplinary application of secular sovereign reason, means in part to recognize ways in which modern anthropology builds itself upon false worship, misplaced trust, and categorical conflation when taking the Cultural (or its categorical cognates) to be all that there is to multiplicity in and of the world. (149)
In other words, in setting reason up as the means by which the anthropologist understands the culture of the “other,” anthropology necessarily limits the way it encounters diversity in the world. Everything the anthropologist sets his sights on becomes subsumed under the category of culture and is deciphered by reason. A ritual sacrifice, for example, is read as a means of establishing a hierarchical social order rather than an act done to appease God. The anthropologist can see this through her interpretive lens, even if the practitioner does not—indeed the practitioner is more likely focused on establishing a relationship to God rather than the social outcomes of the practice.
This way of incorporating theology into the field of anthropology, in my mind, is a welcome intervention. Given the persuasiveness of genealogical accounts from anthropologists like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood and scholars of political theology like Bonnie Honig and Paul Khan, it seems that such a move is a logical next step for those who do not wish to remain beholden to the false God of secular reason.
Yet, as I read these pages, I began to wonder if the category of idolatry, while offering a heft to the critical approach that Furani is advocating, is all that different from the less provocative, though similarly oriented, concept of fallibility. Indeed, fallibility is built into the exercise of secular reason, at least it is when it is practiced well. Pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, for example, held up fallibility as an epistemic virtue that was necessary in light of our finitude as human beings. Truth for the pragmatist is contestable and unresolved. And it is the lack of settlement that makes it possible for the pursuit of knowledge in various fields to continue. A doubt arises about some settled truth, we form a hypothesis that might change our understanding of what is true, and then we test this hypothesis.
Why, then, do we need idolatry to recognize our false claims to possess the absolute when fallibilism will do? Is it just to offer religious people a piece of the secular pie? Or is it a concept that bears more weight upon further investigation?
Whose Revelation?
This leads me to the second point that I want to make, which concerns the kind of theology we are letting into the humanities when we take this route. The idolatry that Furani wishes to mobilize against the sovereignty of secular reason is one I imagine will sit comfortably with the current postsecular moment in the academy. Furani’s claim in the conclusion, however, that we should also be more attentive to revelation, is one that I think might ruffle the feathers of the more sensitive seculars among us.
On the value of revelation, Furani writes:
Theology offers revelation as a chief means for averting confusion as to where sovereignty justifiably belongs, for precluding it from realms where all is finite and transient, where none can ultimately be self-sufficient. I see revelation as a possible resource in revitalizing anthropology’s forms of reasoning, by helping it first to recognize and then retrace its steps, this time away from sovereignty’s stalemates and degrading entrapments, where all that is asked is only what—in sovereignscape—can safely be answered (180).
To allow revelation to speak for itself rather than to try to discipline it via secular reason is a task that Furani sets before us. To do so would allow for a kind of multiplicity that is currently taboo not only in anthropology but also in the wider humanities. Using religious studies as an example, to employ revelation as an analytical concept would be considered by most scholars of religion to cross over from the field of religious studies to theology—to violate a boundary marking an epistemic divide. Following Furani, I think we would be right to be suspicious of the claim that the two were ever as sealed off from one another as we might think. Yet what this means for how we engage theology requires more scrutiny.
Why, then, do we need idolatry to recognize our false claims to possess the absolute, when fallibilism will do? Is it just to offer religious people a piece of the secular pie? Or is it a concept that bears more weight upon further investigation?
My worry here though is not that we will allow the kind of theology Furani describes throughout the book—this is one that can humble claims of the secular human sciences. Indeed this is a theology that I have suggested is pragmatic. It is fallible, open to multiplicity, and suspicious of claims to sovereignty. But what of the more controversial concepts that theology might bring to bear on anthropology?
In the conclusion of the book, Furani writes, “one is not to suppose that all [theology’s] lessons merit heeding.” But exactly how we make the judgment as to which theology is worth heeding and which is not requires the use of reason, adjudication, and interpretation. It requires an interpretation of theology that picks up what it finds useful and discards what it does not. However, Furani does not really explain his criteria for letting in some theological concepts and not others. In advocating the importation of theology without the burden of secular reason, Furani does open up space to let in forms of theology many I suspect would be less comfortable with. The risk of allowing, for example, dogma, gender complementarity, patriarchy, and other “theological” concepts is not foreclosed in Furani’s analysis.
At the End of the World
I want to move toward a conclusion via an allegorical story from the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. I do this in the spirit of both Furani’s book, which I think is beautifully written and employs analogical thinking usefully in making its argument, and in the spirit of Ebrahim Moosa, whose inauguration as Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies is the occasion for this symposium on Furani’s work, and for whom literature has often served as a guide for his thinking.
In “The Tower of Babylon” (from Stories of Your Life and Others) Chiang reimagines the story of the tower of babel from the perspective of a miner who is employed to climb the tower and dig upward into the vault of heaven, a vault that it turns out is made of granite and requires human ingenuity to crack open. Along the journey up the tower many of his fellow workers wonder if what they are being employed to do is an act of hubris. There is story of a flood that led to a great deal of destruction which resulted from previous attempts to crack open the vault. Further, as they climb they pass by all the features that make the natural world humans inhabit familiar, including the sun, stars, and villages that people have built along the path up the tower. They are treading in unfamiliar and dangerous territory. Nonetheless, the miners proceed up the tower, finally arriving just below the vault to heaven in order to complete their work. Over the span of many years they slowly chip away at the granite by warming it with fire so that it will crake more easily. They then employ their pickaxes to break up the loosened granite. Eventually our protagonist miner cracks open the vault and is nearly drowned when a deluge of water follows. He finds himself trapped with a few other workers as those left behind seal them off in the tunnel to avoid being caught in the deluge. After swimming up through the tunnel that has burst open, he awakens to find himself on the ground. For some time he struggles through this new space, unsure of where he has arrived. Eventually he runs into a caravan. He is told by a man in the caravan that he is in the land of Shinar, exactly where he began his journey. The protagonist reaches the conclusion that the world is not arranged vertically with the natural world and humans living below and God above in the heavens. Rather the world is arranged like a seal cylinder where heaven and Earth are not separated but exist alongside one other. Without getting into exactly how this world looks—one can spend plenty of time on reddit looking at various people’s attempts to describe what this world looks like—the conclusion seems to be that when we look into the heavens we are in fact looking at ourselves, albeit from a different vantage point.
Black hematite cylinder seal. Main scene: three deities approach a seated figure, probably a king, the storm god holding his lightning fork and standing on the back of a bull, the moon god holding a crescent standard and standing in a boat, and an interceding goddess. Old Assyrian period, ca 1920-1740 BC. British Museum ME 22963. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I could not help but think of Chiang’s work as I read Furani’s book, especially given the metaphorical description of the anthropodom which its inhabitants have attempted to construct to separate themselves from theology, i.e. the heavens. Reading Furani and Chiang together I wonder if we might begin to think of the anthropodom and theology not as separate spheres arranged vertically but as overlapping and indeed inseparable ones. Here, rather than leaks of theology showing up in the anthropodom we might imagine theology and the secular as already breathing the same air, so to speak; immanence and transcendence are not above and below but intermixed and porous.
And here we might also find ourselves in a position where sovereignty does not reign as there is neither an “above” or “below” and neither reason nor theology is king. Rather both exist alongside us as fallible sciences.
This is perhaps not so far from where Furani wants us to go as we reach the end of the book. And yet, I want to push here the metaphorical distinction between theology and reason to say that they have never really been separate. If this is the case, then the distinction between theology and anthropology falls away all the more and reason and revelation become co-inhabitants of a common world, where the desire for the purely secular or the purely theological both fall by the wayside. Perhaps then what is possible is not only the humbling of anthropology by theology, as seems to be Furani’s aim, but a mutual humbling that requires that we use practical reason in any given situation to determine which concepts to employ, and how.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Turkish Muslims are seen performing the first Friday prayer during Ramadan through a balcony railing, April 16, 2021, in the Sabancı Merkez Mosque in Adana, Turkey. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Alexander Cook. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Redeeming Anthropology
Academics can learn much from the trans-disciplinary work fundamental to Khaled Furani’s book on disciplinarity and the limitations of western epistemologies. Redeeming Anthropology allows us to see beyond the blinders we wear as we trot along the path carved out by an Enlightenment reason. Some of us can’t see the forest for the trees, while some of us might see the forest, but miss the horizon. Others of us are in the cave still watching shadows on walls, perhaps even unaware of the light of the sun itself. Simply put, secular reason limits and defines objects worthy of human knowledge and subsequently leads to a meager and unsatisfying relationship to the fullness of reality and human experience. Perspectives coming from different religious traditions such as the Islamic tradition are differentkinds of knowledge. Yet, Islamic knowledge is only valid or acceptable for modern disciplines once it is curated by Reason with a capital R; Reason with a very particular and Eurocentric, and I would say, colonial, genealogy. Furani’s work shows us that the sovereignty given to secular reason maintains hegemonic control of knowledge. Thus, western knowledge gives itself the authority to narrate the stories of “Others” in the past, and tries to shape their present and future.
From my perspective as an Islamic historian and peace studies scholar, I found in Furani’s book an affirmation of the values of interdisciplinarity. We look at the same issue from the vantage point of different disciplines and sometimes it leads to a valuable critique of our own discipline. This fresh view can help us articulate questions that have haunted our work without us being aware of them, as ghosts on the peripheries of our vision. Furani defines anthropology as the study of alterity, or difference, in a world where the role of the divine has been significantly reduced in our politics and social lives; a condition that Nietzsche defined as modernity. In place of the divine, the categories of Reason, Culture, and State become idols for worship, placed on altars to the “infinite” when they are, in fact, finite and limited.
Historical Reasoning vs. the Past
Fundamentally, Furani reminds us that our idols ultimately reflect ourselves and our relationship to our past. Thus, we find ourselves thinking about how to resolve global problems with deep historical roots from reasonable premises. But we find that others disagree about the facts, historical and otherwise, that we think are perfectly obvious, logical, and reasonable. Furani’s engagement with theology reminds us that “talking about God, the infinite,” as anthropology’s Other is a valuable tool for critiquing the unthinking worship of finite idols that not only do not deserve worship but also dismiss valuable and essential parts of our own humanity as beyond the scope of knowledge itself. Such aspects of humanity include value, truth, aesthetics, and practices of peace and justice. In particular, it includes those humans whose knowledge has been denigrated as irrational, and they themselves as incapable of producing knowledge at all, never mind that their perspectives may point towards lacunae or aporia in our own assumptions about reason.
Furani’s engagement with theology reminds us that ‘talking about God, the infinite,’ as anthropology’s Other is a valuable tool for critiquing the unthinking worship of finite idols that not only do not deserve worship but also dismiss valuable and essential parts of our own humanity as beyond the scope of knowledge itself.
My own work also deals with the theological within the limits of historical reason. I study cosmologies that oriented thinkers in the pre-modern past, before the secular came into being and formed our disciplines. Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, a Muslim scholar in 18th century Mughal India, was not “modern” because he was not forced to limit the role of the divine within the scope of his own intellectual tradition. Yet, he was a rare liminal figure whose intellectual oeuvre asked questions of Islamic history that had broad ethical, aesthetic, and social outcomes. He dealt with questions of religious and cultural alterity within the Islamic tradition by engaging the ideas of Greek philosophers, Islamic theologians, and Sufi mystics. Yet, for a modern historian in the academy, there are values and reasonings that Wali Allah holds that create epistemic difficulties. How, for example, does the modern historian read hagiographical material that ascribes true visions to such a figure when oneiromancy in our worldview reflects the interiority of individuals rather than having external causes and consequences? The limits of our reading makes only certain questions possible to answer historically. The texture of the dreams of an eighteenth century mystic lies beyond the scope of historical research, and his solutions to friction between different kinds of Muslim communities are value-laden and inadmissible. Yet, Wali Allah’s work offers rare insights into potential critiques of fundamental values, such as his insistence that the divine cannot be thought of in terms of universals and particulars because these are fundamentally human constructs. [1]
Living Scholars and Living Traditions
What makes working on Muslim thinkers even more fraught is that they are not simply figures of the past; they are constantly referenced and constitute a major anchor for South Asian scholars to this day. In other words, I am writing about a living tradition through a western epistemological lens. There are scholars of Shah Wali Allah in the subcontinent that I rely on, yet their work is categorized as “theological work” and thus can only be selectively included in the Western academy through citations. This is an example of an epistemic injustice for scholars that help buttress the modern academy in invisible ways, on the peripheries of our vision, yet are denied access to it. The historical and the theological are cousins to the anthropological and the sociological. But the family of knowledge is much, much broader than our modern disciplines, and the scope of knowledge is open and infinite.
Furani’s text reminds us that as anthropologists search for difference abroad, historians delve into the past. One is a spatial quest, the other primarily temporal. The questions that arise, however, resonate deeply, because we are all asking a simple question: “Who are we, and even more importantly, who can we be?” For historians who have often fallen prostrate before the state, producing nationalist discourse that deifies the state for the purposes of national unity, that question was answered differently than it is for historians today. [2] From framing India as historically beset by “Muslim invaders” to the trope of secular Indian nationhood being the natural arbiter of “communal” violence between Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, the state has effectively birthed modernity in South Asia, midwifed by the British presence starting in Shah Wali Allah’s lifetime. It is certainly not the case that there were “pure indigeneous ideas” polluted by “modern British ideas.” Rather, it is that a violent relationship between British and indigenous peoples premised on Western notions of human nature and politics imposed these ideas and organized the subcontinent anew, and that violence continues to express itself in moments of crisis according to the historical logics that gave birth to the state in the first place.[3]
History and Secular Methodology
But if we write a history that decenters the state, what kind of history would we produce? This is a question that historians have taken very seriously in the last twenty years. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe tries to encapsulate the shortcomings of history in precisely this mode when it tries to focus attention on the agency of non-Europeans in writing their own history. Rather than an obsession with objective Truth, or the “laws of history” and the “rise and fall of civilizations,” a new kind of history tries to engage Indigenous critiques of Euro-American mores, the ethics and aesthetics that these people held that reified a particular human relationship to the environment, and the irresponsibility of modern humans to others.
Yet calls for Enlightenment reason continue to reverberate in our temples to Reason, the modern university, not only in the United States, but around the world. That view of teleological Reason, one which culminates in carbon copies of Euro-American ideals, limits historians’ perspective on the past. Rather than taking a good hard look in the mirror of history, we end up staring into a funhouse mirror instead, one shaped primarily by a limited view of human nature, the environment, and the divine. This is largely due to the fact that anachronistic modern reason reduces the motivations of a plethora of Others in the past to self-interest, economic profit, religious bigotry, and irrationality. These narratives limit the motivations of humans, suffocates the spirit, and gives meager sustenance to human creativity. These explanations speak much more to our demons today than they offer a candid and impartial view of people in the past. For a richer history that also allows us to become more than we are, historians as well as anthropologists need to smash some idols.
Rather than taking a good hard look in the mirror of history, we end up staring into a funhouse mirror instead, one shaped primarily by a limited view of human nature, the environment, and the divine.
Historians are motivated to dig up the past. Some do it because they apparently just like digging, regardless of where or when they are digging. However, I find it difficult to imagine that the choice of historical queries, the topics of our interests are somehow simultaneously “interests” and yet paradoxically disinterested. Recent generations of historians have thus started digging with an ear towards finding a useful story, a thoughtful parable or allegory, in service to our collective futures. Historians’ work has to engage with the present because their work, in fact, never reaches the past. It is written for living and breathing people today and in the future. Removing misconceptions and misapprehensions of the past and breaking the idols of the present is an admirable part of the work of historians precisely because many historians’ work is deployed in the service of power and ideology.
It is, however, something many historians have long disavowed, saying instead that they represent the Truth as it was, a positivistic conceit that is slowly unravelling in the face of the infinite complexity of the past and our limited ability to access it.[4] Anthropologists, in a similar vein, immerse themselves in the soil of foreign lands. Some of us even excavate the ground for a necromantic fuel made of the long-dead living things: petroleum. All of this digging, albeit “productive,” comes with a series of both epistemic and, importantly, ethical pitfalls. What do anthropologists owe their subjects? How strongly should the historian hammer the idol of the state and whose history do they rewrite? Fossil fuel use allows for unimaginably complex human systems but it causes climate change, endangering the most disadvantaged among us. Who has to bear the burdens of our choices in the world that we live in today? Who reaps the benefits and who has to pay up when those costs come due?
Conclusion: Going Beyond the Limits of Secular Reason
All of us can learn from these epistemic and ethical challenges that Furani places before us. The sovereignty of secular reason limits the questions that can be asked in the modern academy, and binds scholars to a meager and frail view of reality and humanity. What we sacrifice is a complex and creative engagement with our world, but hope is not lost. Even within the sovereign secular dome of modernity, the “theosphere” seeps in, bringing with it alternatives, and glimpses of a world where our disciplines are not entangled within the “epistemic intestines of the modern state.” But with this hope come many new puzzles, quandaries, and contemplations that Furani might guide us through.
The first question I pose is: Does the concept of idolatry, defined as “a confusion of ends worthy of life’s devotion,” offers us a view of what non-idolatrous worship would look like? Put simply, how would breaking the hold of the State and Reason free us from the plights that we face as a global community? Secondly, what do other disciplines like history, for example, offer anthropology in dismantling the sovereign(s) in modern societies? Are other disciplines less idolatrous than anthropology? Finally, my last question is diagnostic. I think about the issue of idolatrous reason in terms of coloniality. Claude Levi-Strauss notes that “humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk,” and reminds us that monoculture was not the express choice of much of humanity (39). These idols/ideals are most often imposed through education and cultural production, and many of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, especially from the Global South, were educated at elite institutions in Europe and North America. That in itself raises many ethical questions, but to revisit the diagnosis: How can institutions decolonize their methods in order to not convert people to the religion of Enlightenment Reason and still retain value in the education that it offers students?
To begin, our curricula will have to engage more honestly with Indigenous critiques of Euro-American values and assumptions. We need to broader our framework for how we understand people’s actions in both the past and the present, and think about the goals of human communities as a naturally diverse and complex set. To think beyond the state, we also need to think about the value and impact of non-state actors in the making of their own history. This means thinking about history as defined by the people that made the decisions, not based on the impact that it had on Euro-Americans’ ideas of self and Other. Not only will epistemic humility and centering of Indigenous voices enrich the disciplines, it may bring about possibilities of mutual learning and self-critique that leads to more enduring and peaceful societies.
[1] Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, Al-Khayr al-Kathīr (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, 2008),19-20.
[2] For classical arguments about the unchanging nature of Hindus under the British, the Muslims as rapacious
invaders with fundamental differences, see Stanley Lane-Poole, Medieval India under Mohammedan Rule (1903).
Khan Shairani is a doctoral candidate in Peace Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame. Interested in the intersection between religion and peace, his work ranges from historical to modern engagements with Islamic tradition. His dissertation examines the intellectual legacy of two eighteenth-century Islamic scholars from the Mughal and the Ottoman empires who transformed the epistemologies of classical Islamic thought in response to internal and colonial challenges. In particular, he explores how Muslims can navigate tumultuous times by re-engaging and reviving their tradition. His other research interests include colonialism and post-colonialism, Islamic theosophy and, representations of Muslims in film.
Khan received his undergraduate degree in Arabic Studies and Chinese Studies from Williams College and his Master’s degree in Islamic Studies from Harvard Divinity School. While at Notre Dame, he has been a translator and instructor for the Madrasa Discourses program, an initiative funded by the Templeton Foundation that teaches science and philosophy to Islamic seminary graduates in India and Pakistan. He has also co-founded the Graduate Film Club (FLIC), which attempts to introduce intersectional and diverse cinema to students.
Khan's research has been supported by the Critical Language Scholarship, the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, as well as Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He has also received the Qasid Annual Scholarship for the study of Qur'anic Arabic in Amman, Jordan. His professional affiliations include the American Academy of Religion and the American Oriental Society.
lhambra, the complete form of which was Calat Alhambra (الْقَلْعَةُ ٱلْحَمْرَاءُ, trans. al-Qal‘at al-Ḥamrā’, “the red fortress”), is a palace and fortress complex located in Granada, Andalusia, Spain. It was constructed during the mid-14th century by the Moorish rulers of the Emirate of Granada in al-Andalus, occupying the top of the hill of the Assabica on the southeastern border of the city of Granada. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
The Long Legacy of Bad Scholarship
Why does a case of bad scholarship remain so pivotal for discussions of religion and modernity, specifically concerning Muslims and Islam, in the contemporary moment? The “clash of civilizations” thesis is a construct that Samuel Huntington did not invent but did popularize, and it is no doubt an example of bad scholarship. Huntington sits comfortably in a genealogy that includes Bernard Lewis in the twentieth century and Ernest Renan in the nineteenth century. Further, his scholarship is but another example of shoring up the power of European states under the guise of “objective scholarship.” As Dipa Kumar has shown, the vilification and othering of Islam during the time when European empires were expanding consolidated an air of Christian secular/modern superiority. Kumar’s materialist analysis underscores and traces how the othering of Muslims during this time also entailed their racialization: “the political economy of empire…creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, and Islamophobia sustains empire” (24). For Kumar, “anti-Muslim racism [is] a product of empire” and the “normal modality of imperial domination” (not only the right-wing fringe) with which the construction of “free” liberal societies in the west is constituted. Norton, for her part, reaffirms Kumar’s point that Islamophobia is not about religious intolerance but rather about racism (31) and thus requires anti-racist praxis rather than depoliticized interfaith dialogue. Norton’s book constitutes a robust addition to the genre of scholarship that contests the “clash of civilizations” thesis.
There is good reason for this continued response. There are still many in the academy and at think tanks and other sites of cultural production who affirm Huntington’s racist and jingoistic argument. This argument first seeks to attribute the causes of violence ahistorically to cultural identities, and second, argues—with all the empirical pretenses of social science—for the normative superiority of the “west.” The latter is a construct associated with modernity and secularity, which we should understand not as part of a binary of the religious and secular but rather as a politico-theological settlement. Elizabeth Shakman-Hurd exposes this settlement in Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion.
Norton’s book constitutes a robust addition to the genre of scholarship that contests the “clash” of civilizations”thesis.
Norton’s book captures how the “Muslim Question” is deployed, by whom it is deployed, and the purposes it serves specifically in Euro-American cases. Sexual politics, whether veiling, unveiling, or queering, is evident on all fronts where a civilizational logic of othering Muslims is deployed. Norton’s book illuminates the dynamics of sexual politics and how they operate to exclude, securitize, and otherize Muslims. As I demonstrate by drawing on my encounters with Huntington below, this thesis continues to hold a grip on conversations about Islam in the US academy, even as those who oppose it try to imagine new possibilities beyond it. Following this discussion, I turn to the relationship between “the Jewish question” and the “Muslim question” to help us imagine those possibilities.
Grasping for Andalusias
Norton’s book is a compelling demolition of the persistent orientalism that has defined modernity and, specifically, the project of liberal political citizenship, which was born with western Christian colonialism. Under this project, attaining freedom and capital depended upon slavery, depopulation, exploitation, and genocide in colonial spaces. This is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus which Walter Benjamin described as propelled by a destructive wind that piled up debris and suffering as it moved into the future. But the “progress” narrative conceals the debris—how it was caused and who caused it. Benjamin writes powerfully: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Norton’s book documents this barbarism.
But Norton’s book is also compelling for illuminating moments of interruption to this progressive and violent narrative. Like Benjamin’s concept of messianic time and his rejection of victors’ history of progress, Norton, to quote Benjamin, “seize[s] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” This is the memory of Andalus, a moment in Spanish history where one can find “a Europe shaped by more than Christianity” (156). Norton continues: “All three faiths still live in Andalusia. They still mix. They still exchange people and ideas. Catholic schoolchildren on field trips pose at the feet of the statue of Maimonides. Modern Spaniards, like the Spaniards of the past, still move between the Abrahamic faiths” (157). Al-Andalus, Norton underscores, is not “a singular paradise, incomparable and lost” (157). Rather, there are other Andalusias that offer “alternative pasts and open to alternative futures” (157). One such Andalusia, Norton finds in Juha, a “gay Hawaiian Palestinian” band “that challenges not only the clash of civilizations thesis but the politics of sexuality” (200). Juha, for example, weaves Hawaiian kitsch with the traditional call for prayers (201). Another historical irruption is the graphic novel Cairo by G. Wilson and M. K. Perker. The latter, Norton notes, captures an Andalusia by tracing how “the enemy [an Israeli soldier] becomes the ally and friend” (207). Norton reads Cairo as retrieving and reimagining an “ancient, non-Western cosmopolitanism” which unsettles the self-righteous certainty (the progress narrative) of “the liberal model of prescriptive cosmopolitanism fielded by John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum” (208). Accordingly, Norton tells us that “[t]he novel challenges the rule of law as a transcultural panacea; it refuses the divide between sacred and secular that buttresses the ‘clash of civilization’ thesis” (208). Her aim here is not a conservative and reactionary one that would seek to reclaim a “golden age” before the script of European barbarity began to be written on the bodies of marked humans. Neither is her aim to recover a lost tradition destroyed by the imposition of liberal accounts of the law. Rather, she hopes to find in contemporary Andalusias a robust source for an anti-racist re-scripting of the secular. Another Andualisan indicator she highlights is Paul Gilroy’s concept of “conviviality,” which denotes a life together (196) where ordinary and “everyday projects of hybridity and synthesis” interrupt the ugly world that Huntington saw (196). Norton’s Andalusias are sites for reimagining the secular rather than romantic longing for past utopias. Unfortunately, the Huntington thesis is still haunting us and before moving too quickly to these alternatives, we must spend more time countering it.
Her aim here is not a conservative and reactionary one that would seek to reclaim a ‘golden age’ before the script of European barbarity began. . . . Rather, she hopes to find in the contemporary Andalusias a robust source for an anti-racist re-scripting of the secular.
I now turn to my own experience with Huntington to show how his thesis reflects an anti-Andalusian and ideological account of history, politics, and religious traditions. Here, I will highlight Norton’s discussion of the intimate relations between the “Muslim Question” and the “Jewish Question” in Christian European modernity. I will show how it unsettles, like the recovery and reimagining of Andalusias, the Huntingtonian ahistoricity and ideological differentiation between Jews and Muslims as the former become assimilated into Whiteness and the latter remain constructed as Europe’s other.
Haunting the Syllabus
Over twenty years ago, I was a graduate teaching fellow in Harvard University’s Religion and Global Affairs course. The course was typically co-taught by my dissertation advisor David Little, and then alternately by Jessica Stern and Michael Ignatieff as well as Monica Toft as a second professor. For at least three iterations of the course, it was also taught by Samuel Huntington. The late political scientist provoked and upset many students while he confirmed the biases and ideological stances of others. I was a teaching fellow for this course multiple times. Huntington haunted the syllabi in person or through his false and harmful thesis when he was not physically present. At a particularly memorable moment, he exclaimed, “the problem with all religion is sexual repression.” During that moment, he was referring to the sex scandal in the Catholic Church. Still, his proclamation was intended for all who see themselves as religious. A robust contingent of female Muslim students, some wearing hijabs and some without covering, erupted and demanded an apology. He did not offer one. He proclaimed that this was just a fact.
As a professor, I teach versions of this course today, and Huntington is still haunting and lurking in the background and foreground, although I never assign him. Instead, I have students read Edward Said’s critique of the original 1993 Foreign Affairs piece. Huntington’s piece offered policymakers the paradigm they needed when the Cold War framework was supposedly eroding. The same Huntington of the “clash of civilizations” then wrote a book that is highly consistent with the ideological thrust of the “clash.” In the book, he looked globally at the international system and blocks of civilizations (which he used interchangeably with religions) and claimed that inter-civilizational conflict needed to be managed because of the essential incompatibility of civilizations. This value reductionism is harmful as it robs people of their complex histories, politics, and social lives. In a later book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2005), Huntington turns to a discussion of what he interprets as the religio-cultural forces threatening what he deems the “true” Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity (the tripartite Protestant, Catholic, Jewish frame) of the US. What is unmistakable here is a tragic connection between the “Global War on Terrorism,” the securitizing of Muslims globally (including at mosques and community centers in places such as the UK, France, and the US), and the emergence of Trump. Indeed, the reactionary fear around the ontological security of the US, both in terms of its physical and ideological borders, is highly connected to the policies that Huntington’s thesis has informed, the xenophobic fear-mongering rhetoric it has fueled, and the simplistic ways in which it is so deeply ahistorical.
Stencil representing a scene from the torture of Iraqi prisoners that took place at Abu Ghraib Prison during the US war on Iraq. Via Flickr User Duncan Cumming. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Over twenty years ago, in the classroom, we were preoccupied with 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Devastating events twenty years later, including a hurried and disorganized US withdrawal from this “graveyard of empires,” should have finally put this clash argument to rest and led to a reassessment of the horrific policies that informed the US in the aftermath of 9/11. Yet, this has not been the case, and given the previous years’ events, it is not surprising. Norton brilliantly takes the reader through an analysis of the torture and sexualized images that emerged from Abu Ghraib and what they signify. Here the “iconic” image of “a hooded prisoner standing on a box, his outstretched arms attached to electric wires” (181) evokes “religious images” but also one of the Klan: “the campaign against the Arab and the Muslim tried to identify Arabs and Islam with bigotry against Jews and Christians, and made the bigotry the license for invasion, war, and war crimes” (182). Indeed, this historic moment during an unjustified war—which built on the conflation of secularity with Christian democracy during the Cold War, the promotion of religious freedoms as a rhetorical weapon, and the “cleansing” of Christian Europe’s long legacy of antisemitism through its acquiescence and active support of Zionism—set the stage to pivot to anti-Muslim policies, securitizing racialized and gendered postcolonial Muslim subjects and bodies, and developing a set of policies called “countering violent extremism.” These policies were too large (and invested in) to fail even when analysts repeatedly concluded that the evidence did not support the ideological claims (as Lydia Wilson has shown). Indeed, it is not surprising that the sequel to Huntington’s “clash” was “who are we” because the securitizing of Muslims as part of the supposedly global war on terrorism directly relates to the consolidation of right-wing exclusionary ethnoreligious populist movements. These movements deploy civilizational language often through the registers of incompatibility between supposedly “Judeo-Christian values” and Islam.
What about the Jewish Question?
The emergence of racist right-wing populism in recent decades in multiple contexts—from France, Italy, and the Netherlands to the US and India—share an anti-Muslim racism that is often conveyed through the idioms of values, heritage, and religion (including laïcité). As I have already telegraphed, one of Norton’s most critical theoretical moves is to reconnect Europe’s “Jewish Question” with its “Muslim Question.” She shares this significant move with thinkers such as Yolande Jansen and Anya Topolsky, as well as Santiago Slabodsky and Gil Anidjar. This is an important move because it is an Andalusian interruption of the logic of the “clash” that assimilated (White) Jews into a civilizational discourse, as Slabodsky notes. It is an assimilation of the Jews into a Judeo-Christian construct that erases Jews and imposes violent supersessionism in the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Anidjar powerfully examines the Musselman in the death camps of Nazi Germany to explain the inextricable link between the Muslims and the Jews as Europe’s others. For Anidjar, 1492 and the Inquisition are significant points in the chronology. They denote the end of Andalusia and the beginning of the racialization of religious communities and their exclusion and targeting as a mechanism of proto-nationalism, the political project of modernity. Muslims and Jews were both targets of the Inquisition, which disrupted the interwoven socioreligious fabric of Spain.
Norton’s foregrounding of the Jewish Question in her discussion of the Muslim Question is a critical interruption of the ‘clash’ and connects with the constructive yet neither romantic nor utopian aspiration for an alternative Andalusian logic of the secular.
It is beyond the scope of this reflection to go into the historical work and contextualization of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish praxis and theologies in the formation of modernity. I’ll here only underscore that Norton shows how a certain amnesia about the “Jewish Question,” which is otherwise definitional of European modernity and the formation of secular conceptions of citizenship, obscures reality on the ground. Any discussion of the “Muslim Question” in isolation from the “Jewish Question” reflects an ideological move that must be resisted. Instead, what is necessary is an Andalusian frame or what Gil Hochberg has recently described as an “archive of the future,” where it is possible to identify messianic interruptions of violent narratives of history. This move is critical for finally pushing the “clash” out of our syllabi. Indeed, it is not so much an amnesic issue but rather a presumption that the “Jewish Question” was somehow solved with the establishment of Israel. Marc Ellis explains it in terms of an “ecumenical pact” agreed to on the backs of Palestinian natives. This is the same Europe that created the skeleton Musslemann of the camps: the racialized bare life Jewish skeleton, nicknamed “Muslim,” who was clearly marked for imminent death by starvation. The problem with presuming that the Jewish Question has been solved is not only that it was “solved” on the back of Palestinians and through settler-colonial mechanisms, but also that it is nowhere to be found in anti-Muslim securitizing discourses. What is present is a vague appeal to Judeo-Christian civilizational roots, an appeal that itself telegraphs centuries of classical antisemitism. Here it is important to recall the Algerian French public intellectual Houria Bouteldja’s interpellation to the Jews to join the struggle and to leave behind their position as a “buffer people,” which leaves them operating under a persistently colonial logic. Hence, Norton’s foregrounding of the Jewish Question in her discussion of the Muslim Question is a critical interruption of the “clash” and connects with the constructive yet neither romantic nor utopian aspiration for an alternative Andalusian logic of the secular. I conclude by referring to Ebrahim Moosa’s profound point about being a critical traditionalist. What does it mean to be a critical traditionalist within the modern/secular world, but through an Andalusian frame?
On September 16, 2022, twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini died in custody in Tehran following her arrest by the Guidance Patrol (Gasht-e Ershad). Instantly, her death became a rallying cry for young Iranian women against the existing political order that has imposed and maintains unyielding patriarchal restrictions on women’s legal rights and life choices. Captured in the mantra Zan, Zendegi, Āzādi (“Women, Life, Liberty”), the protests that began in Saqqez, Mahsa Amini’s hometown in Iran’s Kurdish north, soon became a nation-wide revolt against the Islamic Republic. The judiciary, the police, and the state-controlled media made an absurd attempt to attribute Ms. Amini’s death to natural causes. But why, people asked, was a young woman in police custody for failing to observe an arbitrary dress code in the first place?
The speed with which the protests spread throughout the country and were radicalized into an anti-regime revolt surprised the government. They were ill-prepared to respond, as was evidenced in its brutal show of force on the streets and in the rapidly unfolding propaganda war inside and outside the country. Finally, after two weeks of mystifying silence, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, spoke. He blamed Western powers for fomenting unrest in the country and manipulating “naïve young people” into executing a sinister plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic. He refused to acknowledge the deep and palpable discontent over a variety of issues that had motivated the unrest. The increasing pauperization of people from all walks of life (caused partly by the crippling US-led sanctions); the anguish and hopelessness of a new generation that feels deeply alienated from the culture and values that ruling classes promote; the feeling of abandonment of marginalized regions, particularly Kurdistan and Baluchistan; rampant corruption that plagues the state agencies and top officials; and many other legitimate grievances of the nation have found no place in the state’s narrative of the revolts that have shaken the foundations of the Islamic Republic.
It is true that there are regional and global state actors who are trying to instrumentalize and exploit these protests in order to topple the Islamic Republic or to coerce the regime in Tehran into submitting to the demands of western powers. But the regime’s failure to acknowledge the legitimate grievances of an entire population will only deepen the protesters’ antagonism and further polarize the political situation.
The ongoing uprisings in Iran might ultimately end the experiment that was Islamic Republicanism. Unlike the common analyses that attribute the current events in Iran to either the total failure of the Islamic revolution or an instance of the impossibility of the Islamic state, I see the present revolt, ironically, as the realization of Islamic Republicanism. I use the term “realization” in a dialectical sense to suggest that the Islamic Republic negates itself through its own realization. In other words, the republican process—with references to teachings of Islam—unleashed massive participation of otherwise excluded social groups (particularly women) who would eventually question the dominant ideology that made that participation possible. This dialectical process began to unfold from the moment when Ayatollah Khomeini, for the first time during his exile in Paris in 1978, spoke of the establishment of an Islamic Republic. He made that declaration with the full consciousness of the essence of republicanism that lies in the principle of peoples’ sovereignty and their right to self-determination.
Unlike the common analyses that attribute the current events in Iran to either the total failure of the Islamic revolution or an instance of the impossibility of the Islamic state, I see the present revolt, ironically, as the realization of Islamic Republicanism.
From the very beginning of the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, the conflicting institutional sources of sovereignty and legitimacy of the state became a contested political predicament. The Majlis (Parliament), the office of the presidency, the prime minister’s office, the office of the velāyat-e faqih (the guardianship of the jurist), and the Guardian Council all struggled to reconcile the sovereignty of the people with the Islamic character of the new republic. The constitution of the Islamic Republic recognized the right of self-determination, so long as its exercise does not contradict the principles of Islamic creeds. In practice, however, rather than a point of reference, Islam became a contested body of religious discourses with competing interpretations from inside and outside of clerical establishment. The framers of the constitution believed that once they established the form of governance, Islam would shape its substance. They wanted to establish a religious state by sacralizing politics, making Islam the point of reference for good politics; in practice they secularized religion, making the state’s expediencies the arbiter of the right interpretations of Islam. In other words, rather than a religious state, the clerical establishment created a state religion. By doing so, not only did they suppress voices of dissent from outside of the polity, but they also marginalized the seminaries and the seminarians and turned them into an appendix to the state and its interests.
The struggle over who could legitimately claim authority in interpreting Islam and its teachings on good governance gave rise to a reformist movement in the 1990s. Now lay intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, women activists, young seminarians, and other social groups claimed authority in interpreting Islam and in defining the meaning of the right of self-determination and its relation to Islamic principles. The reform movement that culminated in the two-term presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) emerged from the unintended consequence of making Islam the point of reference for good governance. The remarkable mobility of women, their unprecedented access to education and health care, and their demands for equal rights, particularly in the cases of divorce, children’s custody, and inheritance, had a constitutive significance in this movement.
Although the reformists theorized their movement on the principle of “bargaining from the top and pressuring from the bottom,” for the most part, they remained a movement for participation in political power. Civil society—the publication of private newspapers, the strong publishing industry, the formation of vibrant intellectual circles, and various forms of women’s groups (reading groups, sports, professional associations)—flourished in precarious terms. Nevertheless, it generated and sustained a deep sense of transformative power among people of all walks of life. Despite the omnipresence of state repression, this collective sense of empowerment and civic engagement grew rhizomatically, without a vertical hierarchical structure. The state, with its complex and oversized system of intelligence gathering and surveillance, remained suspicious of all political parties, professional associations, and other formal institutions that could possibly mobilize their constituents for any form of political and/or civil action. But these informal and loosely connected, or disconnected, networks grew exponentially among a new generation that cared little for the revolutionary mores and values that defined both the ruling classes and those who had hitherto defied them.
The economic crises that were perpetuated by the US’ crippling sanctions, which had intensified during the two-term presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013), hastened the separation and antagonism between the state and civil society. Rampant corruption and virulent crony capitalism, disguised as the privatization project of the state-owned industry, increasingly deepened this antagonism. To reframe this growing discontent, to justify its own patriarchal repression, the state adopted an instrumental relation with Islam, labeling all expressions of discontent conspiracies against Islam and the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic.
Since its inception, there has been a major divide within the polity of the Islamic Republic between those who advocate a totalitarian ideology that operates based on the notion of insider/outsider and friend vs. enemy, and a disappearing minority who promote something similar to an agonistic democracy. The latter aims to turn enemies into adversaries and transform all antagonisms into agonism. The final nail in the coffin of the agonistic tendency was the election of Ebrahim Raisi to the presidency in 2021. Raisi prevailed in an election in which the Guardian Council disqualified all other viable candidates from running. Popular participation was the lowest in the forty-year history of the republic. The conservatives cynically seized all three branches of the government and took a major step toward the realization of their totalitarian dreams.
Women stand at the forefront, driving this nationwide revolt because there exists the deepest contradiction between their massive participation in social affairs (artistic-cultural production, journalism, education, civic engagement) and the patriarchal laws and denigrating regulations that seek to govern their bodies and appearances.
The Supreme Leader, along with the Guardian Council, tried in vain to delink the regime’s legitimacy to electoral participation. For the first time since its inception, the absence of competing factions in elections created a clear rupture between the Islamic Republic’s polity and its constituents. By monopolizing all three branches of the government, the conservatives created a state that defined itself in the self/other binary terms without leaving any institutional forms for the expression of dissent for the “other.”
The protests of the past few months demonstrate how this binary of self/other was translated into open hostilities and seemingly unresolvable antagonisms fought on the streets of every urban center in the country. Women stand at the forefront, driving this nationwide revolt because there exists the deepest contradiction between their massive participation in social affairs (artistic-cultural production, journalism, education, civic engagement) and the patriarchal laws and denigrating regulations that seek to govern their bodies and appearances. We do not know whether this movement will lead to regime change or a major overhaul of the existing order. Those at the top might succeed in using the uprising to entrench the authority of the Islamic Republic through a brutal reign of terror. We all hope fervently that the latter does not come to pass. But one thing is certain as Iranian women have demonstrated these past several months: A nation that has inherited a revolutionary spirit and has perpetuated it through collective expressions of discontent over the past four decades will not easily submit to naked repression, regardless of how it is exercised or justified.
*I would like to thank Julie Livingston for her comments on an earlier version of this essay.
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Professor and Chair of Near Eastern Studies Department and Director of Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (O/R Books [Counterpoint], 2016). He works on topics related to social theory and Islamist political thought and is currently working on a project on Mystical Modernity, a comparative study of the philosophies of history and political theories of Walter Benjamin and Ali Shariati.
March 24, 2022; Prof. Ebrahim Moosa speaks at the Mirza Family Professorship Dinner. (Photo by Peter Ringenberg/University of Notre Dame).
This essay is adapted from the Mirza Family Chair Inaugural Lecture given by Ebrahim Moosa on March 24, 2022. To learn about the gift that established the chair, read more here. A video recording of the lecture is also availableas is a recap of the event. A PDF version of this lecture is also available.
Introduction
Map of the famine in India in 1897, published on page 10 of the Chicago Sunday Tribune, January 31, 1897. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1897 a famine affected the Bombay Presidency in India. Also known as the Bombay Province, this administrative territory of British India included some regions south and north of what is today the city of Mumbai. A drought preceded the 1897 famine, which continued into 1899. Famines in British India, the Nobel prize winning economist, Amartya Sen found, were not due to a lack of food (338–54). Instead, inequalities in the distribution of food and the absence of democracy, especially media coverage of the famine, were their main causes. In short, famines had political origins. My ancestors too were refugees affected by a combination of colonial mismanagement and ecological catastrophe long before these terms were invented.
In 1898, at the height of this particular famine, the fourth son of Essa Vally named Moosa was born. His village was known as Vahalu and was located 12.8 kms/8 miles away from the city of Bharuch. Today it is an overcrowded city on the banks of the great Narmada River. As subsistence farmers, my great grandfather’s family was badly affected by the drought. As a result, some started to look for job opportunities outside India, this time made possible by the ability to travel and work in other British colonial holdings. At the turn of the twentieth century, Moosa and his two brothers, Bagus and Adam, followed in the path of several Gujaratis who made their way to southern Africa. When they reached the port city of Durban on the coast of the Indian Ocean, they found the place over traded. They thus travelled further south to Cape Town, which is where they settled around 1902. If we allow for some errors in documentation, one can with some confidence say that Moosa Essa, as he was known, was somewhere between 12 and 16 when he arrived in Africa with his two brothers. Life in the Cape was difficult. There were few people of Gujarati descent, and as such the place felt alienating. His two elder brothers found the rigors of the Cape so unbearable that they hastily returned to India.
Not knowing how to read or write in English, Moosa Essa often used his thumb imprint as his signature on official documents. Our family took his first name as our family name, Moosa. He persevered as a fruit seller, carrying his produce on his shoulders and hawking it to customers in the city of Cape Town. He took up residence in the area known as District Six, which the planners of apartheid destroyed in the 1970s because it defied the policy of racial segregation. Later he opened a store on the famous Grand Parade and by the time he died was known as a fierce businessman, specializing in the banana wholesale trade popularly known as Moosa Cape Town. As a subsistence farmer he knew the value of land. He invested most of his wealth in property both in South Africa and in India. By the time he died, he accumulated a substantial amount of farming land in Vahalu and not an insignificant amount of property in Cape Town.
From famine-ravaged poverty to modest wealth, Moosa Essa never forgot his origins nor his duty to society. He was instrumental, for example, in the building of a mosque in the District Six neighborhood of Cape Town. He also never forgot his origins in his village in India and did not abandon his faith and culture in the very westernizing environment of colonial South Africa under British and later Afrikaner rule.
One could say that my great grandfather was obsessed with his duty to serve his village and community in India and South Africa. No, he loved and reveled in service. This devotion to service stemmed from his faith. He personally supervised every major construction project he undertook. He embodied the truth in the sense that, as Vikram Chandra puts it in his breathtaking novel, Sacred Games, “Love was duty, and duty was love.”
Using his own wealth but also contributions from others, he was the pioneering spirit who oversaw the building of a mosque in Vahalu as well as a grand elementary madrasa, the equivalent of a Sunday School for the daily religious instruction of young girls and boys. He also constructed a water-tower for the storage of well water and built stairs leading into the village pond for the safety of women who used the pond for sundry purposes, including the washing of clothes and utensils. This was long before the village had running water installed in homes. In addition, he built a grand three-level house for himself hoping that his offspring would one day return to enjoy the respite offered by village life and its pastoral environment. No one returned, though I did visit the village during my student years in India. A secular primary school was incomplete at the time of his death on May 15, 1965, but was later completed.
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Moosa Essa with groups in village, at the stairs to well, attending a ribbon cutting in the village, the water tower he helped construct, and the school he constructed
In 2005 the entire school building was rebuilt. The doors of the old school that were handpicked and paid for by my great grandfather were preserved and retrofitted into the new school in preservation of his memory. My great grandfather was a man of strong character. He was resilient and kind, but he also had a fierce determination to get his way. A lover of fine horses for his carriage, part of his daily routine in India was to stop and get off his carriage at the shrine of an unnamed saint in the village square, offer a prayer, and then go on to the city of Bharuch to conduct his business. He never stopped trying to improve himself and his community.
The Mirza Chair
I am honored to be the inaugural holder of the endowed Mirza Family Chair in Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in the Keough School of Global Affairs and with an appointment in the Department of History. One of the key themes of the Keough School is integral human development, an idea drawn from Catholic social teachings. In different iterations, however, this value is espoused by other faith traditions, including Judaism and Islam, but also secular ideologies like Marxism and socialism.
When I study my grandfather’s legacy, I can honestly say that integral human development was baked into his DNA. His philanthropy and altruism centered around service to humanity. His means to these ends were the mosque, faith, and his practical knowledge of the Islamic tradition. He also had a sense of the importance of education as he was not formally educated. Even though he was not literate in matters of faith—he could not read the Qur’ān—and did not read books about religion, he embodied the tenets of his religion in a unique way. He integrated his faith with his society. My wish is for some of these tenets that my great grandfather inculcated in himself to continue to run in our DNA and in our practice as his descendants.
With the inauguration of the Mirza Chair, the irony will not be lost on you that two diasporic legacies come to fruition at the University of Notre Dame, the premier Catholic University in the United States. My family’s history goes back to colonial pre-partition India, then to colonial apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and now the United States. Muzzafar Mirza, the late husband of Susan Scribner-Mirza, who endowed this chair in memory of him, came from Pakistan to study in the US and then later made this country his home with Sue.
I am relating this story of my ancestors and some parallels to the history of the late Mr. Mirza for two reasons. One is to locate myself in my family’s history, a journey that now connects me to three continents. The other reason is because of the themes which are central to this lecture: history and progress. Many people have the experience of coming from distant lands and locales to this country. Each migration story makes history in one or another way. Does it also represent progress from a worse situation to a better one? What do we mean when we use the language of progress? How does one imagine it and what is its relationship to history? How can we go beyond common sense to grasp these issues? And what does any of this have to do with human flourishing?
The Question of Progress
The idea of progress originates from certain biblical themes of an apocalyptic end along with a mechanistic view of the world wherein its inhabitants aim to create a New Jerusalem. “The idea of progress . . . represents a secularized version of the Christian belief in providence,” wrote Christopher Lasch in his 1991 classic, The True and Only Heaven (40). In numerous apocalyptic writings, according to Ernest Tuveson, history was endowed with a plot and encompassed a narrative of what happened before and what was expected to come. Building on the Hebraic tradition, Christian thinkers and pioneers adapted the Bible’s moral narratives into their own special interpretations of the divine. Saint Augustine, for example, found compelling the idea that history was ultimately progressive, leading to an eschatological end. Later Protestant attitudes also implicitly held that history moves through divinely preordained and revealed stages to a final resolution of human dilemmas.
After centuries of experience, we can now see that there are more deterministic and less deterministic versions of progress. In its strongest posture, progress signifies a particular relation to history: that history has an end (telos) and a predetermined goal. In a more benign way progress could mean advances in knowledge, the betterment of the human condition, and the acquisition of some abilities and the loss of others. In short, on this more benign and less deterministic account, progress might be reframed as improvement.
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin meditates on Swiss painter Paul Klee’s (d. 1940) Angelus Novus. This painting of an angel for Benjamin represents the beguiling angel of history. Benjamin’s caution and deep ambivalence towards historicism surfaces in this analysis. Historicism is the theory that social and cultural phenomena are determined by history or that history is the most basic aspect of human existence. In Benjamin’s view, adherents of historicism tend to empathize with the victors in history. They might forget that there are other claimants of history, a lesson Francis Fukuyama ignored in his book, The End of History and the Last Man.
What intrigues Benjamin in the Klee painting is how the angel flies: his wings are spread but his face is turned towards the past. The wings of the angel cannot close because they are kept open by a violent storm from Paradise that propels him into the future. With a strong dose of irony, Benjamin comments: “This storm is what we call progress” (257–58). Even before Benjamin, earlier Romantic thinkers like Herder, Jacobi, Haman, and T. S. Eliot refused to accept the inevitability of progress. In modernity, the possibility of change for the better is a crucial element in how we conceptualize history. This focus on change in history was central to the Enlightenment episteme of ethics and moral philosophy. Modern science as well during this time began to give us a very different understanding of nature than the medieval Aristotelian worldview. The revelations of nature continuously challenged the truths that were taken to be immutable in earlier stages of human history. In late modernity, as I will later explain, we are beginning to question the assumptions of the Enlightenment and its truth because of the ecological challenges we face. Even as the Enlightenment upended certain aspects of the medieval worldview, it maintained its teleological focus on an ultimate “end’ towards which human action tended. In doing so, it recast a Christian worldview that set up humans as having dominion over nature in secular terms. Today the study of history grapples with all the philosophical challenges in late modernity and the Muslim tradition is no exception.
Philosophy of History in Muslim Traditions
What kind of trajectory of time and change does the Muslim tradition offer? To answer this question, I turn first to the period immediately prior to Islam known as the Jahili period. This era was renowned for its poetry, and the Arabs took pride in it as their choicest repository of wisdom. It was a repository in the sense, writes Tarif Khalidi, that it “supplied much of the wisdom and the practical moral standards handed down from one generation to the next.” Proverbial wisdom involved a heroic conception of life where the “unforeseen change from prosperity to wretchedness, the fleeting character of life and friendships, the exhilaration of love and wine, pride in lordly generosity or even-handed revenge” featured in human life (4).
History also often seeks to understand what moral lesson every epoch provides, and thus what improvements might be made as we move into the future.
With the advent of Islam, some of this wisdom was translated into Islamic categories. The Islamic vision of history added a sense of space and time to them. Space and time were ideally inhabited by those who acknowledge God’s lordship and majestic power in creating the world for the use of humans. Human responsibility involved being a witness of God on earth and undertaking the task of stewardship. Time, however, is less of a chronology of events in the Qurʾān and more of a continuum in which past, present, and future are collapsed. Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Muhammad are “eternally present” says Khalidi, and all of history is present to God in terms of divine omniscience. Humans are invited to see the parables in the scriptures and in the handiwork of God in nature. Truth is captured in knowledge and humans are obliged to seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. By the fifteenth century the writing of history in Islamicate societies had already “transitioned” to new a new conception of history. The earliest phase was a transition from prophetic wisdom to history; from “providential to communal history.” “[F]rom the overwhelming and monumental Qurʾānic time,” writes Khalidi, “to the sequential listing, dating and recording of individual actions performed by members of a community that was beginning to realize the merit of its progress in time . . . and the coming into being of a time scheme which strove to historicize early Islam and to use it to establish hierarchies of moral or social seniority or prestige” (34). History, in my view, can best be described as a series of responses to contingencies and explanations of the conditions in the world. Sometimes these contingencies are expressed in distinctive genres and topics. In some eras, history is preoccupied with the exploits of prophets and kings. At other times, it meticulously documents the lives of influential scholars and pious figures as servants of knowledge and learning. History also often seeks to understand what moral lesson every epoch provides, and thus what improvements might be made as we move into the future.
Two brief illustrations exemplify how history is conceived of in modern Muslim experiences.
In his book, The Road to Mecca, Muhammad Asad documents six years of his travel on camel-back in Arabia after his conversion to Islam in 1926. He talks movingly about his very close friend Zayd with whom he traveled the length and breadth of Arabia. Asad also had a close relationship with King Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia. Zayd however was a member of the Āl Rashīd, a rival kinship group to the Āl Saʿūd clan. In the early years of the 20th century the Āl Rashīd lost out to the Āl Saʿūd in control of the Arabian Peninsula. At one point in the book, Asad and Zayd reach a city called Ḥāʾil. Zayd had not been to the city for many years because the city was now in the control of the Āl Saʿūd.
“How does it feel Zayd, to be back in the town of thy youth after all these years?” Asad asked his companion. Zayd had always refused to enter Ḥāʾil whenever he had the occasion to visit. “I am not sure my uncle,” he replies slowly. “Eleven years since I was here last. Thou knowest my heart would not allow me to come here earlier.” After citing a passage from the Qurʾān about God being the one who gives and takes sovereignty, Zayd adds:
No doubt God gave sovereignty to the House of Ibn Rashīd, but they did not know how to use it rightly…they were reckless in their pride. So God took away their rule and handed it back to Ibn Saʿūd. I think I should not grieve any longer—for is it not written in the Book, ‘Sometimes you love a thing, and it may be worst for you—and sometimes you hate a thing, and it may be the best for you?’ (italics in original)
Muhammad Asad’s comment that follows this exchange is illuminating and wise:
There is a sweet resignation in Zayd’s voice, a resignation implying no more than the acceptance of something that has already happened and cannot therefore be undone. It is this acquiescence of the Muslim spirit to the immutability of the past—the recognition that whatever has happened had to happen in this particular way and could have happened in no other—that is so often mistaken by Westerners for a ‘fatalism’ inherent in an Islamic outlook. But a Muslim’s acquiescence to fate relates to the past and not to the future: it is not a refusal to act, to hope and to improve, but a refusal to consider past reality as anything but an act of God. (159) (emphasis mine)
In this example there is not only a sensibility of history from below, but also an experiential philosophy of life of which history is only a reflection. Important to note is his insight into how Muslims have dealt with the past as an immutable fact. It is a sense of history that leaves the future open, for humans will not achieve except that for which they strive (this is according to a piece of Qurʾānic wisdom). It is that striving that is critical to making history.
If the past is rendered immutable it does not preclude one to act, to hope, or to improve, as Asad put it. Nor is it a future that is preordained, as in the secularized version of progress. In this past century especially we have learned that progress can come at a cost to humans and nature. One thinks of the rain forests in the Amazon that are cut down in the name of economic “progress.” Such actions render the earth more vulnerable to global warming and deprive Indigenous peoples of their homes. Such examples remind us of the importance of Asad’s insight. If the end of history is already set, then there are no contingencies—whether they are ecological or planetary disaster—which might require us to reset or reconfigure our aims.
Fazlur Rahman was a Pakistani émigré scholar to the US and professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago who influenced my thinking early on in my career. He expressed his conception of history in the following words: “Islam is the first actual movement known to history, that has taken society seriously and history meaningfully because it perceived that the betterment of this world was not a hopeless task nor just pis aller [a last resort or expedient] but a task in which God and man are involved together” (86).
While history and society feature as crucial elements in Rahman’s writings in the 1960’s, his task at the time was to depict Islam as a civilizational force as well as a faith tradition for individuals. The idea of history nonetheless played an important role in Rahman’s thought. His various studies led him to an understanding of history that allowed one to reshape the normative questions in Islamic thought. For Rahman the story of the advent of Islam, its scripture, norms and symbols, the actual forces of Arabian culture, were all constructively manipulated for a moral cause. “If history is the proper field for Divine activity,” Rahman wrote, “historical forces must, by definition, be employed for the moral end as judiciously as possible” (21). In other words, early Islam revealed the proper end of human action, but it was up to humans to progress towards that end.
Rahman was, of course, a Muslim modernist. He proudly wore that label and thus had a different viewpoint from Asad. Muslim philosophy of history, or more accurately philosophies of history, are somewhat compelled to discern the providential element in history. In the hands of earlier historians, the past was dissected as an act of God. For modernist Muslim thinkers like Rahman, however, there was a greater emphasis on historicism that was similar to that of his earlier counterparts in Egypt, notably Ṭāhā Ḥusayn. On this view, it was necessary to inscribe moral ends as the telos of history. We see here that the secular idea of progress did indeed impact certain trends in Muslim thinking. And on the face of it, few can quibble with these moral ends. The question is: Whose morals are we trying to bring into being? How do you know which morals are the right ones to hold? And should the moral ends necessarily be hitched to the wagon of history? Even when Rahman does rethink his position, he cannot extricate himself from the modern moral circle. “‘Progress’ we all want,” Rahman the philosopher-theologian clarifies, “not despite Islam, nor besides Islam but because of Islam for we all believe that Islam, as it was launched as a movement on earth in the seventh century Arabia, represented pure progress-moral and material” (70).
Here I have hopefully more than telegraphed two modern Muslim modes of thinking with competing accounts of the meaning and end of history. For Asad, the present and the future we create can be an improvement upon the past, but there is no end or guarantee of this. For Rahman, however, history has a moral purpose that ties the past and future together in the march of progress.
Philosophy of History in the West
As already suggested above, the story of history in the west has also shaped the story of history around the globe. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck has explained how the idea of history changed in modernity. For Koselleck this change occurred with a new way of conceptualizing time. Part of this new conceptualization stems from modernity’s prioritization of immanence, in other words the preference for human indwelling in the here and now, over transcendence. For Koselleck, “time is no longer simply the medium in which all histories take place, it gains a historical quality. Consequently, history no longer occurs in, but through time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its own right” (246).
If in the pre-modern world we recounted what happened in the past and called it history, in modernity things have changed. Koselleck says that time is not independent from us, nor does it transcend us, because history is now more about the future and the modern historian is intimately involved in the making of that future. We are time: in our performance of history we embody time. In other words, the individuated self is coterminous with a modern historicism that has now taken center stage in service of “growing united of world history” in pursuit of a collective singular progress (256). A radical insight that requires greater reflection and critique is when Koselleck writes: “History was temporalized in the sense that, thanks to the passing of time, it altered according to the given present, and with growing distance the nature of the past also altered.” (250)
Given the impact of colonization in different parts of the world, history itself acquired a world-historical quality. Because of colonization, it was not unusual that the modern conception of history also affected Muslims around the world. They too wanted to imagine themselves as coterminous with time itself, moving towards an eschaton, be it improvement in the view of some or progress in the eyes of others. During the first half of the twentieth century, many modern educated Muslims emerging from the dark night of colonialism surely wanted to better their lives. To do so, they often willingly adopted certain notions of western and colonial history. In that era to be a progressive or a modern Muslim was a badge of honor; this is no longer the case today in light of the resurgence of both traditionalism and fundamentalism. It is surprising to find that even some thinkers with a traditional background accepted this almost Whig idea of history as progress.
Some Muslim traditionalists thought of every epoch of history as different and an improvement on the past. They argued that this view dated back to a long tradition in Muslim history, which easily fed the modern historical narrative of progress. So, in the view of a fairly broad spectrum of writers, especially those with a predisposition to modernity, one can glean from their writings a sense of a world that can be improved upon. But more generally the accumulation of experiences, technologies, wealth, and resources do make things easier for those who have it compared to those who did not—hence the rich have a duty towards the poor. The idea of progress, in the modern western sense, was embraced by modernists but approached with a sense of ambivalence by Muslim traditionalists. Nevertheless there was indeed a sense of advancing in history and making things easier for people: instead of laboring like a beast, it was better to use a beast and employ tools and implements to make human life more comfortable. There was also a sense that when you use a beast as a means, the treatment should be humane and with integrity; this too was an improvement upon the previous ways animals were treated.
The Ironies of History
Over time, my own work has shifted in dramatic ways. For the story of how I ended up in the madrasas of India for my formative education in Islamic thought I invite you to read my book What is a Madrasa? Post-madrasa life, for me, had several stages. First, I took up journalism in the UK and then South Africa. This was followed by community activism in the Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa as national director—alongside Professor Rashied Omar who was president of the same organization—which combatted apartheid on an Islamic platform. Following this public service, I attended graduate school and began my life in academia.
My extensive studies of tradition, social practices, and the need to develop solutions for faith communities confronting the challenges of modernity often led me to one question: How does a faith tradition—with its myriad practices, beliefs, morals, and ethical ideals—countenance change over time? A faith tradition with seventh-century Arabian imprints that develops and grows into multiple cultures and civilizations must cope with change. Different aspects of a religious tradition, in my view, change according to different rhythms: law and theology has a slower momentum of change compared to economic and political practices. By now you probably have realized that the discursive tradition of Islamic thought has always been a central thread of my practice and intellectual life, as well as to my identity and professional preoccupations.
In pursuit of this question of change, I studied the work of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, (d. 1111), a Persian scholar who enjoys an enviable stature in the Muslim tradition. Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas are figures of similar stature in the Christian tradition. Some of my ideas were documented in Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination and have bearing on the discussion here concerning history and progress.
In my view, Ghazālī made two major contributions to Islamic theology and philosophy. One was to expand the knowledge framework with which he explained his faith tradition. The second was to allow for spiritual and mystical experiences to also have a place in the epistemic realm. He robustly introduced philosophical and logical arguments in his many theological writings to frame his tradition in the elite idiom of his time, which consisted of philosophical and metaphysical arguments. He was so enamored by philosophy that fellow scholars, both during and after his time, chastised him for grafting Greek and Persianate ideas onto the tapestry of knowledge provided by the Arabian Prophet. He frequently drew on the experiences of mystics to elaborate the inner meanings and subtleties of religious practices. Ghazālī gave equal weight to intuition and discursive reason in a dialectical sense. Ghazālī realized there was a need to ensure religious practices produce ethical outcomes and the “technologies-of-the-self” developed in Islamic mysticism met these goals (see chapter 5). He perceived that there was a need to improve the articulation and practice of Islam that was consonant with a living tradition.
What for Ghazālī might have appeared to be an improvement, development, even progress with a small “p,” was for others the very opposite. And let’s remember that this contestation happened long before the advent of what we call the era of modernity. One such critic was the Kurdish thinker Ibn Ṣalāḥ (d. 1245), a Shāfīʿī traditionalist and an expert in prophetic traditions. Ibn Ṣalāḥ lamented Ghazālī’s claim that whoever did not master logical thinking was not qualified to delve into matters related to legal theory and jurisprudence, a critical discipline in Islamic religious discourses. Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1201), a Ḥanbalī, was extremely critical when Ghazālī endorsed a controversial sufi practice whereby a spiritual novice who was consciously combatting his pride and arrogance sought out means to be humiliated. One technique was for the novice to go to the bath house and “steal” the clothes of the patrons, and then slowly walk out in order to be detected and thus berated as a “thief” or worse, being beaten. In theory, with such rebuke or beating the novice subdues his ego. In endorsing such a practice, Ibn al-Jawzī proclaimed that Ghazālī disqualified himself from being a jurist, i.e., an expert in legal and ethical topics.
Portrait of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī by Kahil Gibran, 1917. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Another critic of Ghazālī was the famous Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymīya (d. 1328). Most philosophers, as well as some theologians and mystics, held the fairly standard view that prophecy was a divine gift. Prophecy was not something one could attain based on one’s effort. However, many orthodox authorities nevertheless held that the essence of prophecy was the imagination. Imagination was related to the quality and luminescence of the soul. The gift of the imagination enabled the Prophet and his followers to deal with the contingencies of life guided by the creative imagination burnished by prophecy. Coupled with this view on prophecy, Ghazālī also viewed the development of the soul through spiritual practices to be the culmination of a religious life. Here he welcomed and endorsed many of the practices adopted by Muslim mystics known as sufis.
Ibn Taymīya, by contrast, was clearly opposed to a concept of prophecy that gave an opening to the imagination and certain forms of sufi practices, especially if such spiritual practices had no scriptural mandate. The fear was that these might corrupt Islamic doctrine and practice. In his view, revelation depended on a fideistic, no questions asked, commitment to God. Only such a commitment could demonstrate one’s utter reliance on the teachings of God. This was accompanied by a belief that these teachings were transmitted to prophets via angels. Ghazālī, of course, accepted the traditional doctrine of revelation. But he also made it more expansive to create a significant place for the imagination, since this was, in his view, the highlight of the prophetic event. Ibn Taymīya consistently refuted Ghazālī and later he also targeted the Muslim mystic Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) with even stronger theological accusations. Ibn Taymīya was unable to come to terms with how revelation affectively works through the power of the soul. To do so would require reexamining the theological guardrails that he insisted such a doctrine must adopt. In Ibn Taymīya’s view, Ghazālī swallowed too much philosophy and this poisonous dose corrupted his thinking and made him divert from strict scripturalist renderings of the faith. Ghazālī, in other words, had betrayed tradition in an attempt at improving it.
For all his fascination with philosophy, Ghazālī nevertheless found fault with the views of the philosophers. He singled out Ibn Sīnā or Avicenna (d. 1037) as someone whose philosophical claims clashed with three theological doctrines. The philosopher, he argued, firstly, denied bodily resurrection and claimed that resurrection on the day of judgment would be in the form of the soul and not the body. Secondly, Avicenna believed that God only partook or knew things that were universal, not particular. And third, the philosopher claimed that the world emanated from God and thus was eternal. On all three issues Ghazālī took a harsh line and declared that such beliefs placed one outside the standard and accepted doctrines of Islam. In my opinion, Ghazālī could have found extenuating circumstances and explanations for the ideas of the philosopher, but he showed no leniency. Later, Averroes, also known as Ibn Rushd (d.1198), in a heroic defense of the philosophers, did a point-by-point rebuttal of Ghazālī’s arguments. He showed that Ghazālī contradicted some of his own canons of interpretation in his theological critique of the philosophers.
Ghazālī thought that he was engaged in improving the discursive tradition of Islamic theological thought through his forays into philosophy, and many welcomed this as an advance on the old ways. In a certain sense this development represented improvement. While his ideas did receive broad reception across the sectarian divide, his approach, as I have shown, was not seen as an improvement by everyone. For some purists his work was a distortion of the original purity of Islam. So already in the eleventh century we can see the contestation over improvement.
History and Tradition
After the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1922, a range of Muslim thinkers in both Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic speaking regions took stock of their fortunes in order to deal with both their civilizational challenges and the need to engage modernity and the nation-state. One resource these intellectuals and Muslim thinkers turned to was “the heritage or tradition,” called the turāth. The turāth is technically the archive of the Islamic tradition, but the use of the term signifies tradition, broadly speaking. The call to study the tradition stemmed from the fact that the thinkers who made this call were a class of intellectuals who benefited from the West, but were also seeking validation from within Muslim societies. Hence engaging tradition was critical in their efforts to refashion society. In the face of Europe’s rise and of the virtues of enlightenment reason and rationality, Muslim thinkers also wanted to build a civilizational future based on the virtues of rationality. They asked: Why did Muslims miss the boat of enlightenment when Islam and Muslims had a civilization that valued reason and rationality? Did Islamdom not preserve and advance the wisdom of the Greeks and the Indians? How did they lose this wisdom despite the Qur’ān’s constant exhortation to deploy one’s thinking? The answer they landed on was a rather flawed one: they erroneously concluded that Muslim civilization had neglected reason and abandoned rationality for other alternatives such as mysticism. Their fingers often pointed to Ghazālī as the thinker that sparked this turn away from reason.
Those who made this diagnosis claimed that rationalism declined because philosophy was evacuated from Muslim culture. This argument, however, was not substantiated by any sustained and serious historical analysis. Often times, these investigations were animated by nationalisms of different sorts, including Arab nationalism, which was shadow-boxing Iranian and Ottoman claims to preeminence in Islamic thought. Several recent studies have shown that these rather shallow analyses of the tradition as proposed by thinkers like the late Muhammad ʿĀbid al-Jābrī and Ḥasan Ḥanafī are palpably wrong, but the myth continues. The myth continues because it makes for an easy scapegoat. The twentieth century diagnostic myth is as follows: rationalism was replaced around the eleventh century by superstition and an extreme reverence for charismatic spiritual authorities, irrespective of whether the latter were dead or alive. Living spiritual authorities created the cult of saints who exercised their power at mausoleums and shrines. This power was exercised on the minds of their unwitting followers with debilitating consequences, the allegation went.
Many today continue to swat at Ghazālī like one beats a piñata at a birthday party. You will also find this narrative that blames Ghazālī for the decline of Islam in popular discourse, such as in public television documentaries like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
For a more robust vision of how to grapple with history and tradition than these critics of Ghazālī we can turn to Tunis-born historian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn (d.1406), who enjoyed a distinct reputation in the past and present for his exacting empirical standards in history but also his philosophy of history. His ideas circulated widely, especially among Ottoman intellectuals and later Western scholars interested in Islam. Among the things a historian needs to know, Ibn Khaldūn impressively lists:
The author of this discipline of historiography needs to possess knowledge of the rules of politics, the true nature of existing things, the differences between different commonwealths of people, locations, periods with respect to ways of living, character traits, customs, sects, schools of learning and all relevant and associated conditions. And how the present is comprised by these elements. The historian must be able to gauge the similarities between the present and the past and the distance between the present and past in terms of their differences. And the historian must be able to analyze the causes of the similarities and the causes of the differences. So too must the historian grasp the foundations on which political dynasties and religions were established; the causes that made them become manifest; the reasons they came into existence and the incentives for their being as well as the conditions of those who established these dynasties and religions and their respective histories. This is necessary for the historian to fully grasp the material cause of every event and the rational principle behind every account. Then only can the historian evaluate transmitted reports based on what he possesses of rules and rational principles. If the narrative complies with the rules and principles and meet their criteria it is deemed sound; otherwise, the historian deems it spurious and dispenses with it. (1:55–56)
Ibn Khaldūn also laments the fact that much historiography fails to account for the changes that occur among a collectivity of people. When one political dynasty dies and another is given birth to, various customs and political practices will undergo change. Additionally, after several decades of rule practices might look very different from how they did at the beginning.
A historian must not project her or his own subjective experiences onto the past when examining it, he warned. But this is also a warning against presentism: reading history in terms of our own experiences. Ibn Khaldūn admits that it is natural for humans to see similarities and analogies at first blush. But often this is a recipe for error. Someone even well-versed in history can sometimes be oblivious to the changes that societies have undergone. Unhesitatingly the person projects the knowledge of the present onto the past and then measures the past based on one’s own experiences. This is a capital error on Ibn Khaldūn’s understanding. Many modern historians of Islam project the experiences of the present to bizarre causes in the past.
At the beginning of Islam and through the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, Ibn Khaldūn asserts, knowledge was not a craft or discipline. Knowledge was equal to a handed-down body of teachings, a tradition that enjoyed a different status. Knowledge was what one had heard from the Lawgiver, meaning from the authority of the Prophet and what he taught of the Qurʾān. The main function of knowledge of the faith was to guide people in specific ways of living.
Bust of Ibn Khaldūn at the entrance of the Kasbah of Bejaia, Algeria. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
More importantly, knowledge of the tradition in this early period was shouldered by persons of prestige, dignity, and influence who wielded the power of persuasion (aṣabiyya), like the Umayyad governor Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī (d. 714), who hailed from a family of influential teachers. In other words, the knowledge actors were also in a sense the political leaders. Hence, the knowledge of faith was baked into the political system of early Islam. Today we will say that the faith tradition was mirrored in the political theology of the early community and vice-versa. If worldly success and ethical living are the requirements for afterworldly success, as the Qur’ān taught, then it was not inconceivable that there should be a relationship between the order of the political and that of the spiritual realm. The Prophet appointed his most senior Companions to the task of transmitting knowledge because it was critical to the identity of the community, reported Ibn Khaldūn. His crucial point is this: in this early stage the transmission of knowledge of the faith was closely associated with people of prestige, influence, and those who had ties of solidarity with the political dynasty that Islam established. It was in the form of a tradition, naql, that they grasped what Islam meant.
Several generations later the character of the knowledge of the faith tradition changed. Ibn Khaldūn is a bit vague on when this exactly happens. But based on his experiences in Mamluk Egypt in the fourteenth century, he was confident that knowledge of the tradition was no longer part of a founding political narrative during his time. The political tradition became somewhat quasi-independent, with profound consequences for the knowledge tradition that regulated theology, law, and philosophical ethics. Muslims had by his time, seven centuries later after the founding of Islam, developed an entire corpus of laws dependent on the early tradition. The corpus of knowledge also advanced different understandings of these laws compared to the early tradition. So, examining Islam as a fully-fledged discursive tradition, as Talal Asad describes it, requires a complex sensibility of the various mutations of tradition, especially the role of politics in the making and practice of tradition. Multiple understandings of tradition were made more complex by debates centered on knowledge of the tradition, a perspective seriously ignored in earnest contemporary studies of tradition.
As part of a unique Muslim Republic of Letters across multiple geographical regions, this discursive tradition not only expanded in terms of substance but also in terms of space. It consisted of contributions from Muslims in Persia, Central Asia, India, North Africa as well as the regions of Western Sudan and the Iberian Peninsula. This vast emerging corpus of scholarship gradually became canonized via an extensive and dizzying array of disciplines, each with protocols and rules of interpretation. In other words, diversity was a major hallmark of Muslim knowledge traditions. Gradually organized scholarship became part of a habitus, an organized way of living. But this organized way of living around a knowledge tradition was now arranged differently and conceived of differently compared to how it was imagined at the very inception of Islam.
Given the needs to educate the emerging communities of early Islam, scholarship became separated from the centers of political power and was independent from the individuals who now led the political enterprise, according to Ibn Khaldūn. He observed that in the later period those who conducted royal and political affairs were too arrogant and preoccupied with their governmental authority to devote attention to education related to the faith tradition. Hence, less powerful people now took up the mantle of education. Some of them were descendants of former slaves and others came from humble backgrounds. As a result of the esteem conferred upon them as carriers of the knowledge tradition of Islam, their status was elevated, but their status was different compared to the political classes.
Ibn Khaldūn’s somewhat jaundiced view of the disinterest of the political elites in knowledge of the faith tradition might be clouded by his personal experiences. Nonetheless, the critical insight Ibn Khaldūn offers is a persuasive account of how knowledge of the tradition also changes with a change in time, place, and political context. It augurs improvement as well as difference.
This insight ought to be helpful to contemporary Muslims and their thought leaders, for it is precisely in the domain of knowledge and how to construe knowledge of tradition in which there is a great deal of hesitation for promoting change today. But what remains unsolved and a dilemma for scholarship to this day is this: If the founding template of knowledge was very much hewed to the order of obedience to God and tied to the order of the political then how can one unscramble the teachings of obedience to God, dīn, from political obedience? Is the political order merely the domain where practical questions are taken up? In the past, the rise of Sufism created some distance between the concerns of the soul and the realm of the political by insisting that faithful living should avoid the realm of the political as much as possible. And in the modern period this historical template is still very much the arena in which Muslims are experimenting with different kinds of approaches to unscrambling or reassembling the architecture of religious thought, especially in relation to the rise of the secular and secular politics. Debates in this sphere involving political and intellectual discussions goes under the moniker of Islamic reform. The question we can now turn to is: What constitutes progress in this schema?
The Ambivalence of Progress: Progressive or Critical Traditionalism?
Muslims in modernity are not immune to the dominant view of progress. In other words, the secularizing influences in the Islamic world are real. What distinguishes a dyed-in-the wool modernist from someone who is less enamored by everything modern is that the modernist believes in the inevitability of progress. However, the opposing view, say the critical traditionalist perspective that I have been advocating, sometimes grudgingly concedes to the possibility of change or improvement. Improvement as fortuitous, rather than as inevitable, holds the promise that change might occur in diverse and multiple forms. This stands in contrast to the totalitarian narrative of progress driven by scientism and liberal capitalism. The deterministic or apocalyptic theory of progress locks everyone in a suffocating straitjacket of a singular modernity. Ignoring this subtlety can produce some of the most irreconcilable dilemmas and forces one to choose between science and religion, rationality and faith, and progress and tradition.
In my work with recent graduates of the madrasas of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in the Madrasa Discourses program which operates within the Contending Modernities project at the University of Notre Dame, we confront endless dilemmas about how to deal with a plethora of knowledge traditions, the histories and geographic locations of dominant knowledge traditions, and the multiplicity of human ecologies they serve. The invitation to help prepare the next generation of madrasa graduates to meaningfully deal with their lived realities came from the leadership of a section of the madrasa community. Mawlana Amin Usmani, the secretary general of the Islamic Fiqh Academy of India, repeatedly implored me to help him train the next generation through a stream of letters and emails. This invitation was acted upon when I moved to Notre Dame and started the program with the generous funding of the John Templeton Foundation.
Participants in the Madrasa Discourses Intensive in Doha, Qatar at the site of the 2019 Winter Intensive.
In the same way as I once learned to encounter the challenges of modernity, many of the participants in our program also wanted to engage modernity while still retaining their Islamic tradition. Here it is a question of negotiating multiple literacies while being aware that modern literacy can be both enchanting and alienating when it is brought to bear on a historical tradition.
This kind of grappling with tradition in the face of modernity is not new, though it is perhaps underexplored in the scholarly literature. An exemplar who wrestled with tradition is Abul Kalām Āzād (d. 1958), the famous anticolonial activist and political figure who served in the post-independence Indian government as minister of education. Āzād is well known for his significant political role as a leader of the Indian National Congress alongside the peace activist and freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi and independent India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. However, there is another dimension of his formation that has received less attention. He was also a virtuoso traditional Muslim scholar, whose education was meticulously crafted in his father’s madrasa. Few have paid attention to his subtle and insightful understanding of tradition against a backdrop of doubt and anxiety produced by the rigors of modernity.
In dealing with his own Islamic tradition there is something poignant, if not tragic, that haunts Āzād. As an innovator of ideas, Āzād sought to remake his state of mind, in short, his psychology. We can follow Nietzsche’s wisdom on this matter. Nietzsche urged one to turn against oneself and arouse fear of oneself, in one’s quest “to overcome the gods and the tradition in themselves” (115). Āzād was fully aware of the burden and risk of turning against oneself and one’s tradition.
At some point as a young adult, he sought out a teacher in the fringe neighborhoods of Calcutta to teach him to play a musical instrument. This was a scandalous desire for a Muslim theologian who was destined to become his father’s spiritual successor. Why? Listening to music was already controversial and viewed as unlawful in the eyes of some who identify as orthodox guardians of the Islamic faith. Āzād knew that in such an environment becoming a musician was suicidal and reckless. But his transgressive search to play a musical instrument was part of a wider questioning attitude that overtook Āzād. This episode of self-questioning is not uncommon to people who study at a madrasa, yeshiva, or seminary. Āzād wrote that at the age of fifteen the certainties provided by tradition began to disintegrate and “the peace of my mind began to tremble, and the thorns of doubt and skepticism pierced the heart.” He continues: “In addition to the voices I heard from all sides, I also felt that something else was lacking. I felt that the universe of knowledge and reality is not limited to what was in front of me. As I advanced in age these pricks of conscience continued to grow” (99–100).
Assailed by doubts, all his beliefs disintegrated and he himself pushed over the remaining ramparts of his convictions. He then set out to find new fortifications.
Indian postage stamp featuring Abul Kalām Āzād. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Āzād not only found rhetorical support in literature, but also deployed literary resources to reach into the depths of the human condition. Dwelling on his conditions of doubt and the remaking of the constitution of his mind, he found solace in the poetry of the Persian émigré poet to India, Kalīm Kāshānī (d. 1651), who was buried in Kashmir.
Kāshānī wrote: “My desire to know has never ever thwarted me/Even on the day of the richest harvest, I still do go out in search of sustenance” (100). In one passage from his famous memoir and literary masterpiece titled Accumulated Dust, which consisted of letters written from jail, Āzād very honestly grapples with the multiple worlds he has to negotiate:
One’s traditional convictions are the biggest obstacles in the path of one’s mental development. No power can incarcerate a person as much as the chains of traditional convictions can fetter one. One is unable to break these chains easily because one does not really wish to do so. In fact, one prizes these fetters of tradition like precious ornaments. Each doctrine, practice and viewpoint gained through one’s family heritage and by means of one’s foundational education, accompaniment, and apprenticeship (sohbat) will be cherished as a sacred inheritance. One will defend this heritage at all costs. But one will never have the courage to meddle with it. Sometimes the grasp of inherited convictions is so strong that even the most effective education as well as environmental changes cannot unshackle its hold. Education will to some extent influence the mind, but it cannot influence the constitution of the mind. One’s mental edifice is always constituted by a line of descent, by family and by centuries of successively transmitted traditions, and whose hand will always effectively do the work of tradition. (100)
Here Āzād exemplifies the dilemmas produced when one must negotiate very different legacies of knowledge at a time when the space for difference and multiplicity is radically shrinking. His words speak to us today as much as they did to those during his time.
History and Tradition in the dihlīz (interstice)
What I have learned from my studies and experiences has made me more tentative in pronouncing muscular solutions to complex problems. What I learned from Ghazālī was the immense value of the in-between space (dihlīz) of daily living and reflection. The spatial metaphor of a threshold or portal, a dihlīiz—an intermediate portal separating the Persian home from its exterior—represents a productive dialogical space. From Ghazālī and countless others we learn how intellectual productivity was enhanced at the interstices of cultures. Ghazālī imagined and theorized all thought and practices to be a continuous dialogical movement between the inner and the outer; the esoteric and exoteric; body and spirit in a productive fashion. He did not configure the dialogic in a simplistic binary relation, but he imagined these to be the multiple nodes in a force field.
Suspended within this force field was the subject diligently tending to the needs of both matter and spirit. Underlying all our critical activity is a complex hybridity and fuzziness, despite our every pretension to smooth it out. And while over the longer duration we can sometimes observe dramatic shifts in knowledge, on most occasions we pass through transitions, creases, and folds in knowledge and time. Improvement is possible, in other words, but progress is halting.
The perpetual quest is to seek emergent knowledge arising out of our struggles and transitions for alternative futures. We do know one thing taught by experience: the dominant paradigms need to be continuously contested with alternative ways of knowing, different types of knowledge, and novel models for society-building. The future, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos pointed out, has become a personal question for us, a question of life and death. Or, as Amitav Ghosh tells us in The Nutmeg’s Curse, something more fundamental needs to be addressed: we have to revise our understanding of matter and the vitality of natural and celestial objects. As he put it, “The hold of the economy on the modern imagination has progressed to the point that capitalism has come to be seen as the prime mover of modern history, while geopolitics and empire are regarded as its secondary effects” (116).
We do know one thing taught by experience: the dominant paradigms need to be continuously contested with alternative ways of knowing, different types of knowledge, and novel models for society-building.
In order to pursue better and improved futures we also need the past, we require the insights of history. We need history to help us imagine, not ready-made solutions, but creative problems to be addressed. “Certainly we need history,” Nietzsche wrote. “But our need for history is quite different from that of the spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge,” he continued, adding: “…[W]e require history for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and action, or even to whitewash a selfish life and cowardly, bad acts” (7).
Many of the thinkers I have discussed were in one or another way compelled to reread the past and now view it as an immutable act of God empowering us to hope and act in search of an open future. Unfortunately, too many thinkers have understood the betterment of civilization in stoutly economic terms, linking the division of labor to the development of society. It may well be part of the truth, but certainly it is not the whole of the truth. For it is practice, as secular moralists would describe it, or the prophetic activity as religious actors would articulate it, that allows us to dedicate ourselves to life. A life premised on balance and distribution is one that avoids a nihilistic end. The improvements we make in giving shape to that prophetic spirit—a life of practice and the will to power—opens the possibilities for new histories, not the inevitability of history and certainly not the end of history. For those, like Ahmet Karamustafa, who view history as a continuous struggle, a gift carrying the possibilities of improvement, the cultivation of civilization remains inviting and utterly tempting.
In conclusion, I want to share from the writings of the littérateur, proponent of mysticism and philosopher, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d.1023). Tawḥīdī was the protégé, if not the “Boswell,” meaning an amanuensis, of Abū Sulaymān al-Manṭiqī al-Sijistānī (d.c.985), his mentor. It captures the messiness of the human condition and especially our earnest efforts to understand complex realities and mysteries. The citation comes from Tawḥīdī’s meditations on coincidences and oddities. But the terms coincidence (ittifāq) and the unexpected (falatāt) do not do justice to the meditation. I think what he intends to say is that things like history, progress, and improvement are complex, imbricated, meshed and messy, yet also distinguishable, and appear to us as the unexpected. Tawḥīdī attributes the fulsome nugget of wisdom to Abū Sulaymān who says:
Things are distributed according to the limitations of nature, psychical powers, intellectually indivisible elements, and divine wonder. What exists here on earth is therefore necessarily either something familiar that is related to nature, or something rare related to the soul, or something unique that is related to the intellect, or something wonderful that is related to the divine being. The unexpected is among the last-mentioned kind; I mean it permeates these various classifications.[2]
History is about contingency. The unexpected is perhaps the most fertile ground of history and where the possibility of improvement, rather than progress, exists. What Tawhidi’s insight reminds us of is that the unexpected is enmeshed in our understanding of nature, our psychology, and divine wonder. Nature, the person, the human mind, and the role of the divine cannot be separated in our understanding of history. If we ignore them, we do so at our own peril. But more so, the result is an impoverished understanding and appreciation of history and the discontents it brings.
*The author wishes to thank Joshua Lupo for his editorial assistance in preparing this post.
[2]Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, Kitāb Al-Imtāʿ waʾl-Muʾānasa, ed. Aḥmad Amīn and Aḥmad al-Zayn, 2 vols. (Beirut: Manshūrāt Dār Maktabat al-Ḥayāt, c. 1960), 2:160; With emendations the translation is from Geert Jan van Gelder, “On Coincidence: The Twenty-Seventh and Twenty-Eight Nights of Al-Tawḥīdī’s Al-Imtāʿ wa-l-Muʾānasa. An Annotated Translation,” in Medieval Arabic Thought: Essays in Honour of Fritz Zimmermann, ed. Rotraud E. Hansberger, et al. (London; Turin: Warburg Institute; Nino Aragno Editore, 2012), 216.
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
The Erez Barrier, the only crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Photo via Flickr user Michael Rose. CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
In the introduction to our edited volume When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism we investigate the sacralization of politics in a variety of nation-states and highlight three modes in which states engage in such sacralization. Sacralized politics sanction the power of one group over others in the same state or territory and empower that group’s exclusive sovereignty, political authority, and belonging to a homeland. The first modality centers around managing consciousness, including the construction of self-identity in relation to others. The second works through territoriality and the expansion or exclusion of land at the expense of other groups. The third operates through political governance and employs violence and a necropolitical regime of control dictating who may live and who may die. Of these three modalities that create religio-racialized constructions of the nation-state and produce exclusivity within the political space, violence has attracted the most attention and debate.
This volume is an effort to respond to a major gap in the western literature that has focused on non-state actors when discussing sacralized politics in general, and violence in particular. We suggest that when multiethnic states employ sacralized politics, particularly in cases of intrastate conflict, colonialism, and settler colonialism, the state produces some groups, including groups of citizens, as legal, cultural, spatial, and/or political “others.”
The four insightful reviews engage critically with main themes of the volume and with its various chapters. The reviews strengthen some arguments, question others, broaden the context of sacralized state politics, offer astute challenges for future research, and most importantly pose vital questions that require sharpening the arguments of the chapters in this volume.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s review criticizes the goal of liberal secularism to purify politics of religion—a critique that we acknowledge and the contributors to the volume focus on in some chapters that address Zionism and the Israeli state. She asks an important and challenging question focusing on the modality of violence. In our introduction, we write, and Hurd quotes, “Ethnic and religious nationalism . . . can play the destructive role of promoting an ethnically exclusive state, and the religious claims can play a double purpose—not only to increase the extent of exclusivity but also to provide legitimation for such exclusion (usually translated into political domination) and means of violence. These means can take extreme forms, precisely because of the religious legitimation” (emphasis added by Hurd). Hurd then adds: “As I interpret this account, the problem with Israeli Jewish nationalism—and perhaps other nationalisms as well—is that it is violent because it is insufficiently secular. Religiously based justifications are ‘particularly venomous.’ Yet would the challenge posed by (settler) state violence be resolved if nationalism were freed of religionism, or in this case, ‘Israeli Jewish nationalism from religionism’” (17)? The answer to this question is empirical and it is hard to answer definitively. Yet, our argument contrasts with what Hurd seems to suggest and is neither based on secularist critique nor secular/religious dialectic. In the case of Israel, for example, it is not that the violence of Zionist nationalism is extreme because its form of nationalism is “insufficiently secular.” Actually, some of Israel’s worst forms of violence—the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of the native Palestinian population, dozens of massacres, destroying hundreds of towns, and taking over the natives’ lands—were enacted under what many Israeli scholars called “the secular phase” of Zionism (which we believe was always undergirded by religious claims).
But since the continued unfolding of the settler colonial project was masked by religious claims, it is much more difficult for Israeli society to face its own reality or to even acknowledge Zionism and its defining and continuing state violence as a settler colonial project. The religious claims also help interpret some global politics, particularly Western international politics, that resist seeing Israel as a settler colonial project despite the overwhelming evidence that it is. Therefore, this example of settler colonialism is more lethal than a settler colonial project obliquely masked by religious claims. Furthermore, whether in the discussions of India, Israel, Sri Lanka, or elsewhere, our concern was not religious-secular dialectics per se, but rather the justification and legitimization of violence with claims anchored in sacred texts. Such anchoring moves the logic of violence itself into the space of the sacred—a space in which a deity is claimed by its followers to be the single authority and arbitrator.
Some of Israel’s worst forms of violence—ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of the native Palestinian population, dozens of massacres, destroying hundreds of towns, and taking over the natives’ lands—were enacted under what many Israeli scholars called “the secular phase” of Zionism (which we believe was always undergirded by religious claims).
But violence is not the only modality we highlighted. Let us look briefly at constructing consciousness based on religious claims. We will give a recent example to further explain our argument. The minister of religious services in Israel’s “center-left” government told Israeli high school students in June 2022 that “[b]ecause we were expelled from our country 2,000 years ago, for 2,000 years we dreamed, we prayed, we wrote songs, we returned to our country. We believe that God, gave us the country, promised it to us in the covenant . . . , the Bible is our Kushan. No one will tell us that it is not ours, all of it. But the Arabs have a different story. We know it’s nonsense, we know it’s not true . . . ” (italics added). Even though Zionism emerged as a modernist/secularist discourse drawing on the language of nationalism, it has been undergirded and authorized by this biblical covenantal narrative. So if one’s God makes a promise based on a covenant, political and religious consciousness are constructed accordingly and the views that fall outside this promise become simply “nonsense”; in such a context, only God can change one’s views. This is different and much less self-conscious than how other forms of settler colonialism progressed, let us say South Africa or North America, in which God has stakes—albeit in the contexts the “promised land” was used metaphorically. A fundamental and defining difference is that while in other cases the bases for legitimacy were transformed by invoking democracy, equality, recognition of past historical wrongs, and facing the settler colonial realities, Zionism has been moving in the opposite direction. Not only is Zionism, in most of its political streams, doubling down on invoking religious claims as foundational for legitimacy, it is also making them increasingly central to its project in Palestine. It openly speaks and acts the sacred, non-negotiable, word of God.
The analyses offered in the various chapters of the book are context- and time-bound, as Raef Zreik’s intervention points out. While highlighting many of the same main points on the relationship between nationalism and religion in different historical contexts and different political arrangements of power relations, he asks a challenging question. Focusing on Zionism, he asks what the discussion would look like if the volume’s title (and the research it has undertaken) was reversed and instead focused on “when the sacred is politicized”? While this would have been an interesting intellectual exercise, it does not address the new intellectual space the book seeks to bring to the public discussion: a focus on the state which invokes sacred texts in order to justify modern politics. Zionism is a case in which the political project came first (albeit always with an underpinning of religious claims), and its overt religious claims came later and continue to this day with a more earnest pace (in Zreik’s view, the political followed the sacred). Yet reversing the question can help us better understand the current stage of hyper-religious Zionism. It is, for example, sometimes difficult to distinguish between a political act and a religious act, and which one is following the other (such as in Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem and Nablus). In this regard Zreik is right to contrast the “here and now” of Zionism when it comes to the relationship between religion, nationalism, and (settler) colonialism. One needs to “dig deep to reveal the intimate relation between these concepts” in Europe’s past, particularly in relationship to colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Indeed, the book poses the challenge about the present: What states are using religious claims drawn from religious texts to justify their policies of ethnic politics and state identity, violence, land grabbing, and international politics? It is most revealing that while other settler colonial projects gradually moved away from the religious discourse used to justify their project of overtaking lands of other groups, Zionist religious claims increased with time. This is an inevitable development meant to obscure the ongoing settler colonial project.
A mural by Irish Republican artist Danny Devenny on the Solidarity Wall in the Republican Falls Road area of Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Arabic text translates “Palestine will return no matter how long it takes.” June 2008. Image via Flickr user Philip Hopper. CC BY 2.0
Gladys Ganiel rightly observes that colonialism and settler-colonial theory is at the heart of the book. Thus, referring to Lloyd’s chapter on Northern Ireland, she points out that while the postcolonial conditions in the Republic of Ireland after 1922 gradually dimmed the salient differences between Protestant and Catholic identities, in Northern Ireland, which remained a settler colonial state, the social and political structures continued to manufacture colonial mentalities. Ganiel highlights the importance of external support for structures—like those in Northern Ireland—that can counter colonial practices, consciousness, and mentalities. This observation is of great importance to our central argument: how can external support initiate structures that counteract mentalities of exclusion and racialization anchored in religious claims?
Ganiel emphasizes the two cases where religious claims are not integral to national politics: Palestine and Northern Ireland. But even if religious claims are not significant at the national level in Northern Ireland, religion still operates as a group marker and therefore might carry significance in other forms. While she welcomes O’Dowd’s concept of vernacular religion in which religion is not reduced to belief but is part of everyday practice, she warns against “reducing religion to high-level religious claims.” Both her own scholarly work and her review of the edited volume resist the reduction of religion and religious claims and emphasize the way the mundane invocation of religious claims and practices construct, transform, and sacralize the political. She argues that in many cases the clergy played a peacebuilding role in Northern Ireland out of intense personal convictions and in doing so have resisted “sacralizing politics.” This observation is important to keep in mind when thinking of positive role that religion can and does play in various settings.
Joram Tarusarira makes an insightful comparison between the current political context in Zimbabwe and some of the case-studies discussed in the book such as India, Israel, and Iran. He discusses the troubled postcolonial constitutionally secular Zimbabwe to show how religion and politics are intertwined. In this particular context, he argues that “the fusion of religion and nationalism is not a necessary outcome.” For example, the fusion between religious claims and nationalism in the legitimation of land and power-politics is often used as an instrument “by political elites to justify and legitimate particular political policies, actions, and imaginaries.”
Tarusarira’s point about the instrumentality of the fusion between religion and nationalism is essential. When are religious claims employed for political sacralization? Are they inevitable? In what cases? For example, in the case of Zionism we argue that sacralization is inevitable because it is necessary for claiming legitimacy. But in India and Sri Lanka such sacralization was not necessary. So, under what circumstances are religious claims invoked and how do they relate to nationalism? Tarusarira uses the case of modern Iran to highlight what Banuazizi also shows in his chapter, namely that religious claims and nationalist claims were interchangeably used as state legitimizers. Religious claims were undermined in favor of nationalist ones after the 1979 revolution in Iran. But the revolution conveniently invoked religious rhetoric as needed during the 1980s war with Iraq. Tarusarira concludes, “The lesson we might take from Banuazizi is that the relationship between religion and nationalism depends on the political interests of those drawing on them. Both religion and nationalism ultimately serve the same purpose, namely political mobilization and state legitimacy.” This same logic of political purpose was employed in Zimbabwe: “What makes religion so powerful and compelling in this context is that it dogmatically sacralizes, and thus provides an absolute and non-negotiable quality to policies and actions. Sacralization thus closes off debate over policies.” This non-negotiability, supported by the sacred text, can potentially bring political debate to a dead end. This conclusion prompts some of the same questions raised by reviewers: Can nationalism not supported by a religious claim can bring politics to a dead end? We argue that indeed, it can. But, as in the question about violence discussed above, violence and political deadlocks that are not anchored in religious claims are contested in a space that remains outside the prescription of the scripture. As Tarusarira notes, the contestation over policies is not locked by the sacred text, and this difference matters for how legitimacy is constructed and maintained.
When Politics are Sacralized seeks to comparatively reveal racially based nationalist-religious claims, along with the social, cultural, and political articulations of those claims and their significance.
Engaging with the insightful reviews leads us to emphasize that our concern in this volume was not religion per se, but rather the justification and legitimization of violence (as one of the other modalities of sacralizing politics) with religious claims. The political impact of this process engenders racialization as religious difference. Thus, in Israel, our central case study, theorizing the state as solely a settler colonial project is complicated by the fact that its ideology is also embedded in claims derived from a religious text. These claims were also employed to construct racial differences, exclusivity, and national identity that were inseparable from its religious justifications/politics. When Politics are Sacralized seeks to comparatively reveal racially based nationalist-religious claims, along with the social, cultural, and political articulations of those claims and their significance. What the various chapters and case studies point out is more the political than the religious per se. They seek to show how political, colonial, or settler-colonial violence often relies on religious text. This text, in turn, is also employed to ensure the privileging of one religious/ethnic group over another in every socio-political, legal, and territorial domain. The book stresses how the sacralization of politics and the invocation of religious differences has become the modality through which power politics, racism, and colonialism operate. Hence, the state’s sacralization of politics turns religious differences into racial differences and legitimizes a racially constituted division of rights, space, and modes of life.
Nadim N. Rouhana is Director of the Fares Center for Eastern for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His research includes work on the dynamics of protracted social conflict, collective identity and democratic citizenship in multiethnic states, the questions of decolonization and transitional justice in settler colonial regimes. His publications include Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (Yale University Press, 1997) and Israel and its Palestinian citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State (Ed., Cambridge University Press, 2017). He has held various academic positions in Palestinian, Israeli, and American universities including at Harvard University, Boston College, MIT, and Tel-Aviv University. He was a co-founder of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs where he co-chaired the Center’s seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution from 1992-2001.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian feminist, is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her scholarship focuses on knowledge production in relation to accumulative trauma, state criminality, surveillance, gender violence, and law and society. She is the author of of Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She is the co-editor of Engaged Students in Conflict Zones: Community-Engaged Courses in Israel as a Vehicle for Change (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2019); When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is currently finalizing The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press, 2023).
In the postsecular moment that the humanities now finds itself in, it is tempting to regard the questioning of the role of religion in politics as one that is old hat. Religion has always been political postsecular critics of liberalism and its secular framework have argued. In this instance, the postsecular represents the demystification of secular reason as neutral with regard to religion and invites renewed inquiry into the theological roots of secularity. Given this claim, our duty as scholars is to reveal the entanglements of religion with the state rather than contest them. And yet, without necessarily questioning the analytic truth of the co-constructed nature of religion and politics, When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, edited by Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian, reminds us that the concepts of the secular and sacred are mobilized in ways that often have devastating real world political and social consequences. More specifically, in this wide-ranging volume, Rouhana and Shaloub-Kervorkian show that religion has served states across the world in legitimating claims to sovereignty in order to justify oppressive policies.
Whether it is Zionist claims to an exclusively Israeli Jewish state, Hindutva claims to an exclusively Indian Hindu state, or Sinhalese Buddhist claims to an exclusively Buddhist Sri Lankan state, in various settings political leaders in ostensibly secular states have drawn on religious claims to shore up their authority and suppress dissent. In addition to these examples, others discussed in the book include Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, and Palestine. The risk in bringing so many different examples together under one volume is that any generalizable results will be lost in the details. However, by laying out a framework within which these essays operate in their introduction, the co-editors persuasively show how nationalism, religion, and the state have been forged in the fires of western modernity and spread around the world.
The contributors to the symposium on this important book toggle between providing their own examples of the sacralization of political claims and the wider theoretical claims with which the book asks us to reckon. Gladys Ganiel draws on her research in Northern Ireland to show the importance of analyzing political and social structures in changing political and social realities. She contends that future work on religion should also focus on the everyday, intimate experiences of religion. Joram Tarusarira, meanwhile, compares the cases in the book with that of Zimbabwe, especially in the religious rhetoric surrounding former President Robert Mugabe and the churches that shored up his authority. His claim, in the end, is theologically normative (and echoes the prophetic strain in Christianity): When Christians become more invested in shoring up political power, they risk forgetting their mission to challenge authority.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Raef Zreik move in more theoretical directions. Hurd engages with the risk inherent in the co-editors contention that secularization would lead to more peaceful societies. Unlike the postsecular critics mentioned up front in this essay, however, Hurd is keen to show that unravelling the theological roots of the secular is not simply an academic exercise, but instead is one that allows us to address substantial issues of inequality more directly. It does so by drawing our attention to different modes of religious interpretation that might otherwise be obscured if we were to assume that all religion is poisonous. Raef Zreik wrestles with the need for conceptual knowledge but also the need to tie conceptual knowledge to material contexts. He traces the desire for abstraction back to Immanuel Kant and follows it through to other major figures and trends in US and European philosophy. In doing so, Zreik asks us to reckon with the deeper theoretical stakes of comparative work like that carried out by the contributors to this book.
Given the genealogical turn that has no doubt also influenced the postsecular turn, comparative studies are often seen as inherently risky. Do they not obscure the particularities of a situation in order to advance a generalizable thesis? What Rouhana and Shaloub-Kervorkian, along with the contributors to this edited volume and symposium show, is that it is possible to engage in comparative work that is attentive to history, social and political complexity, and diversity without losing track of the more abstract concepts that are necessary to compare cross-culturally. In doing so, they remind us that we cannot restrain our work to one context. This is because even though modernity, secularization, and nationalism may have roots in the west, their effects have extended far beyond that origin.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Miniature showing the expulsion of Jews following the Edict of Expulsion by Edward I of England (July 18, 1290). Marginal Illustration from the Rochester Chronicle (British Library, Cotton Nero D. II.), folio 183v. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
This essay is based on a talk given during the “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Critique of Israel: Towards a Constructive Debate” conference held at University of Zurich from June 29–30, 2022.
To confront the relationship between antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the critique of Israel is a daunting challenge. In light of this monumental task, a remark from the Talmud comes to mind. Rabbi Tarfon said, “The day is short, the task is great. You are not obliged to complete the task, but neither are you free to give it up” (Bab. Tal., Ninth Tractate Avot, 2:20–21). This sums up my situation perfectly. My space is limited and the task is great. I could not possibly complete it, but neither am I capable of giving it up. Far from giving it up, the question of the Jewish Question is now at the center of my work on antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the critique of Israel.
This post is divided into two parts. In part I, “Asking the Jewish Question,” I argue for one reading of the Question. I call it, for a reason that I hope becomes clear, “the antithesis reading.” In Part II, “Questioning the Zionist Answer,” I concentrate on an alternative reading, “the national reading,” which I see as underlying political Zionism in all its different forms. (In this essay, whenever I refer to Zionism I mean political Zionism and not the cultural Zionism associated, in the first place, with Ahad Ha’am.) There are many angles of approach to questioning Zionism. In Part II, I refer only to “the postcolonial critique” advanced by the Left —but I barely scratch the surface. (Barely scratching the surface is a good way to describe my essay as a whole.) I argue that, on the one hand, Jews who react against anti-Zionism (or come to the defense of Israel) tend to slip unawares between one reading of the Jewish Question and the other. On the other hand, the Left (including a section of the Jewish Left) tends to be too quick to dismiss their reaction when giving a postcolonial critique of Zionism and Israel. The combination of these two tendencies generates impassioned confusion—confusion that is not merely intellectual—on both sides. The analysis points to self-critique—on both sides—as a condition for the possibility of constructive debate.
I. Asking the Jewish Question
The so-called “Jewish Question” is a question in the sense of being a problem that needs to be solved. But who set the problem? For whom—in whose eyes—is there a problem about the Jews, the Jews as Jews? I suppose the first person who saw the Jews as a problem was Moses, who, time and again, complained to God about them; or maybe it was God who first saw the Jews as problematic. I don’t know. In any case, the problem they saw is not exactly the problem to which the so-called “Jewish Question” refers. The “Jewish Problem” is set by Europe: it is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews.
The term “the Jewish Question” became current in the 19th century. This was, says Holly Case in her book of the same name, “the age of questions,” by which she means questions with the form “the X question.” The X questions were a motley lot, but, by and large, they could be grouped under three headings: “social,” “religious,” or “national.” The Jewish Question, rather like the Jews themselves, had no fixed abode: it could be housed under any one of these headings. I shall focus on the view that, au fond, it was a national question, keeping company with such questions as the Armenian, Macedonian, Irish, Belgian, Kurdish, and so on. I do so because the national take on the Jewish Question is the one that is especially relevant to our conference, “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Critique of Israel: Towards a Constructive Debate.” From Herzl to the present day, the Jewish Question has been construed in political Zionism as a national question; and Zionism lies at the heart of the current debate about Israel and antisemitism.
The “Jewish Problem” is set by Europe: it is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews.
The national take, however, is a mis-take. The Jews were not another case of a European nation whose future on the political map was the subject of debate. Rather, whether the Jews collectively are a nation in the modern (European) sense was up for debate: it was an integral part of the Jewish Question. Nor was there anything novel about querying their collective status: the status of the Jews was seen as problematic for a thousand years or more before the political formations that were the subject of the National Question in the 19th century came into being. And, while there were other groups in this period whose status as nations was up for debate, the case of the Jews was radically different. How so? The answer to this question gets to the core of the Jewish question.
I noted earlier that the Jewish Question is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews. But, although ostensibly about the Jews, ultimately it is about Europe: it is about Europe via the question of the Jews. It always has been, ever since antiquity and the days of the original European Union (as it were), the one whose capital city was Rome. Anti-Jewish animus is older than the Roman Empire, of course. But the story I have in mind begins with the conversion to Christianity of Flavius Valerius Constantinus, otherwise known as Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome. Constantine’s conversion on his deathbed gave birth, in a way, to the question that came to be called “Jewish.” From this point on, Europe has used the Jews to define itself. The question, which we might rename “the European Question,” was this: What is Europe? Answer: not Jewish. Down the centuries, as Europe’s idea of itself changed, this “not” persisted, though it took different forms.
Granted, in the “New Europe” that emerged after the shock and tumult of the Shoah and the Second World War, the role of Jews collectively has, to some extent, been inverted. We are now liable to function for Europe (as I have discussed elsewhere) more as an admired model than as a despised foil, with consequences for Western European policies towards the State of Israel. Furthermore, a thread of philosemitism runs through Europe’s history. Neither of these points, however, contradicts the account I am giving here of the negative role played by Jews down the centuries in Europe’s self-definition.
Clipping from The Jewish Chronicle of piece by Theodor Herzl entitled “A ‘Solution of the Jewish Question.'” January 17, 1896. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Thus, the Jewish Question existed as an issue for Europe avant la lettre. Seen as being in Europe but not of Europe, the Jews were the original “internal Other,” the inner alien to the European self, the Them inside the Us. First, in antiquity, Judaism was the foil against which Europe defined itself as Christian. Then, in the eighteenth century, the Jews were, as Adam Sutcliffe puts it in his book Judaism and the Enlightenment, “the Enlightenment’s primary unassimilable Other,” but no longer as the immovable object to Christianity ‘s irresistible force (254). Esther Romeyn explains: “For the Enlightenment, with its investment in universalism and civilization, the Jew was a symbol of particularism, a backward-looking, pre-modern tribal culture of outmoded customs and religious tutelage” (92). In the following century, the symbol flipped. Romeyn again (partly quoting Sarah Hammerschlag): “For a nationalism based on roots, the distinctiveness of cultures, and allegiance to a shared past, the Jew was an uprooted nomad or a suspect ‘cosmopolitan’ aligned with ‘abstract reason rather than roots and tradition’” (92; Hammerschlag, 7, 20). Europe now saw itself as a patchwork quilt of ethnic nationalities and the question arose: “How do the Jews fit in? Do they fit in? If they do not, what is to be done with them or with their Jewishness?” This was the Jewish Question in the 19th century, a new variation on a very old European theme: the theme of the anomalous Jew; or, more precisely, the antithetical Jew.
In short, the National Question was about ethnic difference and how Europe should deal with it. The Jewish Question was about the alien within—so deep within as to be internal to Europe’s idea of itself. Other groups and peoples, such as Arabs and Africans, have played the part of Europe’s external Others; this is written into the script of European imperialism and colonialism. They too have provided a reference point for Europe to define itself by way of what it is not. But Jews as Jews are not part of the colonial script. As Jews, we have been, ab initio, “insider outsiders,” a people who, in any given era, are the negative—the internal negative—to Europe’s positive: belonging in Europe by not belonging. Certainly, the Jewish Question, as it has been asked in different European places at different times, has features in common with other “X questions.” Moreover, the Jewish Question is not unique in being unique! Each “X question” is unique or singular in its own distinctive way. But the singularity of the Jewish case is such that it escapes the boxes in which other “X questions” are placed. Being seen as antithetical to Europe, like the alien race in the 1960 horror film Village of the Damned: this is what underlies the questionableness of “the Jews.” It is why (to allude to the title of my paper) the Jewish Question is different from all similar questions. I call this reading of the Jewish Question “the antithesis reading.” Whether it adequately describes the Jewish space in the European imagination, the salient point is this: this is how the Question sits in Jewish collective memory, continually working in the background of the Zionist answer to the Question.
II. Questioning the Zionist Answer
The mass of Jews, if only subliminally, bring collective memory to their embrace of Zionism and the State of Israel. They keep slipping, in the process, between two different readings of the Jewish Question, eliding the one with the other: the one I have just given and the one that Theodor Herzl gives in Der Judenstaat. Herzl’s (mis)reading has become a staple of the State of Israel as it defines itself (and, simultaneously, defines the Jewish people). In Der Judenstaat, he fastens onto the category of “nation.” He writes: “I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question …” (15). The subtitle of Der Judenstaat calls his political proposal, a state of the Jews, “An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question”; he means the national question. The indefinite article (“a Modern Solution”) is misleading. Herzl wrote to Bismarck: “I believe I have found the solution to the Jewish Question. Not a solution, but the solution, the only one” (245). Several times (four to be precise) the text refers to “the National Idea,” which, as Herzl envisages it, would be the ruling principle in the Jewish state and, as I read him, in the rest of the Jewish world too (see Der Judenstaat, 49, 50, 54 and 70). The latter idea, if not explicit, is coiled up inside Herzl’s text. I call his reading of the Jewish Question “the national reading.”
Zionism, both as a movement and as an ideology, has changed a lot since Herzl wrote his foundational pamphlet. It has developed two political wings (left and right); it has both secular and religious varieties; and it has produced a state: the State of Israel. But, fundamentally, Herzl’s take on the Jewish Question—figuring it as a national question, putting “the National Idea” at the heart of Jewish identity—has persisted to the present day. This is reflected in the Nation-State Bill (or Nationality Bill), which, upon being passed in the Knesset in 2018, became a Basic Law: Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish People. The law is “basic,” not only for the constitution of the Jewish state but also for the Zionist goal of reconstituting the Jewish people as “a nation, like all other nations” with a state of its own, as Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence puts it. This means reconstituting Judaism itself.[1]
Why do so many rank and file Jews across the globe appear to accept this reconstitution of their identity? Why did Britain’s current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, call Zionism “one of the axioms of Jewish belief”? How could he write: “Open a Jewish daily prayer book [siddur] used in any part of the world and Zionism will leap out at you.” Zionism, noch, not Zion. When exactly did Judaism convert to the creed of “the National idea”? in January 2009, when Operation Cast Lead was in full swing in Gaza, why was London’s Trafalgar Square awash with Israeli flags held aloft by British Jews? I witnessed this for myself. I was part of a small Jewish counter-demonstration that was spat at and jeered by some of the people—fellow Jews—in the official rally. How did people who are otherwise decent, people who uphold human rights, suddenly become ardent fans of forced evictions, house demolitions, and military violence against unarmed civilians? No doubt, there are zealots who would tick this box in the name of “the Jewish nation-state.” But zealotry is not what moves the mass of Jews to flock to the flag. If they identify with Israel (or defend it at all costs), it is not because they are persuaded intellectually by the “National Idea” (which is what underlies Herzl’s “national reading” of the Jewish Question), but because they feel viscerally the unbearable burden of the Question (which underlies the “antithesis reading”). When they wave the Israeli flag, it is certainly a gesture of defiance, and possibly hostility, aimed at Palestinians; but, at bottom, it is aimed at Europe—not just at the centuries of exclusion and oppression, but at the sheer chutzpah of Europe’s asking “the Jewish Question”—a question to which there is no right answer, because there is no right answer to the wrong question.[2]
But we Jews, understandably, are hungry for an answer that will put an end to the price we have paid for the nature of our difference. Political Zionism might appear to provide the answer. Paradoxically, the Zionist answer consists in taking Jews out of Europe to the Middle East in order to be included in the European dispensation. (Or you could say: normalizing by conforming to the European norm; it’s as if, by leaving, we’ve arrived.) Leading Zionist figures, from Herzl to Nordau to Ben-Gurion to Barak to Netanyahu, have placed “the Jewish state” in Europe, or see it as an extension of Europe. As Herzl wrote, “We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia” (30). More recently Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted saying, “We are a part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe.” So, the concept of the Jewish people becomes ethno-national—just like the real European thing; newcomers, who are largely from Europe, create a home for themselves by dispossessing the people who previously inhabited the land—just like a European colony; they turn their home into a state, just like certain former European colonies (such as the “White” dominions of Canada and Australia). Then there is the way their state—Israel—conducts itself in what is generally regarded as part of the Global South. It subjugates, à la Europe, the previous inhabitants of the land; it systematically discriminates against them; it expands its territory via settlers—a classic European practice; and it enters the Eurovision song contest. In all these respects (except perhaps the song contest), Israel courts a postcolonial critique. The Left are happy to oblige. In a way, the postcolonial critique is the ultimate compliment, the capstone on Zionism’s European solution of Europe’s Jewish Problem.
This prompts a surprising question, one that might seem ludicrous or at least redundant, but follows logically from the argument so far. It is this: Since political Zionism locates the state of Israel in Europe, and since Israel conducts itself in the manner of a European colonizing power, what is so objectionable to the generality of Jews—those who close ranks around Zionism and the state of Israel—about a critique that precisely treats Israel as a European state? The answer is that there is a piece missing from the stock postcolonial discourse, a discourse that folds Zionism completely, without remainder, into the history of European hegemony over the Global South, as if this were the whole story. But it is not; and the piece that is missing is, for most Jews, including quite a few of us who are not part of the Jewish mainstream regarding Zionism and Israel, the centerpiece. Put it this way: For Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (like my grandparents), the burning question was not “How can we extend the reach of Europe?” but “How can we escape it?” That was the Jewish Jewish Question. Like Europe’s Jewish Question, it too was not new; and it was renewed with a vengeance after the walls of Europe closed in during the first half of the last century, culminating in the ultimate crushing experience: genocide. Among the Jewish answers to the Jewish Jewish Question was migration to Palestine. But, by and large, the Jews who moved to Palestine after the Shoah were not so much emigrants as (literally or in effect) refugees. This does not, for a moment, justify the dispossession of the Palestinians, let alone the grievous injustices inflicted upon them by the State of Israel from its creation in 1948 to the present day. But it does put a massive dent into the story told in the postcolonial critique. We need another, more nuanced and inclusive, story.
For Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (like my grandparents), the burning question was not ‘How can we extend the reach of Europe?’ but ‘How can we escape it?’
In a sense, both the “national reading” of the Jewish Question, which Zionism assumes and Israel embodies, and the postcolonial critique of Israel and Zionism, are culpable in the same way: both take an existing European paradigm and apply it to the Jewish case, without so much as a mutatis mutandis. Neither passes muster. Moreover, the omission of what is, for most Jews, the centerpiece of the story behind Zionism and the creation of Israel erases a crucial feature of Jewish historical experience and collective memory. Not only does this erasure vitiate the postcolonial critique, it also feeds the suspicion that many Jews harbor that the critique is malign. It has a familiar ring. They feel, in their guts, that it is another slander against the Jews, a new expression of an old animus—antisemitism by any other name. To put it mildly, this is an exaggeration. The Left, in turn, are skeptical about this reaction. It has a familiar ring. They feel, in their guts, that it is disingenuous, a cynical ploy to suppress criticism of Israel. This too, to put it mildly, is an exaggeration. The more one side reacts to the other side, the more the other side reacts to them. This is not a debate. It is a bout, a wrestling bout, where the two antagonists are locked in a clinch, as inseparable as lovers.
The analysis in this essay suggests that each of the adversaries is in the grip of certain states of mind, connected to particular blind spots. In one case, it is confusion about the meaning of the Question that Europe has persisted in asking about the Jews, plus obliviousness to the injustices done to Palestinians by the Jewish “nation-state.” In the other case, it is confusion over the limits of a postcolonial critique, plus obliviousness to what it is that leads so many Jews to react understandably and, to an extent, legitimately, against that critique. The upshot, on the one side, is demonization of the Left; on the other side, demonization of Zionism. Accordingly, the question each side needs to ask is not “How can I break the hold of the other?,” but “How can I break my hold on the other?” “How,” that is to say, “can I loosen the grip that certain confused ideas and powerful passions have over me?” In short, if a futile bout is to turn into a constructive debate, what is needed is self-critique. This is not asking too much of ourselves. But the task is great, and life is short.
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity(2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
Pope Francis holds a meeting with the Indigenous People’s of Canada on April 1, 2022. Photo used with permission of Vatican Media.
On April 1st, 2022, Pope Francis met with a delegation of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. He publicly apologized, naming “indignation and shame” for the violence and harm done to their peoples, especially in residential schools run by local Catholic parishes and religious orders. This statement came after a long and tenuous struggle within the Canadian Catholic Church and with the Vatican as to how to respond to growing historical awareness of persistent and horrifying abuse of children and the dissolution of families and cultures through the residential school system. “All these things,” lamented Francis, “are contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church, I ask for God’s forgiveness, and I want to say to you with all my heart: I am very sorry.”
Joining with the Canadian Catholic bishops, Pope Francis’s pastoral visit and his unequivocal apology is an important step in the reconciliation process. Apologies matter. In the structure and focus of his April 1st, 2022 statement, he navigates the institutional role of the Church and social sin effectively. In doing so, Pope Francis demonstrates that he understands the importance of memory and a good apology more so than his predecessors. Thinking critically about the apology, I want to briefly put it in context, examine what makes for a good apology (and why it often feels like the Catholic church struggles to make a good apology), and look forward to the pope’s upcoming visit to Canada.
Setting the Stage: A Persistent Call for Apology?
From 1870–1997, more than 150,000 children and young adults went through the Indian residential school system in Canada. This system was part of an official state program, but seventy percent were operated by the Catholic Church or Catholic religious orders. These schools were infamous among Indigenous communities for their intentional suppression of indigenous culture, widespread physical abuse, and neglect. In 2015, the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued a call to action with 94 action items. Item 58 specifically called for an official papal apology delivered in Canada like the one Pope Benedict XVI gave to Irish victims and survivors in 2010.[1] In 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked Pope Francis to visit Canada and to publicly apologize for the Catholic Church’s participation in the violence and abuse that characterized the Indigenous Residential School system.
Responsibility for what happened in the Indian residential school system rests with both the Canadian government and the Catholic Church. There have been many apologies both before and after the call to action from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and individual bishops. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI both made statements of apology and regret for the unjust treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada (and elsewhere). Yet, calls for a more robust apology from the Vatican and even from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops remained. From the perspective of the Indigenous communities, the previous apologies were not sufficient. Benedict XVI’s expression of “great sorrow,” still fell short of an apology and they continued to call for an apology from Rome in Canada, addressing the entire Canadian Catholic Church, not diocese by diocese, religious order by religious order. Additionally, questions remain about access to documents and participation in the financial settlements. Ultimately, the situation became acute once more in October 2021 with the discovery of one mass grave of 215 children at Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
A Good Apology: Recognizing more than Sorrow and Complicity
According to a Catholic peacebuilding framework, a good apology is central for creating justice and healing within a community. On John Paul Lederach’s account, “Acknowledgment is decisive in the reconciliation dynamic. It is one thing to know, it is a very different social phenomenon to acknowledge. Acknowledgment through hearing one another’s stories is the first step towards restoration” (26). In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis echoes this: “we can never move forward without remembering the past, we don’t progress without an honest, unclouded memory” (para. 249).
A good apology is necessary, but it is a practice which the Catholic church as an institution has struggled to carry out. All too often the ecclesial apologies concerning historical violence done to indigenous communities and racialized minorities, or in the case of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, feel inadequate. Most often they express deep sorrow while taking pains to frame transgressions as being carried out by a minority or a few bad individuals who committed a harm. The apologies fall short because they apologize for complicity but not culpability in the horrible violence that has occurred.
All too often the ecclesial apologies concerning historical violence done to indigenous communities and racialized minorities, or in the case of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, feel inadequate.
Complicity acknowledges some involvement, largely centered around an individual failure to stop or correct an injustice. However, while doing so, it lessens the responsibility of those within that larger system which enabled that failure to address injustice. Moral culpability, meanwhile, is about taking actual responsibility for wrongdoing. In common parlance, complicity is passive and culpability is active when it comes to one’s relationship to the harm committed. The good apology must go beyond complicity by recognizing culpability in wrongdoing and harm when one was an active participant. The bad apology, on the other hand, avoids including the speaker in the story either by focusing on their feelings or making the harm about the actions of other outliers.
“We do not usually rush to expose our vulnerability and our sinfulness,” noted Archbishop Desmond Tutu reflecting upon South African’s TRC, “but if the process of forgiveness and healing is to succeed, ultimately acknowledgement by the culprit is indispensable–not completely but nearly so” (270). For the Catholic Church in the Americas, this means a recognition that as an institution we were not just complicit in the oppression of non-European persons in the so-called “New World,” but a powerful participant in shaping, implementing, and reinforcing those systems. This requires a deep and nuanced understanding of social sin and our moral culpability in taking active part in committing harms.
Roman Catholic Indian Residential School Study Time, Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories, Canada.
Pope Francis is not the first pope to apologize for the historical injustices committed on behalf of the Church. Pope John Paul II famously did so on several occasions. Catholic social teaching has also long condemned all forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism. The difference here is that Pope Francis more clearly recognized when the Church was implicated in moral harm and identifies with the victims in doing so. This is deeply present when in Bolivia and in his apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia, he apologized to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, “not only for the offenses of the Church herself, but also for crimes committed against native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.” This is in stark contrast, for example, with the way Pope John Paul II began his 1995 Letter to Women framing the role of the Church in patriarchy and sexism without accepting institutional culpability, “And if objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry.”
In his recent apology, Francis noted, “it is chilling to think of determined efforts to instill a sense of inferiority, to rob people of their cultural identity, to sever their roots, and to consider personal and social effects that this continues to entail: unresolved traumas that have become intergenerational traumas.” One lingering barrier to healing and reconciliation is the unresolved trauma tied to the Catholic Church’s role as arbiter among Catholic nations during the Age of Discovery. In the last decade, I have been part of two very different Catholic listening sessions with Indigenous leaders in the Americas and in both cases, someone called for the pope to publicly rescind the fifteen century papal bulls tied to the doctrine of discovery. Historically, Inter Coetera (1493) was nullified by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and by other papal bulls such as Sublimis Deus (1537) which upheld the dignity and property rights of indigenous peoples encountered by Christians.[2] Technically, Church leaders in the United States, Canada, and from the Holy See are all completely correct that any invocation of these papal bulls or the doctrine of discovery by nations and courts bears no connection to the ecclesial. They are not valid for the Catholic church. Nonetheless, at the 2018 Assembly of First Nations members concluded that these existing repudiations were “not enough.” Practically, the papal bulls, the participation in shaping the “Age of Discovery,” and the legacy thereof remains an unresolved trauma for the indigenous of the Americas.
The difference here is that Pope Francis more clearly recognized when the Church was implicated in moral harm and identifies with the victims when apologizing.
The Catholic church, including the current pope, still struggle with the legacy of Catholic missionaries during and after colonization. The last six papacies have sought to put the Catholic church on a path of evangelization that focuses on engagement, inculturation, and the valuing of freedom of religion and peoples. They all spoke critically of earlier periods of missionary cooperation with conquest and colonialism. Yet, for the reasons identified above the apologies have felt insufficient. There is a deep unease about Pope Francis’s decision to canonize Junipero Serra as someone who “sought to defend dignity of the native community” in 2015 over the vocal objections of indigenous communities because of the way in which Serra intentionally sought to eliminate indigenous customs and culture.
Hope for Dialogue and Friendship: Grappling with the Past to Move Forward
Good apologies are merely a step upon which a path of more fruitful dialogue and friendship can be walked. This is another place where the April 1st apology, building on the statements in Bolivia, in Querida Amazonia, and in Laudato Si’, are instructive. Pope Francis’s engagement with Indigenous peoples and traditions seeks to praise insights from their traditions from which non-Indigenous peoples should learn, especially with respect to protecting non-human creation. This also involves giving specific attention—as both the pope and the Canadian bishops have attempted to do—to ongoing injustices that are often ignored, such as exploitation related to extractive industries and the “inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.”
Pope Francis is scheduled to visit Canada on July 24–29, 2022. Papal visits are a unique time of excitement. They energize the local church and have a deep symbolic power unlike much else. Take, for example, Pope Francis’s decision to personally open the Holy Door at Bangui’s Cathedral in anticipation of beginning the year of mercy on November 29th, 2015. Opening the holy door to usher in a year of mercy in the Central African Republic revealed a broader and more inclusive vision of mercy focused on those at the margins. There is much anticipation and anxiety over how Pope Francis will address the legacy of harm done by Catholics and the Church itself to the First Nations peoples of Canada (and to the Native Americans in the United States). The pope himself describes the trip as “a penitential pilgrimage, which I hope, with God’s grace, will contribute to the journey of healing and reconciliation already undertaken.”He understands the importance of a good apology and the deep pastoral recognition that we “have to learn how to cultivate a penitential memory, one that can accept the past” in order to move forward in dialogue and friendship (para. 226).
[1] Item 58 is one of two specifically relating to the Catholic Church. The other, item 48, called upon the Catholic Church and other churches to “publicly adopt and comply” with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples. This is something the Holy See was already a party to at the United Nations, and on which the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops similarly made a public statement of support as part of their responses to the Call to Action.
Meghan J. Clark is Associate Professor of Moral Theology in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, St. John’s University in New York. She earned her Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College. Her research focuses on Catholic social thought, global development, human rights, peace, and justice. She is author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights (Fortress Press, 2014). In 2015, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Hekima University College, Nairobi, Kenya. In 2018, she was a Visiting Residential Research Fellow at the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham, UK. In 2017-2018, she was awarded a Vincentian Studies Grant to conduct fieldwork research with the Daughters of Charity in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. From 2010-2013, she served as a Consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Domestic Justice. Her research has been published in Theolgoical Studies, Journal of Catholic Social Thought, Journal of Moral Theology, Heythrop Journal, among others.
Orthodox priests saying offices during the Euromaidan protests, Jan 21, 2014. Image via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
Western interpretations on the war in Ukraine commonly ignore the importance of both nationalism and religion, even though such elements are arguably essential for understanding the sources of democratic resistance in Ukraine, the motivations behind Russian aggression, and the complex futures that confront the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. The following post critiques one example of western liberal reportage and offers an alternative reading that takes nationalism and religion seriously in the interpretive process.
The War in Ukraine: Beyond Western Framing
In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a campaign begun in 2014 and escalated with criminal brutality on February 24, 2022, many in the west began thinking about the political and social makeup of the Ukrainian nation for the first time. For millions, the New York Times’ flagship podcast The Daily became a place to hear expert analysis and reportage on the war in Ukraine interwoven with explanations of history and place in ways that are brief, digestible, and accessible. For instance, the episode of February 15—‘How Ukrainians View This Perilous Moment’—arranged a suite of powerful personal stories told from the capital Kyiv and several regional contexts into a narrative challenging President Putin’s assumptions about Ukrainian submission to the looming Russian takeover. How insightful such a report proved to be: since the 2022 invasion, the refrain Slava Ukraini (“Glory to Ukraine”) has evoked images of defiance in the face of tyranny, national sacrifice in the struggle against oppression, and of hope and despair on the outer edges of catastrophe.
The magnitude of western solidarity with Ukraine, both its military and humanitarian expressions, can arguably be explained by both the moral gravity and existential proximity of the conflict. These factors are embodied in how civilians have become collateral victims and strategic targets of Russian aggression. Of equal significance, I suggest, is the translatability of the Ukrainian resistance into the idioms of western liberalism. In particular, the discursive superstructure of “democracy versus autocracy” situates the war in Ukraine in a Manichean world that pits the struggle for freedom against the demagogic intentions of a tyrant. The name of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has become universally associated with democratic liberty, much as the names of others before him in different times and contexts. Such inspiring dynamics of solidarity-making are clearly welcome, especially as a sustained humanitarian response by the west toward millions of Ukrainian refugees will no doubt be required.
Yet we are also provoked to ask what may be lost in translating the Ukrainian resistance through the discursive filter of “democracy versus autocracy,” and why this might impact the nature of our solidarity as well as long-term prospects for peace. How might the fight be reimagined beyond westernism and western interests? And how might this reimagining thicken our understanding of democracy and the resources that inform it? I return my thoughts to The Daily, the globally popular investigative podcast that also offers a portal into the liberal worldview, and arguably the best version of it. As its millions of followers would attest, The Daily is nothing if not highly scripted, tightly produced around dramatic pauses, metered interjections, the juxtaposition of serious content with tip-toe curiosity sound bites, evocative theme music, and the communication of mature and insightful analysis in tension with a kind of “explainer baby talk” where the listener is simultaneously informed and infantilized. The movement between these experiences, I suggest, mirrors liberalism itself, notably its nimble capacity to simplify collective phenomena for individual consumption via a reductively thin rendering of social space. In this context, what is left out of a story becomes as important as what is put in.
The Heavenly Hundred: Religion, the Sacred, and National Belonging
Street Memorial to the Heavenly Hundred Victims, 2018. Image via Flickr user Adam Jones (CC BY 2.0)
The initial encounter in the podcast episode on February 15, 2022 illustrates this dynamic. The report first visits a memorial site in Kyiv dedicated to the 100-plus people who are remembered as the Heavenly Hundred. They were killed in a popular uprising, known as both the Maidan Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, that began in late-2013 against the Russian controlled government of Ukraine. Describing the site as “this black steel and granite monument with these kind of spectral faces taken from real life photos of individuals,” the Daily report accurately depicts the memorial as dedicated to a tipping-point event in the modern history of the Ukrainian nation, whose victims are lauded as heroes for the principles of democracy, human rights and freedoms. The podcast narrative twice emphasises the fallen as “individuals” who, collectively, “through the force of numbers, through the force of their own will,” overthrew the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Adding to the narrative is an encounter with “two elderly women there in headscarves, cleaning up the site.” As a final comment, the reporter conveys an explanation from one of the women about her actions. He says: “Every time one of the individuals who died during the uprising in 2014 has a birthday, she hangs their photos on a little holder here and rings a bell.”
End of scene.
The underlying emphasis of this brief account is one of civic defiance, of spontaneous ritualized choices by individual citizens, also depicted later in the report as “college students and history professors” joining volunteer brigades to fight the Russian incursion into Eastern Ukraine. Few would doubt the inspiration of such citizen courage, but as an educative process about the dynamics of resistance in Ukraine—of helping listeners to enter into a social and political space very different from their own; to understand, as the episode’s title suggests, “how Ukrainians view this perilous moment”—the Daily’s account at the memorial of the Heavenly Hundred is deficient in important ways. Such a criticism might seem unfair given the need to produce a fast-moving podcast, were it not that the missing elements in the story are also absent from all Daily reportage to date (again: what is left out is as instructive as what is put in). The elements to which I refer are those of religion and nationalism as formative resources of communal and institutional resistance to Russian aggression. Not coincidentally, I suggest, dynamics such as these also disrupt the ideological scripts of western liberalism.
The Daily scene at the memorial of the Heavenly Hundred begins near what the reporter describes as a “small wooden chapel.” Such a detail provokes us to interrogate the religious aspects of the site, whether they are a central or ancillary dimension, and whether they are an original or a later addition to the lived practices of remembrance that occur there. In an essay titled “Commemoration and the New Frontiers of War in Ukraine,” Catherine Wanner offers an incisive answer:
A popular outpouring of grief over the deaths of protesters in February 2014 resulted in individuals creating vernacular memorial shrines, sometimes in the form of graves, to honor those killed … From the beginning, a prominent religious idiom was incorporated into commemorations, as it was in the protests themselves. Candles, icons, and prayer beads, which evoke the veneration of saints, are among the other objects with clear religious meaning that are placed near the shrines (334, italics added).
In 2014 I was invited to write about the place of religion in the Maidan Revolution, and was immediately confronted by how to interpret powerful images of Orthodox priests placing themselves at the deadly center of the protests, actions that added a more traditionally sacral dimension to the events that preceded the vernacular rituals of the post-revolution memorials. Functioning as a corrective to my initial interpretation that religion was indeed ancillary to the struggles for economic and democratic autonomy—and that these priests had less agency, for instance, than in the earlier anti-Communist struggles in Poland—Wanner attributes religion with both a primary and ongoing role in revolutionary sentiment. For instance,
It has become a tradition for volunteers, soldiers, and others actively engaged in the war effort to come to the Maidan to light a candle near the portraits as a form of ‘blessing’ before they head to the front. In 2017 the exterior wall of St. Michael’s Monastery in downtown Kyiv, wherethe protesters notably took refuge during the Maidan protests, became the site of a ‘Wall of Remembrance for those Fallen for Ukraine.’ The notable presence of clergy during the protests gave way to a rapid expansion of the number of military chaplains who accompanied soldiers to the east (Wanner 334).
The Australian Stefan Romaniw, the first vice president of the Ukrainian World Congress and a participant in the Revolution of Dignity, recalls the coexistence of ecclesiastical leadership alongside grassroots activism at work in Maidan:
I recall the street rallies—many hundreds of thousands of people started at Taras Shevchenko National University and marched to Maidan. I remember Patriarch Lubomyr Husar [Patriarch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church] in an open vehicle speaking to the crowd … Over the course of the revolution, politicians took to the stage, but slowly realized this was a civil revolution—a people’s movement. Civil society took charge.
For scholars seeking to reinstate religious actors, interests, and practices within the political landscape, the reframing of the Revolution of Dignity through the lens of both vernacular and formal religious expressions would constitute an important finding. Such a reframing, to be sure, represents an advance in applying religious literacy to the Ukrainian struggle because we perceive something thicker and more culturally embedded in the modes of Ukrainian dissent. Specifically, many participants in both the 2014 revolution and the anti-Russian resistance today are buoyed by a sacredness beyond the temporal order just as much as they are motivated to uphold democratic sovereignty within it—and much less by the autonomous citizen-self as the sole occupant and hero of thinner liberal narratives.
Yet the fusion of religion and national resistance could also be a legitimate cause for concern when applying perspectives more aligned with critical disciplines, such as the contribution of Diane Moore, which require religious literacy to include “an analysis of power and powerlessness” and ask, “Which perspectives are politically and socially prominent and why?” (384). Whatever roles history professors might have played, we do know for certain that the Maidan revolution was comprised of a variety of actors with a variety of interests, “from the liberal intelligentsia to hardcore nationalists.” The specter of a religious nationalism with strong affinities toward national chauvinism, therefore, creates interpretive dilemmas for understanding how some Ukrainians do indeed view this perilous moment. As Wanner observes,
Religious institutions have tremendous political valence because of their ability to create and morally legitimate new cultural boundaries and the often unsavory emotions that lead to delineations of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ … Many supporters of the Maidan validate religiosity as a fundamental component of Ukrainian nationality (334).
So we must ask, “nationality for whom”? Might religio-nationalist resolve not only galvanize resistance but also unlock historic legacies of social hostility toward religious minorities in Ukraine, including an increasing number holding to no religion? Critical approaches face a dilemma here: the recognition that religion has always been involved in the world of power has caused many to erase it as the mere epiphenomena of hegemonic structural interests, an inverted form of the modern liberal containment of religion as the mere expression of individualized ethics. In a departure from both approaches, and in solidarity with a scholarly tradition that wants to ask critical questions in-and-through religious beliefs, practices, and belongings, in what follows I suggest the legacies of religion in the war in Ukraine offer frameworks for understanding the broader constitutive forces of nationhood beyond western assumptions and a political hermeneutic guided by the frame of autocracy-democracy.
Religion in the Russian State and the Ukrainian Nation
It is important to briefly declare some of my assumptions and show how they apply to the context of the war. I understand the state to be a bureaucratic entity, and as a researcher more aligned to ethno-symbolic theories of nationalism, I part ways with modernist scholars of both a cosmopolitan and critical persuasion who assume that it is the state that creates the nation.1 While acknowledging the salient insights of a modernist like Siniša Malešević that states can powerfully mobilize nationalist sentiment via institutions, ideology, and networks of micro-solidarity, I also hold Benedict Anderson’s popular modernist idea of the nation as an “imagined community” to be far too anemic. To echo the writings of Anthony Smith, nations are not only imagined, they are willed, felt, remembered, and repurposed, and the deep cultural reservoirs from which such actions are often drawn predate the modern state and in some instances give rise to it.
While states differ in polity and efficiency (for instance, often less totalized and more random [or aleatory] in their actions toward the vulnerable), the long held axiom of critical theory that states “see” a certain way remains important. In classical terms, the state is more of a Parmenidean entity—defined by unity, where all movement ultimately must serve the One. The state can assert religion as an archetype, as a “first form” indispensable to the reinforcement of a patriotic standard (or canon) and the upholding of sovereignty. The principal example of religion as archetype in the context of the war in Ukraine is the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and its relationship with the Russian state. In an important essay, Shakhanova and Kratochvíl examine the “patriotic turn” of the ROC via the discursive movements of nomination (naming key actors and concepts), predication (assigning value to actors and actions against a patriotic standard), and argumentation (the construction of a persuasive narrative), leading to the creation of key rhetorical topoi that are employed in the discourses of Russian education and politics. In education, the “topos of indispensability whereby (the Church as the only one who can protect Russia from moral decadence)” develops into a “topos of superiority (Orthodox patriotism is superior to all other kinds).” In politics, the “topos of moral supremacy (the Church’s moral tutelage of the state)” develops into the “topos of power struggle (Orthodox Christians have to be influential in politics)” (120). Religion as archetype is also seen in the authors’ appeal to a 2014 study by M. D. Suslov on the creation of the idea of “Holy Rus.” Here, the archetypal first form is violently imposed upon a geopolitical space, as forecast in President Putin’s now infamous essay of July 12, 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
In contrast to the state, while different nations can be understood against common sets of ideals and concepts, the processes of their formation are both varied and dynamic. Thus, the nation is more of a Heraclitan entity—defined by movement and the possibility that the flows of history will yield new iterations at once recognizable and reconfigured. If the state can assert religion as a singular archetype, the nation can enable religion more as an ideal-type, that is, as a resource that can support multiple political forms. In the context of the war in Ukraine, religious traditions, practices, and interests have an ambivalent quality and can thus contribute to civil and political cultures of both inclusion and exclusion. Regarding inclusion, that President Zelensky is Jewish in a context shaped by histories not only of social hostility toward Jews but also their elimination as a people, becomes a powerful embodiment of democratic pluralism and the role that religious diversity plays to strengthen Ukrainian nationhood. The same can be said of the public unity in support of the Ukrainian resistance by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders on March 21, 2022 in the ancient port city of Odesa.
Religion as archetype has been stridently challenged within the majority religious tradition of Christian Orthodoxy in the region. One such example can be found in the ideational texture of the recent statement, A Declaration on The “Russian World” (Russkii Mir) Teaching, by an international network of Orthodox scholars, clergy and lay people against the Russian ideology. First, the primary appeal is to interpretive practices of the Orthodox faith, notably the ethics that stem from situated readings of sacred text. Second, the affirmation of human equality (i.e. beyond confessional and partisan boundaries) is framed as a prophetic challenge to “all forms of government that deify the state.” Third, that a turning away (a metanoia) from the current conflict is also seen as a turning toward “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” The sentiments of the Declaration were also echoed in the Statement of Solidarity against Christian Nationalism signed by an international coalition of scholars instigated by a conference at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. The Tabletreports a detail from the conference that is relevant to the notion of religion as ideal-type:
At a public lecture during the conference, Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun encouraged Orthodox theologians to “weaken symphonia with the state, and strengthen symphonia with civil society.” The Ukrainian priest and academic used the metaphor of “symphonia” or musical unison to describe Orthodoxy’s relationship with the polity.
Religion understood as a set of both distinct yet malleable communal practices and a metaphor for civic unity encapsulates well the potential of religions as ideal-types in the service of the common good, the challenge to hegemonic injustice, and the building of nations.
Of course, symphonia also possesses an ambivalent quality. As William Schweiker has recently noted, in the case of the alliance between Putin and the ROC symphonia has led to belligerence over civility, thereby highlighting the importance of situating symphonia within the ideal-type of the nation rather than the archetype of a religio-state. Such a rejection would also restore transnational Orthodox unity. Notably, in a recent interview Fr. Cyril Hovorun appeals to Orthodox tradition for support of this idea:
To restore such a unity, in my opinion, the Orthodox churches must condemn the ideology of the Russian world. Such a condemnation would be an update of the famous condemnation of “phyletism” (nationalism applied to ecclesiastical affairs) at the Council of Constantinople in 1872.
Latent within Hovorun’s appeal for a symphonia with civil society is a traditional rejection of the archetype of the religio-state in favor of a preferential option for the plural nation.
“Glory to Ukraine”: Religion and the Sacred Nation
In the case of Russia’s war on Ukraine, we are arguably presented with a geopolitical adaptation of R. Scott Appleby’s prismatic and enduring concept of the “ambivalence of the sacred”: on the one side, “Holy Russia” founded on the archetype of a singular religio-political ontology; on the other, the Ukrainian nation in a resistance struggle understood by its citizens to be contextually and metaphorically “sacred.” The national exaltation of the Heavenly Hundred memorializes the Revolution of Dignity by infusing this sacredness throughout institutional and popular forms of Ukrainian resistance: the advocacy of traditional hierarchs—religious and civic—on behalf of an oppressed and endangered nation; and the accountability of those same hierarchs to the standards of sacred justice believed in traditional and vernacular ways by a citizen community. For the Ukrainian nation, therefore, the bifurcated discourse of “autocracy vs democracy” does not do justice to all that is at play in the circumstances of this terrible moment, nor to the multilayered and situated meanings of the refrain “Glory to Ukraine.”
The dynamics of religion and nationalism are inextricably entangled in the scenarios that will unfold in the coming months and years, not only for Ukrainians but also for Russians. To not acknowledge those dynamics presents a serious deficiency in our understanding and our solidarity. When an elderly woman, whose history is intimately bound up in the story of both peoples, rings a bell at a grave of the fallen, it is unlikely that she intends to channel the powers of western liberal individualism to her cause; it is instead more reasonable to assume that she is releasing a sound that reverberates through spaces that are as primordial as they are modern, linked to communities of both the present and the past, and ritualized in the hope that the sustaining presences of a sacred social order will one day give rise to a renewed and better life for her people.
Slava Ukraini.
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1 For example, I have employed ethno-symbolic theory to argue that the constitutive dimensions of nationalism can be employed to counter the forces of national populism. See John A. Rees, “Religion, populism, and the dynamics of nationalism,” Religion, State and Society, 49, no. 3 (2021): 195–210. For a recent use of Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach in the study of religion and nationalism, see Gurharpal Singh and Giorgio Shani, Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Minority to an Ethno-Religious Diaspora (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
John A. Rees, PhD. is Professor of Politics and International Relations at The University of Notre Dame Australia, where he co-convenes the Religion and Global Ethics program at the Institute for Ethics and Society. Dr. Rees was the 2022 Milward L. Simpson Visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Wyoming (January-May). This article is based on a public talk cohosted by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, delivered at the University of Notre Dame on April 28, 2022.
Image of various archival materials discussed by Moore in Kindred Spirits. Image courtesy of the author with permission.
Thank you so much to my three generous colleagues, Kathleen Holscher, Niloofar Haeri, and Scott Appleby for their smart and thoughtful readings of my work, and to Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo for creating this space for a conversation about Kindred Spirits. It is an honor to see how the book has stretched to speak to scholars working in fields adjacent to my own, and engaging with them is a welcome chance to think more explicitly about shared themes in our field—modernity, colonialism, and spirituality—that may have been undertheorized in the book. All of the thinkers have asked me to be a bit more explicit in my conceptual thinking. I’ll take this as an opportunity to deepen and clarify, and this is a most generous and welcome gift.
To begin with Scott Appleby’s essay, I must say that while reading it, I was seized with sudden flashbacks to my earliest semester teaching undergraduates fourteen years ago, when I would painstakingly try and define modernity for my students. I used Gustsavo Benievides’s Critical Terms essay, and would re-trace, whiteboard marker in my trembling hand, the various meanings of the Latin term modernus, and how it changed over time. More than a decade later now, I am in total agreement with Appleby that those debates seem to have fizzled out; I now rarely engage discussions about what we mean when we say “modernity.” Nonetheless I do appreciate Appleby’s point that I sometimes evoke the term more confusingly than maybe I should, sometimes descriptively, other times with a critical edge.
Grateful for the chance to clarify, I would say that my research relied on scholars of race and transatlantic modernity like Paul Gilroy to make an empirical point about the world that formed the protagonists of Kindred Spirits. Like those Gilroy writes about, some of the writers, poets, and activists in my book also experienced forced exile, fled violence, and lived rootless, vulnerable lives. This form of existence made friendship such an important anchor. This rootlessless also was something that writers like Claude McKay and Gabriela Mistral evoked in the art that give their works a wide, eclectic appeal and reach. This is a descriptive way of thinking about modernity: the global circuits carved from the violence of modernity—enslavement, wars, genocide—and the internationalist, eclectic art that came out of those same circuits. But the critical edge Appleby points to evokes the idea of the modern differently. One example here is where I suggest that male friendship offers an alternative to the dominant modes of male subjectivity that the modern world has on offer (think of the controlled, tough, independent “bottled up version of masculinity”). I do think that modernity is a swirl of cultures, fantasies, hopes, and imaginations, but in the west, despite this empirical mix, there are dominate cultural ideals that define what it means to be modern. I would say that one of these is that men should be emotionally restrained, untethered, and unencumbered. This suspicion of male intimacy was also central to colonial ideologies. Fantasies of male intimacy and sexuality in colonial countries were recoded as sexual sin, in need of Christian intervention and restraint. Or, as Marie Griffith and others have shown, these fantasies became the grounds of elaborate romanticization of sexual freedoms unburdened by western religious constraints. In either case, the Christian west was seen to be the space where men lived lives of independence and restraint when it came to intimacy. Though living in Europe and the United States and Christian, the men I describe in Kindred Spirits lived lives in radical disjunction to that dominant norm. And much of the ideas for this alternative did come from medieval monks (whose affective lives were more “uncorked,” to use Appleby’s words). Marie Magdeleine Davy wrote on the elaborate love expressed among Cistercian monks and Brian Patrick Maguire has written beautifully on medieval male friendship. These were models of alternative ways to embody masculinity taken up by people like Jacques Maritain and Louis Massignon. The affective, even queer way Maritain and Massignon carried themselves is “modern” in a sense because modernity creates space for the perpetuation of hegemonic norms as well as their subversion. I hope this clarifies the point I was trying to make in the book.
I will add here that when Appleby writes that I exhibited a “reluctance to stand back from the reporting of . . . richly detailed research” in some places, I felt he was peering into my soul a bit! The archival sources I used were so vast, so personal, so difficult to excavate, and the authors themselves were so prolific that it sometimes overwhelmed me. I feared I would never get out from under the sources. It is refreshing to now truly step back and bring these larger conceptual points into focus.
I do, however, depart from the conclusion that the “collective agency” of the men and women in my book “did not amount to much,” especially compared to “champions of the ressourcement such as Henri de Lubac and Marie-Dominique Chenu” and those like “Jacques Maritain….who interacted consistently with the Vatican.” I would emphasize here that the world I describe in Kindred Spirits includes Maritain and de Lubac, but by centering those more on the margins (like Davy, Massignon, McKay, Mistral) I move away from centers of Catholic power. White male priests like de Lubac or those White men loved by priests like Maritain were always invited into the halls of power. They looked like that power, and places like the Vatican and Notre Dame recognized them, applauded them, and welcomed them. Black writers like Claude McKay or the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral were illegible to the people in those places and operated in another sphere. As artists, McKay and Mistral worked at the level of imagination untethered to the levers of power in the 20th century. It is thus much harder to track what impact artists had on the cultural imagination than those invited to Geneva or Rome. But I would be reluctant to say they had no impact: McKay offered up in his poetry a completely new vision of what Black resistance could look like, and he is still read today. Mistral won the Nobel Prize for literature. Louis Massignon completely transformed the study of Islam for Catholics and inspired many of the Dominicans who remain prominent and influential scholars of Islam today. But this is a different kind of power. One of their impacts was in dispersing Catholic spirituality to places beyond the reach of the Vatican.
And I am so grateful to Katie Holscher who raises the important issue of coloniality and friendship, especially in U.S. contexts. I had a long section on the language of friendship in relationship to colonialism, associations exactly like those Holscher describes as the “Friends of the Indians” that “worked to dispossess Native peoples.” But this ended up being too far afield from the figures in my book. Still, I don’t want to let the figures in the book off the hook too easily. I especially related to Holscher’s evocations of Catholic confraternities that prayed for the living and the dead, a mix of spiritual and social bonds, in the language of love. Despite the softness of the language and the depth of the mysticism and the fact that it was Catholicism in a secular-Protestant country like the United States, the Catholic mystical imagination in communities like Friends of the Indian still worked to further colonial dynamics. She is exactly right on this point. Although the figures in my book tended to be critical of state power, there is a range in their approaches to this issue. Early in his career, for instance, Louis Massignon’s efforts at friendship with Muslims entailed a mix of prayer and pressure for conversion and we can see the colonial dynamics at work in the way Holscher describes. The most tragic figure in my book is that of the young Muslim scholar Muhammad abd Jalil, who converted to Islam under Massignon’s friendship and care, and was more or less disowned by his parents. Jalil spent time in a mental institution and had a very difficult life. Massignon’s ideas evolved over time, but the issue of friendship as a language that can soften the sound of colonialism is part of the story indeed. As I was writing, I had to remind myself that friendship is much like any other basic human endeavor: eating, walking, play, childbirth, swimming, loving, talking, fighting – something so basic and universal that it can be invested with an almost infinite range of meanings. But a story of the spirituality and politics of Catholic friendship with ties to Paris is one that should never exclude the ways in which this world has been entangled with colonialism. I appreciate this point and could have done more to stretch this. I imagine the possibility of a rich and needed volume on friendship in modern religion, where one would see friendship’s range across geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts. When taken together, we could see what theoretical insights we could glean from a wide ranging set of data that reveals different stories friendship, spirituality, colonialism, and decolonialism in the modern world. This is so important with words like friendship, words that are warm, spiritual, and seemingly harmless. It is important to not simply show that there is always hegemony lurking there, but to open it up, explore it empirically, and be able to stretch our understanding of this important mode of human experience.
Shifting more from the political realm of structures and back into the inner domain, in terms of academic specialty, the scholarship of Niloofar Haeri, an anthropologist of Islam, is furthest from my own. It means a great deal that she connected to Kindred Spirits, and her own scholarship on friendship, kinship, prayer, and poetry has been an important influence on my thinking. Her essay here reminds me why. The language she uses keeps us tethered to the spiritual and the interior, even if it is always, in her hands, entangled with the external realms of language, culture, and embodiment. But nonetheless it has its own kind of integrity. She describes my work on friendship in this way: “There were beloved saints and some contemporaries whose being seemed to emanate a certain blessedness (very similar to the concept of those who are seen to have baraka in Muslim communities). That members of this group saw sacredness as not limited to the divine and to saints and prophets is one of the most interesting discussions in the book.” Reading Haeri I am forced to confront my own habits. For example, I often emphasize the political nature of experiments and efforts of the friendship networks I describe. But for them, it was how friends embodied some part of the supernatural that was most fundamental. The beautiful phrase “to emanate a certain blessedness” (baraka) inspires in me a desire to learn more about the idea in Muslim communities.
Thank you again so much to Katie, Scott, and Niloofar for these incredibly helpful readings that pushed me at last to stand back and clarify my conceptual thinking. I find myself now looking to future projects as a chance to be more explicit in my analysis of how experiments in Catholic spirituality worked to advance or undermine the French colonial project – I was too subtle on that point and need to tackle it more directly. I am also reminded too of the need for further elaboration of second, rather distinctive impulse to consider the experiential aspects of religion, the piety and devotion that requires a somewhat different set of analytic tools. In future projects I hope to go further with both of those rather distinct set of questions, both of which I find fascinating and can tackle more explicitly head on. Thank you again to my generous readers and colleagues.
Brenna Moore is Professor of Theology at Fordham University. She works in the area of modern Christianity, with a focus on Catholic intellectual and cultural history in Europe. Dr. Moore’s teaching and research centers on mysticism and religious experience, gender, a movement in theology known as “ressourcement,” (“turn to the sources”) that paved the way for Vatican II, and the place of religious difference in modern Christian thought. She is most recently the author of Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism(University of Chicago Press, 2021). This project explores a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Modernity, it would seem, makes little room for friendship. Its economic logic, which often goes by the moniker neoliberalism, seeks to isolate us as individuals from the wider communal contexts in which we live. The Protestant reformation, as some scholars have contended, played no small part in ushering in modernity’s mechanistic and individualistic ethos and the economic system that accompanied it. The result of this process has been to reduce human beings down to their component parts so that we might be more active consumers and more disciplined workers. In the early part of the twentieth century, this reduction birthed totalitarian and liberal modes of governance alike.
It is this story of modernity and its logics that the figures examined in Brenna Moore’s Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modernity seek to push back against. Whether in the close circle of friends formed between Gabriela Mistral and Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, or in the spiritual connection formed between Marie-Magdeleine Davy and Simone Weil, these charismatic and avant garde figures drew on Catholic theologies and cultures that stood against the totalitarian worldview that had come to shape many nations in Europe. Without ignoring the role that Catholicism played historically in the colonization of the world and in promoting fascist politics, Moore shows how these thinkers developed an alternative Catholic modernity to the modern world order. With regard to the latter, Claude McKay, another figure that Moore examines, analyzes the links between racism, Protestantism, secularism, and colonialism in the US. In Catholicism, he saw a spiritual alternative to the dry, Protestant, and racist culture of the U.S. While perhaps naive in his embrace of Catholicism as anti-racist and anti-colonial, his critique nonetheless opened up space for being-with-others that pushed back against the dominant trends of his day. McKay, and the other names mentioned above, are only some of those that appear in Moore’s deeply researched and profound book.
The interlocutors invited to participate in this symposium—Niloofar Haeri, Kathleen Holscher, and Scott Appleby—all bring to bear different disciplinary, tradition-based, and geographical expertise on Moore’s book. The result is a symposium that resembles the form of the book itself. By bringing Moore’s insights to their work, these contributors open up space for thought that break through the modern boundaries of nation, discipline, and thought.
In her response, Niloofar Haeri weaves in her own ethnographic research on women’s prayer in Tehran, Iran, with reflections on the contributions Moore’s book makes to our understanding of religion and modernity. She notes that one of the many lessons of Moore’s book is that doctrine is rarely what attracts people to a religion. Rather, it is more often how a religion speaks to the political and social moment in which people find themselves that brings them to it.
Kathleen Holscher, meanwhile, brings Moore’s account of friendship into her own work on the role of friendship in relations between Catholics and Native peoples in the context of the US settler colonial project. By looking at two examples, one from a Protestant religious organization and one from a Catholic organization, she draws out the differing dynamics of friendships in the traditions as they were practiced at the time—the Protestant idea of friendship in service of the nation-state and the Catholic idea in service of more supernatural ends. While Catholics recognized their responsibility towards the plight of the Native peoples—and ultimately a kind of friendship with them that extended beyond the state—Holscher argues that they nonetheless participated in settler colonial practices that deprived Native peoples of their land and religious practices. Holscher asks us to consider, then, the challenging, and sometimes contradictory, dynamics of friendship among these communities, and others.
Scott Appleby, finally, closely analyzes three key questions that are already marked in the title of the book: (1) What do we mean by modernity? (2) What is the relationship between friendship and political activism? (3) What is modern about modern Catholicism? Appleby contends that there is some terminological instability throughout the text, but that this terminological instability perhaps reflects the shifting grounds of the tradition itself as it has found its way into modernity.
In her response, Moore responds to each of these interlocutors, reflecting in particular on the conceptualization of modernity in Appleby’s essay, the intertwining of her subjects with colonial dynamics in Holscher’s response, and the integrity of the inner spiritual experiences of those she writes about in Haeri’s post. She also looks forward to how the contributors’ responses will impact her future work.
As Appleby notes in his essay, Moore’s book “advances Contending Modernities’ exploration of how ‘identity’ is constructed, contested, policed, and transformed under the shifting conditions of what we loosely refer to as ‘modernity.’” Here, I would add that the contributors, in each of their responses, also further that end by engaging Moore’s insights and taking them beyond the borders of the book and into their own research projects.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Poster for a presentation titled “Who was Frantz Fanon.” London, May 2017. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Religion remains an underattended area in contemporary study of Frantz Fanon. This is likely due to the misunderstanding informed by the normative secularistepistemic framework that dictates conversations in humanities and social sciences. The prevailing misunderstanding or bias that pits religion against decoloniality often fails to recognize the ideological (that is, colonial) baggage of the secular and its episteme. The rather simplistic, yet widely held view on Fanon’s relationship with religion, overlooks the numerous nuanced references to religion that he makes. In short, Fanon’s relationship with religion is far more complex and complicated. He constantly appeals to religion even as he deliberately turns away from it. The various streams of decolonial struggles he sets his feet in—be that a political movement or an intellectual tradition—are already entangled in a dynamic and complex interaction with religion. Both his critique of the pernicious presence of religion in social-political life and his gesture to repurpose it (as a vessel to resignify Blackness) remain understudied in contemporary Fanonian scholarship.
Beyond the Western-Secularist Framework
Fanon’s work reveals an ambiguous view of religion overall. He seems mostly critical of the role religion plays within the colonial order and often expresses strong repugnance against indigenous religions, identifying them with myth, superstition, and magic. At the same time, Fanon acknowledges religion’s place in culture as a vital ingredient that fosters national identity. As Federico Settler observes, Fanon “recognized the significance of the sacred in cohering social collectivities and in the recovery of the black self” (5). In “Daily Life in the Douars,” Fanon offers a comprehensive report on the general socio-cultural constitution of the Muslim community bound by a unifying religious identity. Here he gives one of his most sympathetic accounts of religion, sketching out the constructive function that religion plays by providing the foundation for community, security, and order (379–81). The ambivalent understanding of religion that fluctuates between two contrasting views reflects perhaps his own ongoing personal anxiety about the subject, an anxiety that often overwhelms the man who inhabits the crossroad of conflicting desires. This is a man who is constantly negotiating the negative colonial affects of denial, refusal, shame, and the desire to restore to wholeness a self split between the two radically contrasting worlds. He was at times critical of the problematic association of native religions with irrationality made by western critics even as he simultaneously reproduced the same questionable associations himself. We can see this in his different treatments of institutional religions (such as Catholicism and Islam) and indigenous religions. The latter is often an object of shame and abhorrence for Fanon. Fanon’s treatment of Islam was different from Christianity as Islam played a significant role in the Algerian revolution. He acknowledged Islam’s contribution to revolution despite his lack of a deep understanding of Islam and the full extent of its connection to the revolution. His limited understanding of the intricate interaction between religion and culture, particularly of Islam, partly overshadows his views. He did not fully understand the degree to which the tradition of anticolonial struggle in modern history of Algeria was deeply Islamic in nature. Fanon praised the self-organization of Algerian peasants in their involvement in the anti-colonial resistance but failed to understand that the origin of these movements was Islam. Fouzi Slisli unpacks the numerous cultural and historical references that Fanon makes to Algeria without acknowledging their connection to Islam.[1] Slisli wonders, “Was he ignorant of this Islamic tradition or did he choose to ignore it?” (97). Whatever the case may be, Fanon’s harsh stance towards Christianity and African (and Afro-diasporic) indigenous religions did not extend to Islam. Still his otherwise ambivalent attitude towards religion also informed his characterization of some Islamic practices. For example, he refers to the mystical Islamic worship of holy men in Algeria as maraboutism and lists it among the list of “old superstitions,” alongside witchcraft and djinn (Arabic spirits).
Fanon’s critique of the pernicious presence of religion in social-political life and his gesture to repurpose it (as a vessel to resignify Blackness) remain understudied in contemporary Fanonian scholarship.
Such a view of religion is not surprising when considering Fanon’s professionalization in western medical practice. A great part of Fanon’s deep immersion in the worldview of North African Muslims came through his clinical observation and study as a psychiatrist. During his time at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria, he treated a large group of Muslim patients. There he observed that many of his clinical tools (which came from western science) did not work efficiently on his Muslim male patients. The main reason for this discrepancy was cultural difference. The local population adhered to a completely different worldview informed by religion, which made the seamless application of western methods difficult. A dismaying aspect for him as a clinical practitioner was how often the patients’ religion-based worldview conflicted with the scientific method of the psychiatric approach. The traditional worldview grounded in religion did not help with the procedures as there was a widespread tendency among locals to attribute mental illness to a spiritual problem. Yet Fanon does not let go of his ambivalent position towards religion. Even in his characterization of Islam as rather primitive and traditional, he would not set a strict binary of values that stigmatized Islam in its entirety while uplifting the secular worldview. Discussing the traditional tribal structure of the local Muslim society, Fanon describes the transformation of land ownership implemented by the French. The process of land (wealth) redistribution aggravated the economic condition of the poor. Prior to the privatization of property, there were poor people, but not proletarians. What Fanon implies is that even when certain western innovations reflect advanced (and potentially beneficial) technology, not all such customs and implementations signify a true sense of progress.
Fanon’s views were influenced by western-secularist categories that informed modern science and academic conversations. He insinuates the link between the secular and the colonial ideology of the west, yet he often employed the dominant secularist definition of religion.[2] It is far from difficult to identify the same oversight we find in Fanon across numerous examples in contemporary conversations in critical theory. Many interlocutors in contemporary decolonial theory are critical of the secularist discourse, yet they often overlook the secularist categories that reduce religion to a narrow notion. The compound interaction between religion and power is eclipsed by the reductive concept of religion in their works. For instance, the critical study of the formation of race and (de)coloniality in the Americas is often overshadowed by the erasure of religion, an important constitutive element of (de)coloniality. The secularist epistemic framework at play here consigns knowledge and knowledge production to particular forms and locations. Like the normative ideal of the human (Man), this unmarked normative epistemic framework universalizes a particular mode of knowing as the sole arbiter of knowledge. Forms of knowing that emerge from non-western locales are measured and classified according to these normative principles. These unmarked principles are in fact heavily marked with a western-secularist inflection (rooted in Euro-Christian history), and they underlie the study of religion, particularly of non-western religions. In his latest article on Fanon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres makes an important point on the reception of Fanon’s writings by the contemporary academy. A frequent oversight when approaching Fanon’s work, Maldonado-Torres observes, is to interpret it as a traditional academic text by taking his statements at face value, thus disregarding the complex layers of the clinical and revolutionary context from which he was writing. Religion, be it a conceptual apparatus or a constitutive element of the social fabric, occupies a substantial place in the formation of anticolonial struggles and thoughts of which Fanon was a part. Reading Fanon and religion with these complexities in mind lends an interesting twist and insight: Fanon’s critique of religion (political theology) ends up being a critique of the secular, even when he is not naming it as such. His turn to secularist language as an alternative to religion seems to suggest, in turn, an alternative notion of the sacred. The disavowal of colonial religion need not disclaim the diverse forms of religion-making that take place in and through various forms of decolonial movement and imagination. The sacred molds the spirit and movement of decolonial resistance in the colony. But unlike the institutionalized forms (and understandings) of religion, the diverse registers of the sacred usually take murky shapes. And at times, they are presented as antitheses to the sacred, that is, as a disavowal of the dominant notion of the sacred (and of religion more broadly). Yet even in negation, they are not renounced. Fanon’s critique of religion winds up being a powerful critique of the secular. Contrarily, Fanon seeks refuge in the secular in order to resignify the human but he ends up repurposing religion along the way.
Many interlocutors in contemporary decolonial theory are critical of the secularist discourse, yet they often overlook the secularist categories that reduce religion to a narrow notion. The compound interaction between religion and power is eclipsed by the reductive concept of religion in their works
It is not possible to fully unpack and elaborate on the claim I made above in this limited space. I have elsewhere articulated these ideas partially and I develop them further in my forthcoming book, The Coloniality of the Secular.[3] In what follows, I briefly point to a couple of sites (among others) in Fanon’s work that offer possible directions for advancing meaningful conversations on Fanon’s anticolonial critique and the problem of religion.
Two Possible Readings
(1) Fanon offers an insightful phenomenological analysis of the political by tracing how political life is constituted by the violent sanction of normative universals and the distribution of regulative identities in the colony. A paramount insight Fanon offers here concerns religion’s place as the metaphysical foundation of the political. Fanon continuously insinuates that colonial governance cannot be administered by coercion alone. Its fundamental mechanism requires metaphysics: a theological worldview that makes the colonized accept the colonial structure as the only possible reality. A Manichean worldview of good and evil that requires “a reference to divine right… to justify [the] difference” (Fanon, 1963, 5). This is a theology that legitimates the Manichean dualism dictating colonial reality and its values. It is a theodicean order in which the White/colonizer embodies the Good and the Black/colonized represents absolute evil (50). In other words, Fanon attributes the primary characteristics of colonial violence to theology. As Michael Lackey observes, instead of suggesting that theology benefits from colonization, “Fanon argues colonization is at the service of theology, that theology is the parent and original.” Political life is a theological problem as well as a colonial problem. Fanon brings to light the ways in which the category of secular humanism often overshadows the theology (the colonial theology of Whiteness) that constitutes European humanism and its concomitant colonial vision. The secular dilutes the theological edifice of both modernity and coloniality, thus fostering a notion of modernity that distinguishes itself from normative (dogmatic) values, sectarian positions, and power. The violence of its theology and the theology of its violence are obscured by the nominal framework of the secular. The secular hinges the two ends of modernity/coloniality. Fanon’s piercing analysis of colonial modernity implies, in a way, a nuanced critique of the theological edifice that sustains the necropolitical (Mbembe) management of the colonial world.
Plaque on Frantz Fanon Street in Paris, France. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
(2) Much attention has been paid in Fanonian scholarship to the effects of the damage that dehumanization and violence enact on racialized beings, socio-politically and otherwise. Some of these voices also suggest that we pay close attention to the generative ideas that Fanon evokes. They find important constructive ideas in Fanon’s visions such as care, love (Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Houria Bouteldja), fugitivity (Fred Moten), poetics (Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe), and rehumanization (Lewis Gordon), among many others. The bleak outlook we glimpse in Fanon’s penetrating diagnosis does not signal a retreat to resignation, that is, political pessimism. Fanon’s writings and commitment to political struggle consistently demonstrate that the essence of being a human lies in the possibility and capacity of praxis born out of love and solidarity. Building on these insights, we can bring our attention to the sites in Fanon that often go unnoticed, that is, some of the generative ideas that he gestures to in his poetics. Despite his complicated relationship with religion, there are numerous moments in which his appeal to generative concepts and alterity seems to beckon at a certain sense of the sacred, however alternative or unnamed it may be. Joseph Winters has recently suggested that we read the concluding prayers in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a repurposing of Blackness as sacred, “a sacred gone astray” (258). In the face of suffocating colonial-racial violence, Fanon tenaciously refuses to renounce the possibility of an otherwise. Against the common (mis)perceptions, we can read religion as a reservoir of such possibility for Fanon. His lengthy, pessimistic account concludes with a religious rhetoric that signals hope in which he recreates Blackness as the embodied signifier of the sacred. Put differently, what takes place in Fanon’s phenomenological reflection on his racialized body is a reconstruction of the sacred. The secular humanist’s staunch rejection of western religion and metaphysics unfolds, paradoxically, alongside the unnamed figure or moment that evokes a certain sense of the sacred, a sacred presented as an antithesis to the sacred.
Fanon’s critique of religion winds up being a powerful critique of the secular. Contrarily, Fanon seeks refuge in the secular in order to resignify the human but he ends up repurposing religion along the way.
On the one hand, a closer look at the phenomenological method that Fanon employs opens up the possibility of building on the connection between his repurposing of Blackness and religion. Fanon relies on many of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts—many of whose ideas were formed in conversation with Catholic theology—in his phenomenological reading of Blackness. On the other hand, we can situate Fanonian poetics within the twentieth century Caribbean tradition of anticolonial poetics. In many ways, Fanon’s poetics are a direct response and a reaction to Aime Cesaire’s anticolonial poetics, which are heavily infused with theological concepts and symbols. In this sense, Fanonian poetics inherit the theological themes and imagery that Cesaire’s poetics inaugurated. It is the Jamaican philosopher and theorist Sylvia Wynter who develops a full-fledged account of political theology by honing the questions and problems that are dormant in Cesaire and Fanon. Poetics disrupts the normative narrative. They seek to (re)create the world by reconceptualizing symbols and meanings. The decolonial refusal in Fanon signals a moment of decolonial poetics. By reconceptualizing theological symbols ingrained in secular registers, Fanon gestures at the possibility of a decolonial otherwise.
What happens when we read religion as a key fabric of social reality that constitutes both the colonial reality and the intellectual traditions that shaped Fanon’s vision, regardless of how much he was aware of it? What are the insights and perspectives we might gain when we view religion as a segue into decolonial resistance for Fanon? Coloniality censors sacrality, as Talal Asad and Peter Van der Veer have shown. That the secular has consistently provided an efficient platform for the articulation of coloniality raises important questions about the relation between decoloniality and the boundaries that segregate the sacred. When the sacred is isolated from the fabric of social relations, it obscures the enduring power of religion that is carved deep in the fabric of political life. It makes us lose sight of the symbolic power that sustains the colonial order which functions as a theological commandment (111).
[1] Much of the anticolonial rebellion in 19th century Algeria was led by Islamic groups and leaders. As Fouzi Slisli points out, the spontaneity of rural-Algerians’ self-organization that Fanon praises was shaped significantly by this historical tradition (Islamic anti-colonial struggle).
[2] While Fanon does not name the link between colonialism and the secular as such, he constantly insinuates that colonialism is founded on a religious (Christian) worldview and metaphysics, one that operates according to a theological mechanism or logic. In other words, Fanon challenges the myth of secular-modernity by calling out the theological logic operative in colonialism (and colonial modernity). See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; An Yountae, “On Violence and Redemption: Fanon and Colonial Theodicy.”
An Yountae is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at California State University, Northridge. He specializes in Religions of the Americas with a particular focus on Latin American/Caribbean religion and philosophy. He is the author of The Decolonial Abyss (Fordham University Press, 2016) as well as the co-editor with Eleanor Craig of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021). His new book, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World Making is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2023).
Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, June 8, 2020. The Jerusalem Municipality offers Palestinian residents of Jerusalem two options: to demolish their own homes or wait for the municipality’s heavy machinery to do it. The latter will force them to pay huge fines. Photo: ‘Amer ‘Aruri, B’Tselem. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Dr. Deborah Lipstadt testified on February 8, 2022 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in her confirmation hearing for the role of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. In response to a question from Senator Marco Rubio, she criticized Amnesty International’s latest report on Israel, the most recent among similar evidenced-based reports by human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem, which apply the international legal category of apartheid to describe ongoing Israeli violence against Palestinians since 1948. Amnesty’s report on apartheid in Israel is thorough and well-documented. Still, Lipstadt retorted that it is “unhistorical,” “delegitimizes” Israel, and is somehow threatening for Jewish students on US campuses. This portends a worrying and accelerating trend for an important role in the US State Department, carrying on the Trump Administration’s legacy of attacking human rights organizations and conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Dr. Lipstadt is not alone in her harsh condemnation of the Amnesty report, entitled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity,” which was published on February 1, 2022. It prompted immediate reactions from the Israeli government and its aligned American Jewish organizations that seek to control a narrative that persistently erases Palestinian experiences, human rights, and political aspirations. Instead of engaging with the evidence presented in the report, they accused Amnesty of antisemitism and of singling out and seeking to destroy Israel. Never mind that Amnesty is a respected human rights organization that has reported extensively on violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws around the world. Amnesty has, for instance, described Myanmar’s system of rule as apartheid in 2017, without anyone understanding this as rooted in anti-Buddhist prejudice. Amnesty is also reporting now on the severe violations of international law in Russia’s war in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, and no one has suggested that Amnesty is biased against Russians. What is singled out in the case of Israel, therefore, is criticism of Israeli policies: those defending such policies distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel, as an attack against a people.
Knee-jerk allegations of antisemitism are meant to marginalize engagement with this reality, as presented in the report. There is indeed much to discuss: the report is the product of four years of research, based also on the work of Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, and on a large body of scholarship. It clearly shows that, according to international human rights and humanitarian law, Israel has created and maintains a system of apartheid, consisting of segregation, discrimination, persecution, and violence against Palestinians in all the areas under its control and military occupation. The report therefore calls for dismantling the apartheid system, not the state; for those responsible for apartheid to be held accountable; and for the victims and survivors to receive justice—all according to international law. The report is a critique not of a people, but of a state, though it does not prescribe what the political future of the state should look like following the dismantling of the apartheid system.
Jews who care deeply about Israel have, in fact, described it as an apartheid state, including leading Israeli organizations and politicians, among them former prime ministers.
Those attacking the report present themselves as representatives of all Jews, but Jews hardly agree on anything, including Israel. It is, furthermore, precisely the association of Jews everywhere with Israel that puts them in danger, as it confirms in the eyes of antisemites that Jews do not really belong where they live. This unfortunate meeting point of antisemites and apologists for Israeli state violence stems from a shared segregationist view of the world, which brings us back to the report: the reality of the system of Israeli apartheid.
Those attacking the report present themselves as representatives of all Jews, but Jews hardly agree on anything, including Israel. It is, furthermore, precisely the association of Jews everywhere with Israel that puts them in danger, as it confirms in the eyes of antisemites that Jews do not really belong where they live.
On the day before Dr. Lipstadt’s hearing, February 7, 2022, the Israeli Parliament approved in first reading the proposed Citizenship Law, which denies Palestinians married to Israeli citizens permanent residency in Israel and thus bans Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories and Gaza from living in Israel with their Palestinian partners. Israel’s Minister of Health, Nitzan Horowitz, whose party (Meretz) opposes the proposed law, described it as “racist and discriminatory, and there is no place for it in a democratic state.” This failed to prevent the final approval of the law on March 10, 2022. Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked sees the Citizenship Law as an “important result for the security of the state and its fortification as a Jewish state,” expressing the apartheid rationale that, furthermore, casts Palestinians collectively as a security threat.
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.
In The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians, Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor explore how Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians living in Berlin contend with violences of the past and present—most notably the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the ongoing occupation of Palestinians in Israel—in their moral and political lives. In rich ethnographic detail, the authors recount how interviewees from each of these groups understand their relationship to their own communities and to the others in this moral triangle. What readers will discern in these pages is that the historical traumas experienced by one group can occlude the realities of violence and oppression in another. This is most clearly on display in how Germans, even on the radical left, are unable to acknowledge the oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli state. (Ironically, many Israelis living in Berlin are to the left of the German left on this matter.) For many Berliners, offering unflinching support for the State of Israel even when it commits human rights violations is a way to redeem previous generations’ responsibility for the Holocaust. This comes at the expense of the Palestinian people, however, who were not responsible for the Shoah and whose experience of the Nakba is ongoing. The equation of Jewish identity with the State of Israel, is of course, fallacious and ideological. And yet, it remains a potent force in German politics and the country’s social grappling with its Nazi past. It has even led to Jews who speak out against the State of Israel in Germany being labelled antisemitic by non-Jews. Further, it leads Palestinians living in Berlin to avoid speaking out against the actions of Israel for fear of being further marginalized via the label of antisemitism.
Perhaps the greatest virtue of Atshan and Galor’s book is that it forces us to confront the moral realities of people on the ground in Berlin. As the authors note early on, their interviewees range from a psychoanalyst, to a janitor, to a teacher, to a small business owner (see page 6 for a full list of the professions of the interviewees). This range of subjects provides us a glimpse into the complex moral lives of people without the distance that academic analysis of these issues often affords. The result is a moral triangle that is threaded together by an intersectional web. Here identities sometimes overlap where we might expect them to depart (think here of the critiques of the State of Israel by both Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin) and depart where we might expect them to conjoin (think here of the inability to acknowledge the Nakba among German Berliners). The result is an empirical study that invites us to acknowledge the challenges that the lived realities of humans on the ground present to our normative positions.
The essays collected in this symposium grapple with the intersections and divergences among these groups, and their ramifications both in and beyond Germany. Amos Goldberg explores what he calls the “split in current German liberal identity.” This split, he contends, is between a liberal state that attracts migrants like those from Israel and Palestine and a state that sanctions any criticisms of the State of Israel. He argues that this split is reflective of a more general one between anti-/post-colonialism and the story of the Holocaust, where the former is focused on current oppression and the latter on memory. He concludes by noting that, unfortunately, the current oppression of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine has eroded the likelihood of bringing these perspectives together in a way that might lead to peace. Sultan Doughan, meanwhile, reflects on how the category of perpetrator has come to define what it means to be a German citizen. This category, Doughan notes, is bound up with a Protestant-inflected way of conceptualizing moral responsibility that continues to resonate, even in “secular” Berlin.
In their essay, Hannah Tzuberi and Nahed Samour contend that the German state’s “anti-antisemitism,” rather than combatting the logic of antisemitism actually reinforces it. This is because it continues to rely on the image of the Jew as vulnerable and in need of protection. Without this image, the German state’s image of itself as morally righteous could not exist. Thus, paradoxically, the Jew—and in the German political/moral imagination, the (always Jewish) Israeli—must remain a victim in order for the German state to preserve itself, with tragic results for those who suffer under oppression from Israeli state violence. The figure of the Palestinian here emerges as the crucial prism through which the multiple layers of legitimatized, moral violence in Germany must be recognized. Finally, Sabine von Mering puts her own experiences as a non-Jewish and non-Palestinian German into conversation with Atshan’s and Galor’s findings. By interweaving her own experiences of growing up as a Lutheran in Germany and of German-Jewish dialogues that took place at Brandeis in the late 1990s, von Mering shows the possibility of a German standing in solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians.
These essays demonstrate that oppression is not static and that how we remember past oppressive violence cannot be disentangled from current injustices. An even wider lens on this situation reminds us that the forces of secularism and modernity continue to remain potent drivers of political and social strife. Concepts like the nation, religion, or the secular did not appear out of thin air. Rather they are the products of human history. As such, reckoning with their violences, and potentialities, is a collective human responsibility, one with which The Moral Triangle invites us to more fully grapple.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Frantz Fanon and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
A common error in conceiving decolonial theorizing as a standard form of critical theory or as an extension of mainstream postcolonial studies is the assumption that its approach to religion or spirituality is bounded by secularism. It is often forgotten that while the emergence of postcolonial studies is connected to theories of literature and culture in the secular humanities, what is typically recognized as decolonial theorizing came into being in largely inter- and trans-disciplinary contexts that included scholars, artists, activists, and community organizers who were critical of modern western secular ideologies.[1] Some of them also openly drew from and sought to contribute to the study of religion and religious thought.
Often the result of limited engagement with only very few authors in the field, the idea of decolonial thought as an intellectual production that can only consider “the religious” or “the spiritual” through the lenses of western secularism appears to be a convenient trope in the effort to reassert the authority and contemporary relevance of certain forms of scholarship, particularly religious studies, as well as some forms of philosophy and theology. The result is a reduction in the possibilities of profound engagement between these areas and decolonial thought, even as this work has already been taking place among those of us who have been trained in or have been contributing to areas such as religious studies, philosophy, and decoloniality for more than a short time.
One would only have to take a quick look at works of senior and distinguished figures in decolonial thinking, such as Enrique Dussel and Sylvia Marcos, to identify profound critiques of secularism and sophisticated ways to approach religion and spirituality. Related critiques of secularism appear in the works of Eduardo Mendieta, who has a long trajectory of making contributions to philosophy and religious studies, and of the intelectual-militanteCatherine Walsh, who draws from African diaspora and Indigenous views in her account of community formation, decolonization, and the overcoming of the binary between the natural and the human.
It is also important to recognize the impact of African diaspora spiritualities in the works and perspectives of Afro-Caribbean decolonial thinkers such as Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso and Agustín Lao-Montes, and the contributions of the also Caribbean Ramón Grosfoguel to the enrichment of Critical Muslim Studies and the critique of Islamophobia. More recent, but already well established and leading scholars engaging religion and decoloniality include Mayra Rivera, Santiago Slabodsky, and An Yountae, among others.
The idea of decolonial thought as an intellectual production that can only consider ‘the religious’ or ‘the spiritual’ through the lenses of western secularism appears to be a convenient trope in the effort to reassert the authority and contemporary relevance of certain forms of scholarship.
My own work on decolonial theorizing, the decolonial theory and philosophy of religion, and the critique of modern western secular ideologies and the coloniality of secularism, is rooted in conversations and exchanges about related topics with friends, teachers, and mentors before and during my college years in the “unincorporated territory”/colony of Puerto Rico.[2] In conversations on the island-colony with scholars such as the late Jesuit priest and historian Fernando Picó and the theologian and humanities professor Luis N. Rivera Pagán, it was clear that the critique of colonialism could not be consistently carried out without the critique of secularism and vice-versa. I took this to be a foundation already established long before I became interested in it, even if kept in a marginal position within and by a largely secular (and Eurocentric) left, as well as the hegemonic liberal—modern/colonial and secular—arts and sciences.
I was fortunate to find a similar conviction in important teachers and interlocutors while a doctoral student in religious studies, philosophy, and Africana studies in the 1990s. They included the Caribbean and Afro-Jewish philosopher Lewis R. Gordon and Enrique Dussel. Gordon held a PhD in philosophy and was appointed in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. He offered undergraduate and graduate courses that engaged the three areas simultaneously. Challenging the divide between “the religious” and “the secular,” while also critically engaging colonialism and antiblack racism was a given in this context. It was similar in my work with Enrique Dussel, also while a graduate student, and later on in my exchanges with Sylvia Marcos, which started when I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Duke University. At Duke, I worked closely with Walter Mignolo, who is sometimes taken as a poster person for secularism even as his work makes important contributions to the critique of western modernity, including the coloniality of its secularism, as I have pointed out elsewhere.[3]
In short, neither the critique of secularism and the concern with understanding the relevance of spirituality for decolonization, nor the effort to decolonize philosophy and religious studies as fields of study are new. Making it appear so strengthens the coloniality of the liberal arts and sciences.
Lessons from Frantz Fanon 60 Years after His Passing
It won’t be difficult to include many more references to scholars of decolonization who challenge in various ways the coloniality of the secular/religious divide, or whose work contributes to the decolonization of religious studies. Some authors are very explicit in their critique of secularism and their appraisal of the role of spirituality in their searches for decolonization—take Gloria Anzaldúa or M. Jacqui Alexander, for example—while others are less explicit or even suspicious about highlighting the links between decolonization and anything “religious.” However, one can often find contributions to the critique of the coloniality of secularism even among authors who would otherwise appear to be indifferent or critical of religion or spirituality. In this essay, I will share some reflections about contributions to the critique of secularism in the work of Frantz Fanon.
Frantz Fanon represents the FLN (National Liberation Front) and Algeria in the war of independence at the Pan African conference at the Palais de la Culture in Léopoldville, August 27, 1960, in the former Belgian Congo. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Fanon’s work is a major reference in Black and Africana studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thought, among other areas. His work preceded, anticipated, prepared the ground, and continues to serve as guide and inspiration for many contemporary theorists of antiblackness, coloniality, and decoloniality. One of my main arguments here is that Fanon’s work offers valuable lessons in the task of critiquing the coloniality of secularism and that these lessons remain relevant today. One important part of these lessons is that decoloniality is not simply a topic of investigation, but part of a more encompassing decolonial turn that involves the comprehensive decolonization of knowledge, power, and being.
It is already well known that Fanon engaged in and contributed to the projects of decolonizing philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. I propose here that his work offers important considerations for decolonizing religious studies as well. In that sense, this essay continues a central topic in my previous contribution to this space.
I turn to Frantz Fanon here in the context of celebrating the 70th anniversary of the publication of his massively influential work Black Skin, White Masks, originally published in 1952, and of the recent commemoration of the 60th year of his passing and the publication of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon is often depicted as a thoroughly secularist author with little more than suspicion or disdain for anything religious or spiritual. This caricature makes him a good figure through which to demonstrate the limits of secularist interpretations of decolonial thought. Fanon’s work provides important considerations in the exploration of the coloniality of secularism and religious studies while also indicating the generative possibilities that emerge in challenging the strict divide between the religious and the secular.[4]
I refer to Fanon as a decolonial thinker, a designation that he did not use, because he carefully developed the concept of decolonization as a creative process of unthinking and rethinking, as well as undoing and redoing, in the path towards a new idea and practice of being human. He understood this practice as a reconstitution of the open-ended web of human interrelationalities and as the amplification of relations of uninhibited and free giving and receiving that are part of what Fanon refers to as the “world of you,” which is at the core of the idea of decoloniality.[5]
Lesson 1: Understanding the Catastrophe of Modernity/Coloniality
One important contribution of Fanon’s work to the study of religion, philosophy, and theology concerns the entanglement between modernity and coloniality. Fanon’s theorizing reflects an awareness of the overwhelming colonial dimension and effects of modernity. He was conscious that the globalization of western modernity and its connection with the rationalization and naturalization of colonialism and racial slavery represented a veritable catastrophe for societies across the world and for humanity as a whole.[6] This catastrophe has had profound impacts on even the most basic of human activities, such as linguistic and erotic relationships, as Fanon sought to demonstrate in the initial chapters of his classic Black Skin, White Masks.[7]
Using contemporary concepts, one might say that for Fanon, modernity/coloniality has always already shaped the subject, the object, and the context of any potential academic investigation. This means that decolonization is not simply a political practice that is separate from academic work, but the very condition of possibility for countering the coloniality of the human sciences. Since hegemonic academic disciplines, including philosophy and religious studies, are grounded on dominant views of modernity, the critique of modernity should serve not only as a preamble to any academic study, but also as an ongoing activity.
Using contemporary concepts, one might say that for Fanon, modernity/coloniality has always already shaped the subject, the object, and the context of any potential academic investigation.
Fanon’s references to “religion” or spiritual practices in his work cannot be disentangled from his insight about the active role of colonialism and the impact of modern/colonial catastrophe. For example, under modern/colonial catastrophe, the concept of religion can be used at one moment to minimize the standing of one group in one context—e.g., “you are merely religious”—while at another moment serving as a form of “whitening”—e.g., “I am also religious.”[8] Sometimes the two apparently opposite views appear in the same context but are held as true by different parties, or sometimes even by the same party. That is, Fanon never finds “religion” purely out there: he finds “religion” always in context of colonization and global coloniality; always taking unique forms in varied contexts of catastrophe.
Lesson 2: Fanon’s Decolonial Turn against the Coloniality of the Human Sciences
One implication of Fanon’s profound awareness of the impact of coloniality and its creation of shifting and multiple layers of meaning is that one cannot take at face value his statements about religion, among many other topics. Perhaps because he was a psychiatrist and a militant, rather than a traditional scholar of philosophy or religion, the theoretical dimension of Fanon’s texts cannot be disentangled from practice. As a result, what Fanon wrote at any given point is often more complex than what it appears at first sight.
Approaching Fanon’s texts as traditional works in the liberal arts and sciences is a common mistake, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the incorporation of his writings into the academy, but one that can and should be corrected. What Fanon seeks to do with his writing is connected to his therapeutic and revolutionary work and frequently different from what any specific statement in his written work indicates. Often when reading Fanon, it is as if his writing suggests that more important than what it says is the process of thinking and doing that gave birth to it, as well as the unfinished project of which it was and continues to be part. If so, the best way to engage Fanon’s texts is not by seeking to have the “right” interpretation of them—in fact, his writings often resist these efforts—but participating in the practice of decolonial thinking/doing and doing/thinking that was predominant in Fanon’s practical/theoretical and theoretical/practical work.
Pavillon de l’Administration de l’Hôpital Psychiatrique de Blida-Joinville, 1933. Frantz Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in this hospital in the 1950s before joining the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the Algerian revolution. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
This is one important dimension of the project of countering the coloniality of the human sciences, including religious studies: decolonizing knowledge is not the same as simply writing about decoloniality or decolonization. Decolonizing philosophy, religious studies, or theology is likewise not only a matter of diversifying theoretical sources or engaging new topics.
Reducing the project of epistemic decolonization to a question of diversifying topics and sources leads to a reassertion of the priorities and ethos of the modern/colonial and secular liberal arts and sciences, even in projects that describe themselves as decolonial. This is a dangerous path that privileges the position of the presumed “expert” on decoloniality over the multiple actors, agents, creators, and thinkers engaged in decolonial thinking and practice.
Fanon proposes a substantive decolonial turn, one that transcends the limits and that counters the coloniality of the established liberal arts and sciences. His work teaches that decolonizing knowledge involves not only refusing to ignore the role of coloniality in shaping the object of one’s investigation, but also redefining the tasks and priorities of the scholar and the intellectual.[9] This means that the decolonization of religious studies and other fields cannot take place without a challenge to the model of the scholar, the organization of scholars—e.g. departments, centers, institutes, and professional associations—and the training of scholars within the liberal arts and sciences.
Lesson 3: Countering the Coloniality of the Religion/Secularism Divide
A third lesson from Fanon’s work concerns the coloniality of the religious/secularism divide and the need to overcome it in decolonization struggles. Fanon fought for decolonization, understood as generative counter-catastrophic activities in the effort to create “the world of you,” a view that is connected to his conception of healing.[10] One cannot forget that Fanon was a trained psychiatrist and that his preferred method was social therapy, a form of therapy that sought to bring mental health through the process of creating normal—by which it should be understood non-catastrophic—social relations and a social environment.
As a paper written by Fanon and his intern Jacques Azoulay while Fanon was the Director of the Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, indicates, Fanon entirely rejected the thesis that there is something inherently problematic with practices or ideas that are often referred to as spiritual or religious. Indeed, even if beyond the scope of this piece, Fanon’s work with Azoulay speaks to Fanon’s multicultural and multireligious view of a decolonized Algeria, and of the ways in which the French empire approached and managed racial hierarchies in France and its colonies. This explains how a Black person from the Caribbean could be appointed as doctor and hospital director, and an Algerian Jewish person could become his first intern in a psychiatric hospital, where the Arab and Berber locals were for the most part patients and nurses.[11]
Fanon entirely rejected the thesis that there is something inherently problematic with practices or ideas that are often referred to as spiritual or religious.
For the purpose of this essay, I underscore that Fanon did not subscribe to the belief that overcoming religion is necessary for decolonization to take place, or to the notion that decolonization would lead to a religionless society. This is reflected in Fanon’s and Azoulay’s warning to psychiatrists and other scientists of epistemic arrogance and epistemic racism that “some conducts, some reactions can appear ‘primitive’ to us, but that is only a value judgment, one that is both questionable and bears on poorly defined characteristics.”[12] They were particularly referring to the idea that “genies” produced madness, a concept that was normal in Algeria as opposed to other contexts where a different perception of the world was held or where social behavior revolved around different premises.
In short, Fanon invited the critical study of human reality, including what we often call religion, with attention to the massive effects of modern/colonial catastrophe. From a Fanonian point of view, Marx’s dictum that “For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism” could perhaps be reformulated as follows: “For Africa, the African diaspora, the Global South, and the entire world, the critique of modern/colonial catastrophe remains unfinished, and its critique is the prerequisite of all criticism.” Neither Fanon’s view of criticism nor his conception of a healthy individual or society imply the idea that religion or spirituality must be eradicated. Quite the contrary, Fanon believed that activities that are often called religious, like the “regular celebration of Muslim feasts” and the establishment of “a Moorish café” in the context of his work with male Muslim patients, played an important role in their healing process.[13] The other side of this practice was the rejection of the simple implantation and uncritical adaptation of European therapeutical techniques in Algeria. That is, for Fanon the problem sometimes lies with the “science” or scholarly approach rather than with any specific “religion” or similar object of investigation. The decolonization of knowledge, and, along with that, the decolonization of being and power, remain at the forefront of Fanon’s knowledge producing activities.
Lesson 4: Fanon’s Unlearning, Relearning, and Post-Secular Epistemic Practices
Fanon not only learned about Islam and developed insights about the study of religion in the context of his psychiatric hospital and his visits to Algerian towns. He also learned about Islam from Muslim intellectuals and recognized the potential contributions of Islam to the struggle for decoloniality. His words to the Iranian thinker ‘Ali Shari‘ati are illuminating in this context: “I would like to emphasize, more than you do yourself, your remark that Islam harbours, more than any other social powers of ideological alternatives in the third world (or, with your permission, the Near and Middle-East), both an anticolonialist capacity and anti-western character” (Alienation and Freedom, 668).
Justice for All March in Washington DC, December 13, 2014. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
In his letter to Shari‘ati, Fanon also highlights the importance of what he considers to be the “mission” of Shari‘ati and other Muslim intellectuals to “make good use of the immense cultural and social resources harboured in Muslim societies and minds, with the aim of emancipation and the founding of another humanity and another civilization” (668–69). Here Fanon is anticipating his notes about combative decolonial intellectual activity in The Wretched of the Earth, a theme that, as the Frantz Fanon Foundation has recently made clear, is as relevant today as ever.[14]
Fanon also shared with Shari‘ati his concerns about the risks and limits of “reviving sectarian and religious mindsets,” and of any project that sought to bring populations closer to their past more than to promote the birth of an “ideal future.” While Fanon took a different path from Shari‘ati, Fanon concludes his letter by noting that he is “persuaded that both paths will ultimately join up towards that destination where humanity lives well” (Alienation and Freedom, 669).
It is also important to recognize that, while every indication is that Fanon was an atheist, his own work is infused with religious thought and contains a considerable number of religious metaphors. In Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, I reflect on and build upon the relationship between Fanon’s work and those of Christian philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers, as well as the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. I seek to demonstrate that Fanon conceives of subjectivity as a gift and that he views the damnés as those who cannot give because of what had been taken from them. This means that decoloniality is about the restoration of circles of giving and receiving in contexts of catastrophe, which opens up considerable new questions and considerations, including ethical, political, religious/spiritual, and theological ones.
Lesson 5: Open Paths in Conversation with a Post-Secular Fanon
Fanon’s conception of subjectivity, damnation, and decolonization challenge the premises of Cartesian rationalism, Enlightened foundationalism, and modern western political theory—all of which serve as the basis to certain forms of western secularisms. His view of the self as a gift and his intersubjective account of healthy individuality and social relations draw from and are compatible with a large variety of sources, including so-called religious or spiritual formations. This consideration calls for more explorations of connections between Fanon’s view of decolonization and non-secular or post-secular accounts of reality, including the African diaspora spiritualities that are found in Fanon’s own island of Martinique and through the Caribbean, some of which probably informed Fanon’s thinking and worldview too.
I am aware of the argument that Fanon seemed to make concessions to Catholicism and Islam that he did not extend to African diaspora practices.[15] One could debate the extent to which Fanon’s statements about any specific religions are meant to be a description of such religions per se, or if they are meant as a critical analysis of the entanglement between specific religious practices and certain colonial projects. One could also debate whether Fanon had a specific view about African diaspora religions, or whether his approach to local religious practices in Algeria offers an example of approaching religious practices everywhere that would lead to a different conceptualization of other religions, including settings with African diaspora religious practices. This goes back to the points about how to approach Fanon’s writings that I raised earlier.
For Fanon the problem sometimes lies with the “science” or scholarly approach rather than with any specific “religion” or similar object of investigation. The decolonization of knowledge, and, along with that, the decolonization of being and power, remain at the forefront of Fanon’s knowledge producing activities.
My suggestion here is that even if negative comments about African diaspora religions proved to be definitive about Fanon’s interpretation of these practices at any given point in time, this does not entail that parts of his thinking were not positively impacted by the Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices on the island of Martinique. I doubt that only Catholicism influenced Fanon’s sensibilities, but even if that were true, this also does not mean that there are not elements in Fanon’s thought that are significantly enriched when approached from African diaspora epistemologies and spiritualities. The thought of an author is often richer than the various opinions of the author. An exploration of the various ways in which Fanon’s thought might be and could still be entangled with African diaspora views would require work with practitioners. That is, practitioners of African diaspora spiritualities who have mobilized Fanon’s thought in their struggle against racism and colonization might be the best teachers here. The path is thus open for a continued post-secular process of unlearning and relearning as part of the unfinished project of decolonization, and Fanon remains an important companion.[16]
The author wishes to thank Atalia Omer for the invitation to contribute and thank both her and Joshua Lupo for their editorial suggestions.
[3] I expand on my view of Mignolo’s contributions to the decolonial theory of religion in “Religion, Modernity, and Coloniality.”
[4] Others have commented on Fanon’s conception of religion as it appears in his writings. Perhaps the most systematic account is Federico Settler’s 2009 doctoral dissertation at the University of Cape Town, entitled “Religion in the Work of Frantz Fanon.” Settler’s main arguments in the dissertation also appear in his 2012 article “Frantz Fanon’s Ambivalence Towards Religion.” My analysis here is based primarily on texts that appear in Fanon’s Alienation and Freedom, which was published after Settler’s dissertation and article, but this is not where the main difference between his careful study and my reflection here lies. This essay approaches the question of Fanon and religion in terms of the contributions of Fanon’s thinking to decolonizing religious studies and to critically engaging the religious/secular divide. In that sense, it does not aim to be an analysis of the various ways in which Fanon referred to religion in his work, which is Settler’s main focus. I am interested in the possibilities that Fanon’s thought opens up or invites the reader to consider more than on whether Fanon himself believed something or other to be the case. This is what I have taken to be a project of Fanonian meditations, which is different from scholarship on Fanon. This does not mean that this scholarship cannot make contributions to such Fanonian meditations.
[8] Lilia Ben Salem’s notes that a course that Fanon offered in Tunis included the following sentence in the context of discussing racism in the United States: “Religion is often conceived as a way of ‘becoming-white’.” See Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 524.
[9] I thank the Aymara militant-intellectual Esteban Ticona Alejo for his acute observations about this many years ago. Ticona Alejo is the author of various works on Fanon and the “father of Indianism” in Bolivia, Fausto Reinaga, as well as the editor of Bolivia en el inicio del Pachakuti: la larga lucha anticolonial de los pueblos aimara y quechua. I also thank Walter Altino and members of the Atitude Quilombola movement in Brazil, with whom I learned important aspects of this lesson in theory and practice.
[11] Citing an interview with Azoulay in 1998, Alice Cherki writes that: “Almost fifty years later, Jacques Azoulay reports that as an Algerian Jew he only became aware of Algeria ‘in Blida, while working with Fanon. That’s when I realized that there were Muslims—Muslims and a Muslim culture’” (Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 51). In an interview in 2007 with Numa Murard, Azoulay adds that “He [Fanon] sought first to inform himself about the specific culture of Algerian Arabs” and that “he was very active, I less so, although he dragged me along to ceremonies for treating hysteria in Kabylian villages, in which women having cathartic fits were chained down for entire nights” (quoted in Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 191). Azoulay also stated that “Fanon’s intellectual approach enabled me to apprehend a content that I would otherwise have considered folkloric, and from the moment of that realization, I understood it wasn’t” (Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 52). Azoulay’s severed disconnection with the Algerian Arab community recalls Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s analysis of “how France forced Arab Jews to adopt the European persona of Jew as citizen and see Arabs and Muslims as others” (see “Algerian Jews Have Not Forgotten France’s Colonial Crimes,”) and her thesis that, “The conversion of Algerian Jews into French citizenship destroyed thousands of years of Jewish life in North Africa” (“Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues”).
[13] See Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 371. Azoulay reported that Fanon was “very active” in getting to know “the specific culture of Algerian Arabs” and of Algerian society, and that the organization of the Moorish café “provoked sarcastic criticism from the other doctors” (Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 191). Numa Murard, who interviewed Azoulay in 2007, notes that “Fanon permet aussi de redonner vie aux pratique religieuses, que l’hôpital…a tendance à détruire.” See Numa Murard, “Psycothérapie institutionnelle à Blida.”
[16] Learning about this with and from these practitioners will be part of my own efforts in a project that I am leading with Carter Mathes on “Understanding Spirit: Black Religious Practice and the Search for Racial Justice,” hosted by the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies and funded by The Henry Luce Foundation. The three-year project starts in May 2022 and will include the participation of Arts for Art in New York, Nana Sula Spirit in New Orleans, and Corredor Afro as well as the Corporación Piñones se Integra in Puerto Rico. There may be another example here of decolonizing religious studies (as well as philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology) in theory and practice, which could provide material for one or more reflections that continue the discussion in “Religious Studies and/in the Decolonial Turn” and this entry.
In the course of my recent research in Iran, I read informative studies of mysticism in Iran and found Ata Anzali’s history of Mysticism in Iran (see Anzali’s contribution to this symposium here) especially compelling. His and other studies led me to ask: How should we think about modern ideas that were thought up by poets, writers, theologians, scholars, and scientists who lived in pre-modern times? What kinds of blind spots has this division of modern/pre-modern created in our thinking? I would say that there are possibilities that we do not think about because our whole intellectual edifice is so invested in a version of western modernity that is eloquently and methodically critiqued by Robert Orsi in his book on History and Presence.
One of the major blind spots has to do with the rather impoverished way in which we have come to think of language. We make certain kinds of assumptions that prevent us from understanding the many ways language shapes experience. For example, we assume that the relationship between form and meaning always holds, is always relevant, is predictable, and is constant regardless of the kind of text and kind of activity that we are engaged in; that semantic meaning is of utmost importance in our encountering of texts; that memorization, repetition, and regular recitation that result inevitably in internalization make no difference in how language transforms experience. In short, we have an implicit but very consequential idea of the modern sign that is in part a result of how we imagine a modern religion to be.
A modern religion is one where hermeneutic activity with regard to scripture and all similar texts dominates. It is the most important factor in understanding “belief.” Interaction between such texts and individuals is an intellectual give and take where meaning is only the semantic/interpretive one; and believers must operate in their vernacular as opposed to a sacred language associated with their religion (hence Islam and Judaism are not modern).[1] Believers must engage with scripture in their vernacular because they must “understand” what they read. This is all very Protestant, though when we actually look at Protestant church services, for example, and their recitation of Psalms, we realize that we are living with a stereotype of modern religion that even Protestants do not follow. Monique Scheer addresses this point while asking what a modern religion is in the first place, a question close to my heart.
Ferdinand de Saussure, who grew up in Calvinist Geneva (with a few years in Paris and Leipzig), is repeatedly referred to as the “father of modern linguistics.” What in particular was “modern” about his intellectual contribution was that, for him, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Language is a system where everything coheres, according to him. It does not matter where the sign is located; in the Qur’an, the Torah or in psalms, or poems and prayers. Nor does it matter how we use the sign; that relationship is still arbitrary. The problem is that this view does not help us understand why centuries-old texts come to have such a sway over believers, reciters, performers, listeners, spectators, and interpreters. The arbitrariness of the sign leaves us with no answer to this question. That the relationship between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, not logical, nor natural, is true but where does this take us? It could be objected that de Saussure did not set out to theorize language from the point of view of the speaker and her experience, but what he called “the nature of language.” This is true but we are heirs to his conception of language, a conception that has been fed by the Protestant Reformation leading to the idea that any text can be translated and the experience ought not to matter because, whether in or out of translation, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. If there are important texts, it is their interpretation that matters. Bringing what Orsi says, that modernity is premised on absence to bear on this discussion, one could say that the thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign is premised on the speaker’s absence, on the absence of a voice (whether divine or not) (62).
In the Saussurian framework, language leaves religion intact because in the performance of religious rituals and in engaging with religious texts, the dominance of the idea of the modern sign and the singular centrality of the semantic/interpretive does not allow for a different imagination of what language can do to the experience of religion.
One other crucial factor in our implicit assumptions about modern religion is that only when we use our own words to pray and talk to God is it possible for us to be sincere in that act. But if we use someone else’s words in the form of a prayer or poem, that language lies outside of us and sincerity is harder to achieve if not impossible (Webb Keane’s Christian Moderns elaborates on this view). How can we use others’ words to address God and still be sincere? Here there is also an idea of “freedom of speech” that is lurking in the background. If we recite a prayer that we have not authored, our freedom is somehow constrained because we have agreed to use the constraints of someone else’s words.
When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others and matters other than semantic meaning give meaning to and shape such experiences. Kabir Tambar’s piece articulates this point quite well. Hence, when we carefully examine what happens in the recitation of prayers, poems, the psalms, and so on we see that so much of what I just described is wholly inadequate to an analysis where repetition, recitation from memory, and embodiment are at the center of what we are trying to understand and analyze.
One of the major discoveries I had during my fieldwork that truly shook my thinking had to do with what I was told about the recitation of the obligatory ritual prayer, namāz, whose verses are from Qur’anic suras (chapters) that are recited 5 times a day (varying in length) everyday. I was told by many of the women whom I talked to that each time one stands to pray, all kinds of factors affect what one ends up actually communicating to God. I had started out by asking whether doing the namāz is communication and everyone showed surprise at the question. Of course it was communication, they said. Becoming adept at doing this prayer while making efforts not to treat it as a rote activity means in large part to use the words that belong to God to tell Him what the reciter wants to communicate, what she has in mind—questions, worries, gratitude and so on. Hence, the relationship between form and meaning in the act of namāz is not necessary, predictable, or constant. It is crucial to incorporate this into our efforts to understand the work of rituals. In short, the namāz, like many other rituals that involve language, is a recitational act, not a hermeneutic one.
When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others and matters other than semantic meaning give meaning to and shape such experiences.
A related matter brought up by Amy Hollywood has to do with formality and its association with what she calls “religion of the heart” vs. “religion of the law.” Perhaps if we were to change our idea of formality, we would not associate it with law. Namāz is formal in that it has prescribed body postures, has a set sequence of acts, and the words are from the Qur’an. Yet, because individuals use the words to tell God what they want, and because it unfolds in time so that its outcome (degree of concentration, feelings of closeness or distance with God, and so on) is unpredictable, it is not perceived as rigid. This unpredictability is part of the challenge and the attraction of doing the namāz so that its formality does not foreclose the involvement of the heart.
Both Amy Hollywood and Ahoo Najafian bring up the matter of the relationship between religion and literature. I cannot agree more with what they say. We are moved by language, reach various difficult to account for understandings, and experience heightened awareness without being able to categorize these as “secular” or “religious.” I find this to be the promise of the world of poetry and of literature more broadly. Without paying attention to such adjacent and overlapping worlds to religion, we are stuck with the binary of religious and secular as Joshua Lupo puts it, and we isolate religion from neighbors that it clearly exchanges with, albeit often in challenging ways.
Related to the two pieces just mentioned is Brenna Moore’s discussion of Islamic mysticism and making Muslims’ forms of religiosity understandable without orientalizing them. Finally, I agree with Setrag Manoukian, as I elaborate in this piece and in my book, that what we have paid little attention to is that language is not always there for “communication” purposes between a sender and a receiver. Both prayer and poetry show this quite well.
I am grateful to all the authors of the blogs on my book. Each brings up points that I would like to discuss at greater length. I also want to thank the editors of Contending Modernities for organizing this symposium on my book and offering me much food for thought.
[1] Although Latin was not the original language of the Bible, it came to be regarded as sacred for many centuries and so as many other scholars have pointed out, the use of Latin figures prominently in Catholicism being regarded as a “backward” religion.
Calvary Cemetery (Queens, New York) set against the modern Manhattan skyline. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
It is no secret that many former European Christian theologians who became students of world religions drew on phenomenology in their work. The philosophical tradition of phenomenology they in part drew on began in the early twentieth century with Edmund Husserl’s attempt to understand how humans experience the world prior to that experience’s redescription via the social and “hard” sciences. To study religion phenomenologically for scholars of world religions—whom, among others, include Rudolf Otto (d. 1937), Gerardus van der Leeuw (d. 1950), and Mircea Eliade (d. 1986)—meant to bracket one’s own assumptions about the world and, as best as one could, empathetically describe what religious experiences are like for other persons and the manifold ways they are expressed across the various religious traditions of the world. While partially an attempt at understanding and arranging the various features of the world’s religion for the purposes of scholarly analysis, for many of these scholars, phenomenology of religion was also part of a quasi-divine quest to articulate an alternative to the modern world. They saw the latter as fragmented, alienated, and devoid of meaning; to articulate the deep meaning of religion was to offer an antidote to this disease of nihilism.
It is also no secret that this method of studying religion is now seen as passé and lacking in nuance, self-reflexivity, and attention to the dynamics of power in shaping the lives of religious actors and those who study them. Yet, even several decades following the demise of this theoretical and methodological approach, a scholar like Tim Murphy still felt the need in 2010 to write: “I study phenomenology of religion only to bury it,” an ambition in which he is not alone (34).
Murphy’s desire to bury phenomenology is the culmination of critiques of phenomenology of religion that began in the 1990s. During that decade scholars styling themselves as critical students of religion—rather than its “caretakers”—sought to dismantle phenomenology and in its place construct a theoretical approach to religion grounded in genealogical approaches inherited from Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. Rarely has this involved, however, uncovering the philosophical foundations of phenomenology in philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the impact of those philosophies on the study of religion. It has instead treated them as purveyors of an uncritical approach to examining social formations that should be discarded in favor of more “critical” methods.
The announcement of the death of phenomenology is premature, and in this brief post I show that its premature announcement has resulted in a vision of the critical study of religion that is anything but critical. This is because the critical study of religion has imagined itself as a detached form of engagement that does not take into account its own situatedness in a particular historical moment and the first-person perspective that critical inquiry takes. I do not advocate a return to the phenomenology of Eliade or Otto in staking out this position, but instead suggest that we might utilize the insights of philosophical phenomenology on these subjects to reimagine the practice of scholarship today. This call to engage classical sources in philosophical phenomenology, in other words, is not a call to return to them uncritically. Indeed, as decolonial critics in the Contending Modernities series have shown, these philosophers were often steeped in European nativism and exclusivism. This critical reappropriation is instead intended to contribute to philosophical accounts that prioritize the agency of the marginalized who challenge racism, coloniality, and misogyny in our politics and culture.
Phenomenology and Religion
As an initial counter to Murphy, a reader might expect me to employ the William Faulkner line made famous by Barack Obama, that the “past is never past, it is not even past.” On this account, the past cannot be buried because it remains present in how we experience the world today. But this line would be inadequate because it fails to capture the subjective way in which the past lives in us. I would offer instead the following lines from the Israeli TV drama, Shtisel, which focuses on the everyday lives of Hasidic Jews living in Jerusalem:
The dead don’t go anywhere. They are always here. Every man is a cemetery. An actual cemetery, in whom lie all our grandmothers and grandfathers. The father, the mother, the wife the child. Everyone is here all the time.
I prefer these lines, which are attributed to writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, because they remind us that the past is not something that lives outside of us—it is not something we can peer out at or down at from an objective position—rather, it is something carried within us; it fills us with possibility even as it weighs us down. This poetic description of the past is one that can be philosophically articulated via the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, as I will suggest later, history is the contingent source out of which our very subjectivity, and thus our agency in the world, is formed. Further, a critical reappropriation of Heidegger’s phenomenology provides scholars with a vision of critique that values history, contingency, and emancipatory horizons. There are many ways to practice phenomenology, in other words, and in advising against particular reductive approaches we need not abandon the philosophy altogether.
For instance, to embrace aspects of Heidegger’s thought need not mean embracing Eliade’s. The latter would find Heidegger’s historical phenomenology unacceptable. For Eliade, the modern approach to history—with its emphasis on contingencies rather than universals, the particular rather than the general—risked erasing from human existence the power of meaning, order, and a connection to something larger than our individual existence. Eliade saw his task as being to rescue us from such a vision of history—away from modernity—and to return it to a more authentic mode of being, one that was sacred rather than profane, meaningful rather than nihilistic. In nostalgically longing for a past where the burdens of history could be discarded, Eliade, as critics have rightly pointed out, buttressed an uncritical approach to studying religion that often reified patriarchal, heteronormative, colonialist, and racialized visions of religion. For example, in setting up the experience of “archaic societies” as the norm by which all other societies should be governed, he also took their social structures as natural and normatively binding.[1] Thus, for him, traditional gender roles that may restrain the flourishing of individuals were baked into the very essence of the cosmos. Oppression here is naturalized and normalized in such a way that it appears unchanging (See McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion).
I argue that this kind of phenomenology is indeed both intellectually and ethically troubling. But in discarding all of phenomenology along with it, we have lost insight into the breakthroughs philosophical phenomenology made in understanding how it is we come to know the world through our conscious experience of it, and indeed how we are able to question and critique this knowledge.
The philosophical tools for articulating how it is we are able to make critical claims about the world—that is, claims that challenge the seeming naturalness of the normative order and the political, social, and economic institutions that support that order—can be found in the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger.[2] For Heidegger, our existence in the present is part of a continuum from the past. As such, authenticity is not realized in recovering an idealized past, as it is for Eliade, but in taking it up in the present via historical traditions to which we can be held responsible. This “critical phenomenology” has seeds in Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, which Heidegger developed in more historicist directions. For Husserl, the ego’s knowledge of the world is structured intentionally, that is, it is already directed outward away from itself. Husserl saw this as a universal feature of consciousness that would make it possible to articulate a unified and universal human account knowledge. While agreeing with Husserl’s notion of intentionality, Heidegger went further in embedding intentionality in the contingent world. He contended that the human being was indeed structured outwardly toward the world (what he called Being-in-the-world) but that this outward orientation meant that our very way of understanding the world was shaped by the history into which we were born. He further showed how the practice of critical engagement with the world could only come about through our confrontation with the possibility that our way of living in and understanding the world might come to an end. In realizing that my world is contingent in this way, it becomes possible to see my own responsibility to that world, as well as those with whom I share a community in it.
For Heidegger, our existence in the present is part of a continuum from the past. As such, authenticity is not realized in recovering an idealized past, as it is for Eliade, but in taking it up in the present via historical traditions to which we can be held responsible.
Scholars like Russell McCutcheon and Timothy Fitzgerald have assumed that the phenomenological tradition associated with Heidegger and his teacher Husserl committed the same sins as Eliade: highlighting the importance of cosmic meaning over contingency and history. In other words, Husserl emphasized the efficaciousness of meaning for individual flourishing over the way meaning is bound up with structures of domination. As such, self-described critical scholars of religion have rejected phenomenological approaches in favor of genealogical ones. Borrowing from Foucault and other poststructuralists, these critical scholars contend that the genealogical method best preserves a critical edge to analyses of religious traditions. While beyond the scope of this blog essay, I note briefly here that genealogy and phenomenology are not in essence opposed to one another. Indeed, both Heideggerian phenomenology and Foucauldian genealogy emphasize the importance of contingency and history. Where they perhaps differ is in their orientation towards constructing a future. For Heidegger, the self was not so restrained by contingency that it could not act in the world, whereas for Foucault if often appeared it was (even if in Foucault’s later work he shifted towards a more robust account of individual agency).
It would be easy to dismiss this turn as one that is simply based on a misreading of the history of the relationship between philosophical phenomenology and phenomenology of religion. To some extent, it is. But there is a deeper concern that motivates the turn to genealogy as well. And this is that even among philosophical phenomenologists, there is an emphasis on subjective experience and meaning that is suspect to scholars of religion. Why?
Theology, Critique, and the First-Person Perspective
As previously noted, the study of religion, in which phenomenology of religion was for many years a dominant force, often relied on concepts like subjective experience and meaning. As critics have noted, this often led phenomenologists of religion to implicitly or explicitly forward their own Christian theological assumptions about the world. If the past of religious studies lays in the particularity of the Christian theological tradition, so the logic goes, then any critical study of religion in the present must reject that past. Otherwise, scholarship on religion risks simply being another form of theology, and the very reason for the existence of the discipline of religious studies and the departments in which it is studied are thrown into question. Turning to Foucault or Derrida in the past has allowed scholars to claim a critical stance towards religion that bypasses the question of their own subjective relationship to their object of study. Recent developments within the humanities, however, have pointed to the limits of these genealogical approaches and provide an opening to return to phenomenology with fresh eyes.
One proponent of the postcritical turn in the humanities is Rita Felski, who in The Limits of Critique suggests that the critical approach taken by scholars in the humanities no longer offers the resources necessary to meet the needs of students or the wider scholarly community. Following Paul Ricoeur, she describes the critical approach that is now dominant in the humanities as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” characterized by a Sherlock Holmesian “detective-like” approach to examining texts. It is “an attitude of vigilance, detachment, wariness (suspicion) with identifiable conventions of commentary (hermeneutics)” (3). Such an approach pushes to the wayside how a text might affect me, challenge me, or move me. It leaves aside, in other words, the affective ways in which I might meaningfully relate to the text. In detaching myself from my object of study, I repress the ways that I subjectively relate to the text.
Still from the American drama film Sherlock Holmes (1922) with John Barrymore, on page 41 of the May 13, 1922 Exhibitors Herald. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Detachment is often treated as a virtue, rather than a vice, in the study of religion. Detachment, we are taught, is necessary especially because of the subject matter we study. To be too attached is to risk becoming religious, i.e. failing to separate oneself from the object of study that is necessary for “academic” work. It is to become again a theologian, like the phenomenologists of old. We, that is “scholars of religion” rather than “apologists,” implement the tools of theory and in doing so set aside our “experience” and “first-person” perspective in order to practice detachment and sharpen our critical acumen. When we do so, however, I would contend that we risk—contra Felski—not becoming too critical, but uncritical. This is because criticism is always made from a first-person perspective, from a person who is indeed a cemetery of the past and is attached to what they study in a variety of ways.
How can we take account of our attachment to the world in ways that preserve the practice of critique? Phenomenology offers a—though not the—resource for sorting out such issues. When Heidegger and Husserl were analyzing the first-person perspective they were doing so not naively, but with the question of how it is that we have knowledge about the world, and thus how something like a critical stance towards the world was possible. For Heidegger, it is the human capacity to engage with the world in a way that does not merely accept what others say about it—the anonymous “they” (Das Man)—that makes it possible to say that there is something like an “I” that stands apart from the world. This is not the radically independent “I” that stands at the center of libertarian political philosophy or even the “I” that is restrained by the moral law in Kantian philosophy. This is an I enmeshed in history, one that defines itself necessarily through categories handed down to it from the past—Heidegger describes this as its fallen nature. The “I” is bound to a history not of its own choosing, and yet, in recognizing that it is an “I” who takes up that history, sets itself apart from it. For Heidegger, as mentioned previously, this most concretely happens when I am confronted by the possible “death” of the conceptual world that makes my life possible. This might occur, for example, when my concepts fail to make sense of the world—one might think here of the failure of stereotypical gender categories to match up to people’s experience—and thus their contingency, and ultimately their dependence upon me to take them up as meaningful (or not) becomes clear. To return to the earlier example, here we can see why Heideggerian phenomenology is unlike Eliadean phenomenology. Where the latter cements stereotypical gender roles into the cosmic order of the universe, the former treats them as contingent norms that we can take over, re-define, and re-signify.
It is ultimately the dependence of categories upon agents acting within history that makes critical thought possible. Otherwise, the distinction between the world that is known to me and the world itself vanishes, leaving the very possibility of questioning how one understands the world impossible to give an account of. For me to take on any historically constituted normative identity, whether “father,” “colleague,” “brother,” or “teammate,” presupposes an I who takes it up, and therefore cannot be reduced to it. And it is my ability to take these categories up and examine their imbrication in certain political, economic, and social systems, that makes it possible for me to critique them, revise them, or advocate for their abandonment. A more concrete example of this kind of engagement are the recent calls to reimagine what constitutes “public safety” beyond the current conceptual framework that centers on policing. It is thus taking historically constituted norms up from the first-person perspective that makes a critical relationship to the world possible.
Conclusion
How might this aid scholars who want to reconfigure the study of religion as a critical enterprise? First, it helpfully reminds us that a critical disposition toward the world should not be conflated with the desire for objectivity. For even objectivity has a history that spoils such a desire. We are all enmeshed in histories not of our choosing. Our focus should be on how we take up those histories rather than on the naïve assumption that we can abandon them. This requires that, in part, we take responsibility for our own past in the study of religion as a discipline that has always been attached to theology and that in order to self-consciously move forward cannot bury that history. The recent work of Noreen Khawaja is exemplary in this regard. Second, it also suggests that we can think more capaciously about what critical work in the study of religion might look like. Rather than disinterested studies of “other people” who might do theology, unlike those of us in the social sciences or humanities, we might imagine those whom we study as fellow travelers with whom we share a world. This might not mean we always agree with the claims of those we study, but it might mean we see ourselves as bound up with them in ways that cannot be undone by speaking and writing in jargon that distances us from them. Indeed, this is a claim that postcolonial and decolonial critics have for too long been suggesting is necessary if we are to be honest about the reasons for our methodological orientation. While scholars have been rightly eager to take up the tools of these fields, too often our own relationship to religion, theology, and the past of religious studies has remained occluded in our own analyses. In engaging with its phenomenological past in the way I outline here, religious studies might exhume the past and in so doing, learn to live with it even as those in the field set out on new paths beyond it.
[1] I do not mean here to imply that these societies were as oppressive and unchanging as Eliade’s construction suggests, but rather that his construction of them that he drew on using his own cultural presuppositions were.
[2] This is not of course to say that Heidegger’s own political commitments should evade scrutiny. Indeed, as has been carefully demonstrated by numerous scholars, Heidegger’s allegiance to the Nazi party in the 1930s was an allegiance he saw as bearing out the critique of liberalism embodied in his other philosophical work. Nonetheless, following Heidegger scholar Gregory Fried, I would contend that the philosophical problems he raised are ones that still require our coming to terms with and that indeed by interpreting Heidegger through a critical lens, we can excavate a liberatory potential in his thought he himself would not have endorsed. This is part of what it means to take responsibility for the phenomenological tradition of which he is a part.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Iqra Afzal, a vaccinator gives the covid-19 vaccine to Nurhidayah Luding who is a foreign student from Thailand studying at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan on September 1, 2021. IMF Photo/Saiyna Bashir, September 1, 2021, Islamabad, Pakistan. CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The coronavirus pandemic has impacted nearly every individual across the planet. It has ended and upended lives, forced people to make decisions that just a few years before would have seemed unimaginable, and completely, perhaps forever, altered the way people live and go about their daily lives. The following post will explore differing attitudes towards the pandemic across groups from around the world, the sources of pandemic conspiracy theories, and how religious dynamics tie into these two components. This reflection arose from the collaborative discussions between students of the Madrasa Discourses program and a Notre Dame student during the summer of 2021.
Pandemic Perceptions Across Identity Groups
At the outset, we note that attitudes towards the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination against the disease have varied across the socio-political fabrics of different countries. There has been no linear or singular trend in how people have responded to the pandemic. This should not be surprising. Any group of people—whether grouped by religion, social strata, or political affiliation—will have a different response. There is no one way to respond to the pandemic because people have diverse religious and cultural identities that lead them to respond in different ways. Across the globe, though, there are categories of responses that people fall into concerning the pandemic and the vaccine. Most people are welcoming of the vaccine and ready to receive it. Others are happy that a vaccine exists but are skeptical of what they have been hearing and coming across in some news sources regarding (rare) side effects and other potentially dangerous consequences. They worry, for example, that they are lab rats who are being given a vaccine with unproven effectiveness, or that they are likely to receive expired or adulterated vaccines. There are also those who refuse to receive the vaccine for personal, religious, political, and/or other reasons. There are even some who do not even believe that the coronavirus and thus the pandemic are real at all. They think COVID-19 is a fabricated disease and that the soaring number of deaths is nothing out of the ordinary.
Our group discussions focused on this third group, namely those who do not believe in vaccines or the pandemic. These perceptions can at times be driven by different myths, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. Perhaps one of the most prominent drivers of COVID-19 skepticism and conspiracy theories are social media platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok. Some vaccine conspiracy theories that have been widely circulated in India, the US, and Pakistan include the belief that the vaccine will cause you to grow an extra body part, will cause you to “glitch,” will turn you into a werewolf, or will make you infertile. Others believe that the vaccine is actually a microchip tracking device (see some of these myths dispelled here). Still others believe that the vaccine causes autism or a possible DNA gene mutation. While most of these conspiracy theories are created for mere laughs, they nonetheless reveal that people’s beliefs about the vaccine, especially skepticism, fear, or denial, reflect the socio-political dynamics of their countries.
There has been no linear or singular trend in how people have responded to the pandemic. This should not be surprising. Any group of people—whether grouped by religion, social strata, or political affiliation—will have a different response.
One conspiracy theory in circulation among the Muslim minority in India is that the vaccine creates some sort of magnetic force within the body. The conspiracy theory has evolved to include the belief that the United States government may eventually use this magnetism to pull Muslims out of the country and onto Mars. This conspiracy theory reveals much about this identity group’s deeper feelings of mistrust towards the Indian and American governments, which are perhaps further rooted in the feeling of being a minority religious group in their country. Coupled with the irresponsible responses of some political leaders and a lack of trust in the governmental institutions, some people are reluctant to take vaccines from government centers and government medical institutes. They doubt whether the proper vaccine is being injected into them and are concerned that they are being fooled in some way. Another contributing factor among these identity groups is that religious scholars that are held in high esteem are sometimes skeptical of modern tools (such as medical technologies) and methods of modern medicine. When these scholars believe in such misconceptions, they are likely to misguide many others as well.
In the United States, some Catholic Christians are likewise hesitant to receive the vaccine and some flat-out refuse to receive it. They refuse, however, on different grounds than Muslims in India. Some Catholic Christians are concerned that one of the vaccines was made using fetal stem cells. Under normal circumstances, the Church condemns such a practice. A core belief of the Catholic Church is respect for the dignity of all human life, from conception until natural death. Because obtaining embryonic or fetal stem cells typically requires destruction of the embryo or fetus, this practice, therefore, comes into conflict with Catholic doctrine. The global pandemic, and the controversy surrounding the use of stem cells, led Pope Francis to issue a church order to assure members of the faith that in these devastating and unprecedented circumstances receiving the vaccine was recommended, though not obligatory.The Coronavirus has forced Church members all the way up to the highest levels of leadership to make difficult decisions on the tenets of their faith and notions of morality.
In Pakistan, responses to the COVID-19 vaccine have been varied. Although people are often reluctant to receive the vaccine, they again have different reasons than some Muslims in India and some Catholic Christians in the US. The people who have less exposure to authentic information have the oddest reasons for opposing vaccination—for example, that the vaccine may be a population control mechanism, or that it may cause a life-threatening disease. Others influenced by social media believe in different conspiracy theories, including an international conspiracy that the vaccine is intended to surveil and control different populations. Moreover, even some educated and literate people, who typically do not believe in conspiracies, are hesitant to receive the vaccine because they are unsure of its quality. One example is the reluctance of frontline health care providers to get vaccinated. Their reason for not wanting to be vaccinated is that they do not trust the health care system and/or are worried about becoming lab rats. It should be noted that Pakistani Catholic Christians do not raise the stem-cell issue as US Catholic Christians do, keeping in mind that Christians in Pakistan make up only 1.27% of the population while Christians in the United States make up 72% of the population.Rather, their concerns are the same as those mentioned above, and thus are more correlated with the socio-economic class they belong to rather than their religious affiliation. The threatened identity, be it religious or socio-economic, is the source of the conspiracy in which one believes. In each of these identity groups’ narratives, people believe conspiracies because they lack trust in social and political institutions. They believe theories because believing reality feels more dangerous or detrimental to them.
The sources of conspiracies are not religious beliefs but rather are the reservations and vulnerabilities a community already has towards the government, society, or another distrusted entity. Any part of the community that does not receive clear and trusted information will be most inclined to conspiracies. It is the fear of the unknown and uncertain or the feeling of being under threat that is the source of conspiratorial thinking.
Reckoning Identity with the Pandemic
This post has been focused on the relationship between identity, religion, society, and conspiratorial thinking. To conclude, we turn briefly to the deeper questions the pandemic has raised about religious belief and practice.
Due to masses being canceled, a table was set up with blessed palms, yellow ribbons, and prayer cards on Palm Sunday at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Springfield, Tennessee. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
During the pandemic, many individuals and groups were forced to confront foundational issues and questions that they would never have considered. Individuals and religious institutions were forced to make difficult decisions and adapt to a new way of living, praying, and engaging in fellowship with one another. On a logistical level, the pandemic has barred religious people from attending services in person, but, on the other hand, it made virtual services possible. On a more spiritual level, the pandemic has pushed some to become more hostile to religion, while it has pushed others to become more religious. Believers no longer have physical access to their places of worship and may thus feel isolated or abandoned by their religious community or God Himself. They may ask: Why has God allowed such suffering to occur? This may lead them to start questioning their religion or reconsider their faith. For this reason, global religiousness and religiosity may decline. On the other hand, the pandemic led some people to reconsider or revive the religious spirit. The sickness and loneliness that the pandemic has wrought has pushed some believers closer to religious practices and rituals. Some consider it to be a phenomenon depicting the human power to thrive and survive in response to a global dilemma. It has nothing to do with spiritual or divine causes.
The challenges to religious belief as well as the rampant proliferation of conspiratorial thinking indicate that the pandemic has had a significant impact on society. Addressing these impacts will require individuals, communities, and governmental institutions to reevaluate their understandings of the world and their priorities within it. Reckoning with one’s faith is a necessary step for these identity groups in moving forward in this new pandemic world. Likewise, establishing or reestablishing trust in communities and governments appears to be another essential step on the path forward. It seems vital that people be included and involved in decision making and policy in an unbiased manner that addresses community concerns. Additionally, the almost uncontrollable dissemination of unverified information and misinformation demonstrates the dire need for reliable and authentic information.
The world has changed, and people’s identities must change with it.
Mary Kate is a Kellogg International Scholar at the University of Notre Dame studying Political Science and Global Affairs with a minor in Musical Theatre. She spent the summer of 2021 participating virtually in the Madrasa Discourses program. Mary Kate hopes to pursue a career in international relations and public service.
Zulqernain Haider is a PhD scholar at International Islamic University Malaysia, Department of Fiqh and Usul fiqh. He also completed his MA in sociology and anthropology IIUM. He joined Madarsa Discourse in 2019.
Sidra Zulfaqar is a Sharia and Law graduate who completed a Masters (LLM) in the same subject from international Islamic University, Islamabad. She is currently serving as a visiting lecturer at International Islamic University. She joined Madrasa Discourses in 2019.
Religious experience has long been a central, and troubled, category in the study of religion. From Rudolf Otto to William James to more recent theorists like Stephen Bush and Ann Taves, a focus on the experiential aspects of religion has been seen as a necessary counterweight to theological trends that emphasize doctrine and textual analysis, and social scientific trends that treat the individual’s experience as a byproduct of wider social and political contexts.
The theoretical wager of Niloofar Haeri’s argument in Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Poetry, and Prayer in Iran—winner of the 2021 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies, sponsored by the American Academy of Religion (AAR)—is that these two modes of analysis need not be seen as diametrically opposed, and that indeed there is dynamism between how individuals practice and personally experience religion and the traditions and institutions that impose boundaries on those practices. Through fieldwork conducted with a group of middle-class Iranian women, Haeri shows how practices of prayer and poetry reading/recitation converge in ways that allow these women to explore a personal relationship with God. Against stereotypes of rote religious practice that one might find in western media—i.e. that Islam is about fulfilling religious obligation without concern for one’s sincerity in doing so—Haeri shows that for these Iranian women, prayer and poetry open one up to the experience of hāl, which can be translated as joy, passion, and awe before God. In describing how the interior lives of these women take shape against the backdrop of an Iranian society still deeply shaped by the 1979 Revolution, Haeri demonstrates that the boundaries between public selves and private selves are never as stark as they seem. Thus, those who only focus on the constraints that discourse, language, institutions, and structure place on subjective action miss how those limits are embodied by flesh and blood human beings. Because humans are embodied creatures they often take up constraints in ways unimaginable to those who designed them. To believe that it is either the individual or social context that is the main driver of change, in other words, is to introduce a false binaristic choice.
Haeri explodes this binary through her sustained attention to both the context in which these women live and their personal experiences. In chapter 1, she outlines the role of poetry in the childhood and adolescent years of her research subjets; in chapter 2, she details both the conventions and contexts surrounding practices of ritual prayer; in chapter 3, she describes the development of do’ā, or spontaneous forms of prayer, carefully laying out how this form of prayer has taken on a more specific meaning following the Revolution; and in chapter 4, she details the development of prayer books over the past decades. In each of these chapters, Haeri trains her attention on how the women in the group study, pray, and recite poetry against this wider social and political background. Prayer and poetry, on her account, allow these women to speak directly to God (even when they are repeating the words of others). It is a medium through which they give voice to the joys, anxieties, and fears they have about family, religion, and many other aspects of their lives.
The collection of essays in this symposium bring a variety of disciplinary expertise to bear on this monograph, and in doing so open up ways of engaging the book that are as dynamic as the text itself. Brenna Moore shows how Haeri’s book might be useful in the classroom for those wanting to counter orientalist stereotypes of Islamic mysticism, especially in its present-day focus on how practices of prayer and poetry recitation are being reappropriated by Muslim women. Kabir Tambar focuses on the challenge that Haeri’s book poses to familiar ways of approaching textual analysis in Islamic studies. Rather than reading the texts that these women draw on, as well as the claims these women themselves make as self-evident, Haeri pushes us to see texts, and the individuals that recite them and pray with them, as dynamic and ever-evolving. This, Tambar contends, forces us to reimagine subject formation beyond a static and sovereign individual. Ahoo Najafian is likewise compelled by the conceptual boundary breaking that Haeri’s text analyzes and theorizes. Najafian focuses on the the shifiting boundary between religion and literature, and suggests that Haeri’s engagement should lead us to further challenge the assumptions built into categories like those of religion or mysticism. Monique Scheer, meanwhile, compares the practices of the women that Haeri discusses in her own work on Protestant Christian religious experience. Haeri’s book, Scheer contends, upends many of our assumptions about what modern religion entails and reveals a closer proximity between the two traditions than have heretofore been imagined. Amy Hollywood mines similar territory, but does so through a recounting of a recent podcast conversation on the topic of Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre. Similar to Scheer, she finds that Haeri’s recounting of these Iranian women’s practices of prayer share more in common than one would expect with Protestant varieties of Christianity. Here, it is prose that provides the means by which to unlock these deeper theological points of connection. Ata Anzali suggests that currents of modernity run underneath the piety expressed by these women in their practices of prayer. These practices, Anzali contends, share more in common with pre-Revolution secularists rather than, as might be assumed, pre-modern religious actors. This is precisely because of their similar concerns with authenticity and self-expression. Finally, Setrag Manoukian begins his essay by offering an account of a conversation with a woman from Shiraz who, like the women in Haeri’s book, finds deep meaning in poetry. He then explores what he calls the “divergent convergence” between prayer and poetry in Iran concerning the role of language, the relationship between rules and desires, and what it means for prayers to be acts of communication.
The issues raised in the symposium go to the heart of the research concerns that animate Contending Modernities. By inviting us to confront our assumptions about what counts as modern religion, and where its origins lie, Haeri’s book again reminds us that accounts of modernity’s development are indeed contentious, and that there is no singular narrative that unites these different strains. Rather than seek unified accounts of modernity and secularization, perhaps we might take a cue from the women Haeri studies to think more capaciously about the sources and theories we draw on in our scholarly practice.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Contending Modernities is concerned with “exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.” Applying this to the subject of my book Kenyan, Christian, Queer, the innocent reader might assume that Christianity here is the religious force, and queerness a secular one, and that both forces are antagonistically opposed to each other in modern Kenya. After all, LGBT activism and queer politics have typically been understood, and often understand themselves, as secular projects, while contemporary Christianity in a country such as Kenya, like elsewhere in Africa, is frequently associated with a re-enchantment of the public sphere. I am grateful to the editors of Contending Modernities for facilitating this roundtable discussion which, in line with CM’s mission, demonstrates that such an oppositional and binary conceptualization of religious and secular forces is, at the very least, simplistic. Indeed, in relation to the subject matter of Kenyan, Christian, Queer, it appears that the religious and the secular are deeply entangled, with the boundaries between them being fluid, and their interactions complex and dynamic. How else can we conceptualize a context in which the semi-secular state presents Kenya as a Christian and heterosexual nation; a self-declared atheist gay writer engages in constructive black and queer religious thought; hip hop artists launch a Same Love music video with a Bible quotation and a theological statement about God; an LGBT church campaigns for the legal decriminalization of homosexuality; and queer subjects negotiate their sexuality and faith in multiple ways? I very much appreciate the contributors to this roundtable for their thoughtful engagement with my book and for initiating such a constructive conversation that helps to further unpack and understand the complex dynamics that I sought to unravel in Kenyan, Christian, Queer. In what follows, I will respond to some of the questions raised and criticisms made, in particular relating to the underlined need for greater attention to the political-economical and the institutional conditions and structures in which Christian and queer activism takes place in contemporary Kenya, and the reservations about cultural production as a viable and impactful strategy of transformation. Addressing these and other issues, I will make a case for creative imagination as a prophetic and politically significant practice.
Let’s begin with a recent event in Kenya. In August 2021, Ezekiel Mutua was reportedly forced to give up his position as Chief Executive Officer of the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB), an official government body regulating the film sector. The official notification that Mutua has been sent on “terminal leave … pending of the expiry of his contract on 25th October, 2021” does not give any reason for the premature dismissal. Yet rumor has it that the step was taken after KFCB had become subject to an investigation by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission because of irregular payments of allowances and salaries. Whatever the reason, many Kenyan social media users, as well as people working in the film and creative industry, welcomed Mutua’s inglorious ousting. During his six years in office, Mutua had established a reputation as a “moral policeman” and even a “deputy Jesus,” because of the way in which he used his position to fight against, and where possible ban, anything he considered immoral, going far beyond the official KFCB remit. In my book Kenyan, Christian, Queer, I mention Mutua in relation to the official banning by KFCB of the Same Love music video (discussed in chapter 2) and the film Stories of Our Lives (chapter 3). Mutua’s particular concern with issues of homosexuality became a national laughing stock when, in 2017, he called for the immediate isolation of two “gay lions” that had been spotted mating in the Maasai Mara national park.
Rather than offering a political economy analysis of queer arts of resistance in Kenya, I was interested in queer arts of resistance as creative and critical practices of social, political, and religious (re)imagination.
I was reminded of Mutua’s dismissal when thinking about Ebenezer Obadare’s suggestion that in my book, I could (or should) have paid more attention to the workings of the state in policing issues of sexuality and in regulating and restricting the conditions under which “queer arts of resistance” can become socio-politically impactful and viable. Perhaps more than any other governmental body, Mutua’s KFCB, at the time of my research, represented these workings of the state. Yet Mutua’s recent dismissal also illustrates that his self-declared role as a moral watchdog of the nation is not uncontested, and that state power can turn against him (possibly also because Mutua did not refrain from criticizing national leaders for “obscenity in public”). The state is far from monolithic. Even at the highest political level, there is a discrepancy between the very public anti-gay rhetoric of the Kenyan Deputy President, William Ruto, and the much-more low-profile stance of President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has publicly condemned the “witch hunts” against gay people while also stating that Kenya is “not yet ready” to decriminalize homosexuality. Of course, it is important to acknowledge these contradictions and ambivalences of the state, the government, and of political leaders, and to study them in-depth and in comparison to other countries on the continent and beyond. As some of the contributors (Obadare and Lado) to this roundtable suggest, the situation in Kenya appears to be quite different—that is, defined by a greater level of relative freedom—compared to countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast.
Yet the project of my book is a different one. Rather than offering a political economy analysis of queer arts of resistance in Kenya, I was interested in queer arts of resistance as creative and critical practices of social, political, and religious (re)imagination. Ludovic Lado rightly draws attention to the difficulties for such a queer reimagination of Christianity to find a space and affect change in major African church institutions. Without dismissing this concern—obviously the question of institutional, like political, change is an important one, and I salute progressive African clergy and theologians, such as Lado and Esther Mombo, for their important work in this regard—in my book I undertook an analysis of Christianity that is not primarily focused on the church as an institution but on public culture and creative arts. The arts, broadly defined, may have a greater ability to explore the potential of religion to contribute to a progressive, critical, and innovative vision for society, and thus to inspire social transformation. The arts can be conceptualized as the “interstitial spaces” that Sa’ed Atshan, following Homi Bhabha, associates with the potential for intervention that is critical to the decolonization of queer studies.
Although some critics might say that the selection of case studies in my book is “random,” the queer arts of resistance featured in each of these case studies constitute practices of resistance and reimagination that open up alternative possibilities—in this case, alternatives to institutionalized religious, as well as state-sponsored, homophobia. Even my ethnographic case study of a church—the Cosmopolitan Affirming Church in Nairobi—argues that this LGBT-affirming community presents a “space of possibility” with a prophetic significance, even if it does not bring about any (immediately visible) change in Kenya’s major Christian denominations or in the country’s political or legal structures. I am grateful to each of my interlocutors for acknowledging the validity, and indeed the importance, of this approach which recognizes cultural production as crucial for the development of counter-narratives to the hegemonic narratives of African and religious homophobia. I also appreciate why some interlocutors, especially those coming from a social scientific background, would have liked me to give a more critical assessment of the socio-economic and political viability of such emerging counter-narratives and of their long-term effects.
With reference to the Kenyan Christian queer counter-narratives that I document, Obadare asks: “What, really, are the chances of delegitimizing and upstaging Pentecostal demonology around homosexuality, never mind substituting it with an alternative notion of Christian love?” I understand where the question is coming from, and I have asked this question myself in the process of researching and writing my book. There is an abundance of studies of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Kenya and in Africa more broadly. Many of these foreground that Pentecostalism, in spite of its ambitions of radical moral regeneration and socio-political transformation, is an unstable religio-political project. Among other reasons, this is due to its internal fragmentation and pluralization and the resulting competition that follows. It is also because of the instability of religious authority in Pentecostalism. Obadare himself, in spite of the rather robust title of his book about Nigerian Pentecostalism and politics, Pentecostal Republic, acknowledges that Pentecostal Christianity’s “apparent political triumph is by no means irreversible.” In other words, we cannot assume that Pentecostalism in its current form will continue to be the dominant religious option on the African continent forever. Obviously, neither can we assume that the Christian landscape in countries such as Kenya and Nigeria will simply follow a trajectory of liberal progress, and that popular Christian movements which recently have come to profile themselves by a strong anti-LGBT stance, will be gradually taken over by progressive, queer-affirming ones. But I do suggest that religious, as well as social and political change, begins somewhere: with the emergence of prophetic, initially marginal, counter-narratives. Pentecostalism itself began like that, and its principle openness to new revelations from the Spirit present a potential for further transgressions and transformations. As Achille Mbembe has pointed out with reference to the history of slavery and the civil rights movement, “Struggle as a praxis of liberation has always drawn part of its imaginary resources from Christianity” (174). Underlining my earlier point, he adds to this that the Christianity in question is not foremost that of the institutional Church, but is instead “a space of truth” and “a be-coming, a futurity” (175).
The arts, broadly defined, may have a greater ability to explore the potential of religion to contribute to a progressive, critical, and innovative vision for society, and thus to inspire social transformation.
If the account presented in my book reflects a sense of optimism which some readers may find “jarring,” it is because the participants in my fieldwork, and the creative texts in my cultural analysis, themselves reflected a strong optimism. For instance, recent steps to decriminalize homosexuality in countries such as Mozambique and Botswana reinforced their belief that such a change might be possible in Kenya, too, without them necessarily being naïve about the struggle it would take. The queer arts of resistance centered in Kenyan, Christian, Queer present, in the words of Jose Esteban Munoz, a “forward-dawning futurity” (29) and therefore are inspired by—and simultaneously engender—hope. As these arts of resistance are not only queer, but also Christian, this hope, for my research participants, is fundamentally related to faith, that is, faith in God who, in the words of Mercy Oduyoye that serve as epigraph of my book, enables people with a spirituality of persistence to “make a way where there is no way.”
I am grateful to Sa’ed Atshan for observing a very similar dynamics among queer Palestinian Christians, and to Mujahid Osman for observing the same in the context of the Inner Circle mosque in Cape Town, and conceptualizing it, along similar lines, with Sa’diyya Shaikh’s notion of “future-thinking.” My own choice not to downplay or critically evaluate, but instead render explicitly visible and share the optimism of my participants is informed by two methodological decisions. First, my commitment to strive for “researching with,” rather than “researching about,” participants and their life-worlds. Performing what Osman describes as a “political ethic of care” toward my interlocutors, was also a way, as Mombo acknowledges, of addressing my own positionality and thinking about the embodied relationality between me and my participants. Second, my commitment to a postsecular approach acknowledges religion, as Osman puts it, as a possible “source of meaning-making and liberation.” I fully agree with Atshan that such a nuanced, critical yet constructive and empathetic engagement with religion can further contribute to the decolonization of queer studies in the global South because religious knowledge, symbol, and narrative are so important to the world-making of queer subjects in Africa and other global South contexts.
Finally, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in his book Re-membering Africa, has pointed out that “creative imagination is one of the greatest remembering practices” (28) and thus has the potential to counter and overcome the effects of colonialism as a dis-membering practice through which African memory was supplanted by European knowledges. Such creative and imaginative re-membering can be applied to the memory of indigenous traditions of sexual diversity, which were supplanted by the introduction of Christianity in the colonial period and its related Victorian moral values and laws. Some African LGBT activists and thinkers—Binyavanga Wainaina, discussed in my book, is one of them—have therefore suggested to give up on Christianity altogether and instead reclaim indigenous spiritualties. Although understandable, this suggestion overlooks the long-standing presence of Christianity on the continent, which long-predates the history of European exploration and imperialism, and the ways in which Christianity has become deeply rooted in African societies and culture. In this context, it is important to acknowledge that some of the oldest narratives of same-sex intimacy in Africa relate to early Christian traditions, such as between Perpetua and Felicity, two second-century North African women martyrs, recognized by the Catholic Church as saints, and the seventeenth-century Ethiopian nun Walatta Petros, recognized as a saint by the Orthodox Church, and leader of a movement that drove out foreign missionaries. In other words, as much as the account of a creative imagination of Christianity and sexual diversity in Africa offered in my book has a strong present-day focus and is mostly concerned with contemporary Pentecostal Christian imaginaries, there is also potential for a remembering practice that engages with these queer African Christian memories of the past.
Adriaan van Klinken is Professor of Religion and African Studies at the University of Leeds. He serves as Director of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies and the Centre for Religion and Public Life. He also is Extraordinary Professor in the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands (2011).
Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa is a boundary-breaking study of queer life in Kenya. In four chapters and four interludes, van Klinken documents the activism of various queer religious actors in Kenya today. The first chapter analyzes the literary figure Binyavanga Wainaina’s critique of colonial Christianity, the second provides a close reading and theological hermeneutics of the 2016 “Same Love” music video by Kenyan hip-hop group Art Attack, the third examines the Story of Our Lives anthology released by a Kenyan art collective, and the fourth provides an ethnographic account of the queer-affirming Cosmopolitan Affirming Church (CAC), which was founded in 2013 in Nairobi.
While not denying the realities of religiously inspired homophobia in Africa, these case studies challenge the notion that homophobia has led to the disappearance of queer religious life in Africa. Simultaneously, by showing that queer agency in Kenya is expressed in explicitly religious ways, van Klinken also makes the case that liberation need not entail breaking free from religion and into a more secular society, as many queer theorists in the west have claimed. Especially in the last chapter, van Klinken shows the way members of the CAC are reimaging Christianity in ways that challenge the homophobic status quo in Kenyan Christianity. They do this not for pragmatic reasons, on his account, but because their Christian identity is inextricably bound up with their queer identity. To relegate either to the sidelines would be to discount a part of themselves.
Van Klinken’s study is theoretically and methodologically boundary-breaking in at least two interlinked ways: (1) in its crossing of the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, theology, and religious studies; and (2) in its open acknowledgment that the boundaries between scholar, friend, advocate, and lover are often more malleable than is acknowledged in scholarly works. Breaking these latter boundaries, van Klinken expertly shows, comes with the territory of being an ethnographer who is not sitting at a desk reading about queer religious activists in Kenyan, but is in fact talking with them, learning from them, and getting to know them. The breaking of disciplinary boundaries is linked with this on-the-ground work. For in working with people on the ground, van Klinken shows that the boundaries between theology, religious studies, and ethnography fail to hold. Indeed, these boundaries are the fictions of academic institutions that, while sometimes useful, can quickly become limiting when taken to be rigid boundaries one cannot cross in the field. Van Klinken’s disciplinary boundary breaking here is no doubt also linked to his own identity as a gay man invested in promoting a more just world for queer people in Kenya and beyond. Here again, when working with people on-the-ground, and witnessing their struggles, hopes, and dreams, the boundaries between theologian and disinterested religious studies scholar fail to hold. The result of this boundary breaking is a refreshing analysis that is as erudite as it is honest in its aims.
The contributors to this symposium take van Klinken’s work as jumping off point for further reflections on queer studies, religious studies, Christian theology, and comparison. Ebenezer Obadare reflects on the optimism of van Klinken’s conclusions about a more capacious account of Christianity. He brings his own subjectivity to bear on these conclusions by drawing on his experience of living and working in Nigeria. Sa’ed Atshan engages with van Klinken by comparing and contrasting van Klinken’s work with his own work among queer Palestinian Christians and George Paul Meiu’s study of male sex workers in northern Kenya. Through this comparison he shows that scholars have much to gain from de-centering the western white gaze and instead providing a platform for those outside the west to speak for themselves. Ludovic Lado reflects on the challenges of doing work on homosexuality in Africa and the potential for imaging “queer arts of resistance” amongst African Catholics. Mujahid Osman argues for the importance of challenging assumptions about religion in queer theory, and indeed suggests that religion offers a potential emancipatory site for queer people. Finally, Esther Mombo engages with van Klinken’s theology, drawing on her own work to suggest the faultiness of many of the arguments deployed against same-sex relationships in Kenya, and the continued importance of theorizing the body in any account of queer life.
These reflections, like van Klinken’s book, break boundaries between various disciplines. In doing so, they open up new spaces for imagining the emancipatory possibilities that come with attending to queer religious life in Kenya and beyond. By tracing the faultiness of secular opposition to religion in queer studies, and other forms of humanistic inquiry, they remind us again that the secularization thesis that prophesized the end of religion is indeed one that proves untenable. Further, van Klinken’s book and these essays remind us that such a thesis risks not only misunderstanding religion, but the foreclosing of its liberatory horizons.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
“Tabligh Booth” at the West Coast Jalsa Salana, the Ahmadiyya’s annual meeting taking place in Chino, CA on December 20-21, 2019. In this booth, missionaries would share printed resources and answer visitors’ questions about the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Photo courtesy of the author.
“Today it is the distinction of an Ahmadi that he strives for piety with humility and meekness and does not hesitate to lay down his life for it. They are the people who have been promised mercy and blessings from their Lord. No matter what people say to us, we know that Allah is with us and we are witnessing His blessings being showered upon us on account of our sabr.” This passage is from a letter written to the head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s Pakistani congregation. The Ahmadiyya originated in India during the British colonial period in the 1880s. The community self-identifies as Muslim, but this identity claim has been challenged by many South Asian and global Muslim leaders since its inception. In Pakistan, in particular, Ahmadis are legally designated as non-Muslims and are subjected to draconian blasphemy laws. The passage from the letter above, describing how Ahmadis ought to persevere through hardship, encapsulates how this community opposes its persecution and marginalization.
Sabr is often translated into English as “patience.” However, as Saba Mahmood notes in her discussion the practice of sabr among women in Egypt’s piety movements in Politics of Piety: “sabr communicates a sense not quite captured by [patience]: one of perseverance, endurance of hardship without complaint, and steadfastness” (171, fn. 15). Sabr is an active form of embodied agency, and in this piece, I present: (1) the role of sabr in the Ahmadiyya ethical program, and (2) how Ahmadiyya’s externalized practices of sabr seek a type of transformation not included in Mahmood’s theorization of agency. Her approach misses important opportunities to interrogate how religious actors—especially those who are minoritized and excluded from public religious discourses—may express their agency in “oppositional” ways that hold religious and secular forms of agency as mutually constitutive. I argue that the Ahmadiyya practice of sabr is at the core of an “oppositional” intentionality not captured by “resistance” or “conformity.”
Despite global persecution and marginalization, the Ahmadiyya has grown in size and global influence through its practices of tabligh [missionary and humanitarian work] and “jihad by the pen” [versus “jihad by the sword”]. Unlike other marginalized Muslims groups, such as the Druze, who do not engage in proselytization, the Ahmadis commit themselves to spreading the “True Islam” through preaching and the written word. Unlike the Baha’i, who splintered from their Muslim origins, the Ahmadis claim themselves as not only part of Islam, but as practitioners of the “True Islam.” Ahmadis participate in discourses that construct and negotiate an Islamic ontology—who is and is not a Muslim—in which the community opposes how “Other Muslims” cast Ahmadis as apostates, and elevates its own interpretation of Islam.
“Preaching with love” is the Ahmadiyya embodiment of sabr. The community’s “Ask an Imam” sessions are live-streamed on social media (available on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) several times a week, and missionaries will answer questions asked by audience members about Ahmadiyya interpretations of Islam. Sometimes, the missionary will dedicate the beginning segment to a message based on frequently asked questions by the audience or general teachings. On June 29, 2021, the missionary dedicated the first ten minutes to the message of “Preaching with Love and Not Hate.” This was in response to hostility that missionaries face when preaching as Ahmadis, especially online. Throughout the segment, this missionary encouraged Ahmadis to “respond in an academic and an appropriate [manner], even in a strong [approach], but never crossing the limits or behaving in a way that is similar to the way the other party is behaving…when we preach, we should preach with love and with concern…”
The inclination to look for moments of resistance is widespread in modern and postmodern discourses on agency, spanning from liberal discourses, rooted in Rawlsian understandings of the autonomous and rational self, to postmodern discourses, from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler’s theorization of agency through subject formation.
The core of Ahmadiyya intentionality, their practice of sabr, exemplifies the tension between “resistance” and “conformity.” The Ahmadiyya embodiment of sabr has an internalized form, which is more akin to a “conformist” conceptualization of agency, in which the individual is persevering through her circumstances. While internalized sabr is an active form of agency, this is distinct from externalized sabr, in which one perseveres through hardship while also seeking a transformation of circumstances. In the “Ask an Imam” session mentioned above, for example, the internalized form of sabr (when practicing tabligh) is to not behave in a way that mirrors the other party’s hostility, while the externalized form of sabr is to continue preaching with love despite hardship. This externalized form in particular, I argue, takes on “oppositional” forms that are also not recognizable within secular and liberal notions of “resistance.” Because of the emphasis on the practice of sabr, the Ahmadiyya’s continued commitment to spreading “True Islam” rests somewhere between resistance and conformity.
It may be tempting for scholars trained in secular approaches to religious ethics to treat Ahmadiyya agency as a form of resistance. Saba Mahmood argues that liberal feminist assumptions about agency often lead scholars to “look for expressions and moments of resistance that may suggest a challenge to male domination” (8, emphasis my own). The inclination to look for moments of resistance is widespread in modern and postmodern discourses on agency, spanning from liberal discourses, rooted in Rawlsian understandings of the autonomous and rational self, to postmodern discourses, from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler’s theorization of agency through subject formation. Furthermore, agency that seeks transformation has often been referred to as “resistance,” especially among decolonial scholars, while postcolonial approaches to resistance are explicitly premised on secularized assumptions about opposition, in which minoritized actors seek to disrupt the power held by superordinate and repressive structures or actors. However, these secularized understandings of “resistance” misrepresent why the Ahmadiyya claim to worship God as Muslims. As an allegedly apostate group, the Ahmadiyya religious ethic evokes a relationship with Allah that “Other Muslims” might claim this community does not possess. When the Ahmadiyya evokes its relationship to Allah, especially in claiming itself as the “True Islam,” the community is engaging in a form of “opposition” through sabr.
“Love for All, Hatred for None” is the official slogan of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. Here it is featured as a bumper sticker. Photo Credit: Duncan C, via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
The Ahmadiyya practice of sabr cannot be explained through resistance when taking the community’s ethical intentionality into account. Scholars can observe that yes, the community is using a form of “oppositional” language to communicate its self-proclaimed identity as the “True Islam,” but adherents do not interpret this as resistance. The transformation that the Ahmadiyya seek in this world is not to resist mainstream Muslims who delegitimize the Ahmadiyya Muslim identity or liberal colonial powers; instead, it is a divinely-ordained purpose in this life. It is a purpose in which an Ahmadi “preach[es] with love and with concern…” and “strives for piety with humility and meekness and does not hesitate to lay down his life for it.” It is a duty to God that requires the practice of sabr. Reducing this enactment of agency and sabr to resistance or conformity misses the ethical intentionality that holds both as mutually constitutive.
In her account of piety and embodied agency, Mahmood does not include externalized processes of transformation for the women participating in Egypt’s piety movements. Her account of sabr focused on the dichotomous responses by two Egyptian women—one who identifies as “secular Muslim” and another who participates in the piety movements—to the patriarchal pressures put onto single women in Egypt. While the former focused on the “practice of self-esteem” to survive such oppressive social conditions, the latter emphasized sabr. Mahmood cautions her readers from casting sabr as passive. She argues against secular and liberal sensibilities of agency that might see in this virtue a reluctance to actively engage with the situation in which one finds herself. In fact, sabr entails an “individual responsibility that is bounded by both an eschatological structure and a social one” (173). The individual responsibility to persevere and endure is bounded by a duty to God, which will come with eternal blessings, and an acknowledgment that each individual is responsible for her own actions—God is just and everyone will be responsible for their own deeds.
Mahmood’s conceptualization of embodied agency is unable to account for the moments of transformation that religious actors seek in this world, while being committed to a higher eschatological goal. Her conceptualization reinforces binaries of ‘resistance’ or ‘conformity.’
As she is concluding her discussion of sabr as a form of embodied agency, Mahmood argues that “[n]either [woman], for a variety of reasons, could pursue the project of reforming the oppressive situation they were forced to inhabit” (174). Such sociopolitical conditions yielded a form of “conformist” agency—one that is active in nature and has the goal of survival rather than transformation. While she uncovers the “grammar of concepts” within the communities’ own discourses, Mahmood’s commitment to this “positive conception of ethics” narrows the possibilities of ethical action for religious actors, including, possibly, her own interlocutors.
In trying to preserve “a purist interpretation” of conformist religious discourse, as Atalia Omer has argued, Mahmood misses opportunities to consider how religious actors are participating in and shaping modern discourses. Mahmood claims that “[n]either [woman]…could pursue the project of reforming the oppressive situation they were forced to inhabit” (174)—is this necessarily true? Can we think of the women participating in the piety movements as transforming the liberal, colonial, and secular structures within the modern nation-state through sabr? The piety movements exemplified externalized forms of sabr, by advocating to preserve particular values allegedly contradictory to the modern nation-state. The women were participating in and transforming discourses on Islam and modernity through their preservation of piety and acts of sabr. While Mahmood has made substantial contributions to accounts of religious agency in her work, I find that it just falls short due to her own resistance against liberal feminist scholars who “look for expressions and moments of resistance that may suggest a challenge to male domination.” Mahmood’s conceptualization of embodied agency is unable to account for the moments of transformation that religious actors seek in this world, while being committed to a higher eschatological goal. Her conceptualization reinforces binaries of “resistance” or “conformity.” The Ahmadiyya’s ethical program embodies sabr in both the internalized form that Mahmood conceptualizes, but also an externalized one that seeks an “oppositional” transformation.
The claim that the Ahmadiyya embodies the “True Islam,” and that this message must be spread globally, encapsulates what I argue is an “oppositional” form of agency—one that is beyond the binary framework of “resistance” or “conformity.” The recasting of mainstream forms of Muslim identity, or Islamic ontology, is not represented through secular forms of “resistance” when considering the religious ethics undergirding the opposition itself. A duty to God, which calls for Ahmadis to continue advocating for the “True Islam” through “jihad by the pen” and sabr, is the source of Ahmadiyya religious ethics and ethical intentionality. And this practice of sabr is, like Mahmood noted, an active state of perseverance. This practice of sabr is also, unlike Mahmood’s conceptualization, an externalized embodiment to transform this world by continuing to spread the “True Islam.” Therefore, the “oppositional” agency of the Ahmadiyya is more complex than the previous theories of agency—from both Mahmood and those whom she critiques—are able to account for because it simultaneously holds together the ephemeral and temporary nature of this life, while also emphasizing the importance of transforming it. And this work continues for the Ahmadiyya, regardless of worldly consequences. As one Ahmadi leader said to me: we’ve become “oblivious to the fact that someone is trying to harm us…[because] they can only do so much…[the] worst they can do is harm you and send you to Paradise earlier than you would have wanted to go yourself” (interview, March 2021).
Misbah Hyder is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, specializing in International Relations and Interpretive Methodology, at the University of California, Irvine. She is also a Luce Graduate Fellow for The Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa Blog, www.cihablog.com. She studies how persecuted religious minorities respond to their marginalization from state and religious institutions through their religious practice. Her dissertation, The Pen is Mightier than the Sword: How the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Enacts Peacebuilding, focuses on how the global engagement of a marginalized Muslim minority necessitates a re-evaluation of theories on agency for religious actors.
Selection from “The Old Middle East” by Dotan Moreno. Image courtesy of the artist.
Preface/Context
A nearly decade-long Vienna seminar gave birth to The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond.Initiators and conveners of the seminar were the Secretary General of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, Gertraud Auer Borea d’Olmo, and Bashir Bashir. As I mentioned at the book’s launching event (which led to the present CM symposium), my hope was that Gertraud and Bashir could find the time one day to detail in full the methodology behind the seminar and its political and thematic trajectories. For my purposes here it suffices to highlight that at the seminar’s inception two separate study groups were at work: one gathered Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arabs who discussed “Arab Engagement with the Jewish Question,” while the other brought together Israeli and non-Israeli Jews to discuss “Jewish Engagement with the Arab Question.” Due to the complexities surrounding Palestine/Israel, it took nearly three years before a joint gathering of all could be held.
The invitation to join the “Jewish group” was extended to me in 2013; my contribution to the group grew out of my work in two domains: (1) the modern sociopolitics and thought of Jews in the Ottoman/Arab Middle East, and (2) the comparative study of nationalism, Marxism, and binationalism. Since seminar participants could only include one chapter each in the book, my contribution in the former domain remained unpublished. It was delivered—to members of the “Jewish group” alone—on Friday, April 19, 2013 and is published here for the first time as a contribution to this symposium. This 2013 essay—and its 2021 afterthoughts—include thematic linkages to two of the book’s chapters: Ella Shohat’s “On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited” (89–121) and Hakem Al-Rustom’s “Returning to the Question of Europe: From the Standpoint of the Defeated” (122–47).
Were There–and Can There Be–Arab Jews? [April 2013]
This essay addresses two inter-dependent themes. The first is the collective sociopolitical existence of roughly 750,000 Jews who were an integral part of the post-Ottoman/Arab Middle East. This number reflects their presence in the region prior to their en masse dispersal in the 1950s, when two thirds went to Israel and the rest relocated to other places around the globe. The second theme is the possible relevance of this historical trajectory—part and parcel of what is after all modern Arab history—to the future of Palestine/Israel, and the Arab Middle East at large, in the twenty first century. I open with terminological clarification on what I define as “the Arab Question” in relation to this intervention.
Two “Arab Questions”
What is known as “The Arab Question” in Palestine/Israel studies is understood chiefly as the pre-1914 Zionist realization that the territory comprising Ottoman Palestine/Eretz-Yisrael was not “a land without people,” as some European Zionists have wishfully hoped; the territory was instead the home of an indigenous Arab society, numbering at the time half a million individuals. Understood as such, “The Arab Question” was then transformed terminologically (and otherwise) into the “Palestinian question” and—later still—to “The Question of Palestine” (as popularized by Edward Said’s 1979 book The Question of Palestine).[1]
In the context of these remarks I wish to assign a different meaning to the phrase “The Arab Question.” It will be understood here as a question concerning the following conundrum: how to materialize socio-politically an inclusive Arab identity capable of incorporating into itself members of different religious groups, sects, ethnicities, language groups (etc.) who live inside the territory that comprises the Arab Middle East (Palestine/Israel included). Understood as such, this is a considerably broader “Arab Question” than the one commonly discussed in Palestine/Israel studies. My view is that “The Arab Question” framed as such remains relevant to present and future relationships between Palestinians and Israelis.
It is in this context that it is most productive to pose my guiding question here, namely, were there—and can there be—Arab Jews? The simple answer is a resolute “yes, there were Arab Jews and yes there can be Arab Jews” (in the future that is). Yet a more detailed and critical discussion strikes me as necessary.
Trailblazers
The original and daring work of such activist authors as AbrahamSerfati, Ilan Halevi, Abbas Shiblak, and Ella Habiba Shohat rendered the signifier “Arab Jews” meaningful and productive for scholarly analysis. As such, their work enabled the modern critical study of these communities and/or identities. Following these trailblazers, in 1997 (amidst my PhD studies) I too anchored the collective signifier “Arab Jews” via a three-fold justification:
“Arab” is a linguistic and cultural marker rather than a racial or religious one.
Pre-1950s Jews within the Ottoman and Arab Middle East have participated fully in the production and consumption of Arab culture.
Distinctions in the Middle East were commonly drawn internally between “Jews,” “Muslims,” “Christians,” etc., rather than between “Jews” and “Arabs.”
Sixteen years later, I suggest that while this conceptualization is internally consistent and coherent, it still remains weak and insufficiently convincing. This is because the above three-fold justification unwittingly smokescreens what in my present reading is the single most important realm in the constitution of the post-1914 modern Arab identity, namely, the political realm. Put differently, the still most dominant conception behind “Arab Jews” does not acknowledge as lucidly as needed the absolute primacy of the politicalrealm over the cultural, religious, intellectual, lingual and/or ideological realms vis-à-vis modern Arab identity generally and, even more particularly, in relation to the formation and consolidation of modern Arab nationalism since 1917.
The political realm must therefore be tightly woven into every historical and contemporary reflection on Arab Jews considerably more assertively than it has been during the preceding two decades. By saying political I do not have in mind such mundane issues as “party politics.” What I instead have in mind is the broadest substantive meaning of the political, that is, the collective, mass-based undertaking by members of local, national, or regional social groups to put in place a functioning institutional setting capable of facilitating their individual and collective well-being, whether political, economic, or cultural.
In this context, in 1946, the one-year-old League of Arab States stipulated that an Arab is a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic speaking country, and who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic-speaking peoples. “Aspirations” here have chiefly meant political aspirations linked to the Arab struggle against foreign domination (previously Ottoman, and later colonial-European) to achieve some political form and societal configuration of Arab self-determination and self-rule.
The still most dominant conception behind ‘Arab Jews’ does not acknowledge as lucidly as needed the absolute primacy of the politicalrealm over the cultural, religious, intellectual, lingual and/or ideological realms vis-à-vis modern Arab identity generally and, even more particularly, in relation to the formation and consolidation of modern Arab nationalism since 1917.
Scholars agree that there never was a singular political conception of the aspirations of the Arabic speaking peoples (irrespective of whether that was for better or worse). As I explained in 2005, across the Arab Middle East—certainly in the pre-1950s era when indigenous (non-European/non-white) Jews were still present—there have always been vigorously competing (sub-national) variants of anti-colonial nationalism at play. Those included, among others, a religiously informed one (think of the Muslim Brotherhood), a liberal one (such as that advanced by the Egyptian Wafd), a communist one, and a pan-Arab one (such as that of the Iraqi Istiqlāl).
If one generally accepts my proposition that the political dimension (or realm) is indeed very central to the constitution of modern Arab identity (including in Palestine), then the best and methodologically most logical step to undertake in order to examine the collective signifier “Arab Jews” meaningfully and non-trivially is this: turn the scholarly spotlight on politicized Jews across the Arab Middle East. Politicized Jews across the region have been affiliated disproportionally with liberal or Marxist sub-national currents. (Note: it is unnecessary to discuss here the minority of politicized Zionists among the Arabized-Jews since they have certainly prioritized Jewishness over Arabness and thus seldom view themselves as “Arab Jews”). Back now to those non/anti-Zionist liberal or Marxist Jews.
While Arab liberalism and Marxism in the pre-1950s era were both anti-colonial, the former placed its emphasis on (1) institutionalization of as strict a separation as possible between the Mosque/Synagogue and state, and (2) a political conception of equal citizenship. The latter meant that Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, etc. would constitute themselves as democratic states of their citizens, members of minority communities included. Liberal Jews in the Arab Middle East did not advocate for Jewish collective rights as a minority group, nor for cultural autonomy (or for that matter any other type of autonomy), nor institutionalization of consociational arrangements, nor did they view themselves as a national minority. Instead, the aim of politically active liberal Jews across the Arab Middle East was a political and civic one, and stood in some contradistinction to a religious or cultural one. Their aim was the constitution of an inclusive civic-democratic state of citizens.
Marxist Jews adhered to the host of modern liberal tenets I just listed, yet additionally emphasized (1) the dynamics and importance of class analysis; (2) the necessity of socialization, land redistribution, and equality within as classless of a society as possible; and (3) the conception of internationalism as one within which anti-colonial nationalism should be situated.
All of the above boils down to this: even politicized liberal and Marxist Jews in the Arab Middle East did not emphasize cultural nationalism, nor did they particularly care for it. They seldom placed the cultural elements of nationalism—be they informed by religion and/or by supra-state lingual and cultural “Arabness”—before the greyer and more mundane pressing political, economic, and institutional factors commonly understood to be pre-requisites for the constitution of functioning—essentially modern/secular—democracies irrespective of geographical area (see also Joel Beinin on this matter). Pre-1950s liberal/Marxist Jews considered the respective Iraqi, Egyptian, Moroccan, etc. civic-democratic national project daunting and complex enough even without the additional Arab (or pan-Arab) cultural, lingual, and supra-state layer. Iraqi-Jews thus tended to self-identify more as Iraqi rather than Arab, Egyptian Jews more as Egyptian rather than Arab (this also prevailed in the other Arab states).
All of this yields my core proposition: reintroducing the political realm more vigorously—while concurrently relaxing somewhat the focus on such realms as culture and language that scholars tend to place at the very fore in dominant conceptions of “Arab Jews” (and/or “Jewish Arabs’)—makes it more complex to speak meaningfully of these signifiers.
“Who is an Arab” [Non-Jew]?
Perhaps we ought to ponder the question, “Who is an Arab?” In many respects this entire intervention on Arab Jews here is a miniscule segment of its mammoth and more foundational conundrum “Who is an Arab?”
The single most elastic and socially inclusive answer to this question is this: an Arab is simply anyone who speaks (or, for our purposes, perhaps spoke) Arabic as his/her native language; a related conception is that pre-1950s Middle Eastern Jews were Arab in all but the dominant religion. My impression is that these twin conceptions reflect the wishful and ideational thinking of secular Arab nationalists more than the empirical Arab reality on the twentieth-century socio-political ground itself. This is all the more so when one essentially does not have in mind here the post-1952 Nasserist era, a period in which important Jewish communities were no longer present in the Arab world (including in Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, and Egypt).
There were, and remain, members of social groups in the Arab Middle East who spoke Arabic as their native language, yet contest their labeling as “Arab.” This is for a variety of reasons. In Lebanon, some Arabic-speaking Christians identify more as Phoenicians; in Egypt some Copts likewise avoid the signifier Arab; the Arab identity of Druze in Israel is a site of an intense communal wrestling. Iraq, the quintessential Arab country, has always been home to social communities— such as the Assyrians, Turcomans, and Chaldeans—whose native tongue is Arabic, yet who do not necessarily consider themselves Arab. And what sense should scholars make of groups/communities whose native language is Arabic because their ancestral ones have been snuffed out? These may include the Arabic-speaking Amazigh/Berber across North Africa or the Copts in Egypt. Similarly, what sense should scholars make of Kurds who have been gathering in public squares in Iraq or Syria declaring in their native Arabic, “We Are Not Arabs”? Iraq’s quintessential Arab party, the Baa’th, considered Kurds as Arab so long as they themselves refrained from speaking about the question (including in their native Arabic).
I have no pretense of having answers to these puzzles. This lack of an answer, however, has no significant bearing on the argument I attempt to make here: if the quest for “who is an Arab” is found elusive enough, the quest for “who is an Arab Jew” is even more so. The complexities with the signifier “Arab-Jew” springs more from the “Arab side” of the equation and a less from the “Jewish side” (this proposition will require an explanation that far exceeds this essay; please consult my other work on the matter here). For now, it suffices to underscore that the 1936 phrasing by the (obviously Iraqi) Jewish intellectual Ezra Haddād (1900–1972), “we are Arabs before we are Jews,” is invoked in the twenty-first century (Rejwan, 2004, Levy, 2005, 2008; Snir, 2005, 2008)) somewhat nostalgically and sorrily to lament what was back in 1936 a sociopolitical path that ultimately was not taken. Hopeful as Haddād’s words were—and remain—they are best appreciated in the poetic/symbolic realm more than in the muddier matrix of the region’s post-1917 ethno-national politics (involving colonialism, Arab nationalism, and Euro-Zionism).
If the quest for “who is an Arab” is found elusive enough, the quest for “who is an Arab Jew” is even more so.
Even in the case of pre-1952 Iraq—the single easiest and friendliest case in which to employ “Arab-Jews”—it was primarily a minority of introspective members of the (Baghdadi) Jewish intellectual middle-class who defined themselves firstly as “Arab.” This included twenty-first-century luminaries such as Shimon Ballas, Samir Naqqash, Sami Michael, Nissim Rejwan, and Sasson Somekh. These intellectuals undoubtedly deserve the (disproportional) scholarly, literary, and cinematic attention that they have received in Israel/Palestine and globally.
Materialist, evidence-based scholars, however, cannot afford the luxury of ignoring the fact that such (Iraqi) Jews were, and alas remain, an exception to the rule across the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Constructing conceptual and ideational bypass roads around the majority of Jews in the Arab world who did not really self-define as Arab [Jews]—while concurrently focusing on (the above mentioned) few over the majority—is scholarly unjustified, and normatively unproductive, vis-à-vis efforts to induce positive dynamics into the Israel/Palestine matrix. In fact, such misrepresentations—coupled with a didactic tone lecturing Mizrahi Jews that they do not understand that they are “really” Arab—nearly always produce the opposite effects to those otherwise intended. That is, they antagonize “ordinary” Mizrahim outside academia and alienate everything “Arab” even more: Israel’s Mizrahim, irrespective of their class position, tend to detect such maneuvers easily and are on the whole hostile to them. This brings me to the very act of defining—or labeling or signifying—human beings.
A work that echoes some of the Mizrahi condition in the twenty first century. Courtesy of Dotan Moreno.
Self-Defined vs. Other-Defined
An awareness of the differences between self-defined and other-defined procedures of signifying human collectivities is critical in the context of any “Jewish engagement with the Arab question” (both narrowly and broadly defined). Prevailing self-identifications among members of any worldwide group ought to be taken into account very seriously by scholars who seek to observe these groups as candidly, impartially, and respectfully as possible. Here, the signifier “Arab-Jews” springs more from an other-defined procedure of labeling than from a self-defined one.
As a collective signifier, “Arab-Jews” is super-imposed somewhat paternalistically on a social group that the majority of its members either feel uncomfortable with, or do not subscribe to (in both historical and contemporary terms). Whether or not this self-identifying tendency among Jews across the Arab world (Israel/Palestine included) is a consequence of ignorance, “false consciousness,” collective amnesia, Zionist manipulation—or of being “colonial compradors”—may well be in-themselves interesting questions to explore. Yet, such questions remain irrelevant in relation to the theme I highlight here, that is, the importance of scholars having the utmost respect for the prevailing self-identification and self-determination within the groups they observe and study. So don’t call 1948 Palestinians in Israel “Israeli Arab”; don’t call Moroccan Amazigh “Arab”; and be more hesitant and sensible when considering lecturing to working class Mizrahi Jews that they are Arab [Jews]. Socio-politics across the post-Ottoman Middle East are simply more complex.
Lastly, the conception “Arab Jews” reflects the identity of Jews in the Arab Middle East ambiguously since it has been nourished disproportionately by an Iraqi-centric outlook. North-African Jews during the first half of the twentieth century were not as “Arab” as were Jews in Iraq. Notwithstanding that Iraqi Jews comprised 14% of all Jews across the Arab Middle East, their experiences have persistently received disproportional attention compared to those of other Jewish communities in the Arab world.
As a collective signifier, ‘Arab-Jews’ is super-imposed somewhat paternalistically on a social group that the majority of its members either feel uncomfortable with, or do not subscribe to (in both historical and contemporary terms).
It is therefore a conceptual imperative to introduce collective signifiers that (1) can be reasonably applicable to as many of the 750,000 Jews who have lived across the whole Arab Middle East, and that (2) can capture comprehensively as many of their multi-lingual, cultural, social, and/or political experiences. I explained in detail elsewhere why the collective signifier “Arabized-Jews” is in my understanding a more capable and explanatory one than both “Arab-Jews” and “Jewish Arabs.” Because of this, it can help form a “bridge” between diverse minority Jews across ten states in the Arab Maghrib and Mashriq, as well as to unite them for the purposes of scholarly analysis, terminological clarity, and for other purposes as well. Such historical and conceptual enquiries and debates continue to maintain important relevance not only for contemporary Palestinian/Israeli affairs but also for broader Arab affairs and dynamics regionally, including in the complex Arab societies and states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
Afterthoughts, August 2021: Were There—and Can There Be—Palestinian Jews?
Eight years after delivering this lecture in Vienna I can attest more emphatically that the twenty-first century has witnessed a great expansion of studies and discussions on Arab Jews. Yet The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond does stand out. For starters, no collection integrated into itself as thoroughly, critically, and comprehensively the probing of non-European Jews and their experiences. I’m similarly unaware of any work whose editors afforded non-Ashkenazi/non-European Mizrahi scholars 45% of the total contributors’ space. Lastly, the book’s eight launching events during 2021—in Europe, the US, and Palestine/Israel—have been characterized by critical public debates of the highest quality on the question of Arab Jews.
This uplift notwithstanding, the discussion of Arab Jews has disappointingly remained imprisoned within the suffocating walls of academia. To date, the signifier “Arab Jews” has failed to migrate and spread into the broader, more crucial, domains of popular politics and civil society. This, alas, means that the hegemonically entrenched dichotomy separating “Arab” and “Jew”—which has been consolidated since the late 1930s as a consequence of dynamics running across Jewish and Arab national formations—has not fractured tangibly.
By way of illustration, recall that the PLO’s 1964 National Covenant stipulated that “Jews of Palestinian origin [and their descendants, such as myself] are considered Palestinians if they are willing to live peacefully and loyally in Palestine.” Following the Covenant’s 1968 revision this modified article read “the Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion [1917] will be considered Palestinians.” This inclusion notwithstanding, my three decades of scholarship and (non-Zionist) activism confirm that only a handful of Palestinians have considered me a Palestinian even after explaining that I (1) categorically self-define (also) as Palestinian, and (2) am in full sympathy with the democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people.(It has incidentally been a waste of time to attempt and communicate such Mizrahi matters to many pro-Palestinian Whites across Euro-America.)
Let me attempt a second illustration of the meagre materiality of “Arab Jews” and “Palestinian Jews.” The year 2020–21 not only witnessed expanding discussion on Arab Jews but also a Herculean struggle against the International Holocaust Remembrance Allliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. (I took part in this effort here and here for example). The most profound contribution to the global anti-IHRA struggle was a lengthy statement that “Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists and intellectuals” published in Arabic, Hebrew, and English (in The Guardian). Among other important claims, they contended:
Through ‘examples’ that it provides, the IHRA definition conflates Judaism with Zionism in assuming that all Jews are Zionists, and that the state of Israel in its current reality embodies the self-determination of all Jews. We profoundly disagree with this.
While doubtlessly a sensible proposition, as far as I was able to ascertain not a single (Arab or non-Arab) Jew can be found among the statement’s 122 prominent signatories (who reside worldwide). This de-facto omission or exclusion oddly encompasses (non-Israeli) Arab Jews who have been for decades public anti-Zionists (such as Magda Haroun, Sion Assidon, Robert Assaraf, Salim Nassib, etc.). Moreover, I did try—but failed—to find North African or Asian Jews who were approached to endorse this truly crucial statement. It is difficult to fathom why an invitation to add their names to the statement was not extended to such (non/anti-Zionist) Jews as the Israeli Black Panther Reuben Abergel; Professors Ella Shohat, Ammiel Alcalay, Avi Shlaim, Sami Shalom Chetrit, Zvi Ben Dor Benite, Gil Anidjar, Yehuda Shenhav, Smadar Lavie, Yigal S Nizri, or Almog Behar; artists Meir Gal, Rafram Chaddad, or Eliahou Eric Bokobza; filmmakers Osnat Trabelsi and Eyal Sagui Bizawe; author Massoud Hayoun, and many more like them (please do explore the twelve hyperlinks). Would inclusion of North African/Asian/Arab Jews as signatories “dilute” somehow the statement’s Palestinian and Arab “integrity,” “credentials,” or “purity”? Could such inclusion “harm” or “diminish” in some way the uncompromising anti-IHRA message it aimed to convey (to global public opinion mind you)?
Artist Description: In Armpit, the geographical maps of Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories were painted with black ink on my body. The piece concretizes the psychosexual relations between the State and its citizens, the internalization of the state’s memory and priorities over personal history. It illustrates how the State infiltrates, hides and ultimately brands itself using its citizens’ bodies. The second image is of the United States. Image Courtesy of Mizrahi artist, Meir Gal.
I have no answers to such questions, yet I am still of the view that the statement’s anti-IHRA credentials are wanting—possibly even self-defeating—precisely due to the wholesale non-inclusion of (Arab) Jewish signatories. This inevitably plays into the hands of pro-IHRA adversaries and significantly bolsters their dichotomous and separatist case and worldview. Be that as it may, the anti-IHRA statement seems to exemplify paradigmatically that the signifier Arab Jews is plainly absent in the minds of many, and not taken seriously in the slightest. This is a testament to the entrenched logic of European colonialism and modernity that separated “the Jew” and “the Arab” and that underpins the impossibility of the political intelligibility and viability of the “Arab Jew.” After five decades of the (modern) employment of Arab Jews, the signifier appears to remain hollow, discursive, rhetorical, and unwelcome—while also hardly gaining any political purchase. While one would expect this to be the case among Christian and non-Christian Zionists, it bizarrely seems equally so among enough anti-Zionist Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists, and intellectuals.
For the time being, therefore, a Jew cannot really be an Arab or Palestinian in a manner that is non-theoretical or substantive sociopolitically. The Palestinian/Arab anti-colonial/Zionist struggle may well be in some need of broader inclusion and democratic refinement. The pre-1992 approach of the South African National Congress (ANC) seems worth studying.
Behar, Moshe. “What’s in a Name? Socio-terminological Formations and the Case for Arabized Jews.” Social Identities 15, no. 6 (2009): 747–771.
Behar, Moshe. “Mizrahim, Abstracted: Action, Reflection and the Academization of the Mizrahi Cause.” Journal of Palestine Studies 37, no. 2 (2008): 89–100.
Behar, Moshe. “Palestine, Arabized-Jews and the Elusive Consequences of Jewish and Arab National formations.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13, no. 4 (2007): 581–612.
Behar, Moshe. “Do Comparative and Regional Studies of Nationalism Intersect?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 4 (2005): 587–612.
Behar, Moshe. “Is the Mizrahi Question Relevant to the Future of the Entire Middle East?” News from Within 13, no. 1(1997): 68–85.
Beinin, Joel. “Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction.” Foreword to Nissim Rejwan’s The Last Jews in Baghdad, xi-xxii. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Halevi, Ilan. A History of the Jews: Ancient and Modern. London: Zed Books, 1986 (1981).
Levy, Lital., “‘From Baghdad to Bialik with Love’: A Reappropriation of Modern Hebrew poetry, 1933.”Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 3 (2005): 125–54.
Levy, Lital. “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq.” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 4 (2008): 452–469.
Palestine Liberation Organization. “The Right of Arab-Jews to Return.” PLO Information Bulletin 1, no. 2 (1975): 8.
Rejwan, Nissim. The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Serfati, Abraham. Lutte anti-sioniste et Révolution Arabe – Essai sur le judaïsme marocain et le sionisme [Anti-Zionist Struggle and Arab Revolution: Essay on Morrocan Judaism and Zionism]. Éditions Quatre-Vents, 1977.
Serfati, Abraham. Écrits de prison sur la Palestine [Prison Writings on Palestine]. Éditions Arcantère, 1992.
Shiblak, Abbas. The Lure of Zion. London: Saqi, 1986.
Shohat, Ella. “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35.
Shohat, Ella. “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew.” Movement Research Performance Journal 5 (1992): 8.
Shohat, Ella. “The Invention of the Mizrahim.” Journal of Palestine Studies 29/1 (1999): 5–20.
Shohat, Ella. “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews.” Social Text 21/2 (2003): 52–53.
Snir, Reuven. ‘“Mosaic Arabs’ between Total and Conditioned Arabization: The Participation of Jews in Arabic Press and Journalism in Muslim Societies during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 27, no. 2 (2007): 261–95.
Snir, Reuven. “‘We Are Arabs Before We Are Jews’: The Emergence and Demise of Arab-Jewish Culture in Modern Times.” Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies VIII (2005): 1–47.
Tamari, Salim. “Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine.” The Jerusalem Quarterly 21 (2004): 46–60.
The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond interrogates the opposition between the “Arab” and the “Jew” in order to challenge dominant understandings of political identities, nationalism, and citizenship rights. It is a result of a series of workshops organized by the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna that brought a wide range of scholars together who put the Arab and Jewish questions in conversation with one another (rather than treating them as two distinct concerns, as is often the case). This book revisits European modernity by exploring contemporary Arab engagement with “the Jewish question,” which was created by and in Europe, by delving into how Arabs have dealt with the question of Jewish political rights in light of European antisemitism and Zionism. It gives as much attention to Jewish engagement with the “Arab question,” as European colonialism called it, by shedding new light on how Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish voices have dealt with the political rights of Palestinians in historic Palestine. The book’s originality lies in subverting our understanding of these two questions by exposing how they are inextricably intertwined, not only by their histories, but also by their contemporary concern with questioning modernity as well as articulating the meaning of political equality today. The various chapters included in this volume allow us to better understand how European modernity enabled, as much as constrained, geographies of entanglement in Palestine and beyond, as well as offer us new analytical and political perspectives that transcend the confines of ethnic nationalism and the exclusionary understanding of equality.
The motivation for this juxtaposition between the Arab and Jewish aspiration for political equality and freedom arises from three deeply interconnected and important developments that have taken place over the past two decades. First, the Oslo peace process has failed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ongoing colonization of Palestine created irreversible realities that cast serious doubts on the feasibility of partition and the “two-state solution” that this accord offered as the way forward. Zionist colonization has also deepened the intertwinement between Israeli and Palestinian lives, making the equality of Palestinian and Jewish rights in Palestine/Israel central. This issue is still far from resolved. Second, the Arab uprisings that erupted in a number of Middle Eastern countries in 2011 signaled the demise of grand assimilationist ideologies like Arabism, Ba’athism, and Islamism. These uprisings expressed people’s rejection of their authoritarian regimes and the state-sanctioned definition of the collective “we.” They brought to the fore the diverse ethnic and cultural realities that nationalist ideologies sought to repress, as well as a clear demand for democracy and a state that was accountable to all its citizens. Third, Islam and Muslims have become the new internal signifiers of otherness, particularly in the west. This change has posed serious challenges to existing conceptions of democracy in the West. The rise of Eurocentric and Islamophobic notions of citizenship are intimately connected to the globalization of the neoliberal political economy today. They are equally tied to the suppressed memories of Europe’s colonial “past.” These notions reflect an intimate conceptual and historical link between Judeophobia and Islamophobia in Europe, one that continues to impact the Middle East, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more specifically, in more ways than one.
The Arab and Jewish Questions exposes the intersections between the legacy of European colonialism, the failure to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the persistent demand for equal citizenship rights in the Arab world and the west. It shows that the question of Palestine/Israel, the Arab/Muslim question, and the Jewish question are not only entangled, but also belong to the same history. The first part of the book focuses on the historical connection between the Arab and Jewish questions, shedding new light on how they are tied to Europe. The three chapters in this section unpack the link between antisemitism and Islamophobia, showing how it is intrinsically tied to Europe’s refusal to confront its colonial legacies and address its racial prejudices today. It is a product of Europe’s fundamental failure to deal with any non-Christian “other” and of its attempt to transport this failure outside its borders.
The rise of Eurocentric and Islamophobic notions of citizenship are intimately connected to the globalization of the neoliberal political economy today. They are equally tied to the suppressed memories of Europe’s colonial ‘past.’
The second part of the book explores the political connections between the Arab and Jewish questions by highlighting their concerns with notions of political rights and equality. The four chapters in this section go beyond the binary division between the “Jews” and the “Arab” by discussing the figure of the Arab-Jew, which the chapters of Ella Shohat and Hakem Rustom engage more deeply. They each expose the ways in which Zionism and Arab nationalism negated the Arab dimension of Jewishness and repressed the Jewish dimension of Arab identity as a result of their respective ethnic, and intrinsically chauvinistic, definition of the nation-state. The chapter by Yuval Evri and Hillel Cohen challenges the uniform narrative that the Israeli historical establishment has tried to propagate about Jewish political uniformity by exposing how early Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish voices dealt with Palestinian political rights, affirming their congruency with Jewish political rights.
The third, and last, part of the book puts the Arab and Jewish questions into conversation with one another in order to start imagining a viable political alternative to the present stubborn reality that is marked by the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, continuous Israeli aggressions, and failed peace negotiations. The three chapters in this section stress the need to go beyond partition as a paradigm for resolving political problems. In this regard, in her chapter, Jacqueline Rose invites us to engage in the important and difficult task of undertaking a deep introspective approach to one’s nationalist discourse in order to transcend entrapments of victimhood that hamper any liberatory politics. The chapters from Behar and Masarwi explain the dialectic of national identities and unpack some of the challenges that face bi-nationalism or any alternative one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These include finding the means to protect both the individual and collective political rights of Palestinians and Israelis, and to rethink nationalism in more inclusive terms. Such rethinking is ever more pressing today, as the Middle East seeks to create new political entities that protect the rights of others—be it Jews, Kurds, Yazidis, or Copts—as equal citizens rather than as protected minorities, and calls on the state to create new structures that guarantee inclusivity, accountability, and equality for all.
Leila Farsakh is Associate Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author ofPalestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation, (London: Routledge, second edition, 2012) and of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization beyond Partition (University of California Press, 2021). She has also published on questions related to the political economy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, alternatives to partition, and international migration in a wide range of academic journals, including the Middle East Journal, the European Journal of Development Research, Ethnopolitics,Journal of Palestine Studies, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Le Monde Diplomatique. In 2001, she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission in Cambridge, Massachusetts and since 2008 has been a senior research fellow at Birzeit University in the West Bank.
A sticker from a post in Montreal taken on May 20, 2019 likely in reference to the Quebec ban on religious symbols enacted by Bill 21. Photo Credit: Flickr User Ingrid Cold. CC BY-SA 2.0.
On June 6, 2021, in London, Ontario, the Afzaal family was run down and killed by a White man, leaving an injured young boy as the sole survivor. This is the most recent and high profile Islamophobic killing in Canada, following the January 2017 mosque shooting in Quebec. In both cases, the victims were targeted because they were Muslims.
In a similar manner to the reactions after the Quebec mosque shooting in 2017, many politicians and ordinary citizens have claimed that the attack in Ontario is exceptional. They claim that such things do not normally happen in Canada. To treat it as an exceptionally tragic event makes it possible to condemn the violence and to offer sympathy and support to Muslim communities without having to address the conditions which make the Islamophobia that motivates such attacks possible. The connection between individual actions and the systemic context is erased from view when violence against Muslims is treated as an isolated incident rather than as part of a longstanding political context.
Bill 21 is a flashpoint in this context. Bill 21, which became law in 2019 in Quebec, prohibits people who wear religious symbols from giving and receiving public services in the name of upholding Quebec’s commitment to secularism. In practice, the law disproportionately excludes Muslim women who wear hijabs from working in the public sector, as well as other religious minorities who wear visible religious symbols. A few days after the London attack, Prime Minister Trudeau was asked during a press conference about his views on this provincial law in light of his stated commitment to fighting Islamophobia. Trudeau responded that he had already expressed his disagreement with the law before, but that it was up to Quebecers to take it up as an issue.
The connection between individual actions and the systemic context is erased from view when violence against Muslims is treated as an isolated incident rather than as part of a longstanding political context.
Quebec’s Premier Legault, along with other Quebec politicians and party leaders, were quick to reject the idea that there was any relationship between Bill 21, Islamophobia, and the London attacks. As Bloc Quebecois leader, Yves-François Blanchet, stated, “…there is no relationship, no link between Bill 21 and that kind of gestures of hatred because Bill 21 has no meaning in London, Ontario.” Blanchet’s statement, along with those of the other Quebec party leaders, can be read, superficially, as commenting on the fact that a law that is passed in one province has no applicability in another. Technically, that is correct. More significantly, however, it reflects a refusal to see the discursive meaning that Muslims give to these two events.
I want to consider this alleged lack of connection and meaning in more depth, as I contend that it is indicative of a refusal both to know and to see Islamophobia. What does this refusal show us about the underlying relationship between Islamophobia and Whiteness, between Muslims and the nation in Quebec and in Canada? I suggest that there is an underlying relationship between the epistemological (what Edward Said describes as the production of knowledge about Islam and Muslims through reference to the west) and the political that can help illuminate the logic behind this refusal. How Muslims are known is connected to their political subjectivity. The refusal to know and to see Islamophobia, I claim, is ultimately a refusal to accept the political claim by Muslims to be treated as equal citizens. It is a refusal to see how Islamophobia is sustained through its connection to Whiteness in Quebec.
A Secular Nation
As Saba Mahmood has shown, hijabs and niqabs mark a fault line between the secularity of the western democratic nation on one hand, and the religiosity of Muslims on the other. Muslim women who wear them are defined entirely by their religious identity, and perceived as lacking individual agency. This defining makes it possible for the state to intervene via the law to “save Muslim women” in the name of western democracy that is based on secularism and gender equality. For the past decade in Quebec, various provincial governments have made efforts to legislate a ban on hijabs and niqabs. The current Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) government has been the most successful thus far.
The refusal to know and to see Islamophobia, I claim, is ultimately a refusal to accept the political claim by Muslims to be treated as equal citizens. It is a refusal to see how Islamophobia is sustained through its connection to Whiteness in Quebec.
Legault’s government defends Bill 21 by claiming that it reflects Quebec’s “values,” namely, the importance of secularism. Secularism is closely tied to Quebec’s national imaginary following the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, religion and the Catholic Church were removed from the operations of the state and public sphere. At the same time, a Quebecois national identity based on French as its official language, gender equality, and secularism were cast as the defining characteristics of “modern” Quebec society.
Most Muslims in Quebec are francophones and have been settled in the province for several decades, since the Quiet Revolution. However, despite the fact that many Muslims are linguistically well-integrated in a society that centers French as both a language and national identity, their presence as racialized and religious minorities has come to be politicized in recent years within debates about “reasonable accommodation” and Quebec nationalism. The perceived hypervisibility of Muslim women who wear hijabs and niqabs in public spaces has been central to these debates, because it challenges the self-professed ideals of secularism and gender equality as part of a “modern” and nationalist view of Quebec.
The consolidation of secularism in Quebec is dependent in part upon the erasure of Muslim religiosity from public space, where public space is imagined as constitutive of the nation. This legislated erasure of Muslims from everyday public space normalizes and legitimizes Islamophobic violence, as it seeks to make their visibility and acceptance as Muslims exceptional. It creates the conditions that make it possible for someone to set out to kill Muslims in order to literally remove some of them from the nation. This is the meaning that connects Bill 21 in Quebec to what happened in London, Ontario. It is also invisible to Quebec’s government and Quebecois politicians.
Epistemology of Ignorance
The refusal to see Islamophobia in Quebec is rooted not only in Quebec’s idea of “modern” secularism, but also in the history of its relationship to the Rest of Canada (ROC). Quebec politicians also rejected the idea that Bill 21 could have had an impact on the hate crime in London because of Quebec’s relationship to the ROC. They emphasized Quebec’s power and ability to pass laws applicable to its own population without interference from the ROC. Their response, asserting a version of Quebec nationalism, is a well-established frame through which many Quebecois view relations with the (English) ROC. Many see the ROC as having engaged in historical “oppression” that is now being turned into a kind of bullying and convenient scapegoating.
This response ignores the complexity of Quebec’s own position as a francophone White settler society located within Canada, which is an anglophone White settler society. These are two intersecting political projects. While the standard criticism often claims that English Canada dominates over the linguistic minority of French Quebec, this narrow focus ignores how White francophone Quebecois majorities themselves constitute a dominant group in relation to the racialized (non-White) minorities in the province. In other words, the tension that shapes Quebec national identity is its position both as a White francophone minority in relation to Canada and a White francophone majority in relation to racialized minorities in Quebec. Thus, the refusal to see Islamophobia is also a refusal to see themselves as a “White nation” where White majorities who consider themselves to be the “owners” of the nation hold the power to set the terms of belonging for non-whites.
Memorial to the victims of the January 2017 attack on Muslims praying at Quebec City Central Mosque. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Charles Mills describes this refusal to see as an “epistemology of ignorance” in the context of his theorization about the racial contract. This contract lays out the terms in which White supremacy and its colonial projects structure society. The epistemology of ignorance refers to the non-knowledge of White groups who neither know, nor see, how Whiteness structures the world around them and maintains their position within it. They live in a world that is invented using “white mythologies, invented Orients, invented Africas, invented Americas” (18). These are anchored in the White imagination. This is neither accidental, nor incidental, but a necessary requirement for the structure of White supremacy to exist and to endure. It is constitutive of the racial contract itself, “which requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity” (19).
The comments by Premier Legault towards other racialized minorities, in addition to Muslims, demonstrate the ongoing investment in this epistemology of ignorance. In 2019, close to the two-year anniversary of the mosque shooting and in response to a proposal to mark a day dedicated to fighting against Islamophobia, Legault stated there was no need for it because there’s no Islamophobia in Quebec. More recently, in June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd in the US and protests against police killings of Black people, he said that while there was discrimination in Quebec, there was no systemic racism. A few months later, after the death due to negligence of Joyce Echaquan, an Indigenous woman who filmed two nurses insulting her before she died in a Quebec hospital, he reiterated his position against the existence of systemic racism.
Muslim Political Agency
Since 2017, there has been more public discussion about Islamophobia and advocating for Muslims. This change highlights the emergence of a national conversation shaped by Muslim political consciousness and agency. In the aftermath of this latest attack, many Muslims are not only naming their experiences of Islamophobia and laying out the connections between its various manifestations, but more significantly, seeking accountability and action from political parties and their elected representatives. In response to the initial call from the London Muslim Mosque and later from the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), the federal government held a national summit on Islamophobia on July 22, 2021. It remains to be seen what kind of impact or long-term changes will come out of it.
Earlier, I noted a connection between the epistemological and the political, which sheds light on how Islamophobia and Whiteness are connected. Sayyid describes Islamophobia as “the systematic regulation and disciplining of Muslimness” and a denial of Muslim agency “through reference to a westernizing horizon” (423). Muslimness, as “a process of identification by which a Muslim subjectivity is articulated” (423), can only be imagined through reference to the west, which means that it is defined as antagonistic to it. In the case of Quebec, this “westernizing horizon” includes a future in which its Whiteness is secured as part of its “modern,” western, secular, democratic society. Muslim subjectivity, articulated through expressions of political agency, is seen as a threat to this imagined future and met with attempts to discipline it, and ultimately to erase its visibility.
Thus, the refusal to know Islamophobia is an act of Islamophobia itself because it is a refusal of Muslim political claims. However, it is sustained, not through personal prejudice, but through a systemic refusal to see Quebec’s own Whiteness as integral to its national identity. This commitment to the epistemology of ignorance as constitutive of a racialized hierarchy in society is the only way for a government to pass a law that devalues and discriminates against Muslims as racialized and religious minorities who have equal rights as citizens in the polity—and to deny that it does so at the same time.
Uzma Jamil’s research expertise is in Critical Muslim Studies and examines how Muslims are constructed as racialized and religious minorities in the west, using a decolonial/postcolonial approach. Her research and publications focus on Muslims in Quebec and Canada, Islamophobia and racialization, the construction of knowledge about Muslims, and the securitization of Muslims in the “war on terror.” She has previously published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnicities and the Islamophobia Studies Journal, among other academic publications. Dr. Jamil is a founding member of the Editorial Board of ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies and a contributor to the podcast Network ReOrient.
In Wrestling with God: Ethical Precarity in Christianity and International Relations, Cecelia Lynch provides a genealogical account of Christianity’s role in shaping the field of international relations. Throughout the book, Lynch creatively puts a geographically diverse set of thinkers from different moments in history into conversation with one another. She does this so that we might not only understand the past better, but also think with it more constructively in the present. By looking at how Christian theologians confronted the political and social contingencies of their day, Lynch shows how the logic of Christian missionizing and humanitarian activity arose during the colonial era of conquest and continues into the present, albeit now more often in the work of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and FBOs (faith-based organizations). Drawing on Judith Bultler, Lynch contends that we should see these actors in history, and ourselves, as precarious creatures—that is, as persons vulnerable to violence and injustice—perched within traditions not of our own making, but to which we can draw on to further the common good (66). This is what Lynch aims to do in her examination of the Christian tradition in this context.
In her examination, Lynch prioritizes practice over doctrine, i.e. what people do rather than what they profess to believe. In doing so, what comes to the forefront is the process of ethical reasoning rather than its doctrinal precedence or results. Ethical reasoning, on this account, is a form of casuistry, where “religious actors constantly interpret and reinterpret teachings in order to meet their needs for living and acting in specific places and times” (57). In other words, it is a bottom-up process, one where the practical realities of the world shape how we respond to challenges and eventually shape what we call doctrine. It is decidedly not a top-down process, one where we apply previously established principles to new matters without considering the restraint of contingencies. It is these contingencies which make our actions, and our sense of self, precarious.
Lynch treats each of the subjects with whom she engages throughout the book as ethically precarious, practically reasoning actors. It would be impossible to provide a complete overview of the thinkers and arguments that Lynch weaves together throughout this book. Indeed, in each historical era, she makes clear that there is no single interpretive line amongst Christian thinkers, and gives ample attention to a variety of influential philosophers, theologians, and political thinkers. She begins in the colonial era, focusing on the arguments made by theologians like Bartolomé de las Casas and Eusebio Kino concerning the treatment of indigenous peoples in the newly “discovered” Americas. She shows how the terms of these debates concerning, for example whether it was necessary to convert, kill, or peaceably live alongside indigenous peoples were shaped by the contingencies of exploration and the restraints of doctrine. But in responding to these contingencies, she explains, doctrine itself was changed. Her story continues in her discussion of debates about war amongst Protestant and Catholic theologians in the modern world. Lynch dives deep into the 1932 debate between H. Richard Niebuhr and his brother, Reinhold, on the ethics of intervention in the Sino-Japanese conflict. She does so, however, while situating it within its wider theological and political context. She demonstrates, for example, that H. Richard Niebuhr’s account of non-violence was not the only possible interpretation at the time. She shows how a Catholic thinker like Dorothy Day interpreted the Christian tradition in an even more radically pacifist way than H. Richard Niebuhr as an active mode of non-violent resistance. Before ending the book by exploring the current constellation of neoliberal NGOs and FBOs, Lynch explores how liberation theology took up the same Christian teachings as their elder brethren, and yet saw in them a message more concerned with standing with the poor and marginalized. What one is left with after reading this book is a genealogy of Christianity’s role in international relations that balances a wide-ranging scope with historical depth. This approach makes it possible for the actors that appear in each of her chapters to speak to one another and to readers.
In the responses to the book collected in this symposium, the contributors engage with the theoretical as well as ethical questions that Lynch’s book raises. Diane L. Moore puts Lynch’s account of precarity into conversation with Donna Harraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble” to further reveal what an expansive notion of the common good might entail. Michael Barnett wrestles with the boundaries of how we classify Christianity. Atalia Omer extends Lynch’s discussion of technocratic humanitarianism in our present moment and thinks with her about what it means to center those at the margins of religious traditions so that we can imagine new horizons of ethical possibility. Relatedly, Emma Tomalin reflects on the importance of prioritizing local faith actors in overcoming current neoliberal approaches to humanitarian aid.
In thinking both critically and constructively with Christian thinkers from both the past and present, Lynch’s book shows how we might employ critical genealogical methods without succumbing to a cynical and/or fatalistic view of the world. This creative engagement is key to navigating the challenges of modernity and grappling with contested notions of the secular and the sacred. In significant ways, this forum builds upon themes of our previous symposium on Giuliana Chamedes’s A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe, which also gathered scholars together to think both historically and constructively about religion’s role in shaping geopolitical realities in modernity.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
“In the summer of 2014, the police put up a checkpoint at the entrance to the [Bab al-Majles al-Islami] neighborhood. Ever since, all residents have been suffering from severe movement restrictions that interfere with their lives and harm their livelihoods.” Yoav Gross/B’Tselem February 2016, CC 4.0 International.On May 21, 2021 Hamas and the Israeli government agreed to a delicate ceasefire following Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, leaving the narrow Strip, which has been under continuous siege for 15 years, to deal with the aftermath of death and destruction. Shortly after the ceasefire went into effect, U.S. officials reverted to framing the situation in Gaza as a “humanitarian” crisis rather than as a site of “nationalist” or anti-colonial struggle. However, this ghettoization of Gaza and its extrapolation from broader Palestinian struggles reinforces a fragmentary colonial logic. This exposes the manifold ways in which European colonial logics and legacies of blood purity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide still underpin the anatomy of Israeli Jewish systematic Palestinian displacement and fragmentation as well as the ever consolidation of the annexationist Jewish supremacist apartheid regime.
Now, in the wake of the assault on Gaza and unrest in Israel, Israel’s Minister of Internal Security and the Police Commissioner Major General have carried out massive arrests as a part of “Operation Law and Order.” The Operation targets Palestinian-Israelis who resisted violence instigated by Jewish vigilante mobs inside the 1948 lines and who expressed solidarity with other Palestinian communities, thereby resisting their own sequestering from the anticolonial Palestinian struggle. The importation of vigilante settler violence from the West Bank, carried out with impunity on Palestinian citizens of Israel in the so-called “mixed cities” (binational cities that are only “mixed” because of the Nakba or the Catastrophe of 1948), exposed that the citizenship status of Palestinian-Israelis is not worth the paper it is written on. This is hardly a surprise considering that, in 2018, the Jewish Nation-State Law legally enshrined what was already the norm. It did so by resolving the internal contradictions between Israel’s identity as both “Jewish” and “democratic” in favor of ethnocracy and as such the Israeli regime no longer seeks to conceal its disregard of democratic norms and international law. This ethnocratic mode denotes convergences between territorial maximalist settler theology and ultranationalist racist ideologies such as the Kahanism of the Religious Zionist Party. The latter has gained six mandates in the recent election cycle, due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s maneuvering but is just one explicit expression of a broader normalization of Jewish supremacist outlooks. In collusion with the state and underwritten by settlers’ organizations, Kahanists are inciting and provoking violence in binational cities and in occupied East Jerusalem. Kahanism is fixated on connecting ideas of Jewish blood purity to ethnoreligious land hegemony, and it seeks to enact those ideas by implementing policies that Judaize space within Israel. This blood- and land-centric Judaism is rooted in the experience of Jewish modernity in Europe.
In this instance, it is worth recalling the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the public trial of Adolf Eichmann, the executioner of the “Final Solution” against the Jews during World War II. Herself a stateless refugee during the war, she had two insights that can aid in analyzing this moment. First, Eichmann was not an evil mastermind, but rather an obedient bureaucrat totally immersed in an antisemitic ideology concerned with de-Judaizing Europe. To this degree, his evil actions were banal. Second, the Nazi machinery intent on dividing people marked for elimination according to an arbitrary scale of valuation enabled the ghettoization and eventual liquidation process implemented in the Nazi death factories. Not only that, the Nazi regime employed Jews in their own execution, whether through populating lists for the next shipments out of the ghettos or loading bodies into the ovens. In the end, while the Nazis stratified Jews into different categories, it did not really matter what your status was; all Jews were affected by the logic of genocide.
The dispossession of the Palestinian residents from Sheikh Jarrah and the violation of al-Aqsa by Israeli police that triggered the escalation into rocket exchanges between Hamas and Israel exposed how the eliminative specter of Eichmann, in an inverse, is haunting Jerusalem and Palestinian lives. A bureaucratic permit regime that permeates the entire space constitutes a fragmentation mechanism not unlike the Nazi’s taxonomy of different Jews. It is indeed an “ongoing Nakba” or a Nakba by other means, which occasionally explodes into massive aerial assaults and other military operations. The Nakba, a project of ethnic cleansing, was an event in time that involved the massive dispossession and displacement of Palestinians. Yet the Nakba is also ongoing through multiple mechanisms, including the bureaucracy of dispossession and of fragmentation. Indeed, Israeli government employees, police, and construction workers routinely carry out legal orders to destroy Palestinian homes inside and outside the 1948 borders and to dispossess Palestinian citizens of Israel to make room for Jews. And using an arbitrary scale of valuation, Israel has assigned different statuses and identification cards to Palestinians. In the end, fragmentation policies enable the trajectory of Judaification of the land through the construction and maintenance of “reservations” or Bantustans for Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, itself a series of mostly non-contiguous Palestinian islands interrupted by checkpoints and other military barriers, is deeply discredited as a “subcontractor” of the occupation, exemplifying Arendt’s analysis of fragmentation and cooptation of the victims themselves in their erasure.
The truth is that it does not really matter what identity card status Palestinians hold. The recent escalation exposed the links between Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel “proper” and clarified how all Palestinians are subject to the same logic of apartheid. That Israel is an apartheid state was recently determined by the evidence-based reports of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem as well as by Human Rights Watch. They show that the Israeli state is worthy of this label because Jewish supremacy underpins the entire geopolitical space from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and informs the ever-aggressive Judaizing policies that have expanded from the West Bank to the hearts of “mixed cities.” Some analysts call this the Hebronization of Israel, referring especially to al-Shuhada Street in the Palestinian city of Hebron, in which it is now only permissible for Jews to live. Over decades, Israeli government policies fragmented Palestinians, dividing them into an intricate pyramid of categories of identification. The current moment revealed with clarity the anatomy of this colonial logic. Disrupting this logic, we saw on May 18th a general strike across all of Mandatory Palestine, the first since 1936.
What the grassroots organizing in Sheikh Jarrah continues to evoke, in the aftermath of the 2021 assault on Gaza, is how a dispossession from this neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem constitutes a collective Palestinian experience of an ongoing Nakba, regardless of the illusions of autonomy created by the Oslo Accords and the discourse of a (Jewish) democracy within the 1948 lines. The Nakba is ongoing and is manifest in the expansion of the Judaization policies underwritten by settler organizations. The residents of Sheikh Jarrah showed the world the banality of evil operating in every day instances of bureaucratic decision-making, framed by all-encompassing Jewish supremacist ideology. “Operation Law and Order” offers an official show of force that intends to terrorize Palestinian-Israelis back into their apparent domesticity, back into their ghetto, fragmented from other Palestinian experiences in the West Bank and Gaza. It is as if Eichmann’s own tactics and exclusionary and eliminative ideology are alive and well, only now being used against Palestinians. The purist logics of European Christian modernity live on in the land- and blood-centric Jewish supremacist regime which, along with its Palestinian victims, has also imprisoned Judaism and Jews in a militaristic ghetto.
Rather than an aberration, the fascination with conspiracies at the heart of Trump-era White evangelical Christian nationalism is symptomatic of a distinctively modern manifestation of evangelicalism’s obsession with end-time prophecies. These form a surging and resurging current throughout late twentieth and twenty-first century evangelicalism. Confronted by an ever more rapidly changing socio-political context, and now inextricably intertwined with Republican Party politics, end-time apocalypticism and messianism have come to infuse evangelical approaches to contemporary politics and culture. Caught in the siren-song of Trump and QAnon conspiracy ideology, this fixation has leapt from the folk theology pages of popular Christian fiction and populism-inflected evangelical church pews, into voting booths, political rallies and activism, and onto the lawn of the U.S. Capitol at the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. Together, apocalypticism and messianism form a recurring dynamic, pattern, and logic that drives the latest resurrection of White evangelical nationalism—a dynamic, pattern, and logic I describe as “zombie nationalism.”
The Zombification of White Christian Nationalism
Studies of the American religious landscape produced in the second decade of the twenty first century claim that White, Christian America is rapidly ageing and diminishing in population, its institutions receding, its influence waning. If demography is destiny, the argument runs, the relevant demographic trends indicate that White Christian America is dying.
Amid these projected realities, Robert Jones warns of the emergence of a white evangelical Christian “Frankenstein’s monster” (231)—an entity stitched together from the remnant fragments of formerly hegemonic, gradually declining, cultural and institutional bodies. Though long decaying, they become reanimated and propelled by the surging currents and organizing shocks of mobilizing for political power and specific culture war causes. Frankenstein’s monster stands in as a metaphor for the kind of aggressive, concentrated culture war resurrection that White evangelicalism opted for in its political resurgence under Trump and in successive waves of Trumpism (which has outlasted the Trump presidency itself).
And yet, in contrast to Jones’s analogy of a White evangelical “Frankenstein’s monster,” the ethno-religious nationalism that animates contemporary U.S. White evangelicalism is fashioned much more in the image of the zombies of George Romero’s film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), the follow up to the his first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead(1968). Like George Romero’s zombies (and in diametric contrast to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), the latest mutation of this ethno-religious nationalism demonstrates little capacity for the kind of self-discovery, hyper-self-reflexivity, critical-reflectiveness, and desire for nurturing relationships that Harold Bloom describes as the tragic vulnerability of Victor Frankenstein’s creation.
In the Romero original, the zombies emerge slowly. They traverse the terrain with seemingly infinitesimal motions. Their power inheres in the ways they pursue their objectives in mindless, lock-step conformity, and with undeterrable resolve. So it is for the social and ideological patterns that inspirit the latest resurrection of White, evangelical Christian political resurgence. These patterns are reflected in dynamics of reanimation born of motivating commitments and beliefs that are not amenable to contrary evidence. Such recurring dynamics are fueled, moreover, by U.S. White evangelical Christians conceptualizing themselves as an increasingly marginalized remnant in a society that (putatively) originally did, and (allegedly) should still, reflect their central identity and values. It entails the self-perception of being perennially marginalized—and progressively more endangered— victims of an aggressively anti-Christian “secular” society. For White evangelicals, these grievances infuse (and further propagate themselves through) pop-culture genres in evangelical Christian culture that amplify accounts of spiritual warfare, end time apocalypticism, and messianism. As Edward G. Simmons, David C. Ludden, and J. Colin Harris show, these forms of “pop-theology” (or folk theology) prime White evangelicals for forms of cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance is fertile soil for conspiracy fascination that graduates into—sometimes subtle, sometimes flagrant—radicalization. Many Trump-era evangelicals embrace “end-time” and messianism-inflected conspiracy theories that permeate Trump-driven Republican politics and policy-making. From this ensues a proclivity to position their political and cultural opponents on the far side of a Manichean divide and to imbue contemporary politics with cosmic urgency.
During the Trump presidency, for example, White, evangelical Christians were absorbed in ever-expanding numbers into QAnon conspiracy ideology. Some evangelical scholars sounded the alarm about this trend. They declared the active evangelical embrace of—or impassive acquiescence to— QAnon as a departure from true evangelicalism, into an altogether different, heretical religious movement. And yet, this response by evangelical elites makes denial of White evangelicalism’s relation to QAnon all too convenient and un-self-critical. Much like the basic principle of addiction recovery, denying that one even has a problem is a primary indicator that the problem is not only present, but has become, in fact, quite fundamental.
Clearly, not all evangelicals became QAnon followers—though startlingly large numbers have. Evangelical and non-evangelical analysts alike document that captivation with QAnon conspiracies has spread through the ranks of White evangelicalism like wildfire. Careful inspection through the lens of ethno-religious nationalism illuminates that many White evangelicals are primed to embrace QAnon ideology for reasons intrinsic to 20th and 21st century White evangelical culture. Indeed, ethno-religious nationalism—and the distinctive logic and dynamics of zombie nationalism— forms the connective tissue creating a symbiosis between much White evangelicalism and QAnon conspiracy ideology.
QAnon and White Evangelical Nationalism
QAnon theories, and the internet “drops” wherein “Q” would leak putative secret information about government officials and the media, emerged in the second year of Trump’s presidency. They quickly evolved into an increasingly mainstream religio-political movement promoted by Trump (via Twitter). “Q” portrays Trump as a messianic figure who is a bulwark for U.S. White evangelicals and other putatively “patriotic” populations against assaults upon American Christian culture. “Q” is a clandestine (that is, “anonymous,” hence, “QAnon”) internet presence whose viral posts and YouTube videos—frequently sprinkled with quotations from Christian scripture (e.g. 2 Chronicles 7:14) and soliciting prayer from his/her followers—purport to expose the insidious inner workings of the so-called “deep state,” and the intrinsic deceptiveness of “mainstream media.”[1] “Q” purports to reveal how Trump’s alleged struggles against these are infused with apocalyptic significance and spiritual warfare, cohere with end time biblical prophecy, and require the retrieval and defense of America’s “true” identity as a Christian nation.
QAnon flag at Virginia 2nd Amendment Rally in January 2020. Photo Credit: Anthony Crider. Via Flickr.
At its most acute, the QAnon conspiracy ideology asserts that the Democratic party is controlled by a cabal of global elite (“globalist”) and “deep state” anti-Christian and anti-Trump actors (specifically naming the Rothchilds, George Soros, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Bill Gates, and “Hollywood” figures, among others). This cabal allegedly engages in pedophilia, child sex-trafficking, ritual cannibalism of children, and worships Satan. Further, this ideology amplifies the “big lie” or Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 presidential election “in a landslide,” and that the election was stolen from him and his followers. Though seemingly so extreme as to be dismissed out of hand, in fact, White evangelicals in the U.S. embrace these claims at rates far higher than their non-evangelical, Republican counterparts.
Examined in terms of their religio-cultural structures, these conspiracy-fueled patterns of scapegoating and demonization of opponents are neither novel, nor especially unusual. They reanimate distinct features of widely circulated antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—an early 20th century Russian Czarist fabricated account of a Jewish economic and political elite allegedly controlling global politics and economics. QAnon crosses various “Protocols” tropes with the recurrent “blood libel” accusations that inspired numerous Christian pogroms against European Jews, namely, claiming that Jews kidnapped Christian children and used their blood in ritual observance. QAnon demonizes and scapegoats its targets in similar ways, and similarly inspires violence. The antisemitic contours of QAnon ideology make it especially attractive to self-avowed White supremacists and White nationalists (for example, the Proud Boys). These antisemitic contours are “plausibly deniable” for many White evangelicals in virtue of the self-averred, seemingly philosemitic, pro-Zionist policies of the Trump administration. QAnon’s ethno-nationalist elements, intermingling with its religious dimensions, create an intoxicating elixir for White evangelicals who may think of themselves as sharing nothing in common with avowed White nationalists or card-carrying White supremacists. Yet, QAnon brings the elective affinities between these groups into clear and distinct focus. Those affinities form the warp and woof of the ethno-religious nationalism that is the (sometimes camouflaged, often denied) connective tissue between them.
Trump-era White evangelicals have widely adopted various messianic interpretations of Donald Trump. Many of these feed directly into QAnon claims that Trump is an “end time” defender of U.S. Christian culture. This is the same culture previously captivated and emboldened by Franke Peretti’s best-selling spiritual warfare Christian fiction, which generated warnings from some evangelical elites against a looming obsession with “spiritual warfare.” The U.S. White evangelical culture-industrial complex amplifies these claims and dynamics exponentially. QAnon is, in effect, one part Frank Peretti spiritual warfare, one part Left Behind series apocalypticism, and one part Elders of Zion antisemitic conspiracy theory, packaged together in a tantalizing, self-involving variation on Celebrity Apprentice reality television and social media.
Apocalypse Again
End-time, apocalyptic, messianic drivers of White, evangelical Christian nationalism are not new. They form a recurrent dynamic in contemporary White U.S. evangelicalism. The best-selling, end-time prophecy publishing industry emerged in the 1970s and 80s. It was launched by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which the New York Times identified as the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s. This, along with other phenomena of Christian rapture culture (for example, the A Thief in the Night film series of 1972–83), influenced the upsurge of evangelical political engagement in the 1980s. Evangelical apocalypticism surged forward again with the release of the bestselling Left Behind book and film series, and ensuing multimedia franchise, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. All of these are prior examples of the various apocalyptical entanglements that re-emerge in evangelical Christian enmeshment in QAnon conspiracy ideology.
These examples are not merely benign instances of “Christian fiction,” niche Christian nonfiction, or “Christian entertainment.” They have recurring real world implications. For example, 1970s and 80s end-time prophecy and apocaplypticism shaped White, evangelical attitudes toward U.S. national politics in the Cold War. It informed evangelicals’ views regarding the prospects of nuclear war—which many viewed as the form that biblically prophesied apocalypse might take. Hal Lindsey claimed it was the Anti-Christ that would “delude the world with promises of peace” (144). As Matthew Sutton shows (see chap. 11), throughout the 1980s Ronald Reagan catered to his White evangelical base by occasionally entertaining their apocalypticism at various points throughout his presidency. Selling upwards around 80 million copies altogether, the Left Behind series of the 90s and early aughts shaped evangelical views about the State of Israel’s end-time significance in the present, and fueled Christian Zionism. Indeed, the dispensational theology modeled in the Left Behind series spurred Trump to move the U.S Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018.
QAnon conspiracy ideology symbiotically feeds upon populist White evangelical impulses toward apocalypticism and messianism. It captures them through their fusion with Republican political ideology. It retrieves and synergistically reanimates—even as it mutates— earlier religious nationalist patterns. These occur, for example, in re-emergent concepts of the White Christian nation (peoplehood) as a victimized-yet-faithful and long-suffering remnant, that conception’s inter-wovenness with embattled, originally Christian identity and culture (a myth of origin), and the exceptional role of the U.S. as a “chosen nation” (or “new Israel”) in God’s providential plan within world history (exceptionalism). The cyclical resurgence of these dynamics exemplifies “zombie nationalism.”
Hence, the capture of White evangelicals by the siren-song of Trump-amplified ethno-religious nationalism through QAnon conspiracy ideology is no momentary deviation from true evangelicalism. It is the culmination of more than a half-century of evangelicalism’s surging and resurging fixation upon end-times apocalypticism, and its concurrent progressive enmeshment in, and symbiosis with, Republican Party ideology. It is intrinsic—not extraneous or incidental—to White evangelical religion.
Rather than the demise prognosticated by social scientists, the case of “the end of White Christian America” is an example by which to examine how forms of religious authority and identity navigate conflicts precipitated by rapid change and relativized significance in a diversifying context, and how they vie for retrenchment through radicalization in the shifting contexts of modernity. Any hope for evangelical resistance to these trends, much less constructive transformation, will entail grappling with the very changes that appear to them to be the sources of their precarity. This entails working in registers that have emerged in U.S. society more broadly—registers of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. Responding intelligently and intentionally requires that White Christians, in a spirit of teachability, come to terms with past—and recurring—patterns of racism, ethnocentrism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy, in which they are implicated. I examine how race energizes the ethno-religious nationalist impulses of zombie nationalism in Part 2 of this series.
[1] A 2018 poll conducted by the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center Research Institute found that 46% of self-identified evangelicals and 52% of those whose beliefs tag them as evangelical “strongly believes the mainstream media produces fake news”—a central tenet of QAnon. Indeed, the more active respondents were in their church, the more mistrusting of news media they were. This is one trend, along with their widespread embrace of Donald Trump, that has rendered White evangelicals especially susceptible to the central claims of QAnon theories. See Stetzer “Evangelicals need to address the QAnoners in our midst,” USA Today, Sept 4, 2020.
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others.
A grab from an AFPTV video shows a tree on fire near the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque complex on May 10, 2021, following renewed clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at the scene. (Photo by CLAIRE GOUNON/AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images)
Religion is Both Gasoline and Fire
The apocalypse does not just happen. Sure, the case of Palestine/Israel often triggers the use of end-time script metaphors, but their deployment only obscures the anatomy of power, ideology, and oppression. The Palestinians are not the only prisoners of this oppression. Jews and Judaism too are imprisoned within the cages of a nationalistic supremacist ideology, one that needs to be distinguished from Zion as the subject of Jewish longing and messianic anticipation that is hardwired into the tradition. The apocalypse does not just happen. The illusion of cosmic catastrophe serves a political agenda and ideology.
We witness now, in 2021, yet another escalation in Jerusalem, Gaza, and across the “mixed cities” of Israel where belligerent Jewish products of religious Zionism and pre-military religious academies, along with religious Zionists bused from settlements in the West Bank and other Jewish-Israeli bystanders, target Palestinian-Israelis (their neighbors). These Palestinians trace their roots to cities like Lod, Jaffa, and Haifa going back centuries prior to the Catastrophe of 1948 (the Nakba) and the establishment of Israel. These cities are “mixed,” sometimes even celebrated as models of “coexistence,” because the events of the Nakba stopped short of a total ethnic cleansing. The sight of kippa-wearing youth roaming streets with the intentions of a murderous mob to eliminate the Palestinian presence in the cities exposes how religion, when not properly contextualized, becomes both gasoline and fire, a weapon of distraction away from ongoing realities of dispossession and elimination.
An All-Consuming Fire
In May of 2021, during the final days of the sacred month of Ramadan, images of flames billowing up from the Haram al-Sharif as a frenzied crowd of Jewish Israeli religious (mostly) youth sings Biblical revenge songs in Hebrew were spread across social media. These images may come across as an expression or anticipation of an apocalyptic drama. But what they truly expose is why playing with religion could literally be like playing with an all-consuming fire. Unlike the fire burning through the biblical image of the “burning bush,” the miraculous illumination to Moses that called him to pave a path for his people’s liberation from slavery and oppression, this metaphorical ethnoreligious nationalist fire literally threatens total erasure by consolidating a Jewish supremacist regime. Now, it is clear that this all-consuming fire does not only take the shape of “bombing Gaza back to the stone age” as Benny Ganz, the current Defense Minister, boasted about his “accomplishment” (then as the Army Chief) in 2014. The fire now “spreads” to the “mixed cities” inside Israel. This offers a moment of clarity. Respectable human rights organizations have recently confirmed with ample evidence the current Israeli regime as supremacist in its ideology by labelling it an apartheid regime. Certainly, it is hard to look at the display of Jewish ultranationalist youth singing violent Jewish songs on the plaza in front of the Western Wall where once, before 1967, the Palestinian Mughrabi Quarter had stood—that is, before it was abruptly demolished in the aftermath of the Six-Day War–and not reach the same conclusion.
— איימן עודה أيمن عودة Ayman Odeh (@AyOdeh) May 10, 2021
Twitter post by Joint List Knesset Member Ayman Odeh, of Jewish youth celebrating Jerusalem Day and singing “Yimach shemam” (may their names be erased).
National Idolatry
Of course it is hard to escape an apocalyptic foreshadowing when the hateful chants loudly invade the soundscapes and flames from the Haram al-Sharif reach the night sky. Ominous are the images of the flames emerging from this sacred site for Muslims when they are combined with the soundtrack of genocidal Hebrew words sung in front of the Wailing Wall. This wall, it must be remembered, is the last standing remnant of the Herodian Temple. The late Jewish-Israeli sage Yeshayahu Leibowitz condemned it as a site of national idolatry. Another wall, the so-called apartheid or separation wall that has walled off the territories occupied in 1967 (but swallowed further lands in pursuit of its “security” function), has reconfigured the Western Wall as not only a locus of religious piety, but also a locus of nationalist piety. The meanings behind these walls converge when the idolatry of the nation is confused with Jewish piety. Leibowitz saw this happening long before the settler lobby and the so-called “hilltop settlers” began to explicitly dictate the tone of Israeli annexationist policies.
The image of the fire and the sounds of those singing are chilling. Conversations on social media seemed to focus on who started the fire and why. This focus on the minutiae of who started the fire, and why it was started, can seem extraneous in light of the horrific nature of these videos. Still, the details are important. In reality, the fire was likely caused by Palestinian protesters at the al-Aqsa compound, who, prior to and during the month of Ramadan have been engaging in grassroots protests against the looming dispossession of families from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and resisting police brutality that has come in the wake of the protests. The Israeli government further escalated the situation when, on Laylat al Qadr, one of the holiest nights in the Muslim calendar, its security forces raided the mosque—which is a sacred space and a symbol of Palestinian sovereignty and resistance. Under the guise of security, road blocks were also set up to prevent Palestinian citizens of Israel access to al-Aqsa. The confluence of sacred times and spaces (national and religious) is explosive, and those pulling triggers and making decisions targeting religious celebrations may well be lighting the fuse.
Deadly Religion
As noted above, the literal flames were probably caused by a firework lit by protesters that misfired into a tree and were shortly extinguished. The Hebrew chants, like the daily and escalating violence of religious students of pre-military (supposedly Torah-centric) academies in the “mixed cities,” however, were caused by decades of ideologically driven policies of land grabbing, impunity, the manipulation of marginalized (mostly Mizrahi) communities, and the instrumentalization of religion to promote power and ideology. The flames were accidental, and their confluence with the hateful chants was coincidental, or so apologists say. The ultranationalist religious youth seen chanting were redirected to the Western Wall to avoid having their usual “flag parade,” which is the annual marking of the “liberation” or “reunification” of Jerusalem in 1967, proceed through the Muslim Quarter. This notorious annual display of violence in occupied East Jerusalem is met with routine impunity and as such reflects a cementing collusion between settlers and the institutions of the Israeli military and state. This collusion, like the marriage of convenience between secular “security” arguments and messianic settler aspirations to reconnect to the biblical landscape of “Judea and Samaria,” is ubiquitous across the “settlement project” in the West Bank and within the “mixed cities” of 1948 where settler organizations take over Palestinian homes through a variety of methods. These include legal and bureaucratic forms of torture which they have carried out in East Jerusalem or in other places where housing is constructed exclusively for Jews at the heart of Palestinian urban spaces.
The youth did not “come out of nowhere.” Instead, they are the product of an ideology, institutions, cynical power mongering, and the manipulation of, and selective retrieval from, religious traditions.
Messianic settler ideology, anti-Palestinian racism, and the logics of modern nationalism and settler colonialism converged at the Western Wall on this evening in an all-consuming fire sung to a religious tune. This did not “just happen.” The youth did not “come out of nowhere.” Instead, they are the product of an ideology, institutions, cynical power mongering, and the manipulation of, and selective retrieval from, religious traditions. For example, the Torah is often read even within the secular education system as a land title. This amounts to “playing with religion” to advance the settler-colonial business of land seizure and the reshaping of the landscape through ethnic cleansing and the Judaizing of spaces. This is carried out in the neighborhoods of Jerusalem one house at a time, as the residents who will soon be dispossessed from Sheikh Jarrah can attest. The flames by the Haram al-Sharif caused by the Palestinian firework are the kind of accident that happens when one plays with fire. The display of ultranationalist Jewish hate and violence is the kind of religion one gets when religion, both a potential gasoline and fire, is turned into a deadly weapon.
Sacred Times, Sacred Spaces: A Predictable Script for Escalation
The seeming speed and ease of the escalation is also indicative of a cynical awareness of the explosive potential of arbitrary violations of an otherwise delicate status quo in Jerusalem around the management of sacred spaces and sacred times. The question is whose political expediency is served by the current escalation? The answer very likely points us back to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s precarious political situation. Under indictment for corruption and unable to form a coalition after a fourth round of elections in two years, despite bringing explicit anti-Palestinian racism to the Knesset in the form of coalition bargaining with political actors who openly advocate for ethnic cleansing, Netanyahu stands to benefit from a war. This is a familiar script to enhance “national unity” in the face of Hamas’ rockets. As Gaza is bombarded by massive artillery and whole families are buried under the rubble of their own homes, the Kahanists roam the streets and direct their murderous supremacist ideology against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. These are lynch mobs that operate with impunity. Yes, al-Aqsa, Jaffa, Haifa, and Akka (centers of Palestinians within the Green Line) are all interconnected in their experience of anti-Palestinian racism. This recent escalation clarifies the consistency between settler violence within and beyond the 1948 demarcations. How to trigger this escalation? When millions are under constant control and oppression, as is the case for 1967 and 1948 Palestinians, igniting a fire usually follows predictable patterns. The violation of sacred time and space, more often than not, serves as the gasoline.
Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, 8 June 2020. The Jerusalem Municipality offers Palestinian residents of Jerusalem two options: to demolish their own homes or wait for the municipality’s heavy machinery to do it. The latter will force them to pay huge fines. Photo: ‘Amer ‘Aruri, B’Tselem. CC 4.0.
To highlight the anatomy of power is not the same as saying that “real” religion or theology have nothing to do with the eruption of overt violence in May 2021. It is rather to say that religion is inextricably bound up with these forms of power, and needs to be engaged as such. An analysis of “religion” separated from power conveniently extracts it from the story of modernity and colonialism, exonerating it from the ways in which it is implicated in supremacist structures and ideologies. Violent raids of the Haram al-Sharif during Ramadan primed Hamas to fire rockets, using its unsophisticated military weapons to express an outrage against this provocation. The result is an Israeli fallback on its script of Jewish self-defense. With Israeli families now sleeping in bomb shelters (not available in Gaza), religion has operated as planned to distract from the ongoing processes of land grabbing and disregard for Palestinian lives. It remains to be seen if it will also serve to shore up a failing political career.
An Apocalyptic Optic Versus a Deadly Reality
What is the relation between al-Aqsa and Gaza? Some reacted to the viral clips of fire and chanting with self-righteous anger, claiming that it was all coincidental and simply bad optics. Absurdly, they underscore that the ultranationalist youth were at the site because they were rerouted there by the authorities. They were supposed to be in the Muslim Quarter as they are each year during the supremacist “flag parade,” not dancing in front of the Wailing Wall at the time of the accidental fire. This misses the point: this bad and viral apocalyptic “optic” has been an ongoing Palestinian reality. Just a few weeks prior, and as part of the malignant facilitation of the escalation in Jerusalem, a similar display of Jewish supremacist hate and violence likewise provoked and bullied Palestinians. The latter were already on edge due to the pending dispossession of Palestinian refugee families from their properties in Sheikh Jarrah and the arbitrary Ramadan-related restrictions (decreed by the Netanyahu regime in the form of the Jerusalem police) placed on gathering on the wide steps of the Damascus Gate as is common on the festive nights of Ramadan after the iftar meal. These explicit displays of Jewish supremacy at the heart of Palestinian spaces is not new. Nor is the overt racism of one of the groups associated with it, Lehava. The latter is notorious for its long-standing “policing” of potential or apparent miscegenation in West Jerusalem’s Zion Square. There its “troops’” patrol on a regular basis and especially after Shabbat on Saturday nights. This obsession with purity is, on the one hand, an inheritance of Meir Kahane, the Rabbi agitator from Brooklyn, and cofounder of the Jewish Defense League, who imported internalized racial antisemitism and American racial categories to the Israeli scene. Kahane was assassinated and his party outlawed, but Kahanism has endured and thanks to Netanyahu is now fully emboldened in the Knesset. It has endured because Jewish supremacy has always been, if perhaps occasionally articulated more nicely, a part of Zionism as a Jewish nationalist project. To be Jewish (and democratic) otherwise in the context of Palestine/Israel will require relinquishing this supremacist logic that privileges Jews over non-Jews. The obsession with purity of blood and with the related “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine/Israel are all inheritances of modernity and Christian Europe.
The violent raids in al-Aqsa resulted not only in a small accidental fire. It triggered an escalation into another round of assaults on Gaza and rocket fire from Hamas, refocusing attention on Jewish security and self-defense. This shift from al-Aqsa and the showdown against nonviolent protestors to Gaza and the easy deployment of orientalist rhetoric (e.g. “these barbarians use civilians as human shields”) shows how triggering apocalyptic images in sacred spaces and during sacred times distracts from the concrete analysis of the relation between al-Aqsa and Gaza: the ongoing and historical occupation and patterns of dispossession. Like most Gazans, the Palestinians of Sheikh Jarrah are refugees from the time of the Nakba. Israel’s effort to control the narrative prefers apocalyptic explanations that tread on (modernist) orientalist tropes. Such paradigms prevent us from connecting these dots in relation to political and historical time and space.
Al Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem. Photo Credit: MissyKel, 2006. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Hence, what appears to be an intentional escalation of tensions and explicit displays of violence during the month of Ramadan predictably provoked Hamas to fire rockets. Why? The Haram al-Sharif has been a national as well as a religious pivot for Palestinian nationalism and resistance. Its violation constitutes an assault to which Hamas was provoked to respond by firing rockets from Gaza. This move helped Israeli decision-makers revert to their familiar script of brutally “mowing the lawn” in Gaza using the claim of “self-defense.” This predictable script refocuses attention away from the international support Palestinian activists in the occupied neighborhoods of East Jerusalem garnered in advance of their looming dispossession from their homes. This settler colonial logic and the experiences of land seizure constitute the thread that links the Judaization of Jerusalem with the enduring imprisonment of Gazans in their open-air prison. These experiences cannot be reduced to vague apocalyptic optics, or mirages.
The Apocalypse Does Not Just Happen
The powerful images of an end-time Armageddon, brought about by a religious war, are blurred when other images come into focus, like the hunger for power of political opportunists such as Netanyahu. The apocalypse does not just happen. The assault on Gaza under the pretext of defending Israel against the besieged strip and its armed movement’s violent expression of resistance to the Israeli security forces’ desecration of the al-Aqsa mosque exposes the delicacy of the so called “status quo” of the religious sites in Jerusalem. These sites come loaded with symbolism and layers of histories and messianic aspirations, and are indeed deeply related to the prolonged history of the occupation of Palestinians. Playing with fire and religion in al-Aqsa exposes how religion operates within the ideology that structures the occupation that links the refugees of Sheikh Jarrah and their resistance against looming dispossession to the refugees of Gaza. This link exists despite decades of an Israeli policy of fragmentation has sought to disconnect Gaza from the West Bank and the rest of the Palestinian communities.
The “eruptions” of violent Palestinian expressions of overt resistance which also results in Jewish Israeli loss of life and suffering may also offer glimpses into the routine forms of violence represented by decades of an entrenched occupation and an apartheid regime. Religion intersects with and animates the routine violence just as much as it triggers apocalyptic fears and aspirations. Such escalations, if we are willing to look, illuminate the ongoing architecture of a supremacist ideology and reveal what happens when you play with combustible religion. The apocalypse does not just happen because of one misdirected firework. It’s up to us to look beneath to how the pyre and tinder were built.
Sultanim (Shrine on Horizon), 2014. This marker is from a holy site known locally as Sultanim Mazar located in the Yarkand prefecture. At this site there was a Qabristanliq or cemetery for local burials and family members regularly come to pray for and visit their loved ones who have passed. There was also a Khaniqah, which is an enclosed shelter for ritual activity and prayer, and there were multiple markers for important historic persons and Muslim saints. Image and description courtesy of Lisa Ross.
Over the past few years, government authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China have destroyed large swathes of the religious heritage of the Turkic Muslim Uyghurs. This campaign of demolition has proceeded in tandem with the heavy securitization of the region, mass incarcerations, and attacks on the Uyghur language and other aspects of their cultural identity. Although China has justified these moves as necessary to counter terrorism, its actions arguably amount to what UNESCO calls “strategic cultural cleansing”: the deliberate targeting of individuals and groups on the basis of their cultural, ethnic, or religious affiliation, combined with the intentional and systematic destruction of cultural heritage. This attempt to remodel the region’s cultural landscape is impelled by the strategic and economic objectives of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Xi Jinping’s keystone policy introduced in 2013, which aims to secure access to the region’s natural resources and transform Xinjiang into a platform to expand China’s influence and trade across Asia.
Over the past two decades, China has become a key player in the international heritage sphere, and has developed its own unique approach to heritage management. Cultural heritage is linked to political goals. It serves as a resource for political legitimacy and soft power and is used as an asset to boost local economic development. China’s leading role in inscribing the Silk Road on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 2014 demonstrates how it positions itself as an international heritage leader and how closely its heritage strategy is aligned with its economic and political goals.
In Xinjiang, the management of Uyghur cultural heritage has been tightly tied to government attempts to deepen control over the region. The Xinjiang government has used Uyghur heritage as a cultural resource to develop the tourism industry. Tourism initiatives are typically led by Chinese companies, and benefits to Uyghurs have been uneven. The growth of tourism facilitates the movement of Han Chinese into the region, both as short-term visitors and permanent settlers, and provides additional justification for the repressive securitization policies which are deemed necessary to stabilize the region.
Uyghur culture, in the form of the Muqam musical repertoire and Meshrep community gatherings, is strongly represented on UNESCO’s lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and numerous items of Uyghur religious heritage—mosques and shrines—are included on China’s own national and regional heritage lists. Although recognized heritage sites should be protected under national laws, over the past few years thousands of mosques and shrines, including protected sites, have been fully or partly demolished. China argues that government management of Uyghur culture is necessary to protect it from religious extremism. In fact—as evidenced by the large-scale destruction of sacred sites, prohibitions on Uyghur language and literature, and disruption of Uyghur communities since 2017—the biggest threats to Uyghur heritage and culture are the policies of the Chinese government itself.
Mosques, Shrines, and the Transmission of Uyghur History
Up until the 1950s, when the Xinjiang region was incorporated into the Peoples’ Republic of China, religious institutions were central to social and economic life. In the early 1950s, Kashgar region alone had 12,918 mosques. The major festival mosques were the site of mass celebrations at the festivals of Eid and Qurban. Madrasahs (religious schools) provided the main source of formal education for Uyghur boys. The most distinctive and significant aspect of religious life centered around the shrines—tombs of martyrs and saints—which were popular pilgrimage destinations and held their own festivals celebrating the saints.
The spread of Islam into this region started in the tenth century with the conversion of the rulers of the Turkic Qarakhanid dynasty and their conquest of neighboring Buddhist kingdoms. Sufi orders played an important role in the introduction of Islam. Sufi sheykhs were respected as community leaders, and venerated for their spiritual powers. Revered in life as well as in death, the shrines of these historical leaders and saints became important sites of pilgrimage. These saints and their shrines have played a crucial role in the culture and history of the region.
Most of these shrines are not major architectural monuments. Some of the most important shrines are simple mud brick constructions, distinguished visually by the huge temporary structures made up of “spirit flags” which are brought by pilgrims and attached to the shrine or tied together in tall flag mountains.
Religious Revival and “Strike Hard” Campaigns
In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, and with the relaxing of controls on religious life, Uyghurs began to return to their faith, and new forms of piety began to permeate Uyghur society. These trends mirrored revival movements across post-Soviet Central Asia and Hui Muslim Chinese communities. During my visits to the region over the past twenty years, I saw many people returning to family traditions of prayer, fasting, and modest dress; sending their children to Qur’an school, saving money to go on the hajj. An important aspect of the revival was the building or reconstruction of community mosques. Local communities and individual donors raised money to build impressive structures that reflected a renewed pride in the faith, and new community confidence and prosperity.
The Keriya Grand Mosque, 2014, seen here with many visitors. The building no longer exists. Photo Courtesy of Ruth Ingram and Bitter Winter.
Already by the 1990s, the Xinjiang authorities were viewing these developments with deep suspicion. A series of “strike hard” campaigns began to target religious life. Everyday practices, such as daily prayer and fasting, veiling or growing beards, were criticized as antisocial. Activities central to Uyghur culture, including shrine pilgrimage and religious instruction of children, were designated “illegal religious activities.”
Soon after the US announcement of a “Global War on Terror,” China began to adopt the rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism, drawing on internationally circulating tropes of Islamophobia to justify its actions against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities: actions which were increasingly taking the form of cultural cleansing. Activities previously designated “illegal religious activities” were now dubbed “religious extremism.” State media began to designate local incidences of violence as “terrorist incidents” although the specific reasons underlying local violence were more often to do with local power struggles, official corruption, and police brutality.
In May 2014, the recently appointed President Xi Jinping called for the construction of “walls made of copper and steel” to defend Xinjiang against terrorism. Uyghurs’ passports were confiscated, ties with the outside world were cut off, a tight net of surveillance tracked their every movement, and construction began on the system of mass internment camps.
The “Mosque Rectification” Campaign
Rather than targeting the small number of people who might reasonably be judged vulnerable to radicalization and violent action, the anti-religious extremism campaign in Xinjiang targeted all expressions of Islamic faith, and it removed swathes of Islamic architecture from Uyghur towns. Beginning in 2015, and greatly accelerating in 2017, the Xinjiang authorities demolished thousands of mosques under a “mosque rectification” campaign. Many were condemned on the grounds that they were unsafe structures that posed a safety threat for worshippers. Others had their distinctive architectural features, such as domes and minarets, removed. All of this formed a part of the national campaign to “Sinicize” religion, introduced under Xi Jinping to implement his vision of Chineseness as narrowly centred on Han Chinese culture, with “foreign” religious influences increasingly regarded as a threat to stability.
Recent investigations have provided extensive evidence of the demolition or modification of thousands of Uyghur mosques and several shrines (using satellite imagery to verify each site). Not only was the built heritage destroyed. Rahile Dawut, a Uyghur academic who had dedicated her life to documenting the shrines, was detained shortly before the demolitions in November 2017, one among hundreds of disappeared intellectuals and cultural leaders. She remains in an internment camp at the time of writing.
Many Uyghur cemeteries were also destroyed or relocated during this period. The extremely rapid program of removing human remains and bulldozing structures left local people (even if they were not incarcerated in the camps) scant time to reclaim the bones of their family members. Important historical shrines have been destroyed along with the cemeteries. Khotan’s Sultanim Cemetery, for example, has a history of over 1,000 years. It contained the shrine of the Four Sultans, an important pilgrimage site, and many other significant figures in Khotan’s history were buried in this cemetery. In March 2019, disinterment notices appeared around the city of Khotan, warning that the cemetery would be demolished within three days. According to satellite images, the site was completely flattened by April 2019, and part of the cemetery appeared to be in use as a parking lot.
Although the authorities have tried to justify the destruction or relocation of cemeteries by the demands of urban development, it is clear that these moves form part of the wider effort to disrupt communities and break the transmission of Uyghur culture. Such projects of development and securitization attempt to remodel the cultural landscape and to re-engineer the desires and actions of its inhabitants. In Xinjiang, this campaign of demolition came hand in hand with the heavy securitization of the region, mass incarcerations, and physical violence inflicted by state forces on Uyghur bodies in the form of enforced sterilization, and documented instances of rape and torture in the camps. Increasing numbers of independent observers and national governments have argued that China’s policies in Xinjiang amount to a deliberate act of genocide. It is important to note that the systematic destruction of cultural and religious heritage—as we have seen with the mosques, cemeteries, and shrines of the Uyghurs—has historically been deployed as a way to weaken the culture and identity of a people, part of a wider strategy of dehumanization which typically paves the way for the physical atrocities which lie at the heart of our understandings of genocide.
Rachel Harris is Professor of Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on religious and expressive culture among the Uyghurs. Her latest book Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam (2020) was published by Indiana University Press in November 2020, and an edited volume, Ethnographies of Islam in China, came out with Hawaii University Press in January 2021. She is currently working on a Sustainable Development Project on revitalizing Uyghur cultural heritage in Kazakhstan.
In her formidable study of the intellectual project and life of Abū l-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085), Law and Politics under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni, Sohaira Siddiqui makes a number of significant interventions. Among these contributions, she urges historians to read across genres—not to disregard the conventions governing premodern scholarly production, but to throw underlying coherence into greater relief. The coherence in the Juwaynian project is by no means assumed in this book. Rather, it is demonstrated through a painstaking reading of a number of his most influential texts in the domains of legal theory and theology. The relationship of al-Juwaynī’s central concerns of certainty and continuity to his historical and social context is carefully argued. In fact, the fundaments of religion and society themselves, Siddiqui indicates, were perceived to be under threat during this period. As Omid Safi has highlighted in his Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, the early Saljuq regime considered doing away with the Abbasid Caliph altogether (39). Sectarianism had riven the legal and theological communities, fracturing them into mutually hostile Ḥanafī-Shāfiʿī and Muʿtazilī-Ashʿarī camps. Most spectacularly, this rivalry led to al-Juwaynī’s surreptitious flight from Nishapur in 446/1054, following which orders were issued for his arrest (47). This is the backdrop against which al-Juwaynī labored to guarantee a basic minimum of certainty and continuity to religious life. It is worth pausing to unpack these two themes of the Juwaynian corpus and to explore how they relate to Siddiqui’s broader argument. I offer this summary by way of preface to my own engagement with the book’s arguments in my own post. My colleagues, Mohammad Fadel, Joshua Ralston, Walid Saleh and Mariam Sheibani will each contribute pieces on their reactions to the book and its implications for the field. The author will offer a response following the publication of all the pieces.
While jurists had come to recognize and even valorize a measure of uncertainty in their discipline, theology required absolute certainty (qaṭʿ). Al-Juwaynī introduced foundational changes to Ashʿarī epistemologyl, extending the domain of certainty to include forms of knowledge acquired through habitual or customary practice: this is “practical certainty,” and is equivalent to the kind of certainty acquired through exhaustive ratiocination. Siddiqui helpfully gives the example of learning how to drive: with experience, the process becomes second nature, and our knowledge of how to carry it out practically certain (126). While different forms of knowledge are distinct in terms of the paths to their acquisition or the cognitive capacity of individual reasoners, once acquired as certain, they are functionally equivalent (127–28). Thus, the conclusions of individual jurists can possess certainty, without infringing on the validity of legal pluralism. The second major pole of al-Juwaynī’s thought, continuity, enjoys a dialectical relationship with certainty, and the two can never be invoked singly. In certain areas of his thought, such as aspects of legal theory, al-Juwaynī prioritizes continuity where certainty proves unattainable. For example, he accepts the need for qiyās al-shabah, the more dubious form of juristic analogy from resemblances between two legal cases, based on his commitment to continuity and universality in the law. Though uncertain, this technique allows the jurist to extend Divine writ to embrace all conceivable human acts, thus ensuring the law’s completeness, and the continuity of the juristic enterprise (216). But the certainty-continuity dialectic is never a zero-sum game. Even in the case of qiyās al-shabah, al-Juwaynī circumscribes the possibilities for divergence by limiting its exercise to competent legal authorities (muftī–mujtahids, 227–28). The full contours of the certainty-continuity relationship appear most clearly in al-Juwaynī’s political thought, a point I shall revisit in my own essay for this symposium.
Though al-Juwaynī made seminal contributions to a number of fields, his arguments were not always widely accepted, or have not always received the recognition they deserve in modern scholarship. For example, al-Juwaynī seems to have played an important role in preparing the ground for a comprehensive Ashʿarī response to Muslim Neoplatonism (Falsafa, 14–15), a point that still remains largely unacknowledged. This likely owes something to his most outstanding student, al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), whose own innovations are typically accepted to have outshone those of his master. In the domain of legal theory, al-Juwaynī held that the usual juristic proofs offered for the principle of ijmāʿ (consensus) were insufficient, based as they were either on ambiguous Qurʾānic verses or insufficiently attested ḥadīths (163), a view that was not popular among later generations (179–81). There was somewhat less hostility towards his position on tawātur (concurrence) in ḥadīths (156–58). Al-Juwaynī eschewed the formalist stipulation of a minimum number of transmitters for tawātur, which could only ever be arbitrary. Instead, he stressed the circumstances accompanying transmission (i.e. qarāʾin al-ṣidq), which could elevate the contents of the report to the level of certainty even in the absence of broader attestation. The sight of a baby on the lap of his or her wet-nurse accompanied by the sounds of suckling are sufficient proof of feeding, even if the witness does not observe milk flowing into the infant’s mouth (151).
The key themes of al-Juwaynī’s corpus continue to resonate today: believers of all stripes remain interested in the sources of ethical reasoning, and how clearly particular norms can be attributed to their respective traditions. Continuity raises issues of religious authority, likewise a subject of perennial importance.
Omar Anchassi is an Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on Islamic law, theology, and Qurʾānic Studies.
In A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe, Giuliana Chamedes presents the heretofore understudied history of Catholic international diplomacy in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Training her attention especially on the periods around the two world wars, Chamedes shows how the Vatican sought to shape the political and social life of Europe by signing concordats—“bilateral treat[ies] that would bind the Church and nation-state together under international law” (3)—with various European nations. These concordats lent legitimacy to both the status of the Vatican as the spiritual and political center of Europe and to the burgeoning nation states that came into being following the first world war and were eager for international recognition. The Vatican’s goal through the signing of these concordats was indeed to “remake Christian Europe” into something that mirrored a medieval past where the Vatican stood at the center of Europe. For these concordats often stipulated that the state would implement laws that reflected Catholic contemporary Catholic doctrine (concerning marriage and divorce, for example) and maintain Catholic educational systems.
During this time period, the Vatican perceived that communism was the primary threat to implementing this goal. During World War I, while the Vatican also expressed anxiety around the rise of political and economic liberalism, as well as socialism, communism was its primary concern. As Chamedes also demonstrates, quite often this anti-communism was imbued with older forms of antisemitism that had been given new life in the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” during this time period. In its bid to combat the rise of communism, Chamedes shows, the Vatican played an active role in shaping the nation-state, defining the boundaries between public and private religion, and demarcating the meanings of the religious and secular.
As the book demonstrates in careful detail, the Vatican’s obsession with communism was in fact what led it to sometimes aid, and at other times remain silent on, the rise of fascism in the lead up to World War II. Indeed, while there were internal debates surrounding how the Vatican should respond to Mussolini and Hitler’s rise, more often than not in its public facing documents the Vatican ignored the atrocities being committed by these leaders, and instead returned to communism as the primary evil that the Church should focus on eliminating. The Vatican’s complicity in the rise of these brutal regimes, and the Holocaust, remains a ghost that haunts the Church to this day.
As Chamedes notes, even if the center of institutional power of the Church did not address the rise of fascism, lay Catholics and theologians did at times speak out, condemning fascism and seeking points of dialogue with communists and socialists. There was indeed during these times “A War for the Soul of Catholicism” as the title of chapter 7 of the book reflects. It is the tension between how one might have wanted the Church to act, and how it did in fact act, that drives two of the responses to this symposium.
Scott Appleby, drawing on Atalia Omer’s concept of the critical caretaker, reflects on how the theologian or scholar of Catholicism might confront and indeed offer alternatives to the authoritarian vision of Catholicism that animated the views of the Vatican during the early- and mid-twentieth century. In his essay, Toussaint Kafahire, himself a priest and theologian, also grapples with these questions and confronts the fact that the Vatican’s political maneuvering led it to make alliances with fascist governments that betrayed what he sees as the true mission of the Church.
Approaching Chamedes’s book as a fellow historian, Paul Hanebrink reflects on the dynamic relationship between political and religious rhetoric. More specifically he contends that it is important to not only attend to the way political rhetoric is often influenced by religious convictions, but also the reverse, that is, how political convictions influence the way one understands religion. He also suggests that even though the official days of concordat diplomacy are now past, the idea of “remaking Christian Europe” survives to this day in figures like Viktor Orbán, the current Prime Minister of Hungary. Cara Burnidge likewise approaches the book as an historian, contending that Chamedes’s book can be of aid to religious studies scholars seeking to understand how religious institutions have changed in the modern world in light of novel political and social situations. Bringing her own research on Woodrow Wilson into conversation with Chamedes, she also suggests that different notions of “Christianizing” were contending with one another at this time.
Finally, in her response, Chamedes reflects on the notion of the critical caretaker, as well as Burnidge’s concern with competing notions of Christianity and Hanebrink’s attention to the dynamic ways that political and religious language have influenced one another.
In his first blog post for the Contending Modernities project, Scott Appleby wrote, “Neither Catholics, Muslims, or Seculars have been passive recipients of the developments and processes associated with modernity. Rather, each has shaped, resisted, accommodated and adapted to the growing explanatory powers of science; the encompassing reach of the modern nation-state; the differentiation between religion and state, public and private realms; the dynamics of global markets and mass media communication; and other constituent elements of ‘the modern world.’” By uncovering key dynamics of how powerful representatives of the Catholic tradition “shaped, resisted, and accommodated” the modern nation state, and indeed continues to do so, Chamedes’s work, and this symposium, continue the work of unpacking the forces of secularism, religion, and modernity.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Protester holds signs featuring images of Aung San Suu Kyi and Min Aung Hlaing during February 14, 2021 protest in Myanmar. Via Wikimedia Commons. Photo Credit: MgHla (aka) Htin Linn Aye.
For more than half a century, Myanmar’s military generals have based their political legitimacy on the claim that they were protectors of the realm, caretakers of Buddhism, and defenders of the people’s sovereignty in the evolution toward self-governance. In Burmese Buddhism, power is thought to be activated through moral acts and prior karmic inheritance that transforms the self and reality. Political authority is thus a sign of personal karmic election. Pre-colonial ideas of classical Buddhist kingship have endured throughout post-Independence political arrangements, as every ruler has sought to demonstrate their standing as a spiritually potent (hpoun) sovereign. From this principle emerges the notion of karmic kingship, a concept that can help us interpret current events in Myanmar.
An Unstable Diarchy
Myanmar’s fragile ten-year experiment with democracy appeared to draw to a shocking close in the pre-dawn hours of February 1, 2021. Following an electoral repudiation of the military’s (Tatmadaw’s) proxy Union Solidarity Development Party in the November 2020 elections, commander-in-chief, Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, on the back of the claim of a “stolen election,” invoked Article 417 of the Constitution and imposed martial law. Although Article 417 states that only the President can declare a state of emergency, the military appropriated this right for itself in the name of protecting the people’s sovereignty. Min Aung Hlaing contends that Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party have been insufficiently committed to democracy. If necessary, he announced, the Constitution itself could be revoked.
Myanmar’s democratic Constitution was drafted by the military government in 2008 subsequent to the Saffron Revolution, in which the military violently suppressed monks’ protests. These events were followed soon after by the devastating Cyclone Nargis.
Cyclone Nargis resulted in more than 140,000 deaths. The event was made by interpreters to conform to folk beliefs that natural disasters are a consequence of the actions of evil kings who disrupt the moral order and law (Dhamma). Sovereign and state are held to be in alignment; karmic effects of a king’s actions are visited upon the people. The storm was interpreted as a cosmic repudiation of General Than Shwe in particular, who had earned the nickname “Monk-killer Than Shwe.” Rumor had it that at any moment he might be swallowed up by the ground and dragged down to the hell realms.
The General did not take these prophesies lightly. On the advice of his personal astrologer,[1] a constitutional referendum was rammed through with a hasty election before the “waxing of the next moon”—even while the dead remained unburied and hundreds of thousands more were displaced and starving. Rumor and gossip, which had become the media for vox populi during half a century of repression, averred that the karmic stores sustaining Than Shwe’s power had “dried up,” and with it his legitimacy to rule. Than Shwe countered these claims with merit-making activities, pagoda construction, and offertories to the Sangha (monks). He had these efforts reported upon ceaselessly in the national news media. Rumors also circulated that the General was resorting to black magic rites and “reversal of karma” rituals (yadaya) in the attempt to rejuvenate and sustain his power stores.
It is in the context of these events that the 2008 Constitution needs to be understood, i.e., as a desperate attempt by the military to stabilize its power at the very moment they had lost their mandate as legitimate representatives of the moral karmic order. The claim, in 2008 as today, that they alone can grant or revoke democratic civilian power-sharing is as much a statement about the de facto truth of ongoing military might as an assertion of the karmic legitimacy of its leaders.
The Constitution, which was to enshrine the people’s sovereignty, therefore unsurprisingly contained the caveat of mandatory power-sharing with the military. It gave the appearance of a transition away from military rule, while in reality it was a re-entrenchment of power by alternate means. In result, after 2008, rulership of the country could be described as an unstable diarchy: not one government, but two, each with its own portfolios, registers of authority, and claims to legitimacy.
Competing Sources of Legitimacy
Ostensibly, shared civilian-military rule after 2008 meant a stepwise lessening of authoritarian rule. Western observers tended to regard the post-2008 period as an almost inexorable transition to democracy. The country was now “open for business,” as President Obama declared; the long-frustrated hopes of a subjugated people would be realized at last. In practice, politics proceeded as usual in conformity with Burmese Buddhist principles concerning the sources of power and conditions for political legitimacy. Through these means, and by periodic threat of force, the military managed to maintain its grip on the leash of fledgling democracy. Today as well, the country’s political future remains subject to the politics of legitimacy defined by the attempt of those vying for power to demonstrate karmic election to worldly authority.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s political worldview has, because of this unobvious context, often been misinterpreted by outside observers. By now it should be more evident that she has been negotiating between two divergent models for political legitimacy and sovereignty. On the one hand are western principles of human rights and democracy, on the other is karmic kingship.
During her house arrest between 1989 and 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was extolled as a symbol for human rights and democracy and as a witness to their ongoing violation under authoritarian rule. For the Burmese Buddhist majority, the desire for freedom from military rule has not always been identical to the desire for democracy, however, as western journalists have assumed. Generations had grown up isolated from the world under authoritarian rule; their imaginations of freedom drew more proximally from Buddhist sources than from western ones. Exposed as a student at Oxford to western democratic ideals, as a politician Aung San Suu Kyi sought to translate and align these to domestic Burmese Buddhist political culture. Attempting to thread that needle while remaining subject to the military’s de facto minority rule required skills of statecraft that apparently exceeded her capabilities.
Upon ascent to political power, Aung San Suu Kyi undertook a pragmatic approach to instituting a shared framework of the rule of law and establishing its procedures in Myanmar’s Constitution. Her aim to change the Tatmadaw-scripted Constitution, and indeed to “send the military back to the barracks,” put her in direct competition with the Tatmadaw’s design to retain power. Her efforts to solidify her personal power and that of her NLD Party proceeded on the one hand through the ballot box. On the other, she had to vie in the accustomed Burmese Buddhist pattern of elite rivalry among political contenders for the right to rule through demonstrations of their karmic accord with moral Buddhist order.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s effort to carve out more space for civilian representation in government with the eventual goal of reforming the 2008 Constitution and subordinating the military required broad public support from the majority Burmese Buddhist public whose devotion was not primarily to democratic ideals but to the universalistic ethic of Dhamma, the moral law. This split goal or orientation resulted in the compromise the world witnessed as Aung San Suu Kyi’s tacit endorsement of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state. Apparently, Aung San Suu Kyi compromised democratic principles of human rights in the belief that only once the Bamar majority became free of military power could ethnic minority freedoms be addressed.
Protestor holds up three-finger salute during a protest against the military coup in Myanmar. The three-finger salute originates in book and film series The Hunger Games as a signal of rebellion against tyrannical rule. It was also widely used during protests in Thailand in 2014 and has been a popular symbol throughout Southeast Asia. Via Wikimedia Commons. Photo Credit: VOA Burmese.
The power struggle between the Tatmadaw (military) and NLD (civilian) governments evolved into an elite struggle with its own political dynamics that locked them in an arrangement of preserving the existential status of the other in order to preserve themselves. This is because it was the military that ultimately afforded civilian governance the space to operate, while the civilian government gave democratic and political legitimacy to the military in the international sphere. This would explain why Aung San Suu Kyi has been willing to speak in support of the military, even going so far as to shield them at the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide.
On the populist side, Aung San Suu Kyi abjured human rights in favor of espousing illiberal popular beliefs about the priority of protecting the religion against imagined enemies such as the Muslims and Rohingya—a classic obligation of a Burmese Buddhist king. (Although, it should be noted, that this particular nationalist and xenophobic version of Buddhist “caretaking” was not a necessary condition of Buddhist statecraft. Rather, it was a strain promoted and enflamed by the military who sought to present themselves as Buddhist defenders and to divide support for Aung San Suu Kyi either by exposing her as insufficiently Buddhist in her desire to promote Democracy or to expose her to the International community as insufficiently democratic in her desire to promote Buddhist nationalism.) To this extent, Aung San Suu Kyi participated in the logic and practice of karmic kingship. In order to maintain her political power, she prioritized protection of the Buddhist realm in order to sustain support of the majority she required to rule by democratic criteria of the sovereignty of the people.
The rivalry with military leader Min Aung Hlaing was also personal. Voters in the 2020 elections sought to shift the balance of power decisively toward civilian rule, and for a time Aung San Suu Kyi looked poised to succeed at shifting the balance of power to the favor of her ruling party. Min Aung Hlaing, who in July faces mandatory retirement from his position as head of the military, reportedly approached Aung San Suu Kyi requesting that she offer him the presidency in the new Parliament (a role decided upon by Parliamentarians and not by popular vote). She reportedly rejected his request, effectively blocking him from achieving any path to political power either within the military or the government. The move humiliated the General. Moreover, with his name specifically targeted in the ICJ Report as responsible for crimes against humanity, the status of his family’s vast (ill gotten) businesses was likewise threatened. He was politically, personally, and financially cornered. The only path forward was to revoke democracy and presume the path of a world conquering king.
Where Does Karmic Kingship Come from?
Pre-colonial political culture saw the rise and fall of kings as directly related to the store of their hpon, a karmic source of spiritual potency accumulated through meritorious deeds supporting the religion and the monkhood, sangha. The sovereign was mimetically equated with the Buddhist state such that Myanmar’s 800-year history of kingship was simultaneously a history of the preservation and expansion of the Buddha’s teachings and sacred realm, the sasana.[2]
Monk posing with a former Myanmar king and a wizard statue.
Following the rupture of Buddhist kingship under British colonialism, Burma’s (later Myanmar’s) governments all sought political legitimacy in Buddhist monarchical terms, continuing the moral order and causative criteria that had governed Burmese Buddhist ideas of power and authority for centuries prior. In modern times, too, the association of royal symbols with modern statecraft is not just a pairing in the metaphorical sense. Each of Myanmar’s post-Independence military rulers have laid claim to being reincarnations of previous Myanmar kings or bodhisattva kings prophesized to come; in other words, they have acted as pretenders to the throne.
The first post-Independence prime minister U Nu’s vision of a Buddhist welfare society, for instance, drew on ideas of bodhisattva kings whose future Buddhahood certified their worthiness to rule. Drawing on cultural myths and symbolism of the Ashokan Buddhist kingship model in which the state was expanded through conquest, pacification, and Buddhist conversion, U Nu’s military successors drew on a kingship model as well; the state saw its role in terms of unifying and protecting those seen as belonging to the greater Burmese Buddhist order. Dissemination of Buddhism is a virtuous, legitimate undertaking for a king, and the unification (and subordination) of peoples to a national idea of Burmese Buddhist identity was iterated in this model.
Conclusion
Myanmar has a long way to go before it can complete the unfinished business of nation-state building that will entail integrating the various ethnic minorities in a federal democracy, defining who is a citizen, establishing the conditions of authority, and affirming the rule of law. At stake in the current confrontation are the rules of the political game itself, about what kind of political system Myanmar is to have. What we are seeing is not just a contest between authoritarianism and democracy, which it also is, but a contest between two distinct ideas of sovereignty, one based on the will of the people and the other based on the idea of karmic kingship.
Ingrid Jordt is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program for Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her past and current research has concerned processes of political legitimation, lay/monastic relations in Buddhist Myanmar and Buddhist meditation movements in Mainland Southeast Asia. Her principal field site is Burma/Myanmar, where she has been working since 1988, but she has conducted research concerning the export of Burmese Vipassana meditation in Thailand, Malaysia and Laos. She is the author of Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power (Ohio University Press, 2007).
In addition to her academic research, Ingrid has been engaged in humanitarian projects and has served in an advisory role to US government agencies. In 2007-2008, she formed Burma Rescue, an effort coordinated with civil society groups in Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta region to bring resources to victims of Cyclone Nargis when the military government was blocking aid from entering the country.
Map of Moses’ and the Jews’ journey into exile recorded in Exodus. From John Speed’s The Genealogies Recorded in the Sacred Scriptures (1628). Via Wikimedia Commons.
For years, Marc Ellis has been arguing for the importance of a Jewish theology of liberation. His efforts fall for the most part on deaf ears, except, for example, Atalia Omer’s Days of Aweand Santiago Slabodsky’s Decolonial Judaism. Those interlocutors fall, for the most part, within a paradigm of Jews who are, as Judith Butler would say, “intelligible,” to those who dominate Jewish identity today—namely, Ashkenazi Jews, especially those living in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Intelligibility in this context refers to forms of appearance, given the rules of legitimate performance, behavior, or embodiment, that makes sense to those perceiving them.
Despite the historical influence of Latin American Liberation Theology, Sephardic Jews, historically the most prominent in the Americas, seem to lack a voice and visibility. To make matters worse, the various rifts across the views of Jews worldwide—or at least Ashkenazi Jews—range not only from the ultra-orthodox to secular, but also from far right to radical left. This is despite earlier tendencies among critics from the right and the left to associate such Jews primarily with liberalism. What, however, if we were to consider other Jewish voices, Jews among Jews who are genuinely “others”?
Afro-Jews and White Jews Reflecting on Pesach
Consider Afro-Jews. What do such Jews reflect on at Seders during the evenings of Pesach (Passover)? The Seder is a ritual meal involving reflection on Shemoth (Names), popularly known through Christianity as the Exodus story of the Israelites’ liberation from enslavement in Kmt (the ancient indigenous people’s name for the country that eventually became, through Greek conquest, Egypt). It is among the binding narratives of Jews, when even secular Jews often take time for such reflection. During this time of the year, regardless of ideological perspectives, Jews today in and outside of the State of Israel simultaneously reflect on the value of liberation. That is, however, also where many Jews divide. It is much easier to reflect on liberation from enslavement in a story reputed to have taken place in Northeast Africa approximately 3,400 years ago, and one in which Moses—the greatest hero and prophet of the Jewish people—and his biological siblings rose to the occasion in actions reverberating over the ages.
Most white Jews (and many white Christians) overlook the story’s philosophical and political significance, however, in favor of the redemptive elements it offers. Moreover, the closing line at the conclusion of all Seders for Jews outside of Israel—“Next year, in Jerusalem . . .”—poses a challenge for Afro-Jews, Arab Jews, and Jews located among Dalits in South Asia. It makes them think of the plight of non-white Jews living in Israel. For some white Jews, the declaration poses challenges of ambivalence and for others it requires summoning the strongest resources of self-evasion or bad faith because they may support struggles for liberation for oppressed peoples in every country except Israel.
Why do I say this?
First, reflection on enslavement doesn’t require a huge leap for Afro-Jews. Though much of Jewish history has been whitewashed as Euromodernity offered European Jews possibilities of assimilation in the former colonies through promises of racial transformation, the fact of the matter is that the ancient, technically pre-Jewish people of the Exodus narrative (“Hebrews,” “Israelites,” and “Jews” are not identical), were clearly East African and West Asian. This is the case even accounting for, in today’s parlance, “racial mixture.” That combination makes these people unequivocally, in today’s understanding, people of color. Today’s hegemonic white Jewish populations connect with such ancient peoples, then, in the way Germanic peoples imagine themselves the descendants of ancient Mediterranean peoples from whom they claim to inherit a classical past. Some may be their biological descendants, but not all and probably not most.
White Jewish connection with ancient Israelites is mostly symbolic, and when they attempt to make it otherwise, they do so by eliding history and basic facts. This is made easier by simply rewriting the past as white. This whitening emerges from a failure to learn not only the ancient history of East Africa and West Asia, but also crucial moments in Jewish history, such as the events of the first few hundred years after the fall of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and the unfortunate prohibitions against exogamy enacted in the 4th century CE by the Roman Emperor Constantine. The Judeans who became citizens of the Ancient Roman Empire were a proselytizing people, initially ranging from 150,000 (some critics say 4 million), whose efforts produced about 8,000,000 Jews among the Romans in little more than a century.
Such a large influx of people across the Roman Empire pushed to the wayside the earlier Afro-Asiatic peoples and inaugurated a story of hegemony among members who during different periods were at the center of whichever empire displaced others. A line stretching from Rome to Mecca to Andalusia to Spain to Portugal to the Netherlands to Britain to the United States in “the west” reveals one of shifting representations of who “authentically” exemplifies Jewish people. Different lines pushed into Asia, and others through Africa and South America. In all, closeness to enslavement shifted here and there, but for the Afro-Jew from the fifteenth century onward, it is more near than far. In the words of the famed reggae artist Bob Marley, who was also of Jewish ancestry, “Every time I hear the crack of a whip / My blood runs cold” (1973).
If “the slave” is symbolic and to be liberated, then the relationship of the white Jew to the story of liberation is remote. Bear in mind that white Jews aren’t the only Jews for whom identification with enslavement is remote. The history of Arab racism and enslavement of non-Muslim African peoples raises questions for Mizrahi or Arab Jews as well. I’m not focusing on that group here because, frankly, they are not hegemonic.
If “the slave” is symbolic and to be liberated, then the relationship of the white Jew to the story of liberation is remote.
Identification with whiteness leaves no recourse from being identified with the enslaver and master. White Jewish evocation of Exodus thus reeks of hypocrisy so long as such a Jew insists on being white. A different basis of connection must supervene, and for such Jews, nothing affords such a connection more than antisemitism and the historical significance of Shoah (the Holocaust). Thus, “long ago” tends to be the Exodus where liberation is less significant, while “near” becomes hatred of Jews, Jewphobia, the importance of twentieth-century atrocity, and the achievement of the State of Israel. Looking at non-Jewish blacks reflecting on slavery, such Jews quickly speak of antisemitism. When confronting Afro-Jews, however, white Jews prioritizing antisemitism face several problems. Where such Jews relate to Afro-Jews as among Jews, there shouldn’t be an issue, that is except for Afro-Jews bringing along both the realities of recent enslavement and antisemitism. That the overwhelming population of Jews massacred in Shoah were Ashkenazi creates a peculiar Jewish problem. White Jews may question Afro-Jews’ identification of shared loss, but for many white Jews who did not lose family members in that effort at genocide, the question is: Why do they have a more legitimate connection to those victims of antisemitism than their counterparts of color?
Black Dream, White Dread
The situation of such ambivalence and dispute has added difficulty. The “nearness” or “closeness” of injustice and oppression for Afro-Jews is not only about enslavement, racism, and antisemitism. It is also about colonialism.
Why does colonialism pose a problem? A clue rests in the distancing of antisemitism from racism. Jews were, after all, not historically white. It was the need to create distance from the colonized populations in the Euromodern world that raised the demand for growing populations of whites in the colonies. The result was that many groups who were not white in Europe were offered a ticket to become white in its outposts. Difficulty emerged from Christianity being the dominant religion of European colonies because of the transformation of Christendom into a European identity. New identities were born through the protection of religious freedoms, where a group’s religion could be separated from its “race,” a term that emerged from Andalusia in the Middle Ages through a transformation of the word “raza,” which, ironically, referred to Jews and Moors. If Jewishness could be made exclusively religious, then the bearer of the religion could be racially otherwise. Thus, those light-skinned enough to be accepted as white received membership into whiteness by appealing to their religious identity as separate. This was not a good development for Jews who could not “pass” as white, however, and its impact on Jewish history is palatable as a once majority population of color quickly disappeared in proverbial plain sight.
“Travesia del Judio’ street sign in Spain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
There are many negative consequences of Jewish whiteness. The first is that it led to a rewriting of Jewish history to match the expectations of Euromodernity. I define “modernity” here as the value of belonging to the future. As such, it legitimates a people’s present and rewrites their past. Thus, if the future of Jewishness is whiteness, then authentic Jews of the present become white, which makes the Jewish story a retroactively affected one of whiteness as a condition of appearance. This was catastrophic for other Jews, because since they supposedly did not legitimately belong to the future, their present was delegitimated and their past erased. This led to an additional false thesis—namely, that non-white Jews must have somehow come to Judaism. Since whiteness afforded Euromodern Judaism’s legitimacy, this meant that those other people could only enter Euromodernity and then become Jews by other means. The standard position is Christianity. If Africans enter Euromodernity through colonization and enslavement, the presumption is that happens through their having first become Christian. Thus, to stand as an Afro-Jew is, by many white Jews, presumed erroneously to do so as a prior Christian. The Afro-Jew thus faces delegitimation of her or his Jewish history since even when embodying a line of Jewish ancestry older than many white Jews, they are presumed to be “converts” in the presence of a population whose presumed original authenticity is not premised on conversion. Actual Jewish history disputes that.
“Antisemitism” is thus, for many white Jews, an attractive formulation of hatred of Jews since it disassociates Jews from the dreaded designation of being a race, because, as nearly anyone who has experienced racism would admit—like “gender” with regard to “feminine”—“race” is a term that for the most part signifies being of color. As this discussion is short, I won’t get into the details of why “antisemitism” is a concept saturated with bad faith. I will just state this: Most people who hate Jews are not thinking about religion. They see Jews, even if white, as never white enough. They ascribe, in what existentialists call the spirit of seriousness—the materialization of values—that Jewishness is in the flesh and soul of Jews. There is thus the error of avowedly white Jews rallying for religious freedom in the face of a foe that sees them as a racial threat. They want to defend “us Jews” in the practice of our religion while imagining “us whites” in their daily social lives.
If we concede antisemitism as a form of racism, the story is different. As mixed-race people could be hated for both sides of their mixture (think of an Afro-Asian receiving anti-black racism and anti-Asian racism, or Arabs who could be hated as an ethnicity or “race” despite their morphological diversity), the Afro-Jew may ask if both are at work if she or he focuses on racial oppression.
These reflections become complicated when we reflect on the passage into whiteness of many Euro-Jews. The story is, after all, a colonial one, and that precious whiteness is indebted to colonialism, enslavement, and racism. Thus, Euro-Jewish investment in whiteness ensnares them in a defense of colonialism, enslavement, and racism. As liberation discourses are patently anti-colonial, anti-enslavement, and anti-racist, this places Jewish whiteness in a logical collision with liberation and struggles for freedom.
The Afro-Jew thus faces delegitimation of her or his Jewish history since even when embodying a line of Jewish ancestry older than many white Jews, they are presumed to be ‘converts’ in the presence of a population whose presumed original authenticity is not premised on conversion. Actual Jewish history disputes that.
This reactionary position is not, of course, the only historical Jewish story. On the one hand, Jews were so associated with the formation of liberalism that even Karl Marx, a grandson of a Rabbi, saw it fitting to address European Jewish values as ideologically linked to Euromodern liberal capitalism in “On the Jewish Question.” In recent times, the lure of whiteness produced politically neoconservative Jews who moved to the right of liberalism in a desperate embrace of whiteness to the point of, unfortunately, allying in recent times with White supremacist Christians and even, as we see in the United States, politicians supported by neo-Nazi and other fascist groups.
Rejecting Idols, Embracing Ethical Life
To the left of all this are many secular Jews, and among Jews who practice Judaism, the complicated matter of religion offers a unique convergence of their Jewish political identity among those in and out of the white umbrella. I cannot here, because of limited space, spell out the many kinds of Jews who live their faith, ethnic, and racial identities outside of whiteness. As I do that elsewhere, I would here simply like to state this: Many Jews of color who are also Jews of faith do not live their lives worried about what white Jews think of them. They are simply people of faith practicing the varieties of Judaism they know. There is, however, a common question posed to all Jews that come to the fore on the question of liberation, and that is its relation, specifically, to Jewish ethics.
To illustrate my point, consider the famed early Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists. They are often misunderstood today because of how they are studied by Christian theorists who presume the grammar of a secularized Christian framework. The idea of a critical philosophy, originally formulated by Immanuel Kant as transcendental idealism, was a formal, secularized Protestantism. The transcendental movement through Arthur Schopenhauer and G. W. F. Hegel kept the Protestant eschatological elements. In Marx, however, the problem of idolatry was posed as a problem of ideological critique and a rejection of fetishism. Sigmund Freud took these concerns to the inner reaches of consciousness and even the unconscious elements of mind. Adding Edmund Husserl’s effort to explore the critical conditions of consciousness without ontological reductionism, we have three Jewish thinkers (although the first was from a family who converted to Christianity and the third did so on his own) posing what to some seemed the irreconcilable objectives of the material world, unconscious forces, and the social world in which reality becomes meaningfully conscious. Yet the early group of Frankfurt School thinkers—for example, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, all Jewish and committed secularists—took on the task of not only bringing these thinkers together (especially Marx and Freud), but also to do so without collapsing into idolatry, that is, making their intellectual heroes, societal norms, and economic systems into gods. (I regard the post-WWII Frankfurt School, whose main exemplar is Jürgen Habermas, to be a reclamation of secularized Protestant Christian thought.) Adorno expressed this Jewish anti-idolatry position well in the concept of negative dialectics and negative theology.
This rejection of idolatry is also the basis of a uniquely Jewish position on theodicy. Christian theology poses a deity who must be cleansed of contradictions. Judaism, alternatively, poses a deity who must not be named, constrained, reduced—in short, offered as an image. This is a crucial element for Jewish ethics, since it in effect explains “election” (in Hebrew, bhira) and the significance of striving for kashrut (kosher living) according to Halakhah (“the way,” or Jewish law). Many Christians are surprised, even shocked, when they learn that Jews do not need to embrace G-d as an ontological being or entity. An activist philosopher and social worker friend of mine once put it this way: “I don’t go to shul [synagogue] because I believe in G-d.”
This mysterious explanation makes sense for Jews who understand that election or to be chosen does not mean to be better than others. It means to face the fear and trembling of radical ethical responsibility. I add “radical” because the responsibility is for more than specific commandments (mitzvoth). Its radicality rests on taking responsibility for responsibility. In Judaism, this means responsibility for the image of G-d on earth, which, as the argument goes, is not an “image” proper, since that would be idolatrous. It is a responsibility, and it is so often in the form of a terrible, burdensome calling. Through the act of carrying the Torah (direction, instruction, teachings) when becoming a Bat Mitzvah or Bar Mitzvah (daughter or son of the commandments), the honored is also taking on the weight or burden in one reading of ethical life. The seeming conundrum of non-ontological Jewishness is resolved thus. There are Jews who regard G-d as a just being. No Jew, however, should accept the idea of G-d solely as a being. Justice, broadly conceived (because the Hebrew word Tzedek includes but is not reduced exclusively to justice), is the crucial element. Thus, since neither the religious nor the secular Jew would reject the importance of taking responsibility for the ethical face of the universe, my friend’s remark on believing in G-d makes sense. She refuses to be idolatrous, and she insists on the importance of ethical life marked also by righteous action. That friend’s remark was to offer a critique of synagogues that have subordinated Jewish ethical responsibility for responsibility through subordinating it to the fetish of such things as a Jewish state.
Fetishizing antisemitism at the expense of fighting against oppression endangers Jewish ethical life. This leads to a form of idolatrous relationship to Jewish people read through Judaism and, as a consequence, places Jews in an antagonistic relationship to liberation struggles against colonization, enslavement, and racism. Where Jewish people become the enemy of liberation, Judaism, from this point of view, is lost.
Though I have posed these reflections in terms of white Jews versus Afro-Jews and other Jews of color, there is the reality of ideological critique where beneath white Jews is the paradoxical darkness offering ethical life. There are designated white Jews who make decisions to shed the unethical garbs of white investments in anti-liberation. This reflection from an Ashkenazi mother on her son from her union with an Afro-Sephardic-Mizrahi father concludes these reflections:
… there is a general lesson that more fully entering a black world through marriage and parenting has taught me: one must live as if values and virtues and excelling and being a person of integrity matter, for that is what it is to live a human life.
Pope Francis delivering remarks during his visit to Mosul, Iraq on March 7, 2021. Photo Courtesy of Omar Mohammed, Mosul Eye.
“Fraternity is more durable than fratricide,” the pope remarked in his address to a group of Mosulis of different faiths in his recent visit to Iraq. The pope, who experienced conflict and violence in Argentina earlier in his life, can easily understand to where political and religious violence leads. Yet, the Archbishop of Mosul, Najeeb M. Michael, who was standing next to him during the visit to Mosul on March 7, 2021, relayed that “[Pope Francis] shed tears, while taking moments of silence.”
The Christian population of Iraq, as well as Iraq’s other ethnic and religious minorities, have been dreaming of these words being uttered by the pope on Iraqi soil since the fall of Mosul in June 2014. In honoring his promise to visit Iraq at the earliest opportunity despite the pandemic, Pope Francis has sought not only to respond to the calls for help from Iraqi minorities, including those that have suffered from genocide, but also to emphasize the importance of interfaith dialogue and to show that actions mean more than empty words, political promises, and shallow human rights invocations. In June 2014, the pope’s presence in Iraq would have been beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Despite the “never again” mantra that has circulated since the Holocaust, other genocides continue to further frustrate anyone’s faith in humanity, from Rwanda to Myanmar, and to the rule of the Islamic State on Iraqi soil in 2014, one of the disasters-that-were-waiting-to-happen following the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Pope Francis made the “never again” mantra concrete through his actions when he visited Iraq. In carefully unmasking, in all his activities, the very root of the destruction of the Iraqi social fabric that led to the destruction of Mosul, he aimed to provide not only hope to Iraqi civilian worshippers, but most importantly to minorities across the world.
In the series of meetings and gatherings, and in the symbolism of the places that he chose to call upon during his short three-day visit, Pope Francis laid out a diplomatic message that could become the most significant Holy See policy since Vatican II, a message of the concrete connection of the Catholic Church to other faiths at a time of religious divisions worldwide, a message emphasizing the importance of interfaith dialogue for achieving peace nationally and regionally.
In his meeting in Najaf with Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one simple picture of both religious leaders seated side-by-side provided visual counterevidence to not only the idea that the politicization of religion is inevitable, but also to the intransigency of the politicization of the ethnic and social divisions that have plagued Iraq since 2003. These divisions contributed to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq during the rule of Obama administration-backed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in the early 2010s. Under Al-Maliki’s rule, Sunnis were pitted against Shi’ites in a perceived government-sponsored brutality that echoed to many that of former President Saddam Hussein.
Iraqis in Mosul celebrating the visit of Pope Francis on March 7, 2021. Photo Courtesy of Omar Mohammed, Mosul Eye.
The Bush administration’s original sin of dividing Iraq along de facto religious lines through its infamous de-Baathification process led to civil war and the subsequent fall of Mosul in 2014. Years after this divisive colonial policy, the pope’s visit gestures to pathways to recover from this legacy. During the Najaf portion of his visit, the pope sought to place fraternity back into the limelight, and to encourage a move away from political Islam. In this groundbreaking meeting with Ayatollah al-Sistani, who is the second highest Shi’ite authority after Iranian leader Ali Khameini, and the most high profile advocate for the separation of religion from government, Iranian-style, Pope Francis might have performed a diplomatic miracle: that of beginning to help bridge the religious fault lines in Iraq by encouraging, for the first time, Ayatollah al-Sistani to appear in public, alongside the pope, in a show of support for interfaith dialogue and fraternity.
In the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Erbil, Pope Francis also met at length with Abdullah Kurdi, the father of the little Aylan, whose lifeless body was pictured on a Turkish beach in September 2015. Through this meeting, Pope Francis widened the scope of his diplomatic message to the rest of the world. His action subtly connected the dots between the invasion of a country, the division of its population, and the enduring alterations in the genetics of its social fabric, the result of which has often been more destruction.
In the same manner that depleted uranium weapons, Western-made and sold, durably altered the genetic fabric of civilian life, the partial annihilation of the second largest city in Iraq, Mosul, is a physical symbol of a far-reaching human tragedy. In Erbil, Pope Francis placed the onus of responsibility for the dreadful consequences of Western realpolitik on the shoulders of the many governments that sponsor international arms trade, only to close their borders to the collateral victims of conflict. He exposed the price that civilian populations pay for political decisions made elsewhere. Although seeking only to flee from economic hardships caused by war and destruction, many of these civilians have been condemned to suffer the dreadful fate of becoming “migrants,” the euphemistic term used to deny the collective responsibility of European nations for creating the very conditions that drive populations like those in Iraq out of their cherished homes.
His action subtly connected the dots between the invasion of a country, the division of its population, and the enduring alterations in the genetics of its social fabric, the result of which has often been more destruction.
The visit is not just a wake-up call to Iraq and the rest of the world, it is a demonstration of the faith, courage, and integrity of two religious leaders, and many more in their wake, whose coming together will restore not just our faith in humanity, but also our collective and individual responsibility to call on our leaders to start practicing another form of international relations, one more systemic, more humane, and more compassionate. Actions speak louder than words. Not all tears are crocodile tears. Never again is only possible if we all mean it.
Pope Francis included in his speeches in Mosul, Ur, Baghdad, and Erbil, many messages that called the government of Iraq to account. But on his way back to Rome he asked a question that the Iraqi government should take seriously: “Who sold the weapons to the destroyers and who is still selling them”? Answering this question requires a full review of the political and social structure of Iraq and its government’s position up until the post-ISIS period. Such a question is indeed one that should have been asked for a decade. Can anyone answer the pope?
SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (2020)
I want to begin by profusely thanking Josh Lupo and his team at the Contending Modernities program for their time and efforts in organizing this forum, Ebrahim Moosa for penning an incredibly thoughtful and productive introduction, and all discussants—Jonathan Brown, Faisal Devji, Zunaira Komal, Waris Mazhari, Ammar Nasir, and Sohaira Siddiqui—for their extensive intellectual generosity in engaging my book with such depth, brilliance, and insight. Their commentaries are not only a great gift and source of honor; they have also helped me think anew about the book in generative ways. Among the central aspirations of Defending Muḥammad in Modernity is to forge conversations between scholars in Islamic studies, South Asian history, religious studies, and anthropology in addition to generating interest (including critical and normative evaluations) among Muslim traditionalist scholars or the ‘ulamā’, especially in South Asia. Therefore, it is particularly heartening to see that collectively, contributors to this forum encompass all these intellectual profiles. Before I address the excellent points and critiques raised by the contributors, let me very briefly situate and contextualize the book in Western academic studies on Islam and South Asia, and add a word on how that context connects with its main argument. The beginnings of this project lie in my years as a graduate student at Duke University from 2005 to 2012. I entered graduate school during a moment when the field of religious studies was feverishly grappling with the recently published and hugely influential critiques and genealogies of secular power offered by Talal Asad and his students and interlocutors (it still is though perhaps with a more settled view of competing takes and readings). In addition, Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s pioneering work on Deoband, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change, that for the first time brought into view South Asian ‘ulamā’ discourses and debates from a perspective that combined intellectual history and religious studies, had also recently emerged. Fifteen years later, in Defending Muḥammad in Modernity I have sought to further and bring into more deliberate dialogue these two streams of scholarship in a manner that might disrupt secular claims about religious traditions. I do this through close readings of a particular tradition of intra-Muslim contest that highlight alternate logics of life unavailable for secular moderation and disciplinary canonization. More specifically, through a close reading of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic, most often approached with a lens saturated with liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, inclusive/exclusive, reformist/non-reformist etc., I try to present an alternate conceptual framing that instead sees this polemic as a reflection of what I call “competing political theologies.” With the loss of Muslim political sovereignty in nineteenth-century South Asia, the pioneers of the Barelvī and Deobandī orientations and their predecessors articulated and avidly fought for two rival visions of the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the practice of everyday life. This in a nutshell is the argument of the book.
Logics of Sovereignty
The contributors to this forum have engaged varied aspects of this argument, while extending its scope and application in variously dazzling ways. Paucity of allotted space will not allow me to address all the points raised by each commentator; I will choose one or two from each and try clubbing them together when appropriate. In her theoretically electric reading of the book, Zunaira Komal asks the difficult question of how the notion of divine sovereignty in modern Muslim reformist discourses might “be understood alongside the sovereignty of the colonial state as well as the declining sovereignty of nineteenth-century Muslims in the subcontinent? Is the understanding of power within Islam similar or different than what the colonial encounter brought?” During the course of researching and writing this book, I wrestled with this question rather avidly. I cannot propose a resolution to this problem except to point out that traditionalist Muslim conceptions of divine sovereignty, its encounter with prophetic authority, and the implications of that encounter for the practice of everyday life cannot be collapsed or reduced to colonial power and conditions. This, of course, is not a gesture, as I stress repeatedly in the book, to retrieve “native agency” from the rubbles of colonial power. And yet, the competing logics of moral argument—centered on the status of divine sovereignty in a world enveloped by the crisis of political sovereignty—that animated the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic entailed a vision of the political that exceeded and provincialized the modern colonial and postcolonial privileging of the state as the centerpiece of politics. In this regard, I appreciate as well as concur with Komal’s astute suggestion that intra-‘ulamā’ debates on matters like the Prophet’s knowledge of the unknown (‘ilm al-ghayb) showcase a vision of the political that while contending with “the temporality of the world” remain “aspirationally open to the temporality of the Elsewhere.” Thus, though indebted to the technological and institutional conditions of colonial power, modern ‘ulamā’ discourses and debates on divine sovereignty point to horizons of politics that also disrupt the alleged universality of that power. This in turn marks their decolonial potential, as Sohaira Siddiqui has wonderfully elaborated in her remarks on this forum.
Paradoxes of Sovereignty
But as much as I am invested in detailing the distinctive logics of sovereignty at work in ‘ulamā’ discourses, capturing the vexing tensions and paradoxes of sovereignty haunting their discursive programs is also central to my concerns, as Faisal Devji has probingly observed in his signature quizzical style. He has also summed up the central paradox of sovereignty, as reflected in competing modern Muslim reformist discourses, rather pointedly: “On the one hand, a sovereignty unavailable to colonized peoples might have been displaced onto God as a kind of compensation. On the other hand, its expulsion from the world of mortals may indicate a deep suspicion of sovereignty and the modern state it represents. Having been stripped of its own political tradition, in other words, new forms of Islamic thought were magnetized by the idea of sovereignty in a way not so very different from anti-colonial nationalism.” Yes, indeed! Extending Devji’s helpful extension and elaboration of my argument here, I should add that it is precisely this tense interplay between the urgency to retrieve divine sovereignty in a world beset by moral corruption and to deny mortal humans responsible for that corruption any hint of popular sovereignty that renders ‘ulamā’ actors discussed in my book at once thoroughly modern and yet defiantly anti-modernist. In other words, even when critiquing spiritual hierarchies (such as in the Prophet’s capacity for intercession or access to knowledge of the unknown), their worldview remains wedded to a strictly hierarchical spiritual economy whereby the ability of the masses to access the vatic capital of God’s sovereign power and the Prophet’s normative guidance hinges on the mediating authority of the ‘ulamā’. At stake in defending Muḥammad in modernity—whether as an exceptional beloved of God endowed with extraordinary powers (the Barelvī view) or as an agent whose perfection depended on the perfection of his humanity (the Deobandī position)—is precisely the regulation of the encounter between divine sovereignty and prophetic charisma in a manner that ultimately amplifies the sovereign authority of the scholarly class. Devji’s intriguing suggestion that “controversies about the Prophet’s status rehearse a political as much as theological paradox, since the very effort to expel sovereignty from human society while preserving it elsewhere sets the stage for its spectacular return” provides a helpful frame with which one might begin to address a question that both Sohaira Siddiqui and Ammar Nasir raise in different ways: What is one to make of the postcolonial afterlives of these intra-Muslim polemics over prophetic memory and honor that trace their beginnings to the colonial moment? As Siddiqui asks: “[H]ow has the conceptual-ideological problem-space of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic changed [in more recent times]?” Nasir asks a similar question while also advancing the suggestion that perhaps the stability and order provided by the juggernaut of the nineteenth-century colonial state is precisely the reason that many such intra-Muslim and inter-sectarian polemics did not descend to the sort of rabid violence that has often accompanied them in postcolonial contexts like Pakistan.
Postcolonial Ruptures
Let me offer three brief propositions addressing this line of inquiry: (1) The metastasis of violence associated with intra-Muslim doctrinal contestations in settings like Pakistan has perhaps less to do with the weakness of the state (as compared to say the colonial state) than the further intensification of the crisis of sovereignty in popular consciousness and everyday life. The instability of sovereign agency over the contingencies of life is increasingly compensated by the fantastical figure of a Prophet at once incorruptible and yet always vulnerable to injury. The pathological patrolling of prophetic love not only borrows liberally (pun intended) from a distinctly Christian political theology of blasphemy, as Devji in his comments points out; it also signals a rather fascinating interplay of masculine certainty and endemic fragility mapped onto the body of the Prophet. (2) While it is easy to get caught up in the proliferation of intra-Muslim divisions in the postcolonial context, we have also seen the emergence of some curious alliances between otherwise arch rivals. So, for instance, the recent movement and protests over blasphemy in Pakistan have often brought together Barelvī, Deobandī, and Ahl-i Ḥadīth actors in a common program of defying the state and non-state modernist elite. The lines of activity between ‘ulamā’ and more popular preachers and activists have also been often blurred, as seen most dramatically in the rise of the popular outfit Tehrik-i Labayk Ya Rasul Allah (TLYR) that has frequently sucked in ‘ulamā’ actors in their drive to protect prophetic honor even as it cuts into the latter’s’ religious authority in the marketplace of moral persuasion. (3) The space for intra-Muslim disagreement on sensitive theological questions has certainly shrunk; a century and couple decades later, it is almost unthinkable that questions like, “Can God produce another Muhammad?” or “What’s the difference between Muhammad’s and Satan’s knowledge?,” could be discussed and debated as transparently and with the sort of intellectual depth and nuance as they were by nineteenth-century Barelvī and Deobandī pioneers and their predecessors. Indeed, as I elaborate in the book’s postscript, if nothing else, the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic showcases the potential for intellectual fecundity associated with a fierce yet layered and complex polemical encounter. This is not to suggest some sort of a rise and fall model of history that valorizes the ‘ulamā’ of colonial India as occupants of a “golden era” of intellectual valor and sophistication supplanted by the mediocrity of the present. What I am gesturing at rather is an observable constriction in the parameters of doctrinal debate, especially on questions concerning the Prophet.
The Middle Eastern Shadow
Jonathan Brown wonderfully highlights a theme that, while discussed at numerous points in the book, certainly merits much further inquiry and exposition: the relationship between intra- ‘ulamā’ rivalries in modern South Asia and the Muslim intellectual landscape and debates of the Ottoman Middle East. As I detail in the book, the Hanafi assault on Wahhabi thought in Arabia not only colored the polemical ink of South Asian scholars like Aḥmad Razā Khān (d. 1921). Moreover, seeking the endorsement of prominent Arab scholars was also seen as a coveted pursuit by Barelvī and Deobandī pioneers alike (see esp. chapter 9). Brown has also highlighted an instructive irony: “[Aḥmad Razā] Khān’s writings seem to have had little impact on scholarship in the Arab world, certainly not in comparison to Deobandīs like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī [d.1933]. Ironically, if asked about the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen or the mawlid, scholars like [Zāhid] al-Kawtharī [d.1952] and [‘Abdallāh] al-Ghumārī [d.1993] would no doubt take the Barelvī side. But they could read and appreciate the books of Deobandī scholars in blissful removal from the controversies in South Asia.” This observation is pertinent not only to the interaction of Arab and South Asian traditionalism, but in a sense also to the popular reception of these rival groups within South Asia as well. On the one hand, the dominant mode of everyday ritual practice among South Asian Muslims most certainly aligns much greater with the Barelvī worldview. For instance, the Prophet’s birthday celebration today is not only deeply entrenched in the ritual life of the community; establishing it as a heretical innovation seems a task much more socially and doctrinally daunting than it was a century ago. However, despite the ritual entrenchment of the Barelvī orientation, the Deoband school continues to dominate the intellectual and popular terrain of religious knowledge in terms of institutional structures and depth, publishing capacity and output, and outreach to global scholarly audiences, as Brown’s analysis also confirms.
The Work Continues
Brown’s point also connects nicely with a useful and valid critique raised by Waris Mazhari that for all my claims to complicate Deobandī thought, I at times perhaps generalize its intellectual project without having considered prominent Deobandī ‘ulamā’ voices that run contrary to those generalizations. More specifically, Mazhari astutely argues that while I present the early nineteenth-century reformer Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831) and the Deoband school as part of a common reformist program and genealogy, Deobandī heavyweights like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī were in fact deeply critical of what they saw as Ismāʿīl’s acerbic discursive style. Mazhari’s critique not only provides me the opportunity to offer the clarification that my juxtaposition of Ismāʿīl and some of the Deoband pioneers was specific to some among the latter—most notably Rashīd Aḥmad Gangohī (d. 1906), Ashraf ‘Alī Thānvī (d. 1943), and Khalīl Aḥmad Sāharanpūrī (d. 1927)—and to specific theological and normative problems. More importantly, it also serves as a useful reminder of the dizzying variety and the unpredictable scholarly trajectories that populate Deobandī and indeed Barelvī discursive universes. On that note, I hope Defending Muḥammad in Modernity and other kindred works that have appeared in the last couple years will inspire and attract more than a few graduate students to dive into the often-perplexing yet hugely rewarding waters of South Asian ‘ulamā’ traditions of knowledge and debate. Our work, indeed, has just begun.
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, and author of Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) that was awarded the 2020 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize. His work centers on Muslim intellectual thought in modern South Asia with a focus on intra-Muslim debates and polemics on crucial questions of law, ethics, and theology. Tareen is also interested in the intersection of secularism and Muslim intellectual thought, Muslim political thought, and Muslim revolutionary politics in the inter-war period. His various articles have appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion, Muslim World, Political Theology, Islamic Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ReOrient, among many others.
Reading SherAli Tareen’s magnificent Defending Muḥammad in Modernity (Winner of the 2020 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize) one is left contemplating how the ideas of visionary figures can set the complex agenda of future trends and institutions. Take the well-known scholar and political activist Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831), a scion of the influential Walīyullāh family, and a key figure in Tareen’s work. His rigorist theological vision was adopted by some of the founders of the Deoband school, and they outlawed the widely practiced ritual and ceremony of commemorating the Prophet. Paradoxically, the spiritual mentor of the founders of Deoband, Hājī Imdadullāh (d.1899), much to the chagrin of some of his disciples, approved of this ritual, known as the mīlād, as Tareen explains, albeit with some stipulations. Ismāʿīl and Imdādullāh subtly and deliberately re-shaped the discursive practices of Muslims in South Asia, especially those that directly impinged on the relations between institutions, namely, what became known as the Deobandī school and their rivals the Barelvī school of thought. These schools argued over the ritual of mīlād and other doctrinal issues that Tareen discusses in detail. “Once a vision becomes an institution,” the influential German writer Siegfried Kracauer writes, “clouds of dust gather about it, blurring its contours and contents. The history of ideas is a history of misunderstandings” (7).
The jury is still out as to how one should name and frame the nature of these theological shifts which left long shadows on Islam as practiced on the subcontinent. But few doubts arise that their ideas were impacted by the changing political and cultural landscape of colonial India, a phenomenon that multiple participants in this symposium have noted. This harvest of reflections, with each contributor’s unique appreciation, is possibly the best gift to Tareen, who explores, describes, and analyzes the micro-histories of discrete theological debates in colonial India so that his readers can get a sense of what was at stake in these debates in the past and what ramifications they continue to have in the present. Most theological disputes have an afterlife, and some of these intricate and subtle debates about the authority of Islam’s messenger and prophet still percolate in the hearts and minds of the faithful to this very day.
Political Theology
As Tareen himself explains, political theology forms the golden thread in his book. In his contribution, Waris Mazhari acknowledges that religion and politics in Muslim history were intimately connected but he rejects what he labels as the “Western” category of “political theology” as less useful. In my view, the deep roots of “political theology” in Islamic thought can be found in the work of medieval Muslim scholars, which is often unacknowledged in critical scholarship. For instance, Muḥammad Aʿlā al-Tahānawī (died approximately 1707), the outstanding encyclopedist in Mughal India, writes that governance or politics (siyāsa) is “the cultivation of the good in humanity by guiding them to the path of salvation in this life and the next” (1:993–94). The nexus between humans, the world, and attaining God’s salvation is evident in this definition which today enjoys the moniker of political theology. In Tahānawī’s all-inclusive and comprehensive notion of the political, prophets exercise governance over the souls and the bodies of all people. As to the learned, who are fondly remembered in the tradition as “the true heirs of the prophets,” per the premodern prescription their jurisdiction is limited to the nurturing of the souls of the elites. As to the multitude, the discipline and governance of all people in this schema takes place via a regime of regulation by the show of power and of force for the maintenance of order. Even more interesting is that medieval Muslim political philosophy conceptualized the discipline of the self as the “governance of the souls” (siyāsa nafsīya) and the regulation of the realms of subsistence or economics, communal existence, and welfare as the “governance of the corporeal body” (siyāsa badanīya). Disciplining the subjectivities of the people was the task of the scholars, while regulating the public sphere was the task of the political rulers. All of this was part of this Islamic tradition centuries before Michel Foucault made us aware of the technologies of the self.
Most theological disputes have an afterlife, and some of these intricate and subtle debates about the authority of Islam’s messenger and prophet still percolate in the hearts and minds of the faithful to this very day.
Tahānawī explains that two common forms of theological and philosophical politics prevailed among Muslims. One was a politics of justice, also named “a regime of Norms/Sharīʿa” (al-siyāsa al-sharʿīya), which was drawn from the teachings of the prophets, as also articulated by the work of the philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 950). The other was a regime regulated by political philosophy and wisdom (al-siyāsa al-madanīya or al-ḥikma al-siyāsīya) where the rule of the monarch, Sulṭān, or other similar kind of ruler prevailed. Politics as a regime of governance is central to order, justice, and the protection of the realm against all enemies. Early Muslim political theorists viewed the regime of law and political philosophy as part of a mutually reinforcing continuum.
A feature of the composite political theology described above has as its desideratum the need to sustain an empire in harmony with early and premodern Islamic predecessors. Key features of these predecessors were hierarchy and a variety of distinctions, for example, between those who are free vs slave, male vs female, and between different forms of political subject positions and professions. In modern times, the heirs to this vocabulary of Muslim political theology often adopt it uncritically without due attention to the conditions of a different time and altered aspirations. In other words, not frequently practiced is a critical engagement with histories and concepts for their more effective use in the present.
Contextual Theology
It appears that someone like Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, whose thought Tareen’s documents in detail, partially sought a more egalitarian promise in the God of the Qurʾān. While undoubtedly portrayed as a monarch (malik), the God of the Qurʾān is nonetheless also one who does not act in an aristocratic fashion in the same way as earthly monarchs. Shāh Ismāʿīl’s God hears the prayers of the lowly leather-worker as well as the rich landowner without any need for any human intercession and intermediary. Thus, he leveraged the image of God as the fountain of mercy and sovereign authority who is available at the request of all creatures. His desire to reduce the aristocratic elements of political theology to one more in line with the impulse of the pre-imperial Muslim caliphate, which was more egalitarian in its impulses, is unmistakable.
A postage stamp commemorating Aḥmad Razā Khān Barelvī in India. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Alert to the context and the work of Shāh Ismāʿīl, Zunaira Komal provides a reading of Tareen via Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida. For the latter, tradition can also be viewed as an “encounter” and a “gift” even though it might be a mysterious one in its origins. If Tareen’s reading is centered around the contestation over tradition in one sense, then Komal reminds us that the past has multiple echoes as “the unpastness of the past, the unsettled question of tradition.” Drawing on Walter Benjamin, she pushes us to grapple with traditions in such a way that we might “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (128).
We will recall that it was the sect called the Khārijites who seized onto a memory of the nascent (primitive) political impulse at the founding of Islam, roughly three decades after the Prophet died. The Khārijites invoked God’s sovereignty above human claims at a moment when they sensed the danger of internecine conflict. Political legitimacy for the Khārijites was centered on the preservation of divine sovereignty as framed in their clarion call that “only God’s command shall prevail” (lā ḥukm illā lillāh) in all disputes and circumstances. But over time Islamdom’s political theology shifted, grew, and adopted greater complexity as multiple empires rose, evolved, and fragmented. Sunnī juridical theologians paraphrased a Qurʾānic verse that “obedience (dīn) was only due to God” and insisted on the regime of law as a sign of legitimacy of the political order.
Hermeneutical Shifts
Tareen’s nineteenth-century Muslim reformers in South Asia, and those elsewhere in the Muslim world began to rework the regime of norms or laws into their projects of reform, but often neglected rich medieval political philosophy and the lush conceptual vocabularies that were coupled with it. Instead, these reformers energized their discursive tradition and practice by pairing it strictly to scriptural sources—the Qurʾān and the Sunna (prophetic norms drawn from a copious archive of ḥadīth). In the process, the historical memory of the tradition was substituted by a surfeit of confidence and reliance on the norms of scriptural authenticity. With the emphasis on pristine origins, this reformist tradition was bound to clash with existing interpretative frameworks that were embedded in historical experiences that privileged the will of the community and the authority of tradition equally.
Divine sovereignty in this redesigned or reformed tradition was weaponized as a means to alter the hearts, minds, and the worlds of the believers. The stand-off between Fazl-ī Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d. 1861) and Shāh Ismāʿīl in the nineteenth century, and Aḥmad Razā Khān (d. 1921) and the Deobandīs in the twentieth, are both instances of an internal clash within the Sunni Muslim community. Unfortunately, because of the heat of polemics, no mechanism for discursive reconciliation or brokering was possible.
These scorching debates prevailed in the post-colonial periods, as Sohaira Siddiqui points out in her response. She rightly observes that the “problem space” of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemics also have a contemporary manifestation not only in South Asia but even in regions where these Muslim sub-traditions have traveled.
Like Siddiqui, Faisal Devji also reflects on how Tareen’s argument helps us in addressing issues in different contexts. He notes that in the twentieth century the refurbished concept of divine sovereignty became an instrument of ideological state-formation. Such a notion, he claims, has been institutionalized via constitutions and legislative processes. Pakistan and Egypt are two examples of how the concept of divine sovereignty gets embedded into nation-state political orders. Baptized by revised politico-theological concepts, one observes how the legislatures, courts, politicians, and political activists all deploy God’s sovereignty as a war cry to contest, topple, and challenge governments; restrain or ban speech about religion; and mount campaigns against alleged offenses denoted as blasphemy. By purging vast sections of the archive of historical Muslim political theology, Devji suggests the result is “new Islamic actors accepting a European notion of sovereignty which, however, they reserved only for God.” I agree with Devji as to how European notions of sovereignty are patched on to modern Islamic practices. My readings of the premodern literature suggest that notions of sovereignty were meshed into authoritative discourses and symbolic imaginaries. And sovereign-authority was often fragmented and distributed, and perhaps functioned more like rhizomes—sometimes you saw it and at other times it was concealed.
Jonathan Brown is curious as to why these intra-Muslim theological contestations reached such fury in South Asia. Perhaps a comparative study which looked to the slightly earlier period in West Africa could help illuminate the developments in South Asia. Developments in the Sokoto Caliphate under Osman dan Fodio and his heirs might provide one entry point here. In his essay, Brown notes some of the uncanny resemblances in the theological developments in South Asia in the nineteenth century and Arabia in the eighteenth century, but then himself correctly discounts the comparison because he claims that there were crucial differences between the two contexts. Even if it is hazardous to speculate, I would proffer that Shāh Ismāʿīl and his colleagues were a minority in a diminished Mughal empire, where the anxiety of loss and dissolution of Muslim fortunes weighed heavily on their conscience, a point that Mazhari confirms. This might have led them to assess their situation as dire, and thus in need of an exceptional response at multiple levels. The reaction to some of their proposals too was unusually intense.
Afterlife of Theological Polemics
But as Ammar Khan Nasir points out, even amongst those Deobandīs who were devoted and supportive of the reformist cause of Shāh Ismaʿīl there were reservations and discomfort at the latter’s rhetoric of reform. This is a sentiment voiced by a later Deobandī, Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933), who considered himself a supporter of this reform. Curiously, it seems that the judicious among the Deobandīs were unable to reduce the polemical heat in the twentieth century between themselves and their rivals, the Barelvī sect. This would have required them to both voice critical dissent in some matters that they found objectionable in the writings of the reformers, while nonetheless still support the overall reform project. Perhaps the heat and din of polemical exchanges and vested political interests rendered such potential stillborn. For when the stakes are high even the most constructive critique can be viewed as outright rejection.
Darul Uloom Deoband. Deoband, India. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The larger question Nasir poses is whether or not knowledge of the multitude of Muslim sectarian struggles on the subcontinent which date back to the seventeenth century can be edificatory. Historical awareness, he implies, might help imagine new possibilities in the present. He points out that theologians prescribed theologies that caused rifts and divisions that persist to this day among the Muslims of South Asia. He wonders if South Asian Islam can find a formula whereby different religious identities can coexist in ways that disallow the state to own the monopoly over religion. This remains a relevant question. Countless experiences around the world show that the defenders of God’s sanctity and Muḥammad’s dignity often wrap their own personas in the mantle of infallibility and privilege their opinions and thus raise the stakes. Proclamations of sovereignty quickly unravel into pithy slogans and the theological tinder emitted can turn into a conversation-stopper which makes it difficult to pursue any meaningful discussion on myriads of issues concerning law and theology.
We are grateful to SherAli Tareen for providing us with an opportunity to think through a multitude of questions involving God, humans, and the world in South Asia. He has raised many issues for us to continuously ponder. Since many of the ideas Tareen raised are still alive and kicking among the faithful, so to speak, we can therefore be content that over time there might be different permutations of this debate in uncharted waters. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity can also be framed as “contesting” deeply held theological concepts centered on the Prophet of Islam. Central issues debated in this book and their history show that there are conceptual caesuras or interruptions that have allowed the controversy to go on after it reached its peak. Doctrines of a tradition—and Islam is no exception—continue to undergo adjustment and reframing to ever-changing conditions. Reinterpreting a doctrine might at times lead away from a tradition. History has repeatedly shown that no dogma is immune to innovation and new possibilities.
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
José Clemente Orozco. The Epic of American Civilization: The Coming of Quetzalcoatl (Panel 5). 1932–1934. Fresco. Overall: 125 ½ x 205 in. (318.8 x 520.7 cm). Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College. Used with permission.
Comparative Religious Ethics and Decolonial Thought
As a subfield of philosophy of religion, comparative religious ethics is concerned with the study of various peoples’ ethical dispositions and their production of ethical knowledge that might reasonably be called “religious.” At its best, work in the subfield is marked by a commitment to denaturalizing the normative status of Christian and/or European philosophic concepts, vocabularies, and traditions in religious ethics. Sometimes this commitment takes the form of extensive methodological and metaethical reflection. Other times, it appears in the formation of self-consciously provisional categories for comparison. Whatever shape it takes, this commitment might be regarded as stemming from comparativists’ desire to challenge the longstanding cultural imperialisms of philosophy of religion and religious ethics—or what decolonial theorists would call their coloniality—and what the founding editors of the Journal of Religious Ethics in 1973 called “the parochialism and Western bias that tends to characterize the present state of our discipline.” Even though most comparativists have not adopted avowedly radical or anticolonial perspectives, they have generally maintained that neither Christianity nor European philosophy should set the standard for ethical inquiry.
Viewed from this vantage, comparative religious ethics might appear to be one of the subfields of philosophy of religion most readily amenable to a decolonial turn. For more than four decades, many comparativists have aspired to create a field of inquiry that not only includes ethical perspectives and knowledges once marginalized in religious studies but that also is transformed by them. It is a subfield in which many purport to be skeptical of the universality and explanatory power of Christian and European philosophic concepts for analyzing religiously ethical phenomena generally. Yet, for all their awareness of the limits of western traditions and Christian concepts in the production of ethical knowledge, comparativists have not significantly inquired into them as ethical problems in their own right—particularly in view of their historic roles as imperial classificatory technologies both productive and preservative of racial distinctions. Instead, they have been relatively satisfied to assert that the historicity of these concepts as colonial sorting techniques, as a means of propagating differences between peoples that have justified the subjugation of some by others, is rather inconsequential for present analysis, provided, of course, one is sufficiently self-conscious about their use. In other words, despite their recognition of the provincial character of European and Christian moral vocabularies, comparativists have not yet seen fit to delve into the darker side of their historicity—that is, their active involvement with coloniality, and so to embark upon anything that might be called a decolonial turn.
Prompted by the work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, I’d like to propose one possible set of foci for comparison which might inspire comparative ethicists to begin taking this metacritical turn, or at least incline them to begin thinking with decolonial theorists. What I suggest is that empire and race ought to become central focal points for ethical analysis. Comparativists ought to ask how imperial and racial formations have shaped the settings within which peoples have acted and thought, regarding them not as wholly determinative but as nevertheless integral components of peoples’ ethical lives. Such inquiry might proceed from the decolonial observation that empires, and modern European colonial empires in particular, have generated longstanding racialized and gendered patterns of power and domination that perdure into our purportedly postcolonial present, and that these patterns are some of the most pressing ethical problems of our times. It would then regard as axiomatic the idea that religiously ethical scholarship is incomplete at best, and fundamentally ideological or distortive at worst, when it fails to interrogate the ways imperial and racial formations influence ethical subjectivation and moral discourse.
Empire and Race in History
If empires are provisionally understood as macropolities that rule different peoples differently, and if race is provisionally understood to name a structural relationship for the production and preservation of these differences, then it would appear possible to use these concepts as foci for comparative work in religious ethics without lapsing into theoretical heavy-handedness or presentist anachronism. As concepts, they are sufficiently delimited without also being so content-laden that they predetermine analysis. They are also able, as Geraldine Heng and Sylvester Johnson have recently demonstrated, to provide rich frames for theorizing almost a millennia of race-making, even before the category of race was explicitly fashioned during the colonial period. More importantly, however, the ability to comparatively explore the historic entanglement of religious varieties of ethical discourse with imperial and racial formations may expand our understanding of how these discourses came to be what they are in the present, as well as produce new perspectives on how processes of moral formation unfold. If comparativists were to begin studying how religious persons and communities have negotiated the tensions of empire, then it would seem we may likely come to a better understanding both of the darker side of religious varieties of ethical discourse and of their contestation.
Marcus Garvey during a parade on the opening day of the annual Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World at Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York City. Garvey helped spark movements from African nationalist independence to American civil rights to self-sufficiency in black commerce (AP Photo/File). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Of course, not every empire has governed its subjects in the same way. Neither have they all engaged in explicit processes of racialization or racial formation as scholars now use these terms. Nor, as Sylvia Wynter argues, are the patterns of differentiation and domination that various empires have installed equally pressing ethical problems. One would not want to suggest that ancient Chinese, medieval Islamic, or early modern West African imperialisms were qualitatively the same as, for instance, contemporary Anglo-American settler colonialisms. Here as elsewhere in ethical analysis, then, historical specificity and normative clarity are needed. Defined thusly, however, taking empire and race as broad focal themes for comparison appears promising for enriching our understanding of the role that religious actors, communities, and their ethical discourses have historically played in the organization of political power, the production of ideas about and representations of human difference, and the shaping of the present. In particular, for those conversant with decolonial theory, it represents an opportunity to gain better understanding of the long-term historical processes that underwrote the transformation of the category of religion in the sixteenth century, as well as the explicit conceptualization of race. Indeed, deploying these terms as comparative foci in conversation with decolonial thought has significant potential for transforming inquiry in comparative religious ethics. How? I offer three concluding propositions.
Critical Prospects
First, it would require that ethicists finally confront the ways that imperial and racial formations have in many cases been constitutive components of ethical subjectivity itself. As David Scott reminds us, imperial techniques of rule have often functioned such that race “becomes inserted into subject-constituting social practices, into the formation, that is to say, of certain ‘raced’ subjectivities” (196–97). Not only interested in establishing political relations of insider and outsider, citizen and alien, imperial statecraft and colonial governance have also sought to shape the interior landscapes of the peoples whom they have ruled. They have used, as Ann Laura Stoler notes, various techniques of subjectivation, or what Ian Hacking refers to as “making up people,” as chief strategies of rule. Consider the ways, for example, that imperial nineteenth-century U.S. discourses of citizenship articulated racial distinctions together with the ideals of liberal egalitarianism, thereby generating citizen-subjects whose universality was made possible by their racial particularity. That is, the ways that the abstract equality shared by U.S. citizens was made possible precisely through the exclusion of non-national, racialized persons from citizenship. Addressing such strategies and techniques of rule may therefore require a substantial rethinking of central ethical categories and the role they have played in instantiating the very divisions of humanity that are constitutive of what W. E. B. Du Bois once called “the color line [that] belts the world.” Dominant conceptions of citizenship, humanity, personhood, reason, affect, action, responsibility, and even ethics, for example, are not simply neutral descriptors of ethical life with respect to empire. They are, in fact, some of the many tools imperial polities have used to subjugate and subjectivate peoples around the world.
Second, as Irene Oh, Danube Johnson, and others have observed on this blog, such foci would likely also call into question both the category of religion itself as a longstanding imperial sorting technique for establishing artificial criteria and scales of comparison between peoples, as well as any comparative endeavor which uses religious designations to naturalize racial distinctions. In other words, it would likely cause comparativists to have to further confront the ways that their very tools of analysis, i.e., the category of religion and the comparative method, are glossed with imperial residues. I will not here rehearse the well-known stories of the colonial origins of religion or the complicity of comparison in colonial domination, but suffice it to say that a focus on race and empire would not, therefore, be simply a matter of incorporating these topics as further specializations in comparative ethical analysis. It would also involve subjecting many of our dominant methods and assumptions to critical scrutiny as ethical problems in their own right and, perhaps, abandoning them when necessary.
Dominant conceptions of citizenship, humanity, personhood, reason, affect, action, responsibility, and even ethics, for example, are not simply neutral descriptors of ethical life with respect to empire. They are, in fact, some of the many tools imperial polities have used to subjugate and subjectivate peoples around the world.
On this note, and finally, a focus on empire and race would demonstrate, I believe, that a mere commitment to provincializing the normative status of Christian and European philosophic concepts, vocabularies, and traditions in religious ethics is not be enough to qualify work in the subfield as decolonial, or even decolonial-adjacent. It would demonstrate, in other words, that becoming an active participant in decolonial projects, both scholarly and political, necessitates a further commitment: that of generating new modes of ethical inquiry delinked from the patterns of power and knowlege installed by imperial and racial formations, modes likely emerging from sources and/or practices that many comparativists have not heretofore considered “religious” or “ethical.” If comparative religious ethicists want to live up to our aspirational self-descriptions as transformative public intellectuals, whose work contributes both to ethical understanding and modes of ethical living, then we will need to significantly rework our own analytical conventions and ethical commitments. Foregrounding race and empire in conversation with decolonial thought can provide the metaethical spur to instigate this transformation.
Nicholas Andersen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies and a 2020-2021 Interdisciplinary Opportunities Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. He works primarily in the fields of modern religious thought and ethics, with particular interests in Black religious thought, theories of empire and colonialism, and religion in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americas. His dissertation, provisionally entitled "Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands unto God," offers a novel theorization of nineteenth-century Ethiopianism.
If Not Now protest during President Trump’s appearance at American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, March 21, 2016. Image Credit: Flickr User Miki Jourdan.
The flag of Israel has been spotted in white nationalist displays of violence such as the insurgency of January 6, 2021. The Star of David was there. There were also white men wearing shirts that read “Camp Auschwitz,” “Arbeit macht frei,” and “6MWE” (a neo-Nazi slogan meaning “6 million wasn’t enough”). These are obvious expressions of antisemitism that reveal a strange and explosive interweaving with Zionism, or rather Israelism. Years of Israeli hasbara (or propaganda) and its elective affinities with the Christian Zionism that has permeated white American evangelicals brought us this moment of “love of Israel” that wants to kill Jews. The absurdities are in plain sight. This constitutes the tragic upshot of Israel’s weaponization of antisemitism to muzzle legitimate criticisms of its continuous occupation of Palestinians, now labeled “apartheid” by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights’ organization. On the global scene the Israeli efforts have been amplified by the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) which has gained traction globally as a mechanism designed to delegitimize criticism of Israeli policies, diminish the Palestinian struggle for dignity and human and political rights, and enhance militant ethnoreligious nationalism in Israel. Framing itself as an intergovernmental effort to combat antisemitism, the IHRA thus has consolidated a definition of antisemitism to better determine what it looks like in political and social life, with the intention to uproot and criminalize criticisms of Israeli policies. One of the IHRA’s list of examples of antisemitism includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” The ramifications of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism reverberate loudly. To begin with, in so far as the insurgency on Capitol Hill in January 2021 displayed its support of Zionism through use of the flag, this support is not inconsistent with the explicit antisemitism captured in the shirts and other neo-Nazi paraphernalia. White nationalists take from Euro-Zionism’s textbook aspirations for ethnoreligious supremacist political hegemony. There is no room for Jews in “White nationalism” as articulated by the likes of Richard Spencer who has expressed admiration of Zionism’s ethnocracy. The ramifications of the IHRA’s nationalist discourse also reverberate, for example, in the U.S. State Department’s labeling as “antisemitic” the long-established practice of nonviolent actions of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) campaigns. Antisemitism, like other forms of racism and bigotry, should be rejected by appeals to human rights and justice, not through the closure of critical thinking and blind acceptance of official Israeli state policies.
The IHRA’s promotion of its understanding of antisemitism is the latest attempt to instrumentalize antisemitism to control how people are allowed or not allowed to talk about Israel. This account of antisemitism, however, is only possible through the flawed equation of Israel with all Jewish people, forcing all Jews the world over to accept and endorse a military occupation and a country that is increasingly more aligned with the wave of neo-fascism sweeping the world than with international law, democratic values, human rights, pluralism, and racial justice. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be much more comfortable with the likes of Victor Orbán, whose consolidation of power has thrived on antisemitic tropes (along with homophobic, anti-LGBTQI, and anti-feminist rhetoric), than with the American Jews whose social justice activism I trace in my recent work and who channel Jewish values of solidarity with the marginalized and powerless “because Jews were slaves in Egypt.” For this reason, the Jewish people I engaged in my ethnographic work recite the lesson of the Passover story. For them, the lesson of the Holocaust ought not be the maintenance of an ethno-nationalist ghetto via a massive security and surveillance infrastructure. While the Israeli government renders such young Jewish activists pursuing anti-occupation outlook as a “threat”—as is evident in the elaborate surveillance of campus activism—the same government engaged in pomp and circumstance for antisemitic and Islamophobic white Christian evangelicals when they relocated the American embassy, which was formerly in Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem. This is an expression of the marriage of convenience between Christian Zionists, the U.S. Republican Party, and the right-wing Israeli agenda. This marriage is bad for the prospect of a just peace for Palestinians and Israelis, as well as for Jewish safety. The IHRA, the Israeli government, and its “friends” all tell Jews that they can only be safe as long as they are Zionists. President Trump chillingly told representatives of the American Jewish community on the occasion of Rosh Hashanna 2020, “we love your country,” suggesting they are notAmericans. Ironically, one of the IHRA’s examples of antisemitism also includes: “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”
Jews who resist their equation with the occupation assume as their mantra the ancient Rabbi Hillel’s three interrelated questions: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? For them the weaponization of the legacy of antisemitism and the memories of the Holocaust, which many of them carry within their own families, is threatening and wrong both because it manipulates such memories and because it makes them less safe in the face of real and accelerating antisemitism in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many young activists increasingly recognize that their safety depends on linking the fight against antisemitism to other social justice struggles. Many Israelis have taken to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s regime and many others such as B’Tselem for years have decried the weaponization of antisemitism. Their critical voices are silenced within the entrenched ideological regime that the IHRA represents as it coalesces with white nationalist and Christian Zionist antisemitism. Most importantly, this regime renders invisible and inaudible the Palestinian struggle for human rights and dignity that is pivotal for a real peace. A real peace is not the “peace” or normalization of Israel’s relations with Bahrain, the Emirates, Morocco, Sudan and other political entities that were in no direct war with Israel. This push for “normalization” (in the form of arm deals and economic incentives orchestrated by the U.S.) in conjunction with the chilling effect of IHRA on free speech is therefore bad for Jews, Israelis, and peace with justice.
Departure from Saint Louis for the Eighth Crusade. Illumination of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 14th century. Paris, BnF, Manuscripts department, French 2813, folio 298 verso. Čeština: Ludvík IX. Via Wikimedia Commons.
They’ve taken us prisoner,
they’ve locked us up:
me inside the walls
you outside
But that’s nothing.
The worst
is when people—knowingly or not—
carry prison inside themselves . . .
Most people have been forced to do this,
honest, hard-working, good people
who deserve to be loved much as I love you
–Excerpt from Nazim Hikmet, 9-10pm. Poems.[1]
In his signature analysis of European society, the late Tony Judt wrote about how the burden of history weighed heavily on the continent in the twenty-first century. Judt reflected on Europe’s self-image, memories, and culture at a time of great change. At this time, globalization was increasing the exchange of goods across a variety of cultural and political boundaries. As such the people exchanging these goods were also experiencing the world in new ways. Judt’s insight, in a nutshell, was that “the problem was not so much education . . . [but] the public uses to which the past was now put. . . . Governments no longer exercised a monopoly over knowledge and history could not be altered for political convenience” (768).
As a historian Judt was not wrong about Europe’s burden of history. But no one in Paris seems to have heard him when he said that the government cannot control knowledge and history. Currently, ultra-secular French politicians vainly insist on pursuing forms of secularism that do not resonate with all its citizens. Provocatively one might ask: Which history and knowledge of Europe are we talking about? Today’s Europeans also include Muslims and their experiences ought to be part of the moral and political conversation.
The public use of France’s history was most recently put on display in an episode that injured and wounded the sentiments of the country’s estimated 5 million Muslim citizens. How? Sadistically laser projected onto Paris’ government buildings were highly inflammatory and demeaning caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, a figure cherished by Muslims around the world. In doing so, a sector of the French public and its government took delight in abuse under the guise of the right to free speech, a cherished value with deep historical roots in French political society. This episode followed on the heels of a terrorist beheading of Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher who displayed satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in his classroom to cement the doctrine of free speech in his students.
Colluding in this outrage was president Emmanuel Macron, who, in an act of collective psychic punishment, abetted the public display of the caricatures. This collective punishment recalls colonial modes of governance which the French used with abandon in its North African and Sub-Saharan colonies (126–27). To Macron’s mind such retaliatory measures were a corrective to the conduct of the “barbarians” in the heart of the Republic, namely the Muslims, ironically described by Houria Bouteldja as the “wretched of the interior” (121).
Playing the role of secular theologian-at-large, but more accurately as a trainee exorcist, Macron deigned to teach French Muslims how to become assimilated French citizens. He repeatedly signaled his expertise to exorcise the supposedly non-French Islam out of the bodies of his Muslim wards. Actually, Macron was merely rephrasing the infamous words of the dreadful Belgian king Leopold, the founder of the International Congo Society, who on September 12, 1876 told the Geographical Society in Brussels how to civilize Africa: “Civilization opens up the only part of the globe it has not yet reached, piercing the darkness, enveloping the entire population. That is, I wager to say, a crusade worth of this century of progress” (216). The theater of Macron’s crusade is his own backyard, the banlieues—from where the uncivilized darkness will lift when floodlit by the vaunted French version of secularism, laïcité.
Judt’s 2005 sprawling Postwar ironically spoke of French anxieties of the loss of civilization and memory. France’s remedy was to construct the Muslim as the “other.” Two decades into the twenty-first century France finds itself in the midst of a crisis over knowledge and history. While the issue ought to be more complex given decades of immigration by the “unassimilable” Muslims and Arabs, the difference in perception between France’s Muslims and apologists for a xenophobic vision of France is stark. History and knowledge, namely the experiences of those inhabiting France’s economically deprived banlieues, stands in glaring contrast with the Republic’s account of knowledge and history, the latter of which is symbolized by the Arc de Triomphe at the western end of Paris’ Champs-Élysées.
The theater of Macron’s crusade is his own backyard, the banlieues—from where the uncivilized darkness will lift when floodlit by the vaunted French version of secularism, laïcité.
For decades citizens of Europe who are of non-European descent—or as one analyst put it, immigrants who are “extra-European”—were frustrated to the point of despair in their bid to ensure that the rules of governance also reflect their sensibilities (157). Anthropologist Talal Asad long ago noted how Europe’s new immigrants and citizens in the context of Britain were denied a say in “the construction of a domain within which legitimate politics can be practiced—a politics to defend, develop, modify, or redefine given traditions and identities” (305). The continuous formation of the European state ought to include the views, emotions, and feelings in laws, norms, and values of those who are excluded, albeit in constructive contestations, as Asad implies.
In ways not unlike resurgent white power in North America, the Germans, the British, the French, and other European nations have resorted to nostalgia to recover lost memories. The presence of persons of “extra-European” origins have displaced the memories of white Europeans. Now Europeans, and more so the French, feel they are not heirs to history but are cast as its orphans and victims. The creative re-imagining of the national past in France, wrote Judt, was of another order altogether, where history was now replaced by nostalgia (769).
Stripped of territory and resources by war and decolonization, France’s confidence and the security of its global empire were in the latter half of the twentieth century replaced by a search for the nation’s le patrimoine in initiatives led by Presidents Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac. They supported efforts to recover selected memorabilia of the French past. Overtaken by demographic transformation and the anxiety of loss, they inflated France’s cultural patrimony by physically enlarging heirlooms. During the Mitterand era this included enlarging the Port du Gard near Nîmes and Philip the Bold’s ramparts at Aigues-Mortes. During the same period, the prominent Parisian historian Pierre Nora was commissioned to edit a monumental three-part, seven volume, Les lieux de mémoire, translated as Realms of Memory. The French took care to preserve their historical, political, and cultural memories to the exclusion of the memories and symbols of its newer citizens, whose culture only deserved to be ignored.
French Jews were lucky: they received one entry in Realms of Memory. In a few paragraphs Claude Langlois wrote about Muslims and Arabs on the coattails of the following thought, namely, that between 1950 and 1970 some 250,000 to 300,000 Jews emigrated to France, many of whom were Sephardic Jews from North Africa whose ethnic presence went largely unnoticed. More worried was “a public much more keenly aware of the new presence of Islam on French soil” (115). Nothing captures the awareness of the presence and “problem” of Islam and Muslims better than the words of Archbishop, and later Cardinal Lustiger of Paris. Addressing a parent-teacher school event in 1982, he hailed Napoleon I’s recognition of Catholicism, the Protestant Church, and Judaism as a great milestone. “But what difficult problem we face now,” a traumatized Lustiger wondered, “with the unforeseen arrival of large numbers of French-speaking children of Islamic background!” (115).
The exclusion of Islam, France’s second largest religion, from the detailed analysis as an aspect of French culture “was not an oversight” but was deliberate, for there was “no assigned corner for Islam in the French memory palace,” observed Judt (774). On the face of it, this might appear to be an instance of mutual entrapment between the dominant French establishment and the Muslim subalterns in France. But on closer scrutiny, there is greater reluctance on the side of the establishment to provide Muslims any corner. France might profit from an exercise in remaking its national “knowledge economy” (121). Secularism as a modality of life has become, as social scientists would say, too “path dependent” to assume the exclusive right to the production of knowledge and is insufficient as a knowledge economy to deal with the range of experiences of people (238). In the words of Talal Asad, one will have to come to terms with the fact that for some Muslims being Muslim “is first and foremost a way of life and death oriented by a religious tradition in which moral freedom is not conceived of as the identity of the self with itself” (24). Collective flourishing and peace might only be possible when immigrant experiences are more fully integrated into the national life. This requires going beyond the integration of celebrity Franco-Arab football players and rap music artists, who are nonetheless pioneers in this new effort.
April 26, 2018 – President Emmanuel Macron at the OECD. The president attended the No Money for Terror global conference which was organized by the French Government. OECD, Paris, France. Photo Credit: OECD/Victor Tonelli.
Terrorist acts by Muslim actors who avenge their political outrage in the theological rhetoric of blasphemy of a bygone era and those secularists engaging in the collective punishment of Muslims both contribute to a setback in human relations on the global stage. Human solidarity and global interdependence are indispensable for our collective survival as the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change dramatically make plain.
If France and Europe value their symbols then they will have to learn to respect the symbols of multiple cultures and civilizations. Deliberately mocking the sensibilities and religious symbols of religious minorities amount to psychic pain, as Elaine Scarry points out in the Body in Pain. Similar to sensory pain experienced by the body is the pain experienced in the working of the imagination. Why? “While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects,” writes Scarry, “the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects” (162). Imaginary pain, Scarry suggests, is more immediate, causing deeper and more lasting pain. As architectural historian Samir Younés writes, “Intellectual meanness procures satisfaction to the minds of those who enjoy inflicting emotional pain with the intention of causing feelings of inadequacy in a victim.” This amounts to the artistic elimination of the “other” (101). Commodifying Muslim religious symbols and turning these into weapons of torture, bullying, and offense are deplorable acts of violence clothed as free speech, especially when other acts of free speech such as Holocaust-denial and the denigration of people based on their race and/or gender are rightly deemed as hate speech and crimes.
Denigrating and dehumanizing Muslim subjects by turning their religious symbols into weapons of psychic torture allies the Western secular with revanchist Christian culture in a bid to redraw crusader-like boundaries of civilization once more. Muslims inside the West are the unthinkable “difficult problem,” in Cardinal Lustiger’s words. Actually, Macron and his allies at Charlie Hebdo and at Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten are icons of a new secular crusade masquerading as free speech.
Talal Asad described Britain in the 1980s in haunting commentary equally applicable to France today. Asad observed, in remarks soaked in satire, that European states are suffering a post-imperial identity crisis “as an unhappy instance of some immigrants with difficulties in adjusting to a new and more civilized world” (241). Proponents of the European Enlightenment once lectured the rest of the world about the need to embrace complexity. But many Europeans continue to think in straight lines, binaries, and reductionist models. Therefore, Asad’s analysis deserves repetition: “If Europe cannot be articulated in terms of complex space and time, which allow for multiple ways of life and not merely multiple identities to flourish, it may be fated to be no more than the common market of an imperial civilization, always anxious about (Muslim) exiles within its gates and (Muslim) barbarians beyond.” His question was: “In such an embattled modern space—a space of abundant consumer choices and optional lifestyles—is it possible for Muslims to be represented as Muslims?” (24–25). Things have since worsened. French police continue to round up scores of 10 year-old Muslim kids at dozens of schools and terrorize them for hours at police stations for allegedly supporting terrorism. In this case secularism, like terrorism, makes “people carry prison inside themselves” in the poet Nazim Hikmet’s compelling words.
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
Grid formed by criss-crossing suspender cables on a bridge. Photo Credit: Flickr User Dennis Church.
Diaspora is distance plus practice, entangled in mediated scenes, messy, lived.
* * * *
We’re on the far side of Yom Kippur. My mother sends me and my brother a photo of the Zoom service hosted by her synagogue up in Portland. The image is a bit blurred, a bit pixelated. The rabbi, speaker-view large, appears in mid-strum on his guitar, with a 1×6 column of participants stretching mid-song on the right-hand side of the screen. The sonic resonance can’t quite break through the photo, but it’s the noise in the signal that brings me closer to her and this fleeting moment, its low-fi intimacy, its traces of an imperfect digital translation like the smudge of ink on a handwritten letter.
Later, on our weekly family call—a standing date which began about a year ago and has only become more regularized during the pandemic—she tells me about the song. It’s an updated version of the liturgical poem Unetaneh Tokef, which was allegedly composed during the Byzantine period. The original poem is a litany for judgment. Stark poles define the parameters for the futures of the living, including “who shall have rest and who shall wander, who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued . . . who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low.” For those who perish prematurely, Unetaneh Tokef shows death coming in many dramatic forms: swords and beasts, famines and earthquakes, strangulations and stonings. I remember being chilled as a child by its square-eyed view on mortality, the coarse language of spectacular forms of premature death stripped bare of metaphor.
The update to the poem, caught in that visual, sonic, digital blur, is everything. Fire. Searing. Written by the Black Jewish educator and organizer Imani Romney-Rosa Chapman, Unetaneh Tokef for Black Lives was posted to the Lilith Blog in June 2020. Also stripped of metaphor, this update cuts into the starkly mundane ways in which Black people have been killed in recent years. It is a haunting autopsy of four centuries of white supremacy. The mournful repetition, “who shall die while,” addresses a litany of present participles—“jogging, relaxing, holding, decorating, enjoying, sleeping, playing, shopping, reading, running.” The continuous present, fatally interrupted. Chapman’s song includes thirty names, personalizing premature death through the proper nouns of their being and their loss. Names are prefaced with hashtags. In doing so, they become inscribed not only as the traces of individuals to be contained within white supremacy’s Book of Judgement, but also as indexes for a network—an expansive and expanding set of material traces that cuts across time, space, and medium—that reaches out to connect, and in those desires for connection, signals communities composed of mournful and righteous rage. Distance plus practice.
The song is sung in the first-person plural. Black lives are a clarion “we” that unifies a people across more than four centuries, now numbering, as the song tells us, 47.8 million—an approximation of those who identify as Black in the United States, and in an uncanny coincidence, the number of times #BlackLivesMatter appeared on Twitter in the two weeks following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Unetaneh Tokef for Black Lives closes by addressing a “you,” the “white world” named in the song’s opening lines. You are both something far less precise, and far more challenging. The song figures Yom Kippur as a crucial moment not only for personal reflection on, but for collective reckoning with, the fatal consequences of white supremacy. Quoting from Mishnah Yomah, the song nears its close:
The Day of Atonement brings no forgiveness
Till he has become reconciled with the fellowman he wronged.
From the distance of scripture’s third-person singular, Chapman moves immediately to address directly a second-person plural, which is also the intimacy of a second person singular:
When will you atone? How will you atone?
For you, like us, will be judged.
You, like us, will return to dust.
The “white world” was made through conquest and slavery, a worldmaking that created whiteness as a self-authorizing and auto-legitimating regime. Reckoning with that world, the changeful complexity of what it has wrought, along with the worlds that live alongside, beneath, and beyond its ken, strikes me as part of what Unetaneh Tokef for Black Lives calls on us to consider.
* * *
What, then, are the tensions between the you that is plural—a world composed in the calculus of white supremacy—and a you that is singular—an individual and the identity possessed therein?
Part of those tensions, it seems to me, can be grasped through a critical reckoning with the nation-state as such, a political structure that is only naturalized as the commonsensical way to organize political communities in the twentieth-century refashioning of a white world emergent from the ashes of European empires. Is the nation-state, that pharmakon of political modernity, the only means by which to advance a project of minoritarian self-determination? Does it allow us the necessary space to script the value of difference otherwise? Those noisy diasporic traditions of study—Jewish, Black, and Palestinian alike—suggest caution in a hastily affirmative response. As critical race scholars have long argued, whiteness is, among other things, a legal and political construction. It is mutable and shifting, and is materialized through a relation to property and profit, freedom and mobility. It is lived in the affective and somatic tenor of national belonging. Whiteness is a signifier of freedom and territorial acquisition for a national project whose historical predicates were the theft of land and labor rationalized and legitimated through the heuristics of race. Responses to the post-World War II interruption of white supremacy have sought to incorporate into the body politic non-white difference—both legally and culturally—through institutionalized practices of recognition and representation. The frictions of multicultural difference and recognition, slipping into and out of national belonging, and rubbing against the coarse violence of lives hierarchically valued, continues to generate much of the heat in our racial politics.
Is the nation-state, that pharmakon of political modernity, the only means by which to advance a project of minoritarian self-determination? Does it allow us the necessary space to script the value of difference otherwise? Those noisy diasporic traditions of study—Jewish, Black, and Palestinian alike—suggest caution in a hastily affirmative response.
In the churn of our pandemic times, identity keeps calling. Identity’s promise of a “good night’s rest,” in Stuart Hall’s pithy phrase, provides reassurance when living through what Gramsci once termed “morbid symptoms” that arise between the no longer and the not yet (43). And yet, might holding fast to identity, defensively, reactively, also be a morbid symptom in its own right? Whether and how one’s own identity might animate solidarity has likewise resurfaced as a question in recent months. What these questions remind us of is that solidarity is no synonym for identity, equivalence, or similitude. Solidarity is a practice, an action, whose condition of possibility is the messy materiality of social difference, not its flattening. The vitality of solidarity is that it presumes difference. It requires difference, it is vitalized by difference. To predicate solidarity either on embracing identity or rejecting it is to foreshorten the capacity to think across difference. We refuse such resources for thought, which are, indeed, the conditions of possibility for thought, at our peril.
Entangled filaments of Mycelium. Photo Credit: Flickr User Kirill Ignatyev.
How, then, to enable difference to surface in our language and our ways of being?
Analogy continually proves to be one entry point. Analogy mediates. Analogy emphasizes resonance and similitude, without collapsing into identity. It provides a figure in the traditional rhetorical sense, to make sense differently. But the grammar of analogy is a rhetorically thin structure for meaning-making. To arrive at a moment analytically when one can compellingly state a social phenomenon is like another often requires holding at bay the confounding variables—the noise in the signal—of lives lived deeply and in relation to their own histories. Analogy is no more than an analytical tool with which to think. But it is also no less than that, for figures are powerful, and heuristics have truth effects.
For me, several questions arise when faced with the grammar of analogy: What are the historical conditions that have given rise to these particular ways of seeing relationally? How did they come to be infused with meaning? What do they make legible, visible, sensible? And then, what are the constellation of truth effects, the ripples across common sense, that such formulations incite? Questions like these are meant to contextualize analogy’s rhetorical force, even as they pry open space for critique.
Solidarity is a practice, an action, whose condition of possibility is the messy materiality of social difference, not its flattening. The vitality of solidarity is that it presumes difference. It requires difference, it is vitalized by difference.
As I have argued elsewhere, one ought to cast a critical lens on the romance/tragedy narrative of the Black-Jewish civil rights coalition. This coalition wielded analogies as part of its rhetorical arsenal. All too often those who employ this narrative retrospectively impose pat liberal nationalist frames onto a complex history that is wrought with contradictions and critical commitments that exceed this narrative’s terms of reference. Visions of national inclusion, monumental public action, and charismatic leadership are easy highlights in this tale, which are thought by some to then become quickly degraded by Black internationalist solidarity politics, robust critiques of capitalism and imperialism, and the question of Palestine. At the same time, one must consider carefully how Black-Palestinian solidarities have been forged and practiced, how they’ve been suffused with content that has changed over time, that likewise draw on analogical grammars that belie the noise of lives lived across difference.
Beyond analogy lies entanglement. Returning to the reckoning that Unetaneh Tokef for Black Lives prompts, nation-state sovereignty’s plural you reflects the racializing systems of value that give it meaning, and, crucially the entangled forms of sociality that trouble their terms of reference. Certainly solidarity as a practice of relation across difference is one such form. So too are more mundane entanglements. Jewish and Black are hardly mutually exclusive categories, in the United States or anywhere else. Debates persist about racial classification on the U.S. census among Arab, Iranian, and North African American communities who are counted as white. And the historical entanglement of Black and Palestinian freedom struggles, and Jewish involvement in these struggles, have offered political imaginaries beyond the exclusionary visions of Zionism and the cruel calculus of white supremacy. To flatten these histories into particular identitarian narratives unfolding in parallel cannot but seek to regulate who belongs where, forgetting again the noisy insights of our diasporic traditions. These entanglements have resonances, translations and touchpoints, iconographies and ideologies, that have brought these streams of thought and practice into a lived relation, reminding us that distinct communities with differentiated histories draw inspiration from one another, breathing together, apart, in relation across difference.
Keith P. Feldman is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Center for Middle East Studies. An interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar, Feldman’s work examines the interface between race, knowledge, and imperial cultures, with a focus on the U.S., the so-called “Middle East,” and North Africa. Feldman is the author of A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America(2015). He is also the co-editor of #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (2019); co-editor of a special issue of Social Text on “Race/Religion/War;” and the editor of a forum for Comparative Literature on “Blackness and Relationality.”
Osman Hamdi Bey, “Girl Citing Qur’an” (1880). Via Wikimedia Commons.
I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Kecia Ali, Kathryn Kueny, Bob Tappan, Saadia Yacoob, and Travis Zadeh for engaging so deeply with the arguments I make in Gendered Morality and offering their reflections in this forum.
When I was writing Gendered Morality, I was very tempted to say in the conclusion that it is impossible to redeem an ethical system which necessitates the exploitation of women and non-elites and in which the good life is only available to elite men. Such a system should be thrown out completely. Then I remembered how and why these texts have endured. It is not simply because they are classical texts of Islam, written by venerated scholars; it is also because their contents—their insights and advice—have continued to resonate and hold truth for new readers, especially in their observations of a society that was shaped by the ideas in the texts themselves. People want to be cosmically connected; they want to know what part they can play in creating an ethically ordered world; they want to know how to behave in order to live their best lives. Many people believe that the world is, or ought to be, structured hierarchically, the way that these texts say it is. Unfortunately, what these texts offer up is hierarchy and an ethical path that is available only to elite men, or at its widest scope, to those with the privilege to utilize others. Also, quite separately, I do not want to throw out the akhlaq texts because I think they do help us think about what it means to live a good life. I just think that we may be better off taking their questions as important ones to be answered, without adopting their answers.
We might, then, start with the crucial question of how to read ethics of the past in the present. Travis Zadeh reminds us that today’s ubiquitous concept of liberty (thanks to imperialism and colonialism) makes it hard for us to understand the past—how power worked, how society was ordered—and that concepts of hierarchy, while troubling to our present sensibilities, make it easier to understand the ethical order of past societies. I agree about the presentism that makes historical akhlaq texts unsettling, but I would add that not all contemporary sensibilities are repulsed by hierarchies in the texts. Many people on individual and institutional levels continue to believe that exploitative social hierarchy is natural law, or God’s law.
I do believe, as Kecia Ali states, that democratization of ethics is possible, and that self-cultivation remains necessary for broad social justice. Because as Saadia Yacoob points out, self-cultivation is reliant upon social relations, the question that Kathryn Kueny raises is crucial—whether ethical systems based on hierarchy can ever be fully replaced. However, I do think that regardless of their historical significance, asking whether the recovery of pre-modern akhlaq texts is possible—and how such recovery should be attempted—is not where we should focus our energies. Rather, I think that identifying the problematics that critical feminist analyses of them brings up can help to create a more inclusive and just ethics. As my interlocutors in this forum have identified, the major problem is how to think about interdependence in ethics without the exploitative aspects of hierarchy. I think it is possible to address (but not solve!) this problem by breaking it down further into specific issues that the akhlaq texts raise.
Problems I have articulated are: (1) reliance on rationality and its possession in defining the human being, thus excluding women and non-elites because of their lack of access to higher learning; (2) defining moral responsibility using patriarchal concepts of khilafa; (3) expanding access to the moral enterprise has often led to piecemeal inclusion because our paradigms of inclusivity still rely on the exploitation of those not included; (4) the goals of akhlaq, or ethics, necessitate exploitation because of the interconnectedness of human relations that are folded into discipline and practice of akhlaq and how refinement is achieved. I discuss these interrelated topics, sometimes using different language, in the conclusion of Gendered Morality, but here I am going to add a little more texture to that discussion, specifically in response to the generous participation of my colleagues in this forum.
How can we create an ethics which is not incremental or piecemeal in opening the circle of inclusion? As Ali alluded to, one example of this is the case for the United States Constitution. In some accounts, it reflects incremental inclusion; it first granted emancipation to the enslaved, then granted full citizenship to women, then outlawed discrimination against Black people, and later was interpreted to protect other minorities and LGBTQ folks from discrimination. This kind of incremental inclusion into planes of rationality, equality, and justice, as Kueny points out (echoing Audre Lorde and Helen Longino), “only promotes competition among the marginalized for what bits and scraps of the good life or happiness might be cast aside by those with all the power.” Just because the circle of inclusion may be bigger, it is not less exclusionary, and maintains oppressive hierarchies. Bob Tappan’s remarks on redeeming women though the marginalization of animals, similarly, but more broadly, eschews the incremental approach because it is an extension of patriarchy that elevates one kind of subjectivity over and against others.
Historically, the gendered criteria for inclusion has been rationality. Even though the ethicists argued that higher cognitive function is the hallmark of humanity, they didn’t believe all humans possessed it. And even if we walk away from rationality as a criterion for defining the human being, doing so requires some care and philosophical reflection on humans’ relationship to non-human animals since rationality is classically thought to mark the difference between human and non-human animals.
Relatedly, the concept of khilafa in ethics discourses requires several layers of analysis in order to break down its paternalism. On the first layer, khilafa is historically understood as the male mantle of leadership that feigns care for all—paternalism at its finest. On the positive side, built into this definition is the concept of care, which for many is a call to human beings to enact Divine law and justice. As Kueny mentions, khilafa as care has tremendous potential to transform paternalism into empathetic responsibility. But I would caution, as Marcia Homiak reminds us, that care ethics, with its focus on empathy and feeling, is often set up dichotomously against rationality—care defines feminine ethics and rationality while virtue remains within the realm of masculine ethics. Such a construction concedes that women are unable to participate in the taming of the rational faculty that is the hallmark of nafs training in the Ibn Sinan tradition of akhlaq—as if women are irrational empaths. As it stands in that tradition, khilafa is a false care that is bound up with male authority, one that is justified through male rationality and male perfection, and excludes others. Ironically, khilafa requires the care of the elite men who are playing khilifa, which, as Yacoob points out, is dependent upon women’s labor that is done to nurture and sustain the family—including the men—to the detriment of their own refinement.
Patriarchy is an environmentally destructive enterprise just as it is exploitative of non-elite human beings.
Tappan brings up the question of reading khilafa as understood in the akhlaq world and contemporary exegesis alongside Sarra Tlili’s argument that early Qur’anic exegetes did not view khilafa in the same paternalistic light that later scholars did. In this way Tlili recovers khilafa by predating definitions of the term to a time before it came to mean that certain men know best. Tappan questions what happens to the edifice of akhlaq then? Akhlaq certainly comes crashing down because the genre assumes khilafa is a feature of male existential concern (universalized and normalized as human concern). Women and non-human animals serve the same purpose for elite men in that they both act as rational foils and as moral instruments that men utilize. Both are described as less capable and born at a lower station in life (despite descriptions of equality of God’s atoms and matter).
Because religious and philosophical justifications (paternalistic khilafa and male rationality) have been used in a similar way to subdue women as well as non-human animals, and indeed the entire natural environment, for elite men’s purposes, we can see —echoing Carol Adams’s arguments in Sexual Politics of Meat and that of eco-feminism in general—that patriarchy is an environmentally destructive enterprise just as it is exploitative of non-elite human beings.
Perhaps the goal should not be to elevate animals to the level of human beings as much as possible, but to demote human beings to the level of animals.
However, I worry about the emphasis placed on animals’ cognitive abilities and on recognizing religion in animals—as much as that data is incredible—to serve as evidence that human beings need to be kinder to them (we should, anyway). Indeed, non-human animal rationality and religiosity are important to study so that we can flesh out our relationship to them in the cosmic scheme. But as we have learned from disability studies, the mere presence of rationality is not specifically what defines humanity or affords someone ethical deserts or dignity. Disabled human beings who may possess lower cognitive capacity are still considered human. Non-human animals, regardless of their place in the hierarchy of cognitive ability or religiosity, still deserve not to be abused, mistreated, or exploited. Perhaps the goal should not be to elevate animals to the level of human beings as much as possible, but to demote human beings to the level of animals. I read Sarra Tlili’s work as evidence that in the Qur’anic tradition, humans are not so special in the scheme of following God’s natural law because non-human animals also obey God’s commands; thus, the very basis of khilafa in the tradition—that as the best of creation, humans have the responsibility to discipline or order the world—is moot even if it is a post-Qur’anic understanding of khilafa.
However, to “demote” humans is a difficult proposition in light of the great emphasis placed on rationality as the defining feature of human beings in Islamic philosophical and ethical discourse. The tradition is self-congratulatory, naming humans as al ashraf al makhluqat (the noblest of creation) because of their ability to reason. The superlative construction of the term, ashraf (noblest), as opposed to sharif (noble) implies a hierarchy of nobility and a hierarchy of reason. As I argued in Gendered Morality, far from thinking of it as a universal (if an able-bodied) feature of humanity, rationality is used to describe only elite men and dehumanize all others. This leads me to ask how we can dismantle rationality, because of its exclusivist application, as the standard that makes someone sharif (noble).
We need new practices for reading these texts—to ask the questions they ask, but to critique the ways they go about answering them in order to arrive at our own answers. As Zadeh puts it, in the akhlaq tradition, the goal is to tame the body and social relations to serve “the cosmic force of the divine soul as it emanates throughout all existence.” The usefulness of akhlaq’s epistemology for building an inclusive ethics, however, lies in the details. These include: challenging the various criteria used for exclusion in akhlaq such as rationality, understanding interconnectedness outside of exploitative care and paternalistic khilafa, and breaking up incremental approaches to justice and inclusion. In addition to serving as major contributions of Islamic ethics to moral discourses, these concerns are at once practical and philosophical and they require critical feminist reflection.
Zahra Ayubi is a scholar of women and gender in premodern and modern Islamic ethics. She specializes in feminist philosophy of Islam and has published on gendered concepts of ethics, justice, and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women’s experiences. Her first book, Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia, 2019) rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani. She interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition.
Her next book project, Women as Humans: Authority and Gendered Ontology in Islamic Medical Ethics, is being supported by a three-year grant from the Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholars Program. The project is a textual and ethnographic study of gender and gendered experiences in Muslim biomedical ethics. In addition to a focus on practical ethics, in this project she examines what are Muslim ontological, metaphysical, and existential conceptions of women.
Monument to 1795 Slave Revolt, Landhuis Kenepa, Curaçao. Photo Credit: Flickr User CP Hoffman.
The Limits of Black Theology
Black theology has often been made equivalent to black liberation theology. It is perhaps this overdetermination by a sense of liberation that is characterized by a Christian redemptionist account of freedom that can create both a sense of disjointedness between black theology and black studies, and a critical point of engagement. In a recent essay, I noted how Cedric Robinson identifies a homology between a Christian redemptionist paradigm and the political paradigm of the West. While the modern political order aims to repress its mythical foundations, equating the mythic with the primitive as a way of obfuscating its origins, Robinson shows how the combination of the mythic and the scientific provides the foundation for Western assumptions of order. What is so crucial about Robinson’s recognition for developing a decolonial account of black liberation theology is that it makes explicit how the theological paradigm of redemption coincides with the political illegitimacy of black people in the West.
It is an open question as to what can be done with black liberation theology, but taking Robinson’s work seriously requires a close engagement with the question of redemption in black theology. While black liberation theology maintains a steady influence, particularly in providing a critical announcement of God’s siding with black people against white oppression, it also remains the site of critique for its masculinism, its overdetermination by Christianity, and its seeming support of redemptive suffering. Developing theological approaches in conversation with black studies requires a refusal of orthodox Christian theological assumptions of confession at the outset, which, too often, can impose a narrative order on an existential and epistemological situation that is precisely a rupture within Christian order. At the same time, such inquiry must also demand a refusal of secularism’s orthodoxies and the cordoning of the theological to the private sphere. What I consider here are the possibilities of understanding black theology in terms of a black tradition of historical materialism set out by scholars like Cedric Robinson and Sylvia Wynter. Such an approach requires an embrace of the heretical and the heterodox as a means of liberating the black theological imagination from Christian order.
Historical Materialism and the Black Radical Tradition
A recent essay by Matthew Harris and Tyler Davis on James Cone and the Third World is a helpful example of the usefulness of a historical materialist framework for an engagement with black theology. Refusing to cast James Cone in terms that cohere with Christian orthodoxy or subject him to a pragmatic critique of black nationalism which is beholden to the American democratic project, the two provide a view of Cone’s relationship to Third World theologians and critiques that enable a resituation of his work. Here, coming to terms with the limits of black liberation theology doesn’t require it’s supersession so much as its rereading in otherwise terms. It also encourages dehiscence–the immanent splitting or rupturing of its thought and spreading of contents in unforeseen and disordered ways.
Similarly, refusing to excise the theological from black radical thought would go a long way toward resolving the anxiety around religion, spirituality, and the mythic in historical materialist circles. For instance, there is sometimes a Marxist-Leninist critique of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism that posits a “cultural-metaphysical Black Radical tradition” as inadequate to contending with racial capitalism as opposed to “antiracist socialism.” Because Robinson never shies away from mystical elements of the black radical tradition, critiques of him sometimes rest on the desire to expel these elements from his analysis. But it is precisely his understanding of these mystical and mythic elements of the tradition, not as signs of a primitivism, but as key elements of the historical material mode of refusal and resistance to racial capitalism that makes it so insightful. Rather than seeing black religiosity and black theological production as at odds with historical materialism, we, following Robinson, might see them as ways into the historical struggle over the matters of authority and order. As Avery Gordon’s preface to Robinson’s Anthropology of Marxism notes:
The socialist tradition that Robinson uncovers and which finds its exemplar in medieval heretical radicalism was indeed more than an opposition to capitalist exploitation. It issued a morally authoritative analysis of the corrosive abuse of power, the indignities of unrelieved poverty, and the sacrificial value of private property ownership. It had a ‘consciousness of female liberation,’ of popular democracy, and of the inhumanity of slavery and ‘imperialist excess.’ (xxii-xxiii)
Here, Robinson’s historical materialism leads him to the heretical histories that are repressed in the Christian and secular production of knowledge and governance. Taking seriously the material of these histories, a key element of Robinson’s analysis is grounded on the heretical political theological material that provides the foundations for socialist struggle. Thus, Robinson’s attention to this material provides both a recognition of the mixed paradigm of the mythic and the scientific that undergirds Western claims of order, while it also sheds light on the theological as part of the historical material of heretical resistance to hierarchical and racializing authority. For instance, he notes “the religious or pious women” who lived “on the margins between dualistic heresies and the mendicant orders.” “Sometimes as nuns . . . , sometimes as lay mystics . . . , and sometimes as heretics . . . , they appropriated the vita apostolica with a vengeance: experiencing and declaring a special relationship with Christ through Eucharist-inspired visions; preaching the gospel; living lives of poverty; and organizing communes” (47). As Gordon notes, Robinson’s attention to these heretical claims illuminates how social and historical claims regarding divinity and authority make the matter of revelation central to socialist traditions.
Refusing to excise the theological from black radical thought would go a long way toward resolving the anxiety around religion, spirituality, and the mythic in historical materialist circles.
At the same time, refusing orthodoxies requires taking seriously heretical approaches to reading Cone and Robinson. What would it mean to take seriously those readings of Robinson and Cone that do not simply bolster a claim to the black radical tradition as already worked out in advance? Such readings can undercut the making of the black radical tradition, positioning it as supernaturally always already the fulfillment of a promise rather than the work of the people. In some sense, resisting such comforting readings would embrace the demand of these authors to be attentive to the immanent irruptions that produce heretical knowledge and challenge the sedimentation of authority. Reading Robinson and Cone as writing against a white Western imposition of order, then, is important for how one displaces the prioritization of claims of origins or legitimation through a Christian model of redemption, which can naturalize a divine’s sanction of the oppressed. But such a view makes it appear as though God has always sided with the oppressed in history or makes the black radical tradition an ontological totality whose preservation requires a pure reproduction of itself. Such assumptions are inadequate to the reality of black existence and epistemology.
The Historical Material of Black Liberation Theology
While there are limits to the Christian model of redemption that provides the model for Cone’s work, to simply reduce his theology to an anti-black production of Christian order is to miss the extent to which he models black knowledge production, regardless of the field one is in. We are able to read Cone both in terms that take seriously his theology and his critique of redemption history as the production of an anti-black salvation history. If all Western fields of knowledge have served to constitute an antiblack world, there is no other site from which to produce a counter-insurgent form of knowledge. Instead, the heretical appropriation of materials is necessary.
Pier Francesco Mola, The Angel Appearing to Hagar in the Desert (recto). Wikimedia Commons.
But this heretical appropriation is not solely a matter of making claims, but a matter of employing a method and procedure by which existence and knowledge are produced and reproduced. We can turn to writers like Delores Williams and William R. Jones as those who work immanently within the black theological tradition to provide readings of the Christian theological tradition that refuse the assumption of God’s goodness or the preferential option for the poor and the oppressed. Obviously, this claim has been taken as fundamental to the announcement of liberation and to question it is sometimes seen as heretical to black liberation theology. But perhaps we can understand the announcement of liberation as an announcement of the freedom to suspend those assumptions of divine order and to understand divinity in terms that are more adequate to the diversity of black religious experience. Indeed, both Jones and Williams have such staying critiques precisely because they subject black liberation to the demand of the historical material of black existence, epistemology, and culture without seeing this demand as extrinsic to the production of theological terms. That is, they take seriously the theological production of knowledge as structured by this historical material, even as their creative and heretical appropriations of black knowledge production go forth as a theological act against the order of the anti-black world.
If all Western fields of knowledge have served to constitute an antiblack world, there is no other site from which to produce a counter-insurgent form of knowledge. Instead, the heretical appropriation of materials is necessary.
Williams, for instance recovers a Hagaritic tradition as one that has been evaded because of the dominance of the liberationist tradition of reading. This critique requires a displacement of a Christian model of redemption as the terms of liberation because of its inadequacy for attending to black suffering. While Jones turns to a black humanism and Williams posits a womanist revision of redemption in light of Jesus’s life and ministry rather than the cross, both provide ways of thinking with Cone in terms that take the historical material of blackness and theology as demanding a displacement of Christian order. Embracing the heretical proclamation of black liberation from Christian order even as it takes up Christian theological materials might draw attention to the creative re-imagination and re-use of the theological in black culture as critical, existential, and materialist practices of transformation throughout black history.
Amaryah Shaye Armstrong is an Assistant Professor of Race in American Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. Her research takes up black studies, social and cultural theory, and political theology to examine issues of black reproduction. She is also a co-host of Assembly, a podcast on the political theology network.
An Indigenous sovereignty protest in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2017. Photo Credit: Flickr user Mobilus In Mobili.
As religious studies scholars, it is critical for us to explore the racialized perceptions of non-western religious traditions and peoples as well as to trace how these peoples continue to be structurally dispossessed as a result of those perceptions. Decolonizing religious studies means making the hierarchies that exist materially among peoples and their knowledge systems legible. It also means reclaiming and re-centering Indigenous epistemologies, given their historically violent subjugation. While the field has acknowledged its complicity with primitivist and Orientalist discourses, it continues to ignore how structural racism may be operating within it, namely by dismissing the use of decolonial and Indigenous methodologies.
Native American and Indigenous religious traditions were, until fairly recently, perceived by anthropologists and scholars of religion as failed epistemologies, the “primitive” knowledge systems of less complex societies. Categorized as “animism,” their views were framed as childish, superstitious, and cited as clear evidence that they lacked the rationality to govern themselves or lay legitimate claims to their own lands. Indigenous peoples in the Americas were understood to be not only without reason, but also without true religion, making their full humanity suspect. Settler colonial projects relied upon these ideologies to justify Indigenous enslavement, genocide, and dispossession. These ideologies produced legal structures like the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls that declared lands not inhabited by Christians open to seizure by right of “discovery” (theft), becoming one of the most enduring tools of Indigenous dispossession. Indigenous peoples in the Americas continue to live with both the material and ontological legacies of this dispossession. The two are intimately tethered. Scholars of religion must take seriously the real material effects of their contributing to constructions of Indigenous peoples as anything less than fully cogent, agentive, and as having rights to their lands.
While liberation operates as a critical theme in religious studies, the field does not necessarily center projects of liberation—whether from social, spiritual, or even existential constraints. I entered the field of religious studies to research the links between social and religious/spiritual liberation among Native American and Tibetan peoples, given the violent inequities created by settler colonialism. Discourses of liberation in theory and praxis are often left to philosophy of religion or theology. Religious studies sought to differentiate itself from theology by taking historical, sociological, and even anthropological approaches to the study of religion. Liberation theologians recognized material inequities and sought to ameliorate them through a preferential treatment of the poor as an expression of faith. Liberation theology as a praxis is directed at both religious and material liberation and has since been taken up by Black, Indigenous, and other theologians of color to explore the roles of race, gender, and sexuality to these ends, for instance through the exploration of Black, Womanist, and Queer theology. Although resonant with these approaches, a decolonial framework articulates clear critiques of colonial power at the level of epistemology, visibilizing the need for Indigenous knowledge reclamations. As a Chicana scholar of Apache descent, a decolonial approach was ultimately more resonant with the aims of my project in general and Indigenous sovereignty in particular.
While decolonial discourses have been present in activist circles since the nationalist movements of the middle 20th century, they have begun to enter mainstream academia in the last few years. Decolonial thought in the U.S. has overlapping but distinct genealogies. One, referred to as decolonial theory, is situated among Latin American theorists, represented in the work of Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, and is in conversation with post-colonial, critical, and anti-colonial theorists like Frantz Fanon. The other, focused on decolonial praxis, emerged from the work of U.S.-based women of color feminists, such as Emma Perez and Chela Sandoval, in conversation with postmodern and post-colonial thinkers like Homi Bhaba.
Like settler colonial theory, decolonial theory makes the superstructures of colonial inequities in places like Latin America and the Caribbean visible. Decolonial theorists argue that western imperialism operates at the level of epistemology and that modernity could be better understood as coloniality, since modern social structures were determined and continue to operate through colonial projects and their mechanisms, such as racialization. Decolonial theory challenges coloniality’s hierarchies of power/knowledge by denaturalizing the white western world’s monopoly on legitimate knowledge production, who is considered an authoritative voice, and importantly for the field, the ways religious and racial discourses operated together to redefine personhood in the new world.
The latter work on decolonial praxis emerged from the intersectional discourses of women of color working in feminist and ethnic studies activist/scholar spaces. Like liberation theology, ethnic studies is an insurgent body of scholarship forged in the late 1960s that aimed to achieve philosophical and material liberation by enacting a “radical agency against empire, conquest, criminalization, and enslavement” (2) that operates on the global stage. Ethnic studies became the academic space where African-American, Asian-American, Pacific, Latinx, and Native American epistemologies and histories were researched, reclaimed, and re-centered. More recently critical ethnic studies has articulated overlapping links among the multiple intellectual traditions represented in ethnic studies to colonial logics such as heteronormativity, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. The aim of making such links is to distinguish itself from the domesticating discourse of liberal multiculturalism within academia. Like decolonial theory, critical ethnic studies discourses visiblize the structural legacies of colonialism but in settler colonial contexts. Settler colonial theory is mostly applied in white settler contexts, such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia; however, its application in other regions of the worlds, such as Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean is now being explored.
Native American studies co-emerged with ethnic studies and eventually joined with Indigenous studies in order to mobilize towards philosophical and material liberation, which meant explicitly advocating for Native American and Indigenous sovereignty. Here, decolonization is explored as both an end goal in the form of “land back”—the reallocation of Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples—and the radical praxis that supports this end. Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) challenged the colonial legacy of knowledge production on Indigenous peoples by developing Indigenous methodologies, which take an endogenous approach to Indigenous life, essentially deferring to Native peoples as the foremost experts of their own experience and knowledge systems. As a result, new ethical protocols for research have been articulated, given the ways Indigenous peoples and their epistemologies have been delegitimized, misappropriated, and pathologized in the service of white supremacy/racial capitalism. Critical Indigenous studies takes an internationalist approaches to Indigeneity as a global discipline that includes, for example, both Native and Māori studies. In addition, this critical intervention can be understood as an intersectional approach that privileges gender, sexuality, and feminist studies perspectives in its emancipatory project of Indigenous sovereignty, since gender and sexuality are “core constitutive elements of imperialist-colonialist state formations” (6). Theories of decolonial praxis rooted in Indigenous and critical Indigenous studies frameworks help us understand how we, Indigenous peoples and those of Indigenous descent, get free from coloniality—how we break the ontological spells we have internalized and become liberated, how we assert and step into our full humanity.
I take a critical ethnic/Indigenous studies approach to understanding Indigenous religious life by using critical readings from Native scholars or those that center the voices and views of Indigenous peoples. In essence, I center Indigenous epistemologies and assert them as epistemologies in their own right, as opposed to theologies. This not only challenges the assumption that theology is a universal category but also that Indigenous religious worlds are just “beliefs,” subservient to western knowledges. I do this to think beyond the normative assumptions embedded in religious studies, such as history of religion approaches, that may seek to universalize or reimagine these complex worlds through wholly western categories.The work of Charles Long, Tomoko Masuzawa and more recently, critiques by Mallory Nye, remind us that the field was built upon colonial misreadings of the Other. It has done so, as Nye points out, through its “text-focused orientalist scholarship associated with philology, the thematic (and speculative) approaches of Edward Tylor, the functionalism of sociology, the ethnographic and particularist approaches of anthropology, or the contemporary phenomenology that was popularized by Ninian Smart in the 1960s and 70s” (43). These theories are not only mired in primitivism (and Orientalism), but in a western Christian materialist framework that is generally perceived as neutral and even “objective.”
Theories of decolonial praxis rooted in Indigenous and critical Indigenous studies frameworks help us understand how we, Indigenous peoples and those of Indigenous descent, get free from coloniality—how we break the ontological spells we have internalized and become liberated, how we assert and step into our full humanity.
While on the job market, I received critiques that my work was “too theological,” which is a field-specific dog whistle suggesting that an endogenous approach is uncritical, biased, and illegitimate scholarship—”isn’t considering Indigenous perspectives and voices just sharing narratives from an insider’s perspective?” In addition, the normative claims I make in my work in support of Native sovereignty (liberation) may be perceived as taking an “insider’s” stance. Another critique was that my research is more representative of “ethnic studies than religious studies,” as if exploring the intersections of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and religious praxis as decolonial praxis are beyond the appropriate purview of the field. These critiques are directed at my own racialized body, the evaluation of my competence as a scholar of Native descent, and my work as an inherent critique of western-centered knowledge. They are additionally linked to the ways Indigenous knowledges have been framed as a foil to European superiority in the academy.
While there is a general awareness that the field contributed discursively to colonial projects, few scholars consider how their training colors their own perceptions of how research with non-western/non-Christian religious traditions should be done, much less with the non-white scholars that study them. In other words, they don’t recognize how structural racism is operating in the field or within themselves. There is a struggle around the role of “objectivity” in the field of religious studies, an assumption that one can and must teach and publish about religions from an objective and neutral perspective. Travis Warren Cooper argues that this struggle is rooted in the Protestant secular, or the ways in which Protestantism divides the world into two domains, the public (secular) and private (religious). These divisions remain and continue to structure the way that religious studies as a field operates, particularly disciplining non-Christian work that falls outside of what the Protestant secular defines as objective.
Given the field’s colonial history, we need to interrogate the colonialist assumptions that determine who can make truth claims about non-western/non-Christian religions and how, as well as who has the right to determine what constitutes legitimate scholarship. A critical step in this direction is to recognize that there is no neutral position. As scholars, we are always speaking from a particular place, laden with varying degrees of power and interest. One of the problems of labeling the endogenous study of non-Christian/western traditions as theological is that it assumes, a.) that a secular/religious binary is universal, b.) that an endogenous study is uncritical, emic, and ultimately subjective, and c.) that there is only one epistemological position from which one can properly pursue the study of religion. When we dehumanize Indigenous peoples at the level of epistemology, the endogenous study of Indigenous knowledge is rendered illegible. Even impossible. When we ignore the role of colonial/Christian theological logics still operating in the field, we marginalize and silence the work of the most vulnerable among us. Decolonizing the field means religious studies scholars can no longer make ahistorical assessments of nonwestern/non-Christian scholarship and ignore their political histories, as if those political histories do not directly correlate to how knowledge is produced, and power is waged.
Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion whose research and teaching focus on Native American and Indigenous religions in diaspora, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism and is currently working on her manuscript titled The Metaphysics of Decoloniality: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indian and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.
American Jewish Congress member holding sign at Montgomery March, 1965. Photo Credit: Center for Jewish History. Via Flickr.
In the Civil Rights era, Jews were disproportionately involved in fighting for the rights of African Americans, or so the story goes. While this is true to a large extent, what is often overlooked is that many Jews, particularly in the south, were far more ambivalent about civil rights than we think. Many southern Jews were quite critical of “northern” Jews coming south to instigate what John Lewis famously called “good trouble,” and then returning home. What bothered many southern Jews was that the presence of Jews from the north would destabilize a very fragile balance Jews had with white southerners. They understandably feared that when the northern Jews went back home, they would be the recipients of white southern wrath. And in many cases, they were right (see P. Allen Krause, “Rabbis and Civil Rights in the South). There were notable exceptions, for example, Rabbi Seymour Atlas whose civil rights sermons in his synagogue in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s almost cost him his pulpit. His synagogue board demanded that they vet his sermons before they were delivered.
The complex position of southern Jews during the civil rights movement is an apt frame to revisit the question of Jewish whiteness in these days when renewed race consciousness in Black Lives Matter (BLM) meets an upsurge in antisemitic incidents and the troubling new definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The latter claims critique of Israel may be included as an antisemitic act. Internal Jewish debate about whether or not to support BLM can be seen as representing a broader unspoken anxiety about Jewish whiteness in a world where critical race theory about both Blackness and whiteness is far more developed than it was in the 1960s.
As Eric Goldstein has shown in his book The Price of Whiteness, in America Jews worked hard to achieve the status of whiteness. Doing so allowed them to climb the economic ladder to success in ways that non-white minorities such as African Americans could not. This is in part the thesis of James Baldwin’s 1967 essay “Blacks are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” which argued that it is precisely the social positioning that enabled Jews to succeed in what Baldwin called a “white supremacist” nation that served as at least in part the basis for the animus against them among African Americans. Whether Baldwin’s thesis was correct then, or still holds now, namely that it is largely the “becoming white” of the Jew that African Americans find so distasteful, the success of Jews in America cannot be viewed apart from their “whiteness” in the American Jewish imaginary. When the Tri-Faith America project in the 1930s was underway— this project viewed America as a country of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—the assumption was that all three religions were white. As Tisa Wenger shows in her book Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal, Black Christians were not part of that movement. An important caveat to all this is that there also exists the non-white Jew, a category that often suffers from double exclusion within the American imaginary. This imaginary views Jews as white which, by definition, has no room for Jews of color. The complex status of Jews of color is a topic for another analysis.
Whether Baldwin’s thesis was correct then, or still holds now, namely that it is largely the “becoming white” of the Jew that African Americans find so distasteful, the success of Jews in America cannot be viewed apart from their “whiteness” in the American Jewish imaginary.
What made the Jewish whiteness project so successful in America was that Jews were able to enter whiteness and absorb all its privileges without erasing their Jewishness, thus succeeding as Jews in part because of their whiteness. Aptly labeled successful integration, this also had a darker side as David Schraub shows in his recent essay, “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach.” Schraub makes an incisive argument about the intersectionality of Jewish whiteness and antisemitism. In fact, Schraub argues, the coming together of Jews and whiteness feeds too easily into existing antisemitic tropes rather than diminishing them.
In America, whiteness is largely viewed as a neutral, or unmarked, category. Schraub puts it this way, “Whiteness is a facilitator of social power and status, yet it is typically rendered unmarked. Consequently, the privileges and opportunities afforded to persons racialized as White are often not recognized as such—they are woven into the basic operating assumptions of society, such that their beneficiaries do not even perceive of their existence” (384).
Jews have a different social valence. The classic antisemitism we find, for example, in Houston Stuart Chamberlin’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century first published in 1899, or the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” claim that Jews are dangerous because they are a “superior race.” It is Jews’ power that makes Jews a threat to any society in which they live. Chamberlin claims this is in part due to their low exogamy rates throughout history that have produced a pure race that can easily dominate mixed races. The problem arises when these latent notions are then evoked in response to Jews achieving power in society. Thus modern antisemitism arguably emerges, as David Engel argues, in response to the excesses of power Jews achieved after emancipation in nineteenth-century Germany. Emancipation confirmed what Christians feared about Jews all along. In America, Schraub argues, this results in claims like “I always thought that Jews had all this power and privilege—and see how right I was.” Schraub puts it this way: “The Whiteness frame looks at its subjects and asks that we see their power, their privilege, their enhanced societal standing. So far so good. But stereotypes of Jewishness sound many of the same notes: they look at Jews and point out their putative power, privilege, and domination of social space” (401).
The irony in all this is that Jews in America were able to achieve their power in part because of their whiteness and yet such power is viewed, by whites and non-whites alike, as a result of their Jewishness. George Soros and Sheldon Adelson are two examples from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Soros’s Jewishness is “marked” critically by those on the right, and Adelson’s Jewishness is equally “marked” critically by those of the left. Yet each one attained their wealth in large part because both were beneficiaries of whiteness. Jews, by choosing to retain their Jewishness as they enter whiteness, are not unmarked as “whites” but marked as “Jews” who also have the privilege of whites. And this is arguably what Jews want; they want to take advantage of the opportunities whiteness offers while retaining a sense of difference as Jews. But it may be precisely this dual-identity that is a source of negativity against them. This is not to say that Jews have not been marked simply as Jews and become victims of antisemitic acts. Rather, it is to say that the social tolerance for Jews in America is quite high. In today’s America, a Jew will not likely be shot by a police officer because he is a Jew (although a Jew of color may be shot because h/she is Black). That was not true of Jews in other historical periods, and that is not true today of Blacks in America.
The irony in all this is that Jews in America were able to achieve their power in part because of their whiteness and yet such power is viewed, by whites and non-whites alike, as a result of their Jewishness.
An additional component that speaks to the contemporary situation has to do with the complex relationship of Jewish identity to religion and race/ethnicity. As can be seen through the Tri-Faith American project, Jewishness was defined by religion. For example, Father John Elliot Ross, part of the “Tolerance Trio” that toured America in the 1930s (also including Everett Clinchy and Rabbi Morris Lazaron) as part of the Tri Faith America project made a speech that read, “In all things religious we Protestants, Catholics, and Jews can be as separate as the fingers of a man’s outstretched hand; in all things civic and American we can be as united as a man’s clenched fist” (39). This attitude morphs into the concept of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “Judeo” being a Latinized form of Judaism and not Jews. Jews become part of white America in large part because they are viewed as carrying a tradition that is integral to Christianity.
But as this “Judeo” was being concretized, serving as an entry point for Jews into whiteness, something else was happening to Jews in America: the rise of Zionism. One of the early interventions of Zionism in the American Jewish landscape was to question the religious identification of Jews by arguing that Jewishness was rooted in one’s membership in an ethnic nation or “racial” group. Thus the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the premier statement of Reform Judaism at the time, expressed that Jews were not a “nation” but a “religious community.” To provide one example within Zionism: Louis Brandeis, one of the early proponents of Zionism in America, made the case in a famous 1915 speech that Zionism and Americanism were compatible because they shared with one another the same values of democracy and humanism. Other American Zionists were highly critical of Brandeis’s unwillingness to shift the focus of Jewish identity from religion (Brandeis was raised in the Reform tradition of “ethnical monotheism”) to nationalism, which was in part a “re-racialization” of Jews. Louis Lipsky (1876-1963), president of the Zionist Organization of America, editor of The American Hebrew and The Maccabean, and later secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, spoke out strongly against Brandeis’s Zionism/Americanism symbiosis. In Lipsky’s words, the old Zionists (referring to Brandeis) refused “to become part of the race and associate themselves with our problems” (71).
The move to re-racialize the Jews, making them primarily an ethnic group as opposed to carriers of a religious tradition, continued through the twentieth century. This complicated the religious dimension of Jewish inclusion in white America (the Judeo of Judeo-Christian), thereby attenuating Jewish whiteness but not erasing it. In fact, in some white Christian circles, Israel actually strengthened the resolve for Jewish inclusion, albeit in a way that also comes with the price of Israel being a part of Christian dispensationalist theology that does not, in the end, affirm Jewish difference but subsumes it into Christianity. For Jews, Zionism is an exercise in political sovereignty. For many Christian supporters of Israel, it makes Jews a part of the Second Coming when they will have one more chance to accept Christ.
Boston-area Jews gather in Coolidge Corner to protest police brutality and systemic racism. Photo Credit: Flickr User JaccobWakeUp.
In any event, all this reaches our day in a complex way. Jews are still white in America in the sense that they still have access to opportunities open to whites and closed to people of color. Yet Jews are not neutral, and thus not fully white or “unmarked white.” Rather, they carry with them their Jewishness, which has adapted through everything from the Tri Faith Movement to Christian Zionism. Many Jews are also devoted to the fight against anti-Blackness through BLM and to other movements. They have also emerged as critics of Israel’s policies. Yet their participation in BLM and opposition to systemic racism also poses a problem for some within the Black community because Jews participate in them as products of white privilege and all the protections that entails. “Blacks are antisemitic because they are anti-white” may not apply now as it did in 1967, but the whiteness of the Jew has not diminished since that time. How much can Jews as recipients of white privilege truly be a part of a movement against the systemic racism that in part has enabled them to rise to power in white America? Are American Jews willing to forfeit some of that privilege, whatever that might mean, as a gesture to those whose who cannot “pass” into the space of whiteness?
Understandably, Jews want to have both; they want to have the privilege that whiteness offers, and they want to retain the difference that Jewishness requires. Yet it may precisely be this mix that, as Schraub argues, evokes negative reactions against them, both from whites and from Blacks. Their power emerges in part because of their whiteness, yet is invariably “marked” because of their Jewishness. So when Jews support an Israeli regime that is oppressing Palestinians, for many blacks they are simply exercising uber-whiteness as an expression of their Jewishness, showing that they have become so white that they are exporting it as a justification of Jewish power in another country. And when Jews are critical of the Israeli state but still maintain an allegiance to Zionism, some progressives view that as tacit acquiescence to a political structure that systematizes inequality.
Today the fight is not about civil rights, or about equal access to the law. Today the fight is against the white supremacist character of America, it is not about inequality, it is about what Afropessimists call a political-ontology of anti-Blackness. For Jews, as whites, and as Jews, to fully be a part of that fight means to attenuate their whiteness, something we saw was a vexed compromise for southern Jews during civil rights. Jews can certainly fight anti-Blackness as Jews, but that may come at a price; both in terms of their whiteness and in terms of their Jewishness (as many Jews are still aligned with Zionism).
One of the big differences between the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and BLM today is that the former was, as Stokley Carmichael said in his famous Black Power speech in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966 “By Blacks, for Blacks,” while BLM is a multi-racial progressive movement intent on dismantling systemic white supremacy in America. Those who carry whiteness, including Jews, thus have a role in that project. Jews cannot erase their whiteness (they too easily “pass” as white) nor do they want to erase their Jewishness. But Jews can enter this multi-racial movement acknowledging both the benefits of their whiteness and the complexity of their Jewishness that often, although not always, aligns them with a political ideology, Zionism, that today openly engages in racial/ethnic discrimination. Some may disavow Zionism altogether and others may not. But in my view, those who do not must at least recognize the complexity of such an allegiance, and the exceptionalism implied therein, in light of their commitment to fight against the systemic racism on American shores. Jewishness and whiteness in America have always been precarious, and remain so today. Fully acknowledging the knottiness of that equation and closely examining its consequences may be a first step toward more open and honest alliances and partnerships.
Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and the Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His latest books are Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical(Princeton University Press, 2021), and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press). He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion.
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice marching in support of Black Lives Matter, New York City, August 11, 2016. Photo Credit: Gili Getz. Used with permission.
Analogy is all I’ve ever really known. The only child of an Ashkenazi Jew and an African American, I’ve always experienced identification as coupled with recognition of difference. I have no experience of homogeneity to fall back on; even those closest to me are also unlike me in significant ways.
I am used to people thinking of me as a problem. My parents married less than five years after Loving v. Virginia guaranteed the legality of their union throughout the United States. As recently as when I was in college, I’ve been in discussions where the creation of “mixed” children was cited as a reason to avoid interracial relationships—because, the argument went, mixed children suffered a confusion so debilitating that it made their lives not worth living.
But I am not confused. What I am is confusing. In other words, the problem is not my sense of self or belonging, but the way that my very existence unsettles the carefully circumscribed categories that for so many people pass for reality. Even sophisticated treatments of identity fail to account for the possibility of people like me. For example, Aaron Hahn Tapper’s Judaisms: A Twenty-First-Century Introduction to Jews and Jewish Identities centers the diversity of Jews and Judaisms, but assigns Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans to non-overlapping categories. He remarks, “Ashkenazi Jews exist in terms of what they are not; they are not Jews of color” (21). But I am the descendant of “those Jews who trace their lineage back to Eastern European and Russian, Christian majority places” (19), and I am also the descendant of enslaved Africans. I do not shuttle between those identities like a child in a shared custody arrangement. I am always both of those things, at the same time.
A focus on the purported confusion of the interracial person serves to maintain a problematic system for assigning identity by distracting from its failures. In a similar way, fixating on the problem of analogy can obscure the larger structural dynamics that govern the way that analogies function in the realm of identity. Because of the way in which acting literalizes the issues of representation and identification in play here, film can provide a helpful way to approach this subject. Consider the case of a controversy about a film’s casting of a White actor in a role that the original source material had identified as Asian. Framing the matter as a question of whether actors should only portray characters whose identity characteristics they share ignores the broader context that gives the matter its urgency. Whitewashing roles does not reflect a philosophical position about identity and acting. It reflects the strength of Hollywood’s preference for White actors. Because of this preference, a White actor can expect to play almost any character, while an Asian actor can’t even count on full consideration for a role originally imagined as Asian.
In a similar way, when it comes to racial justice, the problem of analogy is not so much a problem with analogy per se, as it is the problem of the preference for Whiteness. Whiteness is so deeply ingrained in US American culture as the baseline human experience that it functions as a kind of skeleton key that opens all doors. In that context, analogy stops being a way of making a connection between two experiences by highlighting their commonalities while acknowledging their differences. Instead, it becomes a kind of whitewashing, a way of overwriting one experience with another one that has more social capital.
Better analogies between Black and Jewish experience begin with decoupling Jewishness from Whiteness and acknowledging the Blackness within Jewishness. The reduction of Judaism to White Ashkenazic Judaism not only erases large numbers of Jewish people, but also neutralizes certain tendencies within Jewish tradition. As Lin-Manuel Miranda reclaimed Alexander Hamilton’s immigrant identity and its continuities with the experiences of contemporary immigrants to the USA, so a similar recognition is needed that white people are not the only legitimate heirs to and representatives of Jewish history and tradition. Many Jews became (sort of) White, but that doesn’t mean that the trajectory to Whiteness is the only arc though which Jewish history should be understood and invoked. When Jews move beyond American racial logic and view their tradition with a greater flexibility not constrained by the limits of Whiteness, the foundation has been laid for truly fruitful partnerships with all manner of groups.
Since the pandemic began I’ve spent more time with Birkot HaShachar (a Conservative version), and I’ve been struck by the depth of their correspondence to central themes in African American religion. African Americans have long turned to religion to counteract the experience of racism and cultivate another basis for identity, to be reminded, in the words of Beyoncé, “If you feel insignificant, you better think again…you’re part of something way bigger.” Through the blessings I acknowledge my interconnectedness with all creation, affirm the fullness of my humanity (or in contemporary terms, that my Black life matters), and embrace my God given freedom in the face of experiences that make me feel powerless.
The blessing that identifies God as the one who made me a Jew speaks to my experience of having my Jewishness called into question by people who don’t think I look the part. African Americans have historically gravitated toward modes of religious expression that emphasize a connection with God not mediated through Eurocentric authority, and to me, this blessing expresses such spiritual immediacy.
The blessing that invokes God as the one who clothes the naked employs imagery that has long captivated the African American religious imagination. In the Black Church, prayers frequently reference the gospel description of a man formerly possessed by a demon by offering thanks that one is “clothed and in [one’s] right mind” (Mark 5:15 KJV). Within the spontaneous prayer tradition of the Black Church, this language functions as part of a preliminary to prayers created in the moment, a regularized way of taking stock of the self and expressing gratitude to God. For me, the image of nakedness captures the vulnerability of being Black in the US and living under a constant threat of sanctioned violence.
In the blessing that invokes God as the one who releases those imprisoned, I hear the dismantling of mass incarceration. I also hear the possibility for metaphorical forms of release, such as from ideologies that imprison the mind, like the assumptions about race, gender, and work to which I all too easily succumb.
Then, when the once-crooked self stands upright, the blessings invite me to contemplate the cosmic power of God, a power that far exceeds those social structures that feel so all-encompassing, and that works toward a different end. In When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele observe, “…the only plan for us, for Black people living in the United States—en masse, if not individually—is all tied up to the architecture of punishment and containment” (203–4). In contrast, the blessings affirm that mighty God with loving attention makes a way for us. Beyond the miracle of survival, the blessings remind me of my connection to powerful heritage and hope of overcoming and invite me to draw strength. The closing prayer to be seen, by God and people, through a gaze marked by grace, loyal lovingkindness, and compassion powerfully expresses my desire as a mother sending Black children out into a world in which their ordinary behavior might be coded as criminal and used to justify violence against them.
The prayer to be seen is also a prayer to be recognized and not defined out of existence or bracketed out of relevance. An important step in dismantling the unique form of oppression that is racism in the US is to transform the perception of the color line as an impenetrable barrier stretching across all of human existence. Race as we know it emerged in history. Neither God nor nature assigned each person a place in a discrete, homogenous group. The limitations of making analogies between groups are just as relevant to the process of designating groups as such. Even those who share Blackness or Jewishness, for example, share them differently, including by sharing both at the same time. In the end, it is all analogy.
Amanda Mbuvi is Assistant Professor of Religion at High Point University. She was drawn to her specialization in Hebrew Bible because of the vivid stories and rich language, and because of the way it connects the various streams of her identity. She approaches biblical studies from an interdisciplinary perspective, engaging questions of identity and community that are prominent in both the biblical texts and current conversations about how we live with those texts and with each other. In addition to her biblical scholarship, her work also examines the relationships between Jewish and Christian identity and racial identity as they play out in contemporary literature and film. Her first book, Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Politics of Identity Formation, was published by Baylor University Press.
“Jews for Black Lives.” Photo Courtesy of Gili Getz and JFREJ—Jews For Racial and Economic Justice. Used with permission.
The 2020 uprising for Black Lives following the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota shook the public debate in the US around white supremacist systems and anti-Black racism. Floyd’s killing was just the latest in a long list of murders of African-American women, men, and trans-people. This uprising occurred at the same time that the COVID-19 pandemic was growing in locations across the country, which cruelly and disproportionately inflicted pain upon communities of color. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mainstream options for responding have been reduced to choosing either the liberal narrative of promoting the common good, or a reactionary identitarian individualism—options which usually share elective affinities with one another. Black Lives Matter (BLM) presented another option: the dismantling of a system of white supremacy that was responsible for police brutality, economic inequality, and for the sacrificing of the frontline black and brown bodies of workers for the sake of capitalistic consumption during the pandemic. In a matter of days almost three-quarters of the adult population in the US seemingly supported the movement. This sudden and overwhelming support for a tireless movement, which until recently was largely vilified, led to a quick re-alignment of discourses around a critical engagement with the enduring legacies of white supremacy.
The concern that has been raised for many in Jewish intellectual and activist spaces is how “white American Jews” can draw on the history of Jewish oppression in solidarity with the current anti-racism movement led by BLM without glossing over their own implication in white supremacy and relatedly, in the occupation of Palestinians. Some mainstream Jewish institutions, organizations, and individuals showed their solidarity by creating or alluding to analogies between Jewish experiences of discrimination and oppression and the experience of Black Americans. At the same time, a growing number of intellectuals took an alternative route. By presenting this issue as a problem of “analogies” these intellectuals usually overlook pre-existent historical relations between the events. Departing from their “white Jewishness,” they objected to the relationalities of histories, explaining that analogizing between different experiences of oppression does not necessarily lead people to develop empathy and, as such, is a failed strategy for practicing anti-racism. At worst, analogies between the suffering of Jewish people and African Americans erases and literally “whitewashes” Jewish participation in white supremacy and, by extension, the colonization of Palestinians. While this critical intervention and self-reflexive interrogation of Jewish whiteness could be a corrective to some mainstream institutional excesses, it also seems out of touch with current developments in anti-racism work in Jewish activist spaces and the attendant reimagining of Jewishness as multi-racial, multi-gender, and oriented towards solidarity with others. The interrogation of normative representation and the creation of multi-racial and multi-gendered spaces are inadvertently rendered invisible and inaudible within the anti-analogizing stance. This deflates the validity of this stance as a challenge to simplistic claims to “Jewish [white] innocence.” Ironically, some of the very same scholars harshly objected a year ago when the Holocaust Museum rejected making analogies between the camps in the Holocaust and near the US/Mexico border because doing so did not take into account the complex and entangled global histories of violence and racism.
The question animating this series is as follows: Does the rejection of Jewish histories, experiences, meanings, memories, and texts as foundations for the cultivation of cross-communal solidarity (because of normative Jewish assimilation into whiteness) itself participate in detrimental erasures of openings for multi-racial and solidarity-focused forms of Jewishness and social justice praxis? Relatedly, can there be Jewish solidarity that is indeed substantially “Jewish” if any appeals to Jewishness are suspect of being false equivalencies? The authors will explore whether speaking from the enclosed positionality of “white Jewishness” ends up, perhaps inadvertently, erasing relational histories, reifying the notion of pure identities, narrowing the conversation of racism to self-identified “white voices,” and policing the emergence of a much more diverse American Jewish landscape as well as multi-racial coalitional spaces. Furthermore, some will explore the incongruence between support for Israel and Israeli policies and commitments to Black lives, Palestinian lives, and anti-racism.
The path forward is clear: to disengage from the whiteness into which the above-mentioned Jews became assimilated. To do so, scholars of Judaism in activist spaces must learn from current international coalitions led by non-white communities such as BLM, and they must take an anti-Zionist stance. But because this position can become incongruent if it leads some to internalize their supposed whiteness not as an outcome of a specific history, but as an all-encompassing identity, caution is needed. Acknowledging their whiteness requires that they reject any appeals to Jewish experiences as points of connection between anti-racist struggles. Others author in this series will survey if this enclosure suggests a tacit acceptance by mainstream Jews of their assimilation into European whiteness and the curious geopolitical construct of the “Judeo-Christian.” For example, this is a good time to interrogate privilege and romanticized accounts of Jewish solidarity with African-American struggles such as the participation of Jews in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Nonetheless, in a historical moment in which support for racist immigration policies is wedded with white nationalism and the promotion of the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation is led by Jewish figures at the highest levels of the White House—where explicit antisemitism is also telegraphed and condoned—it is equally important to de-center white Jewishness. Furthermore, it is also critical to analyze the complex ways in which anti-Jewishness relates to anti-Blackness and where and how creating a marked differentiation between Jewish and non-Jewish experiences itself participates in a logic of internalized Jewish oppression. Most critically, it is important to explore if the reification of Jewish whiteness invisibalizes “non-white” Jewish experiences and knowledges and makes building intersectional coalitions that denounce the interlocking axes of racism, classism, and sexism by multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and “non-white” Jewish communities more challenging. Knowing the importance BLM places in building coalitions, the possibility of creating connections between invisibilized peoples seems to be a task that is challenged by the current intellectual resistance to relationalities and analogies.
The Contending Modernities blog will publish essays by Amanda Mbuvi, Lewis Gordon, Shaul Magid, Susannah Heschel, Walter Isaac, Shahar Zach, Jesse Benjamin, Keith Feldman, and others in this series over the next several weeks.
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Hagia Sophia at sunrise. Photo Credit: Flickr User Matthew and Heather, 2013.
Hagia Sophia is not the symbol of any religion, but a symbol of class. It is the temple of kings and sultans. This has always been the nature of it. It was demolished twice following massive popular revolts. There is sweat, blood and tears of slaves in its foundation. No Prophet would ever set foot in there.
The recent decision by the Turkish Council of State and the President to revert the Hagia Sophia into a mosque has garnered much debate across the Muslim world. On the one hand, there are many, both in and outside of Turkey, who support the decision. Some who support the decision argue that the issue is one primarily concerning Turkish national sovereignty. Others may additionally frame it as a popular Islamist correction to the historical wrong committed by secular Kemalists, who changed the Hagia Sophia from a mosque to a museum. On the other hand, there are those who argue that what motivates the decision is President Erdogan’s narrow populist party political agenda, which is fundamentally opposed to the modern liberal secular notions of religious and ethnic pluralism. The Hagia Sophia has been a contested site for over a millennium, and plays an important symbolic role in how the histories of imperial Byzantine and Ottoman civilizations are remembered in the present.
While these two groups have played important roles in the debate, there is a more fundamental tension at play, particularly for Christians and Muslims who are dedicated to radical understandings of their faiths based on a shared tradition of a liberatory, prophetic critique of materialism and power. Given both the damage and supremacy of modern liberalism and secularism in the Islamicate world, we should fundamentally affirm Muslims’ and Christians’ right and responsibility to build power through religiously inspired lenses and frameworks. That being said, we must always ask: Which religious lenses and whose frameworks? Is this the Christianity of Emperor Constantine or that of Jesus and his flock of radicals? In the words of `Ali Shari`ati (1958–1977), “It is not sufficient to say that we must return to Islam. We must specify which Islam: That of Abu Zarr or that of Marwan, the ruler […] One is the Islam of Caliphate, of the palace, and of rulers. The other is the Islam of the people, of the exploited, and of the poor.”
As Turkish Muslim political dissident Ihsan Eliacik suggests above, the Hagia Sophia is currently neither a symbol nor a sign of prophetic ethos and power for Christians or Muslims. Why do we need to pray in a building as grandiose as the Hagia Sophia (whether as Christians or Muslims or otherwise)? Eliacik suggests we listen to the blood, sweat, and tears in those walls before thinking that Prophets would even set foot in such a place to worship God. The massive and excessive frescos and calligraphy, columns and domes, and marble and minarets say far more about the place as an aristocratic symbol—as a symbol of the accumulation of wealth and religio-ethnic imperialism—than anything about a God of Justice and Mercy. Jesus’s church was the dirt roads and streets of Palestine, and Muhammad’s mosque was made of clay and palm trees. Can we seriously imagine Jesus or Muhammad being enamored by their followers fighting over a bombastic display of material power and wealth? Muslims and Christians continue to play the same game that our Prophets and Creator taught us to be more critical of and urged us to undermine—even to destroy. In this drama around Hagia Sophia, we worship a religion that is against religion, in the name of religion!
Both Islam and Christianity become further unmoored from their radical origins and potential when their sultans, caliphs, popes, and monarchs become obsessed with constructing palaces, monuments, and symbols of unethical power in the name of their religion—ostensibly to the Glory of God, but actually to the god of the nafs (lower self) of these glorified and glory-seeking leaders.
Historically, this large-scale hijacking first occurred in the 4th century of Christianity in Constantinople and in the first century of Islam in Damascus. (Some Muslims would argue that it started much earlier when some among the Companions of the Prophet already had enriched themselves with war booty and begun to practice nepotism, both leading to the bitter remonstrations against the accumulation of wealth and displays of ostentation by the Companion Abu Dharr al-Ghiffari [d. 652]).
The radical message of Prophets is primarily two-fold:
(A) Contrary to the “Islam is peace” discourse of the “moderate Muslims,” to relentlessly attack tyranny and to destabilize—or “render ungovernable,” as we said during the years of the struggle against South African Apartheid—unjust orders, and
(B) to seek justice for all on the margins of society and strive to establish just socio-political orders inspired by our sacred sources.
Rulers should not live extravagant lifestyles, nor should their symbols of sovereignty represent the gross accumulation of wealth and power. They should always do their best to stick to the earthly (not to mention ecologically friendly) and humble homes of those who follow the eternal path of righteous guidance.
Thus, we constantly have to return to asking ourselves: Are we following Jesus, or Emperor Constantine? Are we following Muhammad, or the murderers of his family and prophetic tradition?
Would we rather have a palace in Damascus and Constantinople? Or a humble abode in this life which causes less damage, and benefits us multifold in the Hereafter when our palaces and palatial temples—as all earthly constructions—lie in ruins and the Transcendent weighs our righteousness on the scales?
Interior photo of Hagia Sophia where symbols of both Christianity and Islam can be found. Photo Credit: Flickr User Schezar.
These are the questions we must honestly and critically ask ourselves when the names and symbols of our religions start to get hijacked by “non-idolatrous” idolaters. Outward displays of piety and ethno-religious supremacy have been critiqued as hidden forms of idolatry by the Holy Books and Prophets for a long time. Many of us worship an Islam or Christianity that is cloaked in much more than the otherwise sincere commitment to grappling with existence and attempting to understand what we should be doing while on earth as sojourners returning to the Transcendent.
In Islam, a place of worship of is called a ‘masjid, a place of prostration. Here we are expected to tremble in the presence of the Transcendent, not exult in the glory of a narrow ethnic national chauvinism masquerading as Islam, nor to pay homage to the sultan of the day. Neither the fact that others—the Greeks, the Armenians, the Spanish or whoever else—may have done this to us, nor that those crimes continue against former symbols of the Islamicate, provide us with a license to do this to others.
The suggestion by Sahak Maşalyan, the Patriarch of the Armenian Church of Turkey, that the Hagia Sophia be opened to all religions is an interesting one which moves beyond the pathetically bigoted “God is really a soccer or basketball mascot for the nation” discourse. “Why not keep it as a museum for part of the week and open it for an Alevi semah ritual Thursday nights, for Sunni prayers on Fridays, for the Jewish community on Saturdays, and for Christian congregations on Sundays?” he asked. “Such a transformation,” says Baki Tezcan, in another essay, “would keep the Hagia Sophia alive and better serve its long-term preservation as a cultural heritage site, offer an alternative to Islamist political hegemony, recognize Turkey’s diversity, and set an exemplary international precedent for other similar sites globally.”
The games played by the powerful and the willingness of the masses to cheer them on is not going to get humankind through the critical challenges facing all of us as inhabitants of the earth—our only home which we until recently have been destroying one brick at a time, but have now moved on to one wall at a time. Perhaps we need to go beyond Patriarch Maşalyan’s seemingly noble suggestion, which is aimed at appeasing different tribes, all of them which, again, seemingly, but only seemingly, are obsessed with their tribal deities whom they have created in their images.
I have a far-fetched proposal.
In the context of massive socio-economic inequities, ongoing ecological destruction, and rising tides of religio-ethnic supremacist ideologies in Turkey and around the world, the theological and social response of clerical or governmental leadership should not be guided by the false consciousness of narrow-minded symbolism. Why not convert the Hagia Sofia into something like a shelter for the homeless, a hospital for the sick and needy, a radical education or arts center to raise consciousness, or an indoor garden?
Regardless of how far-fetched this proposal may appear, I am convinced that Muhammad and Jesus would then be far more comfortable stepping into it than they would be if it were to be a cathedral, a museum, a temple, or a mosque.
[1] Eliacik is a Muslim theologian and activist with the Anti-Capitalist Muslims Collective in Turkey
Farid Esack is a leading Muslim liberation theologian who cut his teeth in the South African struggle for liberation. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advance Studies. In 2018 he was presented with the Order of Luthuli, South Africa’s highest national award, for “his brilliant contribution to academic research and the fight against race, gender, class, and religious oppression”. He serves on the board of Africa4Palestine.
Engraving of Spaniards enslaving Native Americans by Theodor de Bry (1528–1598), published in America, Part 6. Frankfurt, 1596.
The body is central to religious life. Religious practices and teachings include insights about food, cleanliness, ritual, sex, and death. But scholarship in the study of religion has at times been oddly forgetful of the embodied grounds of religious traditions and of knowledge. This occlusion of the constitutive role of bodies and materiality is recognized as part of the legacy of modernity. Modern thought construed abstract reason as more reliable than sensibility and imagined rationality as exercising control over one’s body and non-human materiality. But these well-known elements of modern thought are intricately related to colonialism and its organization of the world.
Decolonial scholarship on the body entails not just adding a new category of analysis; it requires a shift in approach. Rather than treating religion, coloniality, and the body as self-contained or self-evident categories, we analyze their imbrication in particular contexts and the ways such terms evoke each other, even where their relationship is forgotten or hidden. In this very short essay, I point to two temporally distant, but paradigmatic examples of the intertwining of religion, bodies, and coloniality. I travel imaginatively to a point of entanglement, as Édouard Glissant suggests, in order to surface connections.
Postcolonial studies in the US academy has tended to start in the eighteenth century, while decolonial studies attends to the earlier period of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. As a consequence, decolonial studies make visible connections between coloniality and religion that are less explicit in scholarship of the later empires. Religious identities were a defining element in the formation of the Spanish empire. Walter Mignolo observes, for instance, “Christianity established itself as intolerant to Judaism and Islam as well as to the ‘idolatry’ of the Amerindians, whose extirpation became a major goal of the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (21). The relationship to Jews and Moors shapes later Spanish discursive and material practices toward the Amerindians.
The distinctions between Christians, Jews, and Moors were based on well-established categories of religious identity, and they were represented as corporeal and inherited differences. As David Nirenberg has argued, categories of religion “were replaced by the genealogical notion that Christians descended from Jewish converts (Cristianos nuevos, confessos, conversos, marranos) who were essentially different from Christians by nature” (242, italics mine). Indeed, according to the doctrine of “limpieza de raza,” “Jewish and Muslim blood was inferior to Christian; the possession of any amount of such blood made one liable to heresy and moral corruption; and therefore any descendent of Jews and Muslims, no matter how distant, should be barred from churches and secular office, from any guilds and professions, and especially from marrying Old Christians” (242). (“Old Christians” referred to those born of Christian parents.) Predicting moral character based on inheritance and managing the risk of contamination through the control of sexual relationships are today associated with “biological race.” But in 14th to 15th century Spain, religious identity was similarly woven through the body to naturalize socio-political hierarchy. This mobilization of bodily discourse in describing religious difference was transposed to the Americas, though not unchanged.
In the Americas, the term “Moor” was used for anyone of dark skin, making skin color a metonymy for a myriad of markers of religious difference. The subordination of Amerindians was asserted through arguments about their religion, practices, and embodiment. The tensions between the bodily and cultural frames for perceived inferiority are evident in the well-known debates of Valladolid between Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas (1550-51). The issue at stake was the right of the king of Castile to subjugate the Amerindians. But the significance of the debate is that the arguments revolved around the status of Indians as human beings, which was treated as an inquiry into their rationality. Sepúlveda, a humanist and translator of Aristotle, based his defense of the conquest on Aristotle’s theory of “natural slavery” as well as on Augustine’s argument that slavery is a punishment for sin (112f). [1] His position was that the Indians were slaves by nature, displaying “an innate weakness of mind and inhuman and barbarous customs” (115). They are as different to the Spaniards as “monkeys are to men,” he claimed (117). In contrast, Las Casas challenged the applicability of the category of “natural slave” to the peoples of the Americas. He explained his position by appealing to cultural evolution. Turning to classical writers like Aristotle and Cicero, in addition to Thomas Aquinas, Las Casas argued: “All the races of the world are men, and the definition of all men and of each of them, is only one and that is reason” (140). If their behavior was starkly different, even seemingly abhorrent, it was not because of an inherent flaw in their capacity for rationality. The differences in the behavior of Amerindians, he argued, was the effect of their primitive culture and religion. The behavior in question included quotidian embodied practices concerning food, the use of the land, and sex. Christianity was deemed necessary to transform these barbarians into civilized men. The Spaniards had the duty to teach the Amerindians as children until they achieved the level of civility of European Christians.
Attributed to José Vivar y Valderrama, Baptism Scene, 18th century, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional de Historia, CONACULTA–INAH, Mexico City. Wikimedia Commons.
Bodily practices were mined for evidence of humanity or lack thereof. Bodies were also the site of religious/colonial intervention, the entry-point for the transformations of those subjected to colonial/religious power. Souls would be conquered through the imposition of specific forms of labor, diet, ritual, sexuality, and family. María Lugones highlights the implications of coloniality for gender by showing that colonialism entailed imposition of distinct gender systems for colonizer and colonized. Native gender identities and familiar arrangements were regarded as “unnatural.” Colonialism broke the links between communities, the land, and their ancestors. Colonialism dismissed and destroyed forms of embodied existence to impose others forms of being that it represented as “natural” and thus universal.
The problematic role of the body in these formative moments of coloniality might tempt us to veer away from theorizations of the body altogether. Indeed, I wonder if the attention to the scrutiny and debasement of colonialized bodies bolsters the appeal of the fantasy of disembodied subjectivity. After all, Christianity defined its universalism against the Jews, represented as too corporeal. The more racialized others are associated with corporeality, the more normalized an ideal disembodied subject becomes. A decolonial philosophy of religion includes the critical insights from other scholarly critiques concerning the occlusion of bodies and materiality, while also tracing the relationship between disembodied universalisms and the projection of debased materiality onto colonized and racialized others.
I have foundMaurice Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of flesh productive in its attention to the ways in which bodies, all bodies, are shaped by the materiality of the world. He attempts to think beyond the Cartesian suspicion of the senses and beyond the separation of the subject from the body. Neither bodies nor materiality are static; both shape and are shaped by human action, including ideas and imagination. Inasmuch as ideas and imagination orient human action they transform the world. And the world in turn shapes our bodies. But even as Merleau-Ponty imagined a world in which all human beings belong to the world, where we all reach toward the world and are received by the world, he lost sight of the ways in which coloniality has transformed the world. He lost sight of how encountering the world meant something starkly different for Hernán Cortez and for the Amerindian subjected to the Spanish crown and its mission. We are all constituted by our relations to the materiality of the world, as Merleau-Ponty beautifully describes, but we inhabit it differently.
Frantz Fanon articulates this critique by focusing on inter-human encounters. He dramatizes how his move toward the world is met with the violent gaze of those whose perception has been distorted by coloniality. Their reactions to Fanon’s body interrupted his approach and impeded the constitution of his body in relation to the world. His body was thus shattered. Sylvia Wynter builds on Fanon’s insights to propose a reconceptualization of the human as a nexus of bios and logos, that is, as constituted by culture and religion as much as by biology. This allows us to analyze how representations of religious differences appeal to embodied differences, or how bodily differences shape the representations of the religious practices of a particular group. It can also help us track how those representations in turn shape the lives of those affected by them—where we can live or work, what we can eat, who we can embrace—and through all of these patterns shape our bodies. A decolonial approach to religious studies might also help us imagine differently toward the transformations of our bodies and the world.
Mayra Rivera is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University. Rivera’s works at the intersections between philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race and gender—with particular attention to Caribbean thought. Her most recent book, Poetics of the Flesh (2015), analyzes theological, philosophical, and political descriptions of “flesh” as metaphors for understanding how social discourses materialize in human bodies. She is also author of The Touch of Transcendence (2007) and co-editor of Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology(2010) and Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire(2004). Rivera is currently working on a project that explores narratives of catastrophe in Caribbean thought.
Screen shot from The Battle of Algiers (1966). Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Representing
One of the most iconic films of political decolonization, Pontecorvo’s 1966 Battle of Algiers, has a memorable scene I would like to recall with my reader. Colonel Mathieu, the commander of the colonial forces, discusses with journalists the power of discourse in the midst of the uprising. For Mathieu, the role of activist-intellectuals in the public sphere is diminishing his possibilities of military success. Dismayed by their role and clearly containing his anger, he exclaims: “Why are the Sartres always born on the other side?” After expressing exasperation at how dangerous the existentialist philosopher is as his foe, Mathieu abruptly exits the scene.
In a film full of nuances, the scene leaves very little space for doubt. From the gaze of the colonizer, the radical continental philosopher is seen not only as a contributor to the task of political decolonization, but also runs the risk of becoming naturalized as a born-barbarian (from the colonizer’s perspective a betrayal of civilization seems inconceivable). This naturalization, however, is not innocent. “The Sartres” are made, more times than not, into the representatives of the struggle and emerge as the rational alternative to the colonial status quo. The colonizer’s gaze assumes a battlefield where there are clean, all-encompassing sides: the rightful civilizational project and the subversive radical continental philosophy, the latter appointed as the epistemological representative of political decolonization.
Yet, when we reflect on the radical continental philosopher’s role from what Enrique Dussel calls the “underside of modernity,” doubts undoubtedly emerge. When the tables are turned, the positionality of even the most radical among continental philosophers, Sartre being one example, is questioned. In recounting his personal encounter with Sartre, Edward Said reflects on the silences and paradoxes in Sartre’s political thought. He reads Sartre’s solidarity as “flat,” “innocuous,” “unrewarding” and ultimately “a bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who admired him.” More recently, Algerian Houria Bouteldja completes Said’s reflections. She argues that the limitations that Said rightly recognized were a consequence of Sartre’s reified framework that was unable to leave behind a Eurocentric conception of selfhood. Heir to a continental philosophy that has obscured its situatedness since Descartes, “Sartre did not know how to radically betray his race” (23).
Sartre’s “other side” is definitively a contribution from a specific European location, but may not be the “underside” of decolonial theory. In a stage set by the Mathieus of the world, Europe contains the proposal and its dissent while the underside is invisibilized. In the socially-committed film, the native Arab/Berber resisters are powerfully represented in countless scenes with dark, intense eyes full of rage, portraying the thirst for revolution. But in the few opportunities they have to intervene in the public debate, they are rapidly silenced by legitimized voices. Following the famous postcolonial dictum, they cannot speak and remain largely voiceless.
Christianizing
The attempt to erase the underside is not a problem of the past. In a series of essays published by Al-Jazeera in 2013, Hamid Dabashi and Walter Mignolo interrogated the celebration of another radical continental philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. Confronting the Euro-Marxist oblivion of the universalized claims of his framework, Dabashi asked a pungent question: “Can the non-European Think?” When Mignolo responded in the affirmative, confronting the idea that Europe has the universal monopoly of dissent, he went beyond frameworks of political colonization and entered into the realm of epistemological decoloniality. To understand the reasons for the erasure of the underside it is necessary to explore the patterns of domination that emerged during colonization but nonetheless transcended the context to develop global hierarchies that continue to exist to this day. From the perspective of those on the underside, the “universal radicality” of continental philosophy, represented by Žižek in this case, is premised on the silence and erasure of non-European thinking.
I invite my reader, therefore, to think of the revolutionary representation of radical continental philosophy as a colonially sanctioned dissent that universalizes a provincial difference while invisibilizing the underside of modernity. Coloniality not only monopolizes the only sanctioned path to universal redemption—in what Anibal Quijano calls evolutionism—but also selects its legitimate form of dissent. This is perhaps one of the most perdurable modern strategies of coloniality. In the now famous debate of Valladolid(1550–1551), conceived by critics as one of the most influential legitimizations of early modern racism, the imperial state appointed Euro-Christian theologian-philosophers to discuss “the nature” of Natives. In this discussion, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, retrieving Aristotle, offers one of the first modern formulations of biological racism and proposes to forcefully convert Natives into subservient Christians. Bartolomé de las Casas, enthroned as the radical and later liberationist alternative, develops one of the first formulations of cultural racism, insisting on Natives’ adaptability through conversion without physical force. If for the continental philosopher there is no possibility of thinking outside Europe, for the colonially appointed philosopher of religion there is no possibility of existence outside a totalizing Christian framework.
This is one of the legacies of the multiple “1492s.” As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have shown in their work, and I have also explored, this starts a process in which a diversity of communities were negated, rejected, or invisibilized. Ultimately, most had their humanity put in question and were intertwined as victims of Christian evolutionist genocides. One could think, therefore, that the first step toward decolonizing philosophy of religion would be to contest the Christian frameworks that provide the hegemonic sources of its ontology and epistemology. Some pioneers writing before the current explosion of decolonial philosophy of religion (such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Marc Ellis, Salman Sayyid, Tomoko Masuzawa,Gil Anidjar, and Abdulkader Tayob) have called for leaving behind disciplinary frameworks. From distinct standpoints, they challenged the hegemony of Christian schemes, the coloniality of the concept of religion, and/or its secular reiterations. For several of these authors, deeply knowledgeable of religious studies as a discipline, decoloniality delinks from evolutionism because it opens paths toward pluriversality, not toward a new Christian universality with multiple local paths.
While some trends in the field follow this early insight, in many others this impetus is missed. It is not surprising that philosophers of religion continue to privilege Christian frameworks. After all, one of the privileges of coloniality has been universalizing its provincial framework. What we need to interrogate, however, is why several works in decolonial philosophy and theology are repeating some of the same patterns. These works are valuable in other important aspects. Some, for example, offer persuasive challenges to ontological dualism. Yet, they employ frames that more often than not make discourses intelligible insofar as they are expressed within a Christian framework, or its secular reiterations. Either reproducing overt coloniality or its sanctioned dissent, often these proposals inadvertently reproduce the same evolutionism they are formally contesting.
Luis Fernando Camacho, a Bolivian civic leader, in a Cabildo calling on the people to regain democracy. Photo Credit: Ayrton. Wikimedia Commons.
This does not mean we should rule out some forms of Christianity as sources for decolonial knowledges. It is true that Frantz Fanon called Christianity the Church of “the white man” before critiquing the evolutionism of its “calling” to the colonized “not to the ways of God” but “to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor” (7). And Mignolo argued that previous radical liberationist projects, that may have called Fanon’s wretched of the earth to other ways, changed “the content but not the terms” of the conversation (92). Yet, current readers of either author may not object to the idea that, as part of a pluriversal project, some self-identified Christian communities in some contexts can depart from systemic fractures, engage critically with the encounter of cosmovisions in their own midst, and ultimately contest evolutionist coloniality. Today, however, philosophers of religion in the American academy often employ Christian frameworks that may not fully address Fanon’s and Mignolo’s concerns.
“Hernan Cortés fights with two Indians.” Image credit: Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer. Wikimedia Commons
The problem is not necessarily Christianity, but the omnipresence of Christian normativity in discourses of dominance, rebellion, and re-existence. This creates a very narrow setting that reproduces the allure of totalization. In the field, there are some incipient tendencies we may want to interrogate. A first tendency is to follow the critique that the secular is not a neutral space in order to intervene in public debates with normative Christian resources instead of delinking from them. A second tendency is to reify a world religions model, presenting other alternatives as foreign (this time) latecomers to coloniality, thereby making Christian resources the most natural fit for a decolonial project. A final tendency is to universalize an American interpretation of “Christian hybridization,” overlooking the suspicion communities around the world have of hybridity as a strategy that ignores power differentials, sublates knowledges, and enshrines European Christianity as the normative locus of existence. I am not arguing that we should universally question the potential of some forms of Christianity as decolonial resources. Unmasking secular neutrality, establishing conversations from cosmovisions one inhabits, and exploring groundbreaking accounts of “popular Christianities” can be truly useful resources for decolonial projects. The task is to confront the role that Christian normativity plays when it is predicated in evolutionism, one of the primary strategies of coloniality.
Decolonizing
Today a decolonial philosophy of religion in the American academy may be at risk of becoming a sanctioned space of dissent within an omnipresent Christian normativity permeated by evolutionism. It is then necessary to find alternatives. Dussel, no stranger to evaluating Christian forms of dissent, challenges evolutionist models by appealing to another methodological resource: barbaric philosophies’ analectics. Confronting those models that attempt to create universal consciousness by sublating all other possibilities, he uses this resource to challenge totalizing frameworks. Objecting to narrow epistemological alternatives to internal contradictions of a hermetic framework, he elaborates decoloniality from a positive reaffirmation of cosmovisions that live under the pressure of coloniality, but have not been swallowed up by modernity. As such, they resist demands of hegemonic universality and work toward a world where, as the Zapatista movement has proclaimed, “many worlds can fit.”
While the abrasiveness of totalitarian evolutionism spread throughout the whole world, the knowledges that were rejected, negated, and/or invisibilized were not ingested. In many cases they not only resisted colonially imposed frameworks of dissent, but also took distance from essentialist, apolitical, romantic claims to return to utopian pasts. These barbaric lenses provide a framework to learn from the work of dynamic, heterogenous, and transversal communities that, suffering from the wound of coloniality, have found ways to transform, translate, and create knowledges to resist centuries of evolutionist epistemological genocide. Christianized and not, within and between these communities we find social movements, political coalitions, and intellectuals who are practicing a dual critique against both coloniality and power structures within their own collectives, opening spaces for intersectional and pluricultural conversations. They provide other frameworks the philosopher of religion can draw upon for decolonial critical theories, practices, and horizons.
Philosophers of religion in the American academy, then, have options in front of them. They can opt to develop a radical critique from already legitimized sources in the field, but may need to question how they became legitimized (and sacralized) as colonially sanctioned dissent. They can opt to creatively subsume coloniality and resistances into a hybrid third space creating a new superseding option, but should consider the unequal weight of a Euro-Christian framework that may inadvertently result in the fulfilment of the work of colonial evolutionism. Or they can unmask the systemic allure of totality by acknowledging colonial difference and think from, and with, critical thought emerging from barbaric (rejected, negated, or invisibilized) cosmovisions. These can all be radical options, but not all of them will be decolonial proposals.
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Wooden model of a house explaining the Constitution created by activists in Ahmedabad, India. Photo courtesy of RAJEEV KHANNA/TheCitizen.in. Used with permission.
Beginning on December 14, 2019, and lasting until they were forcibly removed when India went into lockdown to address COVID-19 on March 24, 2020, protesters occupied a major road in the neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh in the southern part of Delhi in order to demonstrate against the combined effects of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC)—a 24/7 protest that has lasted over 100 days. Susan Ostermann’s post explains these new laws in greater detail. At the heart of this peaceful protest were women from the middle-class neighborhood itself who were often identified in the press as “housewives.” Many of them were middle-aged or older and many were wearing hijab. Around them sprung up street art, a revolutionary library, children’s activities, and more. The protest inspired solidarity protests around the country. Protesters faced threats from far-right Hindu groups to forcibly clear the area. These threats materialized into actual violence when vigilantes fired guns into crowds of nearby protesters. On social media and in the press, protesters at Shaheen Bagh describe protesting not just against the CAA and NRC (and the Bharatya Janata Party [BJP], the ruling party in government that passed these laws) but on behalf of India’s constitution and the secularism it enshrines, offering an argument about how to define Indian democracy, and who best represents that democracy. They do so by deploying precisely the identity markers that supposedly mark them as oppressed and other: their status as women, female family members, and Muslims.
The Shaheen Bagh protests deploy representations of kinship and home to underscore the vision of a secular, inclusive democracy enshrined in the constitution. Rather than understanding the home as a passive space to which persons retreat from the “real” world, the protesters at Shaheen Bagh demonstrated the enormously generative potential of home and kinship for rewriting democratic values. The Shaheen Bagh protests are innovative not because of the gendered identity of the protesters, but because of how protesters have mobilized that identity to contest powerful scripts of citizenship, religion, family, and nation. Shaheen Bagh’s protesters offer lessons for how to reconceptualize links between public and private, providing new terms for inhabiting domesticity and democracy. Such reconceptualizations are especially valuable as the COVID-19 crisis underscores connections between private labor and public value which are typically hidden from view.
The protesters at Shaheen Bagh address and invert the representations of Islam, gender, and family that the BJP has deployed to defend the CAA and other legislation that many see as Islamophobic. In passing the CAA, India’s ruling party has suggested that some people belong in the Indian nation-state while others do not, depending on religious affiliation. This notion builds on longstanding efforts to portray Muslims in India as outsiders, “invaders,” or, more recently, “guests” of a Hindu nation who ought to follow the norms of their hosts. The supposed negative treatment of women at the hands of Muslim men plays a central role in these representations (while conveniently distracting from the many ways the Indian state has failed to support women from all backgrounds). Since the late twentieth century, the Hindu right has targeted Muslim family laws, and their supposed ill-treatment of Muslim women, to argue for universal (read: Hindu) family and inheritance laws. Some on the Hindu right have even suggested that gender inequality in contemporary India stems from the arrival of the Mughal empire. These strategies allow right-wing Hindu nationalists to co-opt critiques of gender inequality in contemporary India for the sake of undermining the status of Muslims in India more broadly. Narratives of oppressed Muslim women draw on a long-established, globally circulating Islamophobic discourse that treats the status of women as an index of how “civilized” a social group is. Such anxieties about the status of women were a trope in civilizing missions going back to India’s colonization by the British, and continue to justify Western imperial missions in the Middle East and Central/South Asia (as numerous historians and anthropologists have demonstrated, including Lata Mani,Antoinette Burton, Mrinalini Sinha and Lila Abu-Lughod).
As the contemporary life of these narratives shows, binary distinctions such as civilized/uncivilized, oppressed/liberated, and public/private are highly portable, easily translated from one scale of comparison to another (what anthropologists call “recursion”). For example, longstanding distinctions between the “West” as “civilized” in comparison with “uncivilized” colonized societies (or, today, the “developing world”) can, in turn, be used by powerful groups within so-called “developing” countries like India to distinguish between more or less “civilized” citizens based on religious identity. The cruel irony of these recursive translations is that they enlist people in reproducing the very distinctions that, at other scales of comparison, are used to marginalize them. On the other hand, such interpretive practices can allow people to remake those categories by applying them to new contexts. In Shaheen Bagh, for example, a group of “housewives” domesticates the public space of a major road, and in so doing emphasizes that such public spaces were home all along.
The Shaheen Bagh protests invert representations of Muslim women as oppressed by the men of their community by centering a leaderless group of Muslim women who emphasize their status as women and as family members. Instead of being trapped at homes run by men who are not themselves full, “real” citizens of the nation, they present themselves as representatives of the nation by invoking their status as female kin. They draw on the language of family to describe their relations with fellow protestors. The older protesters are frequently described as “dadis,” grandmas, and visitors describe being addressed as betis, daughters. To those who paint Muslims as guests overstaying their welcome, these invocations of female kinship provide a different language of belonging in the nation state: grandmothers always ready to welcome you home. In claiming ties of intergenerational kinship, protesters draw on shared understandings of female familial solidarity. Such claims of kinship push back against the NRC, which requires citizens to prove citizenship via documentary evidence of property ownership and descent from male kin—documentation less readily available to women than to men.
At the same time, such invocations invert assumptions that female kin are subordinate or passive, shared across communities in India (and beyond). These aren’t just dadis—they’re described in the press as dabaang dadis, bold or fearless grannies. In invoking female ties of kinship, these dabaang dadis respond to the aggressive, austere models of masculinity that inform the Hindu right, where leaders emphasize a virility that derives from ascetic discipline. These are best encapsulated in representations of Prime Minister Modi, who lives alone, or in representations of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ajay Mohan Bisht, known as Yogi Adityanath, who dresses in the saffron robes of a mendicant. For these leaders, such discipline must also be applied to the nation itself, which must be defended via borders and bullets. Against this model, the women of Shaheen Bagh draw on longstanding ideas about home and family to experiment with other modes of belonging, one where citizens are strengthened rather than weakened through their relations with diverse others, where open-ended relations of pyaar, love and affection, draw citizens to the nation. When vigilantes chanting right-wing slogans fired at protesters, protesters responded with a nara, a protest slogan of their own, while holding signs that said “not bullets but flowers:” Desh ke in pyaaron pe phool barsao saaron pe (Let flowers rain on the heads of those beloved of the country).
In reframing the links between gender, kinship, and citizenship, Shaheen Bagh’s protesters are remaking the definition of secularism in India. Against those who seek to use religion to define who can call India home, offering, at best, a space of tenuous tolerance for “guests,” protesters at Shaheen Bagh and others are reimagining constitutional secularism as a kind of home, a space of belonging. This approach is beautifully encapsulated in images that circulated in the wake of the CAA’s passage, documenting efforts to create educational “constitution houses” that embody India’s constitution as a literal house, with key tenets providing the foundation, windows, and roof. Along the roofline, above the door, reads the words: “this home belongs to people of all religions.”
Julia Kowalski is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs and a concurrent faculty member in the Gender Studies Program and in the Department of Anthropology. A cultural anthropologist by training, she has been conducting fieldwork in north India since 2007, focusing on issues of gender, kinship, women’s rights, personhood, gendered violence, and institutional practices.
Kowalski’s research draws upon methods and theories from cultural, medical, and linguistic anthropology to understand how people work together across differences of culture, social status, and political commitments to create social change. Her current project examines how elite activists, middle-class female staff, and clients facing household violence debate the meaning of women's rights, via an ethnographic study of family counseling centers run by women’s rights NGOs in Rajasthan.
“The name of Jesus is above COVID-19.” Message on a sign at Joy Christian Center in St Cloud, Minnesota. Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull.
The woman leans confidently out of her car window, her right hand at high noon on the steering wheel. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” she tells the reporter for CNN, who has just asked about her decision to attend a crowded late afternoon evangelical church service in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. “Aren’t you concerned you could infect other people inside?” the reporter presses. The woman swings her head defiantly, her straight black hair catching the overhead lights. “No, no, I’m covered in Jesus’s blood,” she says. People who don’t go to her church “could get me sick,” she says, when she goes to Walmart or Home Depot, “but I’m not, because I’m covered in Jesus’s blood.” Then she drives off.
It may protect this woman against infection, but Jesus’s blood paints me into an epistemological corner. I have argued for an approach to religion I’ve been calling plural ontological realism, which in this case means I take this woman at her word: her experience of Jesus being really present to her in the community of other Christians (she was clear in her brief comments how important the church was to her) protects her from infection (and perhaps from infecting others, although she seemed to care less about this). I am committed to resisting the impulse, deep in the theoretical inheritances of the modern study of religion, to lift this woman out of the ontology in which she became (or remade herself as) a subject and through which she lives her subjectivity in relation to others, among whom are, in this instance, the people she meets in Walmart and Home Depot. Any theoretical work about the role of religion must begin (although it does not end) with the reality of this woman’s claim of immunity, within her world, without translating it, and relocating her, into alien ontologies. This is not to suggest that her world is singular: it is adjacent to and cross-cut by other ontologies (such as the reporter’s). Amid this ontological diversity, evangelical Christianity of a particular sort is determinative for this woman, at this moment in history and in her life.
Every sentence of the preceding paragraph requires discussion, but this is not why I am here right now. Rather, I want to think outwards from the corner. I begin by wondering why, ever since I heard this woman’s comment on the night’s news, I have been feeling I needed to do something about it. What is this imperative and where does it come from? Is it the disciplinary impulse to speak for others (she seems to be doing ok on this front); or, is it the drive to translate her to others? If it’s the latter, then to what end? The way the question insisted on itself to me was specifically in the form: what is to be done about this woman? Eventually, I came to see this as an articulation of the drive to power that moves through the study of “religion” in modernity. We scholars of religion are more aware of this drive now, but, still, the temptation exists to offer our services as deputies of law and order. Resisting this is the first thing to do in response to this woman’s statement about being washed in Jesus’s blood. I accept the ontology of facts as given: she continues to shop at Walmart in a pandemic because she is protected by the blood of the Lord in which she has been washed.
Ontology is not a structural or structuring given; it is the living environment of experience, imagination, relationship, and understanding. This woman leaning out of the car on an Ohio evening lives amid “a plurality of actual worlds,” in philosopher Markus Gabriel’s words, and so do we who do not share her vision (16).[1] This plurality calls for, in response, a disciplined agility in moving among worlds, a sort of ontological multilingualism. Sometimes, in certain circumstances, such agility is possessed by religious practitioners themselves (and not just in the modern or contemporary eras). This woman might have thought to herself, well, when I’m in Walmart, I will be among people who do not live in my world and I must act accordingly. Why she apparently does not is itself a question for religious, historical, psychological, and sociological analysis. To accept the plurality of actual worlds is to recognize discrepancies of power among them, as well as within them. This woman’s world appears to be underwritten by the privileges of whiteness, social class, and a certain kind of Protestantism that has been aligned—as much by scholars of evangelicalism as by politicians—with US nationalism in its most exclusivist iterations.
Leaning out of her window, the evangelical Christian woman in Ohio was speaking a world that was as much political as religious, as racially white as Christian (although African American and Latinx evangelical Christians have been heard to say similar things, which raises some interesting questions too), and as nationalist as evangelical. It is neoliberal in its qualified individualism (qualified by the allusion to the fellowship of others like her, in the context of which her supernatural immunity is given). It is exclusionary. Christ’s blood is circulating through all of this. And it is circulating through the insistence of Georgia’s governor on opening bowling alleys, tattoo parlors, hair salons, and fitness clubs well before knowledgeable health experts think it is safe to do so, even though he makes no reference to Christ or his blood. In this way, plural ontological realism renders the old sacred/secular dualism otiose.
If I am not thinking about what I might do about this woman, what’s on my mind in the corner? I am curious about how this woman’s neighbors are responding to her confidence in Jesus’s blood, if they do not share it, or her non-evangelical family members, and how she will deal with their concerns in turn. Why is she (seemingly) unable to extend Jesus’s protective ablution to all people or to align it with the self-sacrifices of health care professionals in this time, to see the holy in the work of doctors, nurses, and orderlies? I am aware that her most strident construction of her ontology comes in response to a question posed by a representative of what has been framed in her world as “fake news.” Would she be as strident were her voice not amplified at the highest levels of political and economic power? I wonder if this woman is ever drawn to realities that are alien to the ones she knows and, if so, where she may encounter them. I also acknowledge—as a citizen of this democracy—that I find her position on the pandemic absolutely terrifying. I have been intrigued by an idea circulating among my solidly left-wing Twitter friends that asks people who refuse social distancing on ontological grounds to accept responsibility for their health care if they are infected with Covid-19 and to be taxed accordingly for the health of others. Ontology creates responsibility, for this woman—and for those of us who live alongside her.
I cannot reassure anyone that what this woman says is “not religion,” “not Christianity,” that she is crazy, that hers is an example of bad Christian evangelicalism versus some putatively good version of it, or that her claim of supernatural immunity is alien to the world that “we” moderns ostensibly inhabit. That is modern religion on display in the Ohio parking lot. The attempt to cauterize it with any prefix—anti/pre/alternative—is self-delusion. Religion(s) have rarely been “modern” in the normative sense of the word. The other-than-modern quality of modern religion empowers the challenge particular religious actors pose to contemporary political conventions, for instance. It also makes religion(s) exceedingly dangerous. We need new ways of thinking about how to live with, and against, ontologies as threatening to our common life as this woman’s is, before she kills us all.
[1] Gabriel defines “ontology” as “the systematic investigation into the meaning of ‘existence,’ or rather the investigation of existence itself aided by insight into the meaning of ‘existence’” (5). There is a new interest in ontology and in what might be called lived metaphysics across the disciplines. A helpful overview may be found in Greg Anderson, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Robert Orsi is Grace Craddock Nagle Chair of Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also Professor of Religious Studies, History, and American Studies. His most recent book is History and Presence, which was published in 2016 under the Belknap Imprint of Harvard University Press. Orsi is currently at work on a book called Give Us Boys about the formation of young men at a Jesuit high school in New York City in 1967–1971 as an episode in the broader history of modern Catholic sexuality, class, and urbanism.
The exterior of the Sehitlik Mosque, Berlin. Photo courtesy of author.
This week, the adhan (Muslim call to prayer) can be heard throughout Germany and the Netherlands. Sometimes, it joins with the sound of church bells, an unfamiliar and evocative symphony, as religious institutions offer support not only to their constituents, but to whole, shaken societies. For the first time in history, both countries have allowed the adhan to regularly penetrate public space. This is unquestionably a response to the COVID-19 crisis, a desperate grappling for social unity and godly protection. Calling out, with the knowledge that no one can come together, over a hundred mosques seek to soothe collective wounds. These wounds, of course, cut deeper in particular communities, as we have seen in African American communities in the United States—those already marginalized are affected at far more devastating levels than the economically and socially sheltered.
Still, this public call to prayer is remarkable not only in sound but even more so in its social meaning. Just months ago, such a move would have appeared nearly impossible. In my forthcoming book, Mosques in the Metropolis, I critique the European project of modernity by unsettling assumptions about “progress” and “civility” through two mosque communities in London and Berlin. Exposing the deep and unrelenting inequality faced by diverse Muslim populaces, as well as their capacities to exert agency, the mosque rises as both a threshold space and an interstitial opportunity for building solidarity. Such solidarity may center on fomenting deep mutual support within, and yet extending beyond, Muslim communities into the cities and states in which they live. This includes focusing on shared concerns, from the natural environment’s decay to supporting vulnerable populaces, and building knowledge that can transcend taken-for-granted assumptions about Islam. In Berlin, such solidarity emerged at the Sehitlik Mosque under the leadership of Ender Cetin, who invited the whole city into the mosque through daily tours, and yet also encouraged mosque community members to deeply engage in the city, through participation in civic activism, educating on pluralism in schools, and running for political office.
Today, as the world comes to a grinding halt, the mosque rises as such again, offering an opportunity for deepened solidarity through a medium that can touch us even in isolation, uniting us through sound.
My book project, and my personal surprise in the public adhan, are both rooted in the reality that Europe has long resisted the inclusion of its Muslim populaces, who largely migrated as post-colonial migrants and guestworkers, called to rebuild fractured European countries after World War II. It has since delimited their rights, resisting the bestowal of citizenship for decades (for instance, Germany only changed its citizenship laws from blood-based to birth-based in 2000). Even with legal equality, politicians and media outlets long continued to suggest that Muslims and/or Islam cannot fully belong to European nation-states. Over the last few years, Dutch and German politicians like German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer have continued to debate whether Islam belongs to their respective nation-state.
Muslim bodies, and institutions like mosques, have been regulated, even demonized in European public life. We have seen the Muslim body as site of conflict emerge in the so-called headscarf debates, which limit Islamic garb in public life, across countries like France, Germany, Spain, and Denmark. We have witnessed the securitization of Muslim bodies in xenophobic and violent government anti-radicalization agendas. And we have watched the form of the nation-scape shaped by fear, such as through the banning of minarets by popular referendum in Switzerland in 2006. Until recently, the far-right wing has been on the rise, building its base specifically on anti-immigrant and anti-Islam platforms. In Germany, for example, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, capitalizing on discontent with the massive refugee migration in 2015, received enough votes to enter parliament in 2017.
In such contexts of resistance to plurality, discourses of tolerance have emerged. As Wendy Brown critiques in her book Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, “tolerance” is at once a “discourse of power and practice of governmentality” (8) achieved through a practice of toleration, a making do with that which makes the dominant group in society uncomfortable. Tolerance, often attached to rhetoric about Muslims in Europe, is a bitter civilizing discourse disguised by a saccharine rhetorical wrapper of the enlightened, liberal sensitivity—a contronym, perfectly synonymous with its own antonym: intolerance.
Instead of tolerance, late sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued in “Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence,” that we must move to solidarity; in the words of Bauman scholar Shaun Best, true solidarity emerges when “the ‘I am responsible for the Other’ and ‘I am responsible for myself’ come to mean the same thing” (317). As another Bauman scholar Keither Tester asserts, this shifts the goal away from being “with” the other to being “for” the other. Solidarity in this sense does not equalize but rather locates value in each person and each community on its own grounds. A public adhan is arguably an expression of such solidarity, rather than tolerance, as it transcends the usual attempts to reshape Islam vis-à-vis mainstream secular norms.
COVID-19 has changed everything, turning our worlds upside down. It is as if we have all tumbled down Alice’s well to Wonderland, where big is small and small is big, and nothing looms larger than our new, collective fear. This new normal has, in many ways, lifted us out of ourselves. And it holds pain and lessons for us all. In Flesh and Stone, social theorist Richard Sennett eloquently argues that solidarity can emerge through a recognition of pain—of the self and of the other—creating a civic body anew. Today, support for the AfD is suddenly waning, as many of the same refugees once demonized serve as frontline medical workers, responding to a call to save lives.
From our new vantage point, former fears seem small, our former, open lives filled with the lives of others not just big but beautiful. This evokes Freud’s conceptualization of “the narcissism of minor differences”: focusing on what we do not share in order to construct distinct, and superior, selves—occurring on the cultural, as much as individual, level. Through such “narcissism of minor differences,” Europe has long defined itself against and above its religious minorities, both Muslims and Jews. And this has, over a thousand years, eroded opportunities for deep and lasting solidarity time and again.
Has COVID-19 shaken Europe, and the so-called “Western” world writ large, awake from their dreams of superiority? Does it have the power to invoke a reckoning with the deep and lasting inequalities and violence faced by Muslim communities across the continent?
These questions remain unanswered, if not unanswerable in this still-acute moment. Yet in this crisis, we are revealed together and apart as equally fragile and equally human. And our shared humanity nests within our shared fragility. Within this metaphorical set of nesting dolls, we can see solidarity emerge: in individuals devoting their days to making medical supplies and neighborhood supports for the vulnerable. And we can hear the rumblings of solidarity in the adhan, answering the so-called “question of Islam” in Europe with a prayer, perhaps once and for all laying it to rest.
Of course this has not erased a deep colonial and imperial history that led to the migration of Muslim populaces to Europe in the first place; nor the violence perpetrated against their bodies then, and their bodies now, in the form of formidable security states. But it does make visible, or rather audible, Islamic forms so long excluded from the public sphere. As Jeanette Jouili and Annelies Moors show in their special issue on Islamic soundscapes, Islam is deeply rooted in auditory practices and histories; public forms of “sonic” Islam contribute to what they term “a politics of listening.” The sound of the adhan permeating German and Dutch publics today shows the sociopolitical power of a soundscape transformed and through it, the nationscape is transformed as well. Here we are confronted with the opportunity of not only seeing or hearing, but really listening.
The interior of the Sehitlik Mosque, Berlin. Photo courtesy of author.
I visited the mosque that began this new tradition in 2014, located in Duisburg-Marxloh, a neo-Ottoman form facing a church, where tour guides stressed that their community belongs not only to the global Muslim ummah, but to Germany. I remember the face of an old man sitting on a stone bench outside of the mosque, hands folded on his lap, who greeted me with warmth, and an old woman who patted my hand when I first entered the mosque. The mosque community’s openness, its vulnerability, and its willingness to push back against the so-called Islam/Europe divide, moved me then. The soothing sound of its adhan moves me now.
Today, from Duisburg-Marxloh to Amsterdam, mosques are singing a prayer across Europe. In this prayer made out of song, a newfound togetherness rises, and with it an invigoration of a solidarity I never imagined possible (but who among us imagined the current state of the world to be possible?). Who knows if and whether it will deepen and last; that is a conscious choice to be made when the world moves to its familiar rhythm again. Yet this is a moment of reckoning not to be overlooked, where boundaries—so deeply etched in our geographies, and deeper in our imaginaries—can be overcome. Let us not forget this lesson when the dust settles, and we, of all religions, ethnicities, races, nationalities, mourn our dead. Let this serve as a reminder that so much more unites us than that which divides us, and that we can—and should—be for one another, when we begin again. And until then, let us find comfort in this harmony found in crisis, in a new civic body constructed from the pain, and the hope, that we share.
Elisabeth Becker is a cultural sociologist and postdoctoral fellow with the Religion & Its Publics Project and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Her research explores Muslim communities in urban contexts across Europe and the United States. She is currently completing her book (Mosques in the Metropolis), a comparative ethnographic work on European mosques, contracted with University of Chicago Press, and has published with the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, International Journal for Islamic Architecture, and Annals of Tourism Research.
Stockholm public library. Photo courtesy of the author.
Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, scholars of religion and other disciplines in the humanities have been looking for alternative methods and theories to represent the Other. But finding this alternative has been elusive. In a recent reflection, Birgit Meyer lamented the fact that the humanities remain Eurocentric. One of the challenges of decolonization is to address this desire for an alternative method and theory against the reality of a distorted field. Whilst scholarship has become steadily global, the field continues to be dominated by what V. Y. Mudimbe called a Colonial library.
The study of Islam in the modern world offers an opportunity to address this dilemma in a concrete way. From the US to Pakistan, there has been a renewed interest in applying theories of religion to Islam. In doing so, scholars turn to the comparative study of religions that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe during the highpoint of colonialism. While a postmodernist skepticism of the discipline of comparative religion is readily embraced in the field, there is no equivalent skepticism of the colonial condition. Thus, J. Z. Smith’s critical reflections on the study of religions are easily remembered against theologians who work in the field. In contrast, the colonial imbrication of the discipline is ignored or only briefly acknowledged. For example, Russell McCutcheon’s critical review of phenomenology is directed against Eliade and most scholars of religion who betray a hint of theological or sui generis thinking, but is virtually silent on the colonial condition of the discipline. Scholarship monitors the intrusion of theology into the discipline, while allowing colonialist assumptions to go unchecked and unthought. Colonialism is often euphemistically represented as modernization or a benign intervention that changed the world.
For Islamic and religious studies, critical voices within Islam offer a decolonial perspective that challenges these assumptions. These critical voices emerged in response to colonialism in different parts of the world, at the very time that the study of religions was taking off in the colonial centers of power. The contrast between the scholarship of the colonizers and colonized has, to my mind, never been seriously discussed. Critical voices in Islam have certainly not been ignored, but they have been evaluated against the backdrop of social processes or political alliances created by colonialism. For example, modernization, traditionalization, and postmodernism are first found in the West, and then adjusted and hyphenated for the rest of the world. Political alliances are similarly measured against new political realities created in the colonial and post-colonial centers of global power.
The author with the bust of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Photo courtesy of author.
Paying close attention to the intellectual labour of critical voices from colonized contexts leads us to new insights on how to think about religion. In a book published in 2009, I focussed on how intellectuals like Muhammad Abduh and Sayyid Ahmad Khan grappled with new definitions for thinking about religion and Islam. I argued that a new intellectual discourse was developed on Islam for Muslim societies. This discourse was entangled with colonialism, but its intellectual labor on religion as a concept was unmistakable. My work was inspired by Talal Asad and David Chidester’s critical reflections on the construction of a discourse of religion in the Western tradition, in which Asad provincialized the discourse of religion in the history of the West, while Chidester showed its colonial roots. In a twist of irony, Asad and Chidester have been followed by many other reflections on Western scholars; their critical reflection has accentuated Western scholarship. As in similar navel-gazing exercises of critical scholarship, the Colonial Library became even more dominant than before.
In my book, I took a different approach. Following Asad and Chidester diligently, I could have paid attention to how the category of religion was used implicitly and explicitly by Western scholars of Islam. But taking a different course of action in this book, I paid attention to the intellectual labor of Muslim critical voices instead. In a decolonial gesture, I turned my gaze away from Western scholars on religion, and paid attention to how religion was theorized in different political and social contexts.
I have since realized that taking these critical voices seriously as intellectual labor goes against a dominant view of the study of religion. Since the nineteenth century, religion has been conceptualized in a number of diverse ways. But one dominant thread running through the discourse is captured in Peter Berger’s metaphor of a sacred canopy. Functionalist theories from Durkheim onwards emphasized that religion totally and completely envelops its members. Adherents to religious traditions can only see the world through its rituals, narratives, and beliefs. In a famous phrase by Clifford Geertz, religious symbols clothe the social world “with … an aura of factuality” (4). Notwithstanding critical reflections of religion, this perception of the power of religion remains dominant. Critique is not expected from religious discourse.
Alongside the totalizing effect of religions, the study of religion generally argues or assumes that only the modern scholar can see the truth of reality. Unlike the religious subject, the scholar is not enveloped in an “aura” of factuality, but sees things as they are really are. Self-criticism is not entirely missing in the study of religions, but it is believed that eventually secular critique is the only critique worthy of its name. In contrast, I would like to suggest that critical voices within Islam and other religious traditions should be counted within the tradition, and recognized for the work they do against such totalizing accounts of religious experience. These critical voices shatter the vision of religion as a sacred canopy, and call for a more complex and differentiated model of thinking about religion.
In conclusion, critical studies of religion have accepted the fragility of the concept of religion, but they have problematically focused entirely on the Western tradition. In response to Asad, Chidester, and others, the Western tradition is sometimes provincialized and exceptionalized in one move. In this latter practice, no other theorizing of religion is said to be possible. Religion belongs to the West and its academy. A decolonial approach such as I have offered pursues a comparative exercise in which the Western tradition is neither universal nor exceptional. It must enter into dialogue and conversation with other ways of thinking of religion and the religious.
A decolonial gesture in the study of religion must address the challenge laid down by Said. Since his significant publication, scholars have searched relentlessly for an alternative. But over this period of time, the Colonial/Western Library has become even more dominant and hegemonic. One way of addressing this anomaly is to seriously look at the critical intellectual labor that is found within religious traditions. Such a gesture may unseat a deep-seated assumption about religion, shared by nineteenth- and early twenty-first-century scholars, that religious worlds are totalizing.
Prof. Abdulkader Tayob holds the chair in Islam, African Publics and Religious Values at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has published on Islam in South Africa, modern Islamic Thought, and Islam and the History of Religions.
The Waldseemüller map from 1507 is the first map to include the name “America” and the first to depict the Americas as separate from Asia. There is only one surviving copy of the map, which was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2001 for $10 million. Credit: Martin Waldseemüller / Public domain.
The history and study of the anthropological category of religion is deeply entangled with the formation of modernity/coloniality. In this context, whoever defines, identifies, and explains religion wields much power. Modernity/coloniality is not meant to describe the experience of modernity in the colonial territories, as opposed to modernity in the metropolitan European empires or the “developed” world. Rather, modernity/coloniality refers to the logic of colonial differences and hierarchies that are constitutive of the idea and project of Western modernity since at least the sixteenth century.
It was in the context of the early formation of Western modernity as an idea and a project that the category of religion emerged as an indispensable term for making sense of the difference between the colonizers and the colonized. Since then, “religion” as a category of classification and analysis has served as a dispositive of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being in the formation and solidification of “modern Western civilization.” It has been crucial in the constitution of the “secular line” and the “color-line,” understood broadly, that are at the center of how the globalized Western human sciences and the modern state understand and forcibly construct a “world.”
Religious Studies and the various sub-fields that constitute it can participate in the collective struggle for ideas, practices, and institutions that aim to overcome the limit of the “modern world order” by engaging in a decolonial turn. This turn involves enriching, complicating, and sometimes moving away from a focus on the classical debates in the field of Religious Studies and Theology to an embrace of fields and epistemic practices grounded in decolonial transdisciplinarity, such as Ethnic studies and related bodies of thought and practice.
Religion and the Colonial Project
An initial question that scholars during the sixteenth century pursued in the context of conquest and colonization was whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas had religion or not. The question indicated a break with the general presumption that the Orbis Christianus (Christian world) was populated by people with religion and that the main difference between them resided in the degree of truth or falsity in their beliefs. It was a dangerous question to explore: having no religion could indicate the lack of a soul, which pointed to an ontological difference, and not merely to an epistemological difference, between the beliefs of conquistadors and those they colonized. In short, if religion was a universal characteristic of humans, then not having religion indicated a lack of humanity.
In the Christian theocentric paradigm, a religious other was someone whose beliefs can be questioned, and the main goal was conversion. In the emerging paradigm, on the contrary, the non-religious other is someone whose very humanity is put into question, which opens up a horizon of unexpected possibilities in terms of practices of engagement and behavior. Determining who has religion and who doesn’t, as well as what kind of religion they have, then, became crucial not only for social organization, but also for making sense of the globe. This was not a small matter given that European Christian kingdoms and the emerging nation-states became the largest empires that the world has ever seen, and that European travel narratives, racial thinking, as well as economic and geo-political ambitions, informed the creation of maps and narratives that were used to navigate, order, and make sense of space and time in the world.
The differentiation between people with religion and those without it had important precedents in the “Old World,” which is why Columbus was able to deploy the concept in his first contact with Taino peoples on the island of Guanahani in 1492. It is necessary to continue studying these uses prior to 1492, just like it is important to consider the Middle Passage, after 1492, to understand the full scope of how the differentiation between people with religion and people without it came to define Western attitudes toward colonized peoples in the unparalleled planetary expansion of the system of presuppositions, symbols, and institutions that is called Western modernity. It is also important to consider that more crucial than the specific categorical distinction between people with religion and people without it is what it creates: an environment where, no matter how well a racialized group performs, demonstrates, or is simply assumed to have “religion” or any features reserved for humans, their full humanity is still continually put into question.
Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois. Credit: Bain News Service, publisher / Public domain.
Looking back from the vantage point of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the formidable social scientist and thinker W. E. B. Du Bois recognized the problem well when he wrote, “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question”: “How does it feel to be a problem?”[1] This perpetual question is a manifestation of the Manichean misanthropic skeptical attitude toward Black people, indigenous people, and people of color that entered Western modernity perhaps most clearly through the distinctions between having religion (and a soul) and not having religion.[2] This skeptical attitude is like a dangerous poison that turns a desire for progress and civilization into genocidal acts.
Du Bois confirms the ever-present character and reach of this modern/colonial attitude when he writes that “above [the] actual words and obligato of tune and tone” of “even the sweeter souls of the dominant world” continually plays the following recommendation:
‘My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born—white!’”[3]
Du Bois describes a social reality where Manichean misanthropic skepticism is no longer a doubt or a question, and not merely a matter of science and fact that can be refuted with evidence, but a belief and a tenet of faith. The audacity of such a religion, a “religion of whiteness” or “white religion,” to use Du Bois’s terms, is such that the recommendation of a prayer for whiteness turns the racist question about the humanity of someone into the expectation of self-annihilation—to kill the Black in oneself so that the white can be born.
Misanthropic skepticism thus generates its own colonial and racist spirituality as well as a prayer that serves as a constant reminder about the meaning and value of whiteness: “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”[4] The identification and critical analyses of questions, attitudes, prayers, religions, and spiritualities that harbor and reproduce coloniality is as important as the analysis of “religious” formations that counter the prayers and spirituality of whiteness. These are all important areas for decolonial religious studies, decolonial philosophy of religion, and decolonial theologies.
In short, the anthropological discourse about religion was from the outset deeply implicated in the discourse of race and in projects of global expansion and socio-political control. It is thus not possible to understand the genesis and power of the anthropological category of religion without understanding race and modern colonialism, and it is not possible to understand the formation and workings of race without understanding the various uses and functions of “religion” in the modern/colonial world. Determining who has religion and what kind of religion they have is clearly then, not merely a disinterested scholarly affair, but a crucial endeavor in the design of an increasingly globalized modern/colonial order.
The Spread of Colonial Logics
Surely, with time, Western societies conceded (or were made to concede) that basically all peoples around the globe had one religion or another, just as they had culture. But it is important to recognize that this only happened in a context where the West found other markers by which to distinguish itself and maintain its sense of superiority over non-Western others. This was the case especially in relation to “Black” people, whom they regarded as natural slaves. The new terms used to discriminate were philosophy and science, which opened up the possibility of formally conceiving the study of religion as a scientific affair or as an extension of philosophical reflections on religion or religious ethics.
The entanglement of science and philosophy in the reproduction of modernity/coloniality is clear in the reproduction of racist taxonomies, craniometry, and presuppositions about the intellectual capacities and autonomy of non-Western peoples through the 19th century, for example. In the United States, these found a home, probably less in religious seminaries than in the emerging universities of the time, which in turn became homes for Religious Studies. There were also notions of high culture and low culture, as well as of rational religions and primitive religions that came to inform work in the field. The classification of the religions of the colonized as primitive or irrational was instrumental to sustain the dehumanizing logic that justified colonialism and slavery.
The conception of religion as truly universal, including collectives that had been considered as lacking religion before—although not so clearly including people who were considered to be natural slaves—did not challenge the racist differentiation between the colonizers and the colonized. It rather became another form of colonization via inclusion. That is, Christian categories for understanding Christianity—as well as modern/colonial distinctions between the religious and the secular—became the optics through which other “religions” would be observed and analyzed. The religious would be distinguished from the secular, and Christianity would often be conceived as the religious formation most attuned with modernity and the secular organization of society.
In this framework, non-Western religions could only aspire to be represented as “world religions.” However, achieving this status would still keep them at odds with modernity because the number of followers and geographical extension of a religion does not endow it with the capacity to offer a ground for or to complement a rationally organized society. For regardless of geographical reach and size, in relation to Christianity any “world religion” could be represented as irrational. The political repercussions of this should be clear since the more irrational any “religion” is represented the more threatening it appears—take the discourse on Islam and Islamophobia today, for instance. Coloniality, therefore, takes place not only when certain practices are excluded from the category of religion, but also when they are included in it. A decolonial turn in the study of religion takes a critical engagement with this logic of categorization as a necessary step in the production of any new knowledge about religion or the religious.
Religious Studies and Decoloniality
Religious Studies has certain advantages over traditional disciplinary formations when it comes to engaging in a decolonial turn. To start, its interdisciplinary character can make the religious studies scholar less attached to the methods and organizing principles of any discipline than mono-disciplinary scholars. Interdisciplinarity can lead to a healthy skepticism of the powers of any given discipline in light of the way the categories it employs are bound up with categories central to other disciplines. And yet, interdisciplinarity falls short of introducing a decolonial turn because the modern Western disciplines are themselves typically built on the epistemological edifice of coloniality.
“La presión” by Giovani Diaz Morales. Mural in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photo courtesy of the author.
Combining Western-centric disciplines does not make the combination any less Western-centric or colonial. For example, religious studies scholars could employ linguistics and geography to study the Middle East and still reproduce Orientalism. Studying Judaism through the lenses of archaeology and hermeneutics could remain confined within and reproduce an anti-Semitic framework. Cultural anthropologists could add area studies to their scholarly tool set and also remain limited by explicitly or implicitly approaching indigenous populations as if they are passive or largely ignorant. In short, the proliferation of inter-disciplinarity by itself does not challenge the color-line. The same is true of reassertions of mono-disciplinary formations and of defenses of science, the humanities, and the liberal arts. More creative and audacious thinking is needed to turn academic disciplines and inter-disciplines, including Religious Studies, into consistent engines of decoloniality.
Given how instrumental the identification and study of religion has been for the conceptualization and legitimization of the modern/colonial order, Religious Studies has to engage in self-critique along with a wider critique of the modern European sciences to help dispel the limitations and dangerous effects of modernity/coloniality. For this, a positive relation with emancipatory and decolonial transdisciplinary spaces such as Ethnic Studies and related fields becomes necessary. These fields not only have a long history of critical engagement with the traditional disciplines, but they have also formulated questions and produced approaches that are crucial in uncovering coloniality. They generate knowledge that contributes to decolonization, and seek to create border zones of decolonial activity in between the university and a wide array of knowledges that are found outside it. A decolonial turn in Religious Studies through a generative interaction with Ethnic Studies and related fields, and with other decolonial projects inside and outside the university as well as in different parts of the world, is crucial to produce a twenty-first century Religious Studies. Likewise, as I hope that the analysis of white religion and prayer above demonstrates, fields such as Ethnic Studies and decolonial projects outside the academy could gain much from the analyses and insights of decolonial Religious Studies, decolonial philosophy of religion, and decolonial forms of religious thought and theology.
[2] For an exploration of misanthropy, white supremacy, and an analysis of a white God in an anti-black world see Lewis R. Gordon,Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism(Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995).
[3] W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Humanity Books, 2002 [1920]), p. 56.
[4] ibid., 56. A picture of “religious leaders” praying in the Oval Office with Donald Trump after he signed the proclamation for a national day of prayer on Sept. 1, 2017 lends itself to further analysis of the prayer of whiteness, white religion, and white Christianity. J. Kameron Carter uses the picture in his column entitled “Behind Christianity Today’s Editorial is a Deeper Crisis of America’s Religion of Whiteness,” Religion News Service, Dec. 24, 2019.
Columbus Before the Queen (1843) by Emanuel Leutze. Linking key events in the timeline of Ibero-colonial encounters, Leutze anachronistically depicts Columbus before the “Catholic Monarchs” inside the Alhambra palace of the recently conquered Emirate of Granada. {{PD-US}}
Decolonial thought presents important challenges to the academic study of religion. Numerous studies probing its relation to religion have been published in recent years within the various sub-disciplines in the field, yet the full significance decolonial thought offers for the study of religion needs yet to be unpacked. Decolonial thought and its analytic of modernity/coloniality as a theory and method for the study of religion calls for a careful reconsideration of the dominant—yet often unmarked and unnoticed–Eurocentric epistemic framework dictating the field.
The emergence of decolonial thought in the Americas is rooted in the long history of anti-colonial movement and criticism in Latin America and the Caribbean dating back to the first colonial encounter. It is, however, in the recent works of the Argentinean-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel and the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano that a clearer notion of decolonial thinking emerges that parallels and complements postcolonial theory as developed by Edward Said and his interlocutors. Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power highlights the polychronic nature of power that is operative in colonialism. On this account, coloniality manifests itself beyond the historical institution of colonization.
In his genealogical study of the modern category of religion, Talal Asad shows how the category of religion came to refer to a privatized notion of religion, one which essentializes religions based on their compatibility with the universalizing norm of secular rationality. Many have argued, after Asad, that the construction and the essentialization of the category of religion is itself a problematic endeavor because it reinforces the colonial framework of knowledge (Fitzgerald 2000). Likewise, because their definitions are dependent on one another, the emergence of the secular cannot be separated from the category of religion. Recent debates about secularism interrogate the modern concept of religion, pointing out the undying influence of religion in the constitution of the modern West (Charles Taylor, Jurgen Habermas, Jose Casanova). Yet others point at secularism’s significant role in the constitution of the modern colonial world. A critical study of secularism, they insist, attends to the complex structure of power configuration and power exchange at work in (neo)colonial governance as well. These complex structures both inform the construction of the secular and obscure the normativization of Western liberalism. In other words, the secular has been serving as the ideological banner of modern Western universalism which preserves Western/Christian hegemony while depoliticizing (the notion of) religion. [1]
A protest in Barcelona, where multiple organizations marched towards the statue of Columbus denouncing the genocide and the plundering of the entire colonial process of Latin America. Photo Credit: Flickr user fotomovimiento.org
The modern notion of religion can therefore be viewed as a product of the emergence of modernity/coloniality. Here, secularism functions as the mirror twin of modern religion that welds together the two ends of modernity/coloniality. As Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado Torres have shown, the invention of race cannot be articulated apart from the emergence of the modern concept of religion. The traditional lines demarcating ontological difference between people shifted from a religious language (religious difference) to a secular language of scientific reason (racial difference). In other words, Europe’s colonial imaginary was constituted by the newly emerging racial categories which now replaced religion’s role of drawing lines of hierarchal difference among diverse populations. From the fifteenth-century Spanish inquisition to the sixteenth-century Valladolid debate, and from the missionary activities in the new world to the rise of comparative study of religion in nineteenth century Europe, religion—in its secularized iteration—was racialized and became instrumental in marking off ontological differences which aligned with Europe’s colonial interests.[2]
The substantial role religion has played in the historical trajectory of modernity/coloniality is obscured by the hegemonic installation of secularism as the ideology dictating the Western epistemic framework. This means that the secular can be viewed as the medium through which religion enacts coloniality. The large absence of engagement with religion in the study of modernity/coloniality is symptomatic of the coloniality of knowledge which informs the religious/secular binary. Taking decolonial thought seriously means considering the challenges and insights decolonial thought offers to the study of religion, especially as they pertain to questions about methods, texts, sites, and conceptual frameworks. There is an urgent need for a Trans-Atlantic, decolonial theory (or a decolonial method) for the study of religion in which scholars re-situate the Americas and the Trans-Atlantic historical experience as primary sites for theorizing modern religion. The collusion between the colonial encounter and the emergence of the modern study of religion has been pointed out by many already. Many suggest that the eighteenth and nineteenth century of colonialism are primary reference points for this collusion. While the modern discipline of the academic study of religion was certainly informed by the more recent imperialist enterprises of Europe, there is a much older and more important time and place for understanding the symbiotic relation between the simultaneous invention of the colonial other and the modern imaginary of the West: the colonial encounter of 1492.
Using the Spanish-American colonial encounter as a frame of reference for the study of religion and modernity/coloniality offers a more efficient starting point for interrogating the fundamental epistemic assumptions inscribed in the conceptual-theoretical frameworks employed in the study of modern religion. At the same time, focusing here also helps us to read the Latin American intervention in religion from a decolonial angle, highlighting the decolonial seeds that existed all along in Latin American religious thought. Eventually, this endeavor will lead to the call for an engagement with Latin American/Caribbean intellectual traditions among scholars of religion in the North American academy.
A decolonial theory of religion would involve reconsidering the Trans-Atlantic process of imperial designing as the primary site for analyzing modern religion—a process which involves the reconfiguration of the religious (racial) cartography in the Iberian peninsula (Spanish Inquisition), the colonial encounter, and the theological-legal debates on the humanity of the colonial other (Valladolid debates).[3] Other key sites that deserve equally important attention include the various anti-colonial indigenous thoughts and movements, liberation philosophies and theologies, as well as the work of scholars who turn to the historical experience of the African diaspora in order to probe and reflect on an alternative to the modern/colonial order and its worldview that is based on anti-blackness.
An auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition and the execution of sentences by burning heretics on the stake in a market place. Wood engraving by Bocort after H.D. Linton.
The general lack of engagement with religion in the field of decolonial theory is indicative of the hegemonic secularist regime which informs the theoretical categories employed for identifying and analyzing religion. Consequently, not only is the role of religion in coloniality unexplored, but so are the complex intellectual genealogies constituting diverse forms of anti-colonial movements and ideas (many of which are inspired and informed by religious sources). This is why engaging secular texts and thinkers deserves equally as much attention as religious ideas and movements in the Americas. When considering the mutual imbrication of religious/aesthetic/cultural sensibilities and political vision in the Americas, it is highly imperative that we reconsider these secular texts (such as Frantz Fanon’s or José Martí’s) as sources for theorizing religion. Failure to do so results in the continuous loss of nuanced critiques and understandings of religion in those texts, as well as an understanding of the full implication of their political vision. The fact that the study of Latin American and Caribbean religions is primarily dominated by the study of local communities’ “practice” elements, while little attention is given to their intellectual production, might be symptomatic of the practitioner-scholar divide in religious studies that Aisha M Beliso-De Jesús has recently observed. Such a divide reproduces the academic division of labor between the West and the non-West, or between the northern hemisphere and the global south, in which the Christian West/North produces knowledge through theory (text), while the contribution of the non-Christian global South is consigned to practice (ritual).
Using the Ibero-colonial encounter as the primary reference for the study of religion and colonialism offers critical resources for reconsidering the problem of knowledge and power inscribed in the process of knowledge production within the field of religious studies. It exposes the complex layers of coloniality of power in which religion (and its study) is implicated. The analytics of modernity/coloniality allows us to see the critical importance of re-situating the study of Western religion in the Trans-Atlantic framework. At the same time, examining the colonial Americas from the Trans-Atlantic perspective leads us to a fuller understanding of Western-secular modernity which emerges with its inseparable other, coloniality.
An Yountae is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at California State University, Northridge. He specializes in Religions of the Americas with a particular focus on Latin American/Caribbean religion and philosophy. He is the author of The Decolonial Abyss (Fordham University Press, 2016) as well as the co-editor with Eleanor Craig of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021). His new book, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World Making is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2023).
Mexico City – Palacio Nacional. Mural by Diego Rivera showing the History of Mexico: Detail showing the burning of Maya literature by the Catholic Church. Image Credit: Wolfgang Sauber.
Theories of (de)coloniality raise profound questions and possibilities for the study of religion. Decolonial theory names and challenges enduring social, economic, political, and epistemic Eurocentrism that continues to define modernity even beyond the era of direct colonial domination. Bringing a decolonial lens to Contending Modernities opens up crucial new sites of analysis and engagement, as we consider how the academic study of religion—and the concept of religion itself—has helped to perpetuate modernity’s violences, and might yet contribute to the project of decoloniality. Contending Modernities’ new series, “Decoloniality and the Study of Religion,” brings together preliminary reflections from thinkers exploring the intersection between decolonial thought and the academic study of religion, with future posts planned that will delve into different sub-disciplines in the study of religion such as comparative religious ethics, philosophy of religion, and theory and method in the study of religion.
The Co-Constitution of Racial and Religious Difference
The essays in this series have two goals. First, they show how modern, Western conceptions of religion reinforce a global system of power that decolonial thinkers refer to as modernity/coloniality, revealing the complicity of the academic study of religion in these enduring patterns of violence. As An Yountae’s essay shows, decolonial thinkers draw an explicit linkage between the emergence of the category of religion itself and the simultaneous construction of racial and geographical (European/non-European) difference. In particular, decolonial thinkers point to 1492 and the completion of the settler-colonial Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the subsequent expulsion or forced conversion of the peninsula’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants. In the aftermath of the fall of Granada, Jews and Muslims who converted to Catholicism remained persecuted as marranos (“swine”) under suspicions of crypto-Jewish and crypto-Islamic practices, revealing a novel co-mingling of religious and racial difference articulated in contrast with its constitutive (white/Christian/European) other through an emergent racial logic of blood purity. These interlinked Iberian constructions of racial and religious difference were subsequently globalized through European colonial encounters with indigenous peoples on the land that would become the Americas, and through the explosion of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
In the centuries since, this foundational construction of religious difference has functioned alongside interrelated and intersecting constructions of racial, gender, and geographical difference to frame systems of social, economic, and political domination—the conditions of coloniality—that reinforce the supremacy of a Eurocentered modernity over and against the perceived inferiority of those it has relegated to its darker side. As Kwok Pui Lan’s essay illustrates, the colonial construction of religion vis-à-vis the referent of a Eurocentered modernity has also been subsequently transmuted through modernity’s “secularist myth,” further reinforcing the othering of non-Western religions as backwards, irrational, and even violent in contrast to the modern, rational, and supposedly peaceful West.
Against this historical backdrop, the academic study of religion has itself functioned as an active participant in the perpetuation of modernity/coloniality’s Eurocentric hierarchy of knowledge production. Both during and beyond the era of direct European colonization, Western scholars of religion have played an active role in the imposition of Western concepts that have invisibilized non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world, flattening the epistemologies and ontologies of non-Western peoples within universalizing categories to fit within modernity’s self-narration. The Western academic delineation of “culture” from “religion” as distinct objects of study functioned through the age of colonial expansion to reductively categorize any number of non-Western epistemologies and constituted ontologies—that is, lived non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world—into the “backwards” or “primitive” categories of folklore, myth, and superstition. Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s essay elucidates a similar Eurocentric logic at work in the construction of the category of non-Western “world religions,” a thinly-veiled proxy indicator for racial, geographic, and even temporal (not “fully modern”) difference that marks the non-Christian religious as constitutively outside the modern West. As Tomoko Masuzawa explains in The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (also quoted by Maldonado-Torres), rather than affirming global religious pluralism as Western scholars might claim, the imposition of the category of “world religions” itself naturalizes an explicitly Christian theological lens for understanding what constitutes a religion in the first place, while simultaneously inscribing all non-Christian religions within a hierarchal system of rank-ordering that continually reaffirms (modern, Western) Christian hegemony. Through these two interpretive categories—world religions and culture—Western scholars thus continue to advance narratives of racialized religious difference whose shared logics are traceable to the encounters of 1492, dividing non-Europeans into those possessed of the wrongreligions (Iberian Jews and Muslims first, and later adherents to any of the various non-Christian “world religions”) and those possessed of no religion recognizable as such (especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas).
De-Linking Religion From Modernity/Coloniality
Anti-neoliberalism protestors display flags and other symbols of Chile’s indigenous Mapuche people. Image Credit: Maximiliano Vega.
The second goal of these essays is to contribute to a burgeoning focus on the possibilities of imagining religion de-linked from the universalizing logics of modernity/coloniality. Such an approach rejects a modern Western conception of religion as a unitary, discrete variable that can be neatly disaggregated from other facets of human experience—what Kwok Pui Lan describes as “sui generis and separated from other cultural, social, and political aspects.” Instead, while highlighting the insufficiency of an unreconstructed understanding of religion, these essays also indicate the possibility of reconceptualizing religion in a way not reducible to the all-encompassing epistemological claims of a Westernized modernity. To this end, the essays in this series indicate the vital importance of the many ways of knowing and being in the world that have been suppressed in part through the use of the modern, Western category of religion itself.
Despite religion’s problematic genealogy as a category of Western analysis, these essays indicate the vital roles that decolonized accounts of religion might play in the formation of what decolonial thinkers refer to as “loci of enunciation“—a sense of positionality that reflects how one is acted upon by the global colonial matrix of power—from which ethical and political alternatives to modernity/coloniality can be imagined and enacted. Abdulkader Tayob’s essay in particular highlights the possibilities of a decolonized approach to Islamic Studies—and the study of religion more broadly—rooted not in the universalizing comparative hermeneutics of the colonizers, which presume a neutral vantage point that somehow transcends their subjects of study, but rather in the critical intellectual productions of Muslim communities themselves. Such an approach, to borrow a phrase from Tayob, helps to effect the provincialization of modern, Western approaches to the study of religion without simultaneously re-exceptionalizing them, opening the doors to dialogical possibilities between “other ways of thinking of religion and the religious.”
Decolonial thought unmasks the histories of violence that undergird Europe’s self-appointed status as the sole producer and purveyor of knowledge. Confronting these histories and their enduring structural manifestations requires that we also confront the epistemic legacies of colonialism that inhere within the Western academy. In the study of religion, this includes confronting the Eurocentrism of the field’s definitional concepts and categories and admitting the roles they have played in legitimizing the historic and enduring violences of Europe’s colonial projects. To that end, these essays offer an important and timely intervention into conversations on how the academic study of religion has participated in the maintenance of the modern/colonial world-system’s social, political, economic, and epistemic hierarchicalizations, while also indicating ways forward for the decolonial study of religion.
Garrett FitzGerald is a PhD candidate of Political Science & Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and Research Associate for Contending Modernities. Garrett’s research interests focus on translating religious resources of meaning into political action, especially around the genesis, conduct, cessation, and processes of reconciliation that follow communal violence. In particular, he hopes to build upon previous field research in Honduras, exploring ways in which religious actors and communities articulate and enact alternatives to violence.
Nigeen Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo by the author.
Kashmir has a special place in the South Asian imagination not only because of the famed beauty of its landscape but also because of its unique religious and cultural history. The idea of Kashmir as a “special place” is an old one. We encounter it in pre-modern Sanskrit religious and literary culture, Persian histories, political discourse in postcolonial South Asia, and in modern popular cultural forms such as Bollywood film. The historian Ronald Inden has made a compelling case that it is these imaginings of Kashmir as a special place that account for the intractability and intransigence of India and Pakistan on Kashmir.[1] What is, and remains, special about Kashmir is a unique vision of religious pluralism in its religious and cultural history that has not yet found political articulation.
The modern State of Jammu and Kashmir, which the Indian government has reorganized through an act of the Indian Parliament (Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019), was born as a feudatory, princely State of British India ruled by the Dogra dynasty of Jammu (1846–1947). It emerged at the end of the Anglo-Sikh war with military help from the British. The idea of Kashmir as a “special place” had already been in place when it was mobilized by Kashmiri Muslim nationalists from the 1920s to the 1940s to challenge the legitimacy of Dogra rule. But it was only in the 1930s, after the Dogra army massacred protesting Kashmiris, that the latter launched a popular movement for sovereignty that received support from prominent Indian nationalists agitating against the British colonial rule. Such nationalists included Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Maulana Azad. By the late 1930s, many Kashmiri Hindus had joined Kashmiri Muslims in this struggle for the idea that Kashmir belonged to Kashmiris. This movement was interrupted by the Partition of British India in 1947 and rapidly unfolding events in its aftermath (communal strife which spread from Punjab into the Jammu region, the revolt against the Dogra State in Poonch, and the arrival of the Indian Army in Kashmir on October 26, 1947 to ward off Muslim tribal irregulars from Western Pakistan backed by the Pakistan Army that had entered Kashmir, and the first India-Pakistan war of 1947–48). Even though the post-Partition sectarian strife receded, it morphed into a political dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Louis Mountbatten discusses the partition plan with Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and other leaders in 1947. {{PD-India}}
In 1948, the State of Jammu and Kashmir was effectively divided by the first India-Pakistan war into a Pakistani-controlled territory and an Indian-controlled territory (most of the Kashmiri-speaking region, however, passed into Indian control). The Kashmiri nationalists had close relations with the leaders of the Indian freedom struggle (Mahatma Gandhi had visited Kashmir just before India’s Partition in the hopes of reconciling different views in Kashmir) and the idea of Kashmir as a “special place” with unique political aspirations was recognized in the form of the special provisions of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The terms of Kashmir’s membership in the Indian union were debated for five months among the Kashmiri and the Indian leadership in 1949, with the result that Jammu and Kashmir emerged as an autonomous State within the union of India. Yet the aspirations for full independence never died down in Kashmir (even as pro-Pakistan politics were increasingly suppressed within Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir ) and tensions emerged as early as 1953 when Kashmir’s nationalist leader, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, was jailed for allegedly seeking independence. The arrest of Kashmir’s most popular leader, Sheikh Abdullah, in 1953 also started the process of diluting Kashmir’s autonomy and slowly eroding Article 370. Such slow dilution was evident as early as 1963, when India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke of “the gradual erosion” of Article 370. These events, seen as a political betrayal by Kashmiris, were also the culmination of a strong protest movement by the Hindu nationalists in India who considered these special provisions to be nothing other than yet another shameful capitulation by the ruling Indian National Congress Party to Muslims.
It is this Hindu nationalist view which has triumphed in the Indian government’s recent decision to completely and unilaterally abrogate Article 370. Such a decision was made ostensibly to help better fight a decades-old anti-India insurgency in Kashmir (an insurgency which has for the most part been inconsequential, but has been significant enough to disrupt political processes and keep the Indian Army engaged in the region now for more than thirty years). It is far from clear if cancelling Kashmiri autonomy can boost India’s counterinsurgency efforts and produce a decisive victory, but it is possible that it could return Kashmir to being narrowly imagined as a site of sectarian Hindu-Muslim conflict. One might even wonder if a return to the original provisions of Article 370 that had been negotiated in 1949 and were demanded by Sheikh Abdullah’s son, Farooq Abdullah, on his return to power in 1996, could have stopped this insurgency in its tracks at a time when it was struggling militarily.
One ends up in Kashmir where one started off in the first place. The political claims of both India and Pakistan on Kashmir not only go back to the moment of the creation of the two States in 1947, but also pass through the history and memory of the sectarian conflict between the Hindus and Muslims of South Asia, stretching back even further in history (in the case of Kashmir, to the fourteenth century). The genesis of the Kashmir conflict, and its trajectory in the late twentieth century, is a complex subject. But what is clear enough is the symbolic centrality of both the religion and culture of Kashmir to India and Pakistan. Such culture includes shared sacred spaces such as astaans, Kashmiri Sufiyana music, folk forms such as Kashmiri folk theatre (band pather) and Kashmiri folk music (chhaker), Kashmiri poetry, and Kashmiri arts and crafts. These would be claimed by Pakistan as a distinctive Indo-Muslim culture and by India as an example of its secular and plural traditions. Religion and culture have been fundamental to shaping the idea of Kashmir as a “special place.” But even though the Hindu and Muslim religious cultures in India and Pakistan offer us fantasies of Kashmir as either a sacred Hindu space or a lost Muslim paradise, the actual Kashmiri Hindu and Muslim religious culture affirms Kashmir as a heterodox and plural spiritual space.
Dance of the Sufi Dervishes by Behzād, circa 1480/1490. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. {{PD-US}}
For most Kashmiris themselves, it is the vision of a Kashmiri spirituality expressed as a continuum of Saiva-bhakti-Sufi-tantric ideas in Kashmir’s literary culture—in particular, the mystical poetry of the Saiva saint-poet Lal Ded and the Muslim Sufi poet, Nund Rishi—that best articulates the idea of Kashmir as a place, even a “special place.” A close reading of these saint-poets reveals a deep commitment to religious tolerance, caste equality, and philosophical thought which gets taken up by generations of Kashmiri poets and historians, and informs Kashmiri ideas of the self. The Saiva, Lal Ded, uses Sufi metaphors and the Sufi, Nund Rishi, uses Saiva metaphors (Nund Rishi calls the Quran sahaja, the simple yet blissful path). This recognition, and the recognition of the political desires that flow from it, has become difficult to express in light of the rise in sectarian tensions in Kashmir and the rest of South Asia since the 1990s. It is likely to become even more difficult after the controversial end to Kashmir’s residual autonomy under an already eroded Article 370. One could dismiss this vision of Kashmiri religious pluralism as disguised nationalist rhetoric (as studies on “Kashmiriyat” or Kashmiriness as a nationalist, or subnationalist, ideology purportedly promoted by the Indian State often do), but these ideas about religion and culture are not only affirmed by many Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims. They also represent the possibility of a future that rejects sectarian understandings of Kashmir’s multiform past. But Kashmiri religious pluralism (philosophical thought of Lal Ded and Nund Rishi, in particular) also poses a challenge to official versions of Indian secularism that have not been able to ward off the threat of majoritarianism and offers a different way of thinking the secular (much like the thinking of Kabir and Gandhi) as an enabler of respect for and dialogue across religious traditions. The Saiva-Sufi milieu in Kashmir is one of the many distinctive moments of religious pluralism in South Asia. A deeper understanding of this religious pluralism can open up new pathways for thinking about democracy and freedom not just in Kashmir but also in the rest of South Asia. This idea of Kashmir is impossible to abrogate.
*Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the positions or policies of Ashoka University.
Abir Bazaz is Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University. His research interests include Religion and Literature, Comparative Indian Literatures and Cinema Studies. He is also a documentary filmmaker.
End Islamophobia, Silent Protest at Union Station, Washington DC. Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull.
A postcolonial approach to the study of religion and peacebuilding must begin with demystifying the dominant myths that impede productive discussion. Popularized by academics, pundits, and the media, these myths reflect Eurocentric and Euro-American biases that have deep connections to colonialism. Demystifying these myths will make it easier to engage in peacebuilding work across religious traditions.
The first myth is the “clash of civilizations” myth proposed by political scientist Samuel Huntington. Huntington suggests that future wars and conflicts will not be fought because of ideological differences, but because of clashes between religiously based civilizations. His hypothesis became popular because it asserted Western hegemony and provided an explanation of world politics in the post-Cold War era. However, his understanding of cultural and religious difference has deep roots in colonial discourse. In Orientalism, Edward Said pointed out how, in pursuit of colonization, the West created an image of the “Orient” as inferior, backward, and uncivilized for the purposes of control and domination. Huntington reactivated this threat and the fear of colonial difference by treating civilizations as homogeneous and bounded entities with no cross-civilizational interactions and crossovers.
Edward Said. A Mural on a San Francisco Street. Photo Credit: Rachid H.
The second myth is the myth of secularization, which regards religion as irrational and incompatible with modernity. The secularist myth sees religion as either irrelevant or a problem for social life in general. More particularly, it sees religion as an obstacle to conflict resolution. Proponents of secularism point to religious elites and religious institutions as the sources of social conflict. This secularist myth displays Eurocentric and colonialist biases when it takes the development of Western history since the Enlightenment as the normative measure of the trajectories of other societies. In Formations of the Secular, anthropologist Talal Asad gives an historical account of the concepts and political formations of the secular that have shaped secular attitudes in the modern West and Middle East. He argues that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion or be seen as more rational than religion. The secular has a multilayered history in different cultures. His study challenges a monolithic understanding of modernity that uses capitalist modernity as the model, and invites further inquiries into what scholars have called “global modernities.”
The third myth is dangerous and Islamophobic, for it proposes that some religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, are inherently peaceful, while Islam is militant and condones violence and Jihadism. This argument is dangerous because it can lead to false stereotyping and the scapegoating of whole populations. It is ahistorical because it overlooks the Crusades, Christianity’s complicity in genocide and colonialism, and the internal rivalries within both Christian and Buddhist traditions. The association of Islam with religious violence and the language of “religious insurgence” as threatening also shows again a strong Orientalist bias. It downplays the history of colonialism, marginalization, and displacement in the Muslim world. The acts of a tiny minority of Muslim extremists should not be taken as representative of Islam as a whole. There are many Muslim leaders and organizations working tirelessly for peace. In Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam, Mohammed Abu-Nimer shows that there are principles and values in Qur’an, Hadith, and other elements in the Islamic tradition that support peacebuilding and conflict resolution.
Postcolonial studies can help demystify these myths and also shed light on problems inherent in the study of religion. Postcolonial critics point out that “religion” is a problematic category and the study of religion in the modern West has often been linked to racism and the construction of the Other. When the academic study of religion developed in the mid-nineteenth century during the heyday of colonialism, Christianity was taken to be the reference when compared to the “mythic” religions of the East and the “primitive” religions of Africa. As religion emerged as a field of study in academia, there was a tendency to treat “religion” as sui generis and separate from other cultural, social, and political aspects. This reductionist and simplistic approach continues to be seen in introductory “World Religion” courses. Here, different religious traditions are reduced to certain belief systems, creeds, heroes, and a few key practices. In the name of religious literacy, a very truncated form of knowledge is introduced, which may heighten the differences of diverse traditions and reinforce biases students have already held. These kinds of introductory courses do not promote dialogue and peacebuilding because they reinforce colonial and Orientalist myths. Using insights from postcolonial and decolonial studies, Richard King, David Chidester, Santiago Slabodsky, and myself have pointed to new ways of conceptualizing the study of religion and theology drawing on our studies of Indian religions, African religions, Judaism, and Christianity respectively.
Postcolonial studies also offers constructive criticism for the emerging field of religion and peacebuilding, which focuses on the themes of interreligious dialogue, the retrieval of religious resources for peacebuilding in various traditions, and the instrumental role that religious actors and networks play in the dynamics of both conflict and peacebuilding. While studies in these areas have much to contribute, too often their focus has been on male academics, educated elites, and prominent religious leaders. More than thirty years ago, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading postcolonial theorist, asked, “Can the subaltern speak?” Her question raised issues concerning the politics of representation, the relation between power and knowledge, and the importance of creating infrastructures so that subaltern voices could be heard and understood. In the study of religion and peacebuilding, it is crucial to pay attention to subaltern religious consciousness and grassroots efforts in promoting peace.
Cathayan Nestorian Cross from the Nestorian Stele. {{PD-US}}
Women’s participation in peacebuilding also needs to be highlighted. Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding discusses the obstacles and opportunities women religious peacebuilders face because patriarchal practices have often prevented them from assuming authority in religious organizations and leadership in peace efforts. Some women seek to work through religious institutions or find other spaces to promote peace and exert their influences. The late Dekha Ibrahim of Kenya, a devout Muslim, served as a trustee of Coalition for Peace in Africa and received several international awards for her peacebuilding efforts. Buddhist nun Mae Chee Sansanee from Thailand led a peace walk and reached out to Muslim women when conflicts broke out between the Buddhists and Muslims in southern Thailand. She has also led interreligious dialogue in conflict zones around the world. Catholic sister Marie-Bernard Alima of Congo formed a network called the Coordination of Women for Democracy and Peace to educate and train women to provide leadership in human rights, political movements, and efforts to prevent sexual and gender-based violence.
Postcolonial critics regard cultures and histories as overlapping and mutually inscribed, and such recognition can aid in peacebuilding. It is helpful to use the lens of hybridity to investigate how different religions and cultures have encountered, learned, and borrowed from one another and changed as a result. For example, when Christianity came to China in the seventh century, it had to borrow Buddhist and Daoist concepts to translate Christian terminologies. The symbol of Nestorian Christianity was a cross resting on a lotus flower, the latter of which is a symbol from Buddhism. A hybridized understanding of religious traditions and religious identities will help overcome a binary construction of “us” versus “them” and recover the history of complex interactions among diverse religious traditions. It will also open avenues to imagine identity and difference as fluid and changing in our increasingly interconnected world.
Alt-right counter protestors holding Israeli, Trump, and American flags and ‘Stop Holocaust Exploitation’ posters at the ‘Close the Camps’ rally at Farmington Holocaust Memorial Center, Michigan. August 20, 2019
President Trump’s comment last week that American Jews who vote for the Democratic Party are being “greatly disloyal” has sent shock waves through the Jewish world. What did he mean? Disloyal to whom? Isn’t the accusation of disloyalty an anti-Semitic dog whistle? By not initially defining the object of “disloyalty” Trump opened up various possibilities of how his comment can, or should, be parsed. Groups on the Jewish left such as Jewish Voice for Peace and J-Street to the center-right AIPAC contested this statement. President Rivlin in Israel contested this statement. The Likud-led government said nothing. The overt partisan overtones of the comment resulted in Jewish Trumpists defending the president, saying that, even if the comment may have been poorly articulated, American Jews who vote for “the party of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar” (this is how Trumpists are reconstructing “the Democrats”) are being disloyal to Israel and, given the current fusion of pro-Israelness and allegiance to the Jews, are being disloyal to the Jewish people.
Critics of the comment claim that the language of disloyalty is anti-Semitic. The problem is that in this case the “dual loyalty” equation implied in Trump’s “disloyalty” locution seems to be inverted. The anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty has historically been used to claim that the Jews are being disloyal to their country of residence in favor of their loyalty to the Jewish people. Later, the question of loyalty extended to the state of Israel. In the late 18thcentury, the question of Jewish loyalty was posed to the Jewish sages in France in the wake of their emancipation. Could the French Jews, who ostensibly had loyalty to another collective (the Jewish people), ever be fully loyal to France? The French sages responded that the Jews are a people of a religious tradition and not a nation and thus fidelity to the Jewish people does not stand in contradiction to allegiance to the French nation. On this basis they were emancipated.
The Trial of Dreyfus. Vanity Fair, November 23, 1899
This precarious equation lasted until it exploded with the Dreyfus affair in 1894 when French officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused and convicted of treason. (The conviction was later overturned.) A young Viennese journalist named Theodore Herzl covered the story and heard the reactions of many French men and women who were convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt. These men and women claimed that Dreyfus, as a Jew, could never give full allegiance to France. In some way, this gave birth to Zionism, which claimed in part that even the fully assimilated Dreyfus’s of the world will never be accepted as full citizens in their country of residence. That is, Jews could never fully shed the suspicion of dual loyalty.
While “dual loyalty” is indeed often an anti-Semitic canard, it is also a real challenge to all of Diaspora Jewry, especially after the establishment of the state of Israel. What is meant, for example, by the 1990s bumper sticker, “I Love New York but Jerusalem is My Home”? What if a passerby said to the driver of a car with such a sticker, “Go home”? Would that be anti-Semitic? In a way, yes it might be, but what about the bumper sticker itself, what is it trying to convey? Today, what does “home” refer to if not the capital city of another country? My point is that if Jews reflexively claim that the accusation of “dual loyalty” is anti-Semitic, we too easily ignore that it was, and remains, one of the great challenges of Jews in modernity.
Here is an example: I have friends—Modern Orthodox Jews—whose son was considering enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Almost everyone he shared his plans with at a Shabbat Kiddush said to him, “If you are going to serve in the army, why not join the IDF?” His response was, “because I am an American.” But what was behind the response of these American Orthodox Jews to this young man? “If you are going to risk your life,” they may have been thinking, “why do it for the U.S.? Why not do it for Israel?” Is this an instance of dual loyalty? If we deflect all accusations of dual loyalty, we miss the ways we practice it all the time.
Trump’s comment on Jews’ “great disloyalty” wasn’t accusing Jews of dual loyalty; in fact, he was suggesting Jews are not exercising dual loyalty enough! Can we thus say that this isn’t anti-Semitic at all? Yes. And no. In the wake of Trump’s comment, at a Close the Camps rally of liberal American Jews held outside Farmington’s Holocaust Memorial Center near Detroit, a white supremacist counter-demonstration showed white nationalists waving an American and an Israeli flag. White supremacists, whose worldview emerges from the KKK and other like-minded groups, are waving the Israeli flag to protest against liberal American Jews. Is there a connection between Trump’s comment and this phenomena?
One way to understand this is to look back at the American Zionism of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. In the teens of the 20th century when most American Jews were at best ambivalent about Zionism, precisely because it exacerbated the anxiety of dual loyalty, Brandeis stood as a proud Zionist. But Brandeis deeply understood the challenge Zionism posed to a Jewry desperately trying to become “American.”
My approach to Zionism was through Americanism. In time, practical experience and observation convinced me that Jews were by reason of their traditions and their character peculiarly fitted for the attainment of American ideals. Gradually, it became clear to me that to be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.
Indeed, loyalty to America demands rather that each American Jew become a Zionist. For only through the ennobling effect of its strivings can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance. The Jewish spirit, so long preserved, the character developed by so many centuries of sacrifice, should be preserved and developed further, so that in America as elsewhere the sons of the race may in future live lives and do deeds worthy of their ancestors.
Israeli and American Flags fluttering on mast. Photo Credit: James Emery
The fusion of Americanism and Zionism for Brandeis was his way of allaying the fears of dual loyalty among many progressive era American Jews. While I am quite certain Trump does not know of Brandeis’s Zionism, and Brandeis certainly did not intend his Zionism to be blind allegiance to a Jewish state (his Zionism was not even promoting a Jewish state), I think Trump is inadvertently using Brandeis’s logic to make two points. First, on Trump’s reading, American Jews are being disloyal to their people if they do not give full allegiance to the state of Israel and its government (Brandeis, of course, lived long before the state of Israel). And second, that such disloyalty is also disloyalty to America since, as Brandeis said, “to be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”
So when those white supremacists waved an Israeli flag to protest against an American Jewish protest against detention centers in a Detroit suburb, the flag wasn’t about being pro-Jewish (one could reasonably assume some hold anti-Semitic views) or even pro-Israel in any conventional way. It was pro-American. Thus American Jews who support “the party of Tlaib and Omar” are not only disloyal to their people. They are also disloyal to America. Thus Trump’s inversion of the “dual loyalty” equation does not erase its anti-Semitic connotations; it merely recalibrates its implications. Watching white supremacists waving an Israeli flag, as jarring as it may look, is therefore not dissonant at all.
Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and the Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His latest books are Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical(Princeton University Press, 2021), and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press). He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion.
Dance of the Starlings, Photo Credit: Conni Nielsen
This paper was originally conceived of as a response to an important panel conversation at the American Academy of Religion in Denver, Colorado on November 17, 2018. Moderated by Professor Atalia Omer, the panel was the occasion for a conversation between leading scholars on the theme of “Moral Obligations, Prophetic Actions, and the Search for Solidarity from Historical, Transnational, and Global Perspectives.” The panelists were Professor Daniel Boyarin (in abstentia; UC, Berkeley), Professor Farid Esack (University of Johannesberg), Professor Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College), and Santiago Slabodsky (Hofstra University).
The to-and-fro and the back-and-forth of the dialogue suggests a conversation that took with the utmost seriousness the intellectual and ethical urgencies of the subject matter, particularly as it relates to the specific cases of South Africa, Palestine, and Israel. These places and cases command and demand our attention today, especially the attention of those of us who work in religious studies inasmuch as the drivers of the devastation and death, both spectacular and slow, monumental and everyday, in these places in the world are inextricably bound up with questions and the very meaning of religion and life together. And now to my response…
While I am unable to do justice to all of the nuances of the panel conversation, I would like to surface an issue that moves at the oblique edges of the discussion. This is the issue not just of colonialism, which was explicitly invoked and theoretically attended to, but of settler colonialism. Here we might think of settlerism along with enslavement as modernity’s inner logos or meaning, the pillars that stand up the modern world as an arrangement or an economy and ecology that, with Cedric Robinson, also bears the name “racial capitalism.” As such settlerism (or land theft) with enslavement (labor theft) is that through which modern consciousness, modern desire, and modern life emerges. It is that through which Western life and thought lives and moves and has being. It is the practice of a violent and limited, an appropriative and expropriative, a thieving and exclusionary “We-ness.”
Putting a fine point on this, Iyko Day observes that “settler colonial racial capitalism is [neither] a thing” nor is it adequately understood as a historically isolable event or series of events. Rather, “[settler colonialism] is a social relation.” That is to say, settler “colonial capitalism is more appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than a linear chain of events” (112-13). This ecology manifests in relation to that Westphalian international system of states associated with what has come to be called the West and whose activity is carried out under presumption of a particular figure.
This is the figure of “the settler.” Within (post) enlightenment philosophy the settler is known as the sovereign, self-determined subject, and within political thought as the “citizen.” As normative citizen, the settler indexes or represents and even stands as a proxy for what is proper, indeed, for the properly human whose standing is over and against those imagined as Man’s nonhuman or less-than-human Others, those, that is, who fall short of the human as such. If the settler as citizen embodies propriety and proper (political) subjecthood and thus embodies proper life and thus is properly human, then the Other to the citizen gets cast as nonhuman or less-than-human or marginally-human or infra-human and ultimately a threat to the political economy of citizens or those deemed properly human, the community of the human “we.”
However, what philosopher and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter gives us to understand about this imaginary of the human is that it is an “overrepresentation.” By this she means that rather than being made to the measure of the world, this specific genre or version and historical unfolding of the human has come to stand in the place of the human as such. This is the genre whose spatiotemporal and geographical and even geological unfolding is named (Western) Man.
In “worlding” himself, Man enacts two things. On the one hand, Man seizes, settles, or acts to possess the earth for himself. John Locke gives us the philosophy of this settler colonial seizure of the earth through his theory of property. On the other hand, precisely in his geopolitical and geological rupturing or “anthropocening” of the earth, Man also registers the biopolitical production or “massification,” as Jasbir K. Puar has recently put it, of populations. The point of Man’s conversion of populations into unhuman masses is so that total value or total life might be seized or cannibalized, indeed extracted from them for the founding and sustaining of the settler state and for the general sustaining of its central, normative figure, namely, the human (homo politicus, homo economicus). In other words, Man is a figure of ontological and planetary terror, as Calvin Warren powerfully argues. The terror of Man both produces and targets the nonhuman or the less-than-human mass(es) figured as the Racial Other.
The ongoing attacks against black life and native peoples in the United States, along with the specific cases of South Africa and Palestine in the latter’s ongoing struggle against Israeli settler colonialism, I contend, showcase the problem of the human as the central problematic internal to settler colonialism. But also, I would argue, it is at this site of the unhuman, the loci of an “inhuman” darkness, that we find a strange, queer diaspora that, precisely in its unhumanity, its parahumanity, its humanimality, indeed, in its adjacency to the mushroom—which, as Anna Tsing elaborates, finds a way to survive devastation—bespeaks an alternative: Modes of life beyond or in excess of the temporality of Man. Let us, again, call this the mass(es), that dark swarm whose movements are like the murmuration of starlings, a murmuring mass. Like the wandering monks of old (I mean the “gyrovagues” who freaked out St. Benedict and against whom he wrote his “Rules” of obedience), the murmuring mass is a wandering, borderless, non-settler “we” whose very presence unsettles every property line, every boundary that the settler imposes. This is a different kind of “we,” one not centered on the human. This is a ”we” that is before, after, and beyond every state-sanctioned or exclusionary “We the People…” We need a language for this different, non-statist we-ness.
A murmuration of starlings at Gretna, Photo Credit: Walter Baxter
When Professor Boyarin calls for a “deep theorization of diaspora” that is neither the same as a “statist nationalism,” with its racism and violence, nor like a “denatured German-style Reform in which ‘Judaism’ is a faith, or a ‘religion,’ or even a prophetic turn of mind, as per the American Council of Judaism,” but rather is a diaspora devoted “not to the government” but to an otherwise we-ness, a we that is “both here and elsewhere” and that is also Palestinian inasmuch as the Palestinian “we” is a “we” “whom ‘we’ [Jews] . . . oppress”—when Professor Boyarin says these things he is pointing to something like the alternative we-ness of which I speak and that settler colonialism seeks to arrest through the imposition of state logics. The alternative isn’t elsewhere, but instead is an elsewhen marked by a kind of quantum communion that is irreducible to statist or biopolitical logics, including statist or settler colonial logics of religion and the settler gods. Professor Boyarin, in effect, calls for the decolonization of time itself. As Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip puts it, our moral obligation is to “snap the spine of [humanist] time” (141) inasmuch as within settler colonial or humanist time support for racist, statist, anti-Palestinian Zionism, which must be rigorously distinguished from Jewish identity, in effect operates as an extension of white supremacy into the Middle East in the name of supporting the state of Israel and in complex ways reverberates back into the U.S. in both antisemitic and antiblack ways.[1] This is the circuitry of settlerism as political theology.
This all brings me to something Professor Heschel says. I am thinking of moments in the course of her comments in which she takes us into what might be thought of as the spirituality of the issues at hand. Her comments are powerful and, in a good way, absolutely arrested me.
After talking about her sojourn through the 1960s and about how hearing Dr. King affected her so, Professor Heschel asks the question, “What does it mean to be moved?” This is a powerful question, worthy of just sitting with, brooding with, dwelling with, as we meditate on our moral obligations in this moment of settler colonial devastation of peoples and of the earth itself.
“What does it mean to be moved,” she asks?
This question is utterly bound up with social movements as historical-empirical phenomena, movements like Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But also what emerged out of May 1968, such as what traveled under the name “Black Power.” And more recently, what is called “the Movement for Black Lives” and the movement for a free Palestine. But never taking her eye off of social movements in their phenomenal appearing, Professor Heschel invites us, as it were, to look inside of such movements to ask a question, to catch sight even if only in a flash of another order.
Hers is the question of how a movement moves you. What in a movement moves you? What gives itself through a movement even as it exceeds the mo(ve)ment? What moves (within) the movement? This is a question of the sacred interior, which is not the interior of the would-be sovereign individual or the settler-as-citizen subject. This is the interior of the mass(es), an interior mass whose fundamental entanglement manifests the sacred and bespeaks a poetics of the social. Perhaps when Frantz Fanon inquired into “that within,” the gulf or abyss or the indefineable vanishing point that exceeds racialization or what epidermal blackening and browning as cultural operations aim to arrest,[2] he too was approaching the question of what moves subterraneously, underneath, and in excess of the political.
“What does it mean to be moved,” Professor Heschel asks.
It’s then that just as her listeners, an audience of scholars, might expect her to offer your classic or scholastic (read: typically academic) answer to the question she poses, she pulls back. She refuses to answer—at least in such a way that would freeze the question in answering it. What comes through is that it is not so much about the answer as it is about keeping the question alive in whatever answer one gives. It’s, in other words, about the ongoing quest(ion)ing.
And so, immediately following upon her asking her moving question, Professor Heschel says that to be moved in social movement is to undergo something. It is to be set in flight, to be set roaming and roving and wandering, to be opened out into what exceeds you, to move into the open, to have one’s limits crossed, all borders breached, the very notion of “world” broken open. In short, it’s to be “in the break.” This Heschel calls “religious experience,” about which she says, “I need that.”
Finally, Professor Heschel caps her reflections by further saying, in effect, that to undergo social movement is precisely to not give into despair, knowing (and this is very deep) that “there is something else coming.” Affectively caught in the wave, so to speak, in the sensation, carried by the feeling of what’s coming, to be touched by and to haptically surrender to that something else beyond the political as we know it—about this Professor Heschel says, “I have to hold onto that,” for “that I guess is what keeps me going with the praxis.”
There is a terrible beauty borne in what Professor Heschel, I think, is getting at. Here we glimpse social movement as an anticipatory praxis of something else coming, manifest in a kind of ante-political assembly, a mode of gathering or assembly or commune-ion that falls outside of though it surges through the violences of state time and history. Her words are a kind of “sorrow song” that celebrates the mass(es) or social movement even if that celebration is singed with some sort of sadness. This all arrested and moved me, I must say, inasmuch as I’ve been thinking a lot about what spirituality means in settler colonial times, about the “mysticism” of social movements, something I’ve recently called the “the mysticism of the riot” and the spirit(uality) of the general strike. What if spirit is of the riot? What if spirit is the general strike, ritual of an alternative cosmology?[3]
To be moved by the more-than-now, by a wholly-other, something-else-future is to be under fugitivity’s sway. Per the black radical tradition’s meditations on the historical figure of the fugitive and the arts of escape, fugitivity here bespeaks an other order of time. This other temporality bespeaks, as Melissa Louidor puts it as she thinks with Fred Moten, a certain “mobilization of black vitality.” It is a “futuristic impulse to claim the not-yet-forged possibilities of existence.” That impulse, to stay with Louidor a bit longer, might be thought about in terms of certain “biomechanic and metaphysical forces [that] activate” imagination, which is to say “effort, an effort that is integral to claiming survival.” To dwell within fugitive time or to be fugitively on the move is to resonate with, indeed to reside or tarry with, the im/possibility of other worlds. I’m talking about new ways of dwelling with and being on the earth. This is a kind of quantum communion, the veritable entanglement of all things precisely at the level of thingliness itself, at the level of base matter or raw vitality. In short, the modernity of fugitivity names the mobilization of a queer vitality, an “aliveness,” Kevin Quashie might say, beyond racial category.[4] While constantly engaging politics and maneuvering with respect to state structures, that which moves in fugitive time moves under the sociopoetic propulsion of an uncaptureable force that is irreducible to political ontology and its presumption of the human. As such, fugitivity is an insurgent practice of prophesy, though without the figure of the singular or sovereign prophet. For in fugitive time the prophet is the mass(es), the swarm of social movement as such.
I cannot help but hear Professor Heschel’s question—What does it mean to be moved?—in conversation with a tradition of black radical thought and the distinct notion of the sacred that is internal to this tradition and that drives its arts of escape, the arts of black rapture. The something-else-future that Professor Heschel’s language conjures or is reaching for is, like black radicalism’s poetics of the sacred, of an insurgent, dissident, rebellious, anti-doctrinal, and non-teleological future. Felt in the present, Professor Heschel’s question registers as a disturbance that is always already in play and that as such witnesses to an alternative present. Such a temporality, such a future, is radical. It is a future without frame, without foreclosure, marked by a peculiar kind of nonhumanist dispossession, movement outside of propertied self-possession.
To be under the claim of such a future is to be indebted to a future of something else coming, Heschel says, or that is “a’comin’,” to purloin from Judith Weisenfeld. And because it is a’comin’, it moves one into a different kind of now, a now that, again, exceeds the time of the human. This revised understanding of the future where the future is not merely what follows past and present suggests what might be called, defying grammatical convention, the tense of the future-now.
What might the future-now mean, where both “the now” and “the future” are unmoored from liberal humanist progressive narratives or temporalities (of death), unhooked from time schemes that presume the settler, or the sovereign, individuated subject? What could freedom released from settler time mean? And, what does this all mean for social movement(s), for a free Palestine, for Palestinian life in its adjacency to black life, and for a Jewishness released from Zionist-statist-settler logics and thus thought of as conspiring with, literally breathing with, blackness and Palestinianness, a Jewishness entangled in “blackpalestinian breathing”?
With Professor Heschel, I offer this answer which is not and cannot be one. At a minimum the tense of the future-now might be thought of as the opening of the imagination to the impossible. The tense of the future-now brings into view what settler time forecloses as not possible. Nevertheless the impossible surges through, fracturing time and history to announce another beginning. Genesis otherwise. The tense of the future-now is the tense, to borrow from Dawn Lundy Martin, of “unforeclosure” and the unforecloseable.
Unsettling settler time or the time of patriarchs and sovereigns, the tense of the future-now is marked, as experimental film maker and video artist Arthur Jafa has put it, by both tension and potential. Beyond time as given to us to shut down imagining the im/possible, the future-now discloses every instant as measureless, saturated by “potension.”
Could this be what moves a mo(ve)ment? Could it be that the tense of the future-now is nothing less than the tense of spirit-time, what is of the life (and) times of the unhuman wherein we are given to dwell with the earth even as we work to survive the settler world (of Man)? The riot, the rebellion then, is a threshold of the sacred where in passage we dwell in fugitivity’s future-now, rhythming “freedom time,” an alternative conception of time that presences an alternative present. Music-ing fugitive time is the creative, the ethical, the “poethical” task. . .Task of a homiletics of the unhuman, witnessing to a wounded, unspeakable joy . . . Task of something else a’comin’ . . .
[3]J. KameronCarter, “Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred).” Social Text 139 (forthcoming).
[4]The idea of “vitality” and “aliveness” reflects conversations with Quashie around his forthcoming book, Black Aliveness; or, The Being of Us.
*The opinions expressed in this piece do not represent the official opinions of Contending Modernities research initiative and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies or their faculty and staff.
J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He works in black studies, theology and philosophy of religion, and literature and poetry. His book is Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008). He’s just finished a book manuscript titled American Religion: White Supremacy as Political Theology and he is in the final stages of another book project whose topic is blackness and/as the sacred.
Olivia Wieczorek performing at the 2016 Polish National Final. Photo Credit: Serecki, Wikimedia Commons.
Israel is a nation that has no secrets. The democratic process of self-exposure is celebrated time and again. Its model of self-reflection, however, has changed over 70 years of military brutality, occupation, and settler colonial violence. Long ago, it used to follow a model of remorse, also known as “shooting and crying.” The tradition is traced back to S. Yizhar’s powerful novella Khirbet Khizeh(also spelled: Hirbet Hizeh or Hirbet Hizah), originally published in 1949. The novella tells the story of several young Israeli soldiers who are ordered to “clear” some Palestinian villages right after the end of the 1948 war. The text is a moving depiction of post-war atrocities, of colonial violence, of performative militarized masculinity, and of the inner turmoil of the narrator, who himself is a young soldier. The soldier wishes to belong to his fellow warriors, but his conscience hurts. Eventually he decides to join the rest in evacuating the village and leaves his remorse to be dealt with in the future.
Yizhar’s text is important because it is a very early documentation of the Nakba (Arabic for “Cataclysm” or “Catastrophe”). The significance of including the Nakba (with detailed accounts of destruction, violence, and expulsion of Palestinians) in one of the earliest Israeli novels to be published in Hebrew post 1948 cannot be overstated. That this very text became required reading for all Israeli high-school students right around the 1967 war, then a best seller, and finally a TV series a few years after the 1973 war, leaves little doubt about the significant impact this short text has had on generations of Israelis. What is this impact? Without undermining the outstanding literary qualities of the text (there are but a few Hebrew writers as talented as Yizhar, and this novella is a true masterpiece of modern Hebrew literature), one must recognize the poetic and political ethos of this text as one that soon became a model for many future Israeli novelists, songwriters, and filmmakers. In the work of acclaimed authors such as Amos Oz, David Grossman, and even more contemporary writers, this trope is dominant. A few of the more familiar cinematic works that follow this model include Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Lebanon (2007), and more recently the TV series, Fauda (2018).
If the tone of remorse and hesitation is strongly captured in Yizhar’s early novella, over the years the trope of “shooting and crying” has become just as much about remorse and moral dilemmas as it has become about self-justification and the creating of a masculine, warrior subject. Such a subject is human and sensitive, but also logical and responsible. Amos Oz—a writer who has always been considered “leftist” by the right and “right” by the left—best captured this model of subjectivity in his response to a question about his feelings concerning his service as an Israeli soldier in both 1967 and 1973: “I have done many things that I am sorry I had to do, but nothing that I am ashamed of.”
“Sorry for things I had to do.” This “non-apologetic apology” was the model of self-critique advanced in Israel in many politically reflective works of literature and cinema. “Shooting and crying,” as this style became known, was a way of maintaining the nation’s self-image as youthful and innocent, along with its sense of vocation against the reality of war, growing military violence, occupation, invasion, and an overall sense that things were going wrong. All in all, this long poetic tradition, which has at times produced better works than others—Waltz with Bashir is undeniably a cinematic masterpiece—followed the very same logic of Golda Meir’s somewhat less artistic, and significantly more coarse statement: “We can forgive you [the Arabs] for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”
But the days of shooting and crying are over. Shooting continues, but crying has stopped. It has been replaced with laughter: hysterical, cynical, crude, perhaps even desperate laughter. The general logic is the same: Israel hides nothing. It does not deny the violence and the shooting in which it is involved. It does not deny the occupation, the violations, the torture. Israel denies nothing. On the contrary, it openly depicts and documents its wrongs. In the past, it was the soldiers who were shooting and crying. This time around, the soldiers are shooting and the rest are dancing. And everything takes place out in the open. There is nothing for anyone to look for, to dig up, to expose; all is out in the open, because Israel has nothing to hide.
So what do we get now, when we are no longer shooting and crying, but rather shooting and singing? The more recent and more cynical (and perhaps more effective and dangerous) Israeli poetics and politics of self-reflection no longer bothers to portray Israelis as sensitive beings who shoot out of necessity, “We will never forgive them for what they made us do to them!” This change in style can be first detected in Waltz with Bashir, a film in which the old melancholic tone of the crying soldier is replaced with a dance soundtrack, neon colors, and a club scene. But it has only recently reached full maturity in the most vulgar presentation of a campy campaign that promotes something like: “We’re here, we’re occupiers, get used to it.”
Late last week, Israel released a response to the ongoing international critique against holding the 2019 Eurovision contest in Tel Aviv. Produced by a private media company, the video features two singers (one identifies as a Russian, the other as Arab) who meet two reluctant young blond tourists at the airport, most likely with the intention of convincing them that they should support Eurovision in Israel. The young tourists never appear convinced. On the contrary, they seem concerned, suspicious, and bitter, and they eventually leave their hosts. Meanwhile the Arab and Russian Israelis are jumpy, lively, and overtly “marketing” the country: “Stop! Don’t say a word! I know just what’ve you heard—that it’s a land of war and occupation.” The singing goes on, sparkles in the air, as the four leave the airport for a brief tour: “We are here to be your guide—a small country with pride!”
Truthfully, the video is confusing. If one does not know it is part of an official Israeli campaign, one is likely to think it is a parody, or perhaps even another BDS commercial (part two of the queer for Palestine dance revealed earlier this month). “This is the land of honey, honey . . . Our land is always sunny, sonny” the two hosts sing as they invite their hesitant tourists into a short “indoctrination,” telling them everything Israel has to offer in addition to the occupation: a dying Dead Sea that is shrinking due to capitalist activity; beaches full of bitches (also known as feminine gay men); lots of Jews (and only some are greedy); great shawarma everywhere; and the Al-Aqsa Mosque as symbol of “the beloved capital.”
So why would this be the formal Israeli campaign? Precisely because this “humor” and campiness have become clear and identifiable political and poetic tactics that can be easily mimicked, regenerated, and used as if following a narrative of reclaiming. Once again, Israel generates its message from the position of “strategic weakness”: the world says these horrible things about us? Well then it is either because everyone is anti-Semitic (they think all Jews are greedy!) or because they think we don’t know what they know and they think they need to teach us. But we know all there is to know, and we know better than they know. Even so, they patronize us, suggesting we don’t know what we do know: “the occupation isn’t nice.”
Shooting and crying is passé. Shooting and singing is more appropriate, especially as a promo for Eurovision in Tel Aviv. There is no point in denying the Israeli occupation (no one denies it) and no point in denying colonial violence and destruction (no one denies it). So? Lets dance! Where the mockery about nostalgia (“land of milk and honey”) comes on the same plate with the self-negating anti-Semitic jokes about greedy Jews and the matter of fact acknowledgement of the occupation (in the campaign’s first line no less!!), there is not much left for the critic to say. This is the importance and the danger of this new “campy” style. Its self-reflexivity and ironic nod is far more sophisticated, politically speaking, than crying. This is not merely replacing shooting and crying with shooting and singing. It is more like replacing shooting and crying with shooting and singing about just how vulgar it is to be shooting and singing. The bottom line message? Do you want to be shooting and crying? Crying about shooting? Or… would you rather join the singing? Don’t spoil the party. That’s not cool.
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, the modern Levant, Semitism, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema and art. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination(Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives, and the production of knowledge.
Art Heals mural in Los Angeles, California. The image draws on the mythic imagination of Aztlán but depicts a Tongva woman and rebel leader, Toypurina, at its center. Photo Credit: Author.
On March 31, 2019, student leaders from the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA; the Chicanx Student Movement of Aztlán), a U.S. Latina/o/x organization present on many high school and college campuses across the country, voted to change their fifty-year old name. They decided that they had to drop two of the most mythically politicized facets: “Chicanx” and “Aztlán.” Although they haven’t decided on a final name, right now they have chosen an Espanglish acronym: Movimiento Estudiantil Progressive Action (MEPA). In an Associated Press story, some MEChA alumni criticized the students for running away from or trying to erase their history.
Given that the names “Chicano” and “Aztlán” have been contested for fifty years, by debating these terms and voting to alter their names these students are actively participating in that history. In a statement on the decision, their national board made clear that they are not disavowing earlier generations.
Becoming MEChA: Historical Context
In the late 1960s, across the country, students mobilized to demand courses and programs of study that decentered modern European thought and reflected a greater sensitivity to the full human experience. The struggle for self-naming was part of the struggle for self-determination and greater educational opportunity that proliferated among these movements. For those engaged in decolonial struggles, there was often a hope that pre-modern stories and traditions might offer fuel in resisting contemporary colonial structures. The names “Chicano” and “Aztlán” were themselves invested with meaning by young people who were searching for names and ideas that would reflect their self-perception better than the terms outsiders had placed upon them.
At the same time, these movements were always more diverse in composition and less unified in perspective than later narratives like to depict. As a student of Christian scriptures, I am familiar with the ways on-the-ground human diversity often gets flattened in the memorialization of supposed moments of origin. I partially offer this reflection in the hope that MEPA narratives can do a better job of remembering how much of their fifty-year history has involved a multiplicity of perspectives and ongoing contestation.
Dominant Chicano movement narratives offer a clear and progressive origin story that begins with the triumphal inclusion of Chicano and Aztlán as terms of self-identification. In March of 1969, possibly 1500 activists met in Denver with a focus on Chicano nationalism. The term “Chicano” had started to circulate among activists a few years before. It felt like a reclaiming of an older term, and a variety of myths about the exact origin of the word abounded, though many thought it came from “mechicano,” a reference to the indigenous Mexica peoples. “Chicano” was also deployed with pride in contradistinction to the derogatory names that had been placed upon “ethnic Mexicans” (a term I take from historian Ernesto Chávez in order to speak to the pan-ethnic conglomeration of diverse peoples) by outsiders since the United States had seized and conquered the northern half of Mexico in 1848. From the history of 19thand 20thcentury lynchings in the borderlands amid Anglo depictions of “dirty Mexicans” to the use of “Operation Wetback” as a name for a mid-20thcentury federal government operation of mass deportations, ethnic Mexicans had confronted a variety of slurs employed to justify violence.
During the 1969 conference, the poet Alurista wrote the preamble for El Plan de Aztlán, where he renamed the southwestern United States “Aztlán,” the land the Aztecs migrated from before moving to the Valley of Mexico and the land to which they promised to return. Alurista intentionally drew upon a myth that antedated European colonialism, a myth that invoked both a pre-Columbian past and a future where colonial sufferings have ended.
MEChA Logo
In choosing the name “Chicano” for themselves and “Aztlán” for the lands on which they met, activists refused dominant depictions of ethnic Mexicans as foreigners. Instead, the United States was the foreign interloper in a grander history. Chicano/a/x activists were claiming a deep ancestral connection to the lands on which they lived. Precisely because ethnic Mexicans had faced so many forms of displacement and erasure in U.S. history, the powerful longing for place that rests behind these names persists through fifty years of engagement with Aztlán.
In April 1969, more than one hundred ethnically Mexican students, staff, and faculty from twenty-nine of California’s public colleges and universities met in Santa Barbara in order to craft a plan for higher education. But they also brought together several distinct student organizations and combined them into one new group: MEChA. The name was meant to signal a radical vision and commitment to self-determination. They were not “Mexican American” but Chicano. They were a movement in Spanish. They were not in California but Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the people we call Aztecs. Collectively, they became a mecha, a “matchstick” or a “fuse.”
Contestations over Aztlán
Yet Chicanos were themselves a diverse group, and they were more divided over the name and their platform than the October 1969 publication of El Plan de Santa Barbara makes it seem. Chicana feminist and Santa Barbara steering committee member Anna Nieto-Gómez has long observed that the published text flattened out the diversity of voices and the plurality of visions that had been present in Santa Barbara. Nieto-Gómez tells a different narrative about the Chicano movement’s history. For her, certain questions and practices of internal contestation were always part of ethnic Mexican student activism.
Even in 1969, some young activists already wondered if the name “Chicano” represented too much of a break from their own past. The term “Chicano” was more commonly used within particular academic and activist contexts. What about friends and family who were not as educated in activist lingo? Many wondered whether the name worked to exclude rather than to unite.
Aztlán, with its promise of a once and future homeland, was also quite pliable in its imagination and reception. Some participants in the Chicano movement, as filmmaker Jesús Treviño describes in his autobiography Eyewitness, may have hoped for a more literal reconquest of Mexico’s northern territories. And some activists, like Alfredo Acosta Figueroa as he describes in his book La Cuna de Aztlán, may have really believed that they had found the literal homeland of the Aztecs in a specific place in California.
Most, however, quickly turned to a more spiritualized description, where Aztlán became more of a state of mind. They saw it as an alternate utopian space, or, as Luis Leal described it, “Aztlán symbolizes the spiritual union of the Chicanos, something that is carried within the heart, no matter where they may live or where they may find themselves.”
Current MEChA member from Seattle University, Nicolás Cruz, in his widely circulated paper criticizing Aztlán (“Reflections on Aztlán and Its Role in the Chicanx Student Movement”) makes note of the possibilities of this spiritualized approach. Cruz particularly engages with the analogy of what Israel means to different Jewish communities, highlighting their long history of contesting the meanings of homeland and diaspora. Yet, he still leaves that comparison wondering if spiritualizing Aztlán sufficiently addresses critics’ concerns.
Cruz’s criticisms and those of other student leaders target these visions of Aztlán as themselves implicated in colonialism, racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, and transphobia. In a move familiar to students of religion, many elder activists depict these criticisms as contemporary impositions that fundamentally misunderstand an ancient myth and the historical context of the movement from which these ideas emerged. But I would suggest that, even if we discuss them on different terms now, all of these critiques have long histories.
Chicano Park mural of Aztlán. Photo Credit: Author.
As early as the 1970s, some activists wondered if Aztlán relied too much on a romanticized, imperial vision. Aztlán, as it was imagined, partially derived its power from Spanish interpretations and manuscripts. The Mexicas, to whom “Chicano” supposedly referred, also colonized and dominated a great diversity of indigenous peoples before the Spanish arrived. Many ethnic Mexicans are indigenous but not Mexica. Additionally, in the last fifty years, the U.S. Latina/o/x population has grown and diversified dramatically. Many members of MEPA trace their ancestors to various parts of Latin America and not just Mexico.
Moreover, appealing to the Mexica people and to Aztlán grew out of a 1920s Mexican nationalist revolutionary mythos that valued racial mixture (mestizaje) rather than indigeneity. As Néstor Medina has succinctly outlined in his book Mestizaje, certain Mexican nationalists appropriated indigenous imagery even as they opposed indigenous rights and erased Mexicans of Asian and African descent.
Attempts to narrate and contest the complex racial stratification of the Americas have hundreds of years of history, even if, again, how we name those contestations now looks different. So too, in the case of the Chicano movement, do we find long-standing concerns about how indigeneity is respected in relationship to mestizaje. Indeed, indigenous ethnic Mexican objections to the concept of Aztlán may have been one of the most important factors in the decision to change the name. Even Alurista quickly rethought his positions, and his Nationchild Plumaroja (1972) sought to be more gender inclusive and more focused on indigenous traditions rather than mestizaje.
Since 1970s Chicano activism was borne out of solidarity with other minoritized communities, some activists also asked about the rights of other minoritized populations, such as African Americans, American Indians, and Asian Americans. Aztlán seemed to refuse other claims on a shared space.
In the history of settler colonization of the Americas, many colonizers entered territories and mapped new names (or misappropriated indigenous names) on places that already had names recognized by the indigenous people living there. What does the idea of Aztlán mean for the place names of the many living indigenous communities throughout the United States? Do visions of Aztlán enable solidarity with their quests for sovereignty, or does Aztlán simply become another settler colonial misappropriation and misapplication, where an indigenous name from one part of the continent gets appropriated and mapped onto another, erasing the claims of indigenous peoples? This question is at the heart of the current debate and decision to move beyond Aztlán.
The criticisms around the inclusion of women and LGBT* students also have longer histories, even if they are not as directly apparent in the vision of Aztlán. Triumphal unified narratives of the 1970s Chicano movement too often focused on the leadership of cis-male heterosexual mestizos. As Maylei Blackwell researched in ¡Chicana Power!,Chicanas formed their own organizations quite early in order to create space outside of patriarchal demands. The Chicana feminist newspaper Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was already in print by 1971, and in Houston, more than 600 Chicanas gathered for the Conferencia de la Mujer.
Nieto-Gómez, among others, laid challenges to Chicano movement leadership structures that favored men and compelled women to be subservient, enabled sexual harassment and abuse, and that proclaimed an ideology of family grounded in patriarchal hierarchy while erasing women. Feminist critics specifically coined the term “hermanidad,” a more gender inclusive sense of siblinghood, to counter the more masculine dominated language of “carnalismo” or “brotherhood.” By the late 1970s, Chicana feminist Anna Nieto-Gómez was pushed out of Chicano activism because some figures wanted to eliminate practices of internal contestation, especially feminist contestation.
“Women of the Resistance” Mural in Balmy Alley, San Francisco. Photo Credit: Author.
Why Aztlán’s Time Is Up
Moraga may have found a way to queer Aztlán, but every generation wonders if they should continue to refashion the myths they have inherited or if it is time to create new ones. MEChA is not the first 1960s/70s-era Latina/o/x organization to confront such a name change. The National Council of La Raza changed its name to UnidosUS in 2017. Rodríguez has also wondered about whether familial metaphors are still usable, after the movement-era struggles around hermanidad and carnalismo (and queer belonging within and outside of both metaphors). He argues that the long-standing power of familia means that these metaphors cannot be abandoned, but he still awaits a “next of kin,” some other approach to fictive family.
To be sure, the generation that created MEChA, and the generations in between who benefitted from their struggles, have an emotional attachment to the name. Chicano scholar and activist Alvaro Huerta captures how important MEChA was to transformations in his consciousness and his life in “Reflections of a MEChista.” I wrote my 2016 book, Revelation in Aztlán, precisely because I was intrigued by the power that this mythic place name wielded for people who felt that they have been denied place in the United States.
Today’s students, however, are still carrying forth the legacies of conscientization, rigorous intellectual debate, and critical social action that made Aztlán a potent utopian imagination for previous generations of MEChistas. Current students have seriously debated the meanings of “Chicano” and “Aztlán,” and despite recognizing their potent histories, they worry that the baggage associated with them hinders their abilities to craft the better world that earlier generations sought.
In this regard, these current students are also participating in debates that rage across the globe about how best to relate to the traditions our ancestors passed down to us, especially when those traditions seem deeply implicated in historical practices of oppression such as colonialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and/or transphobia. Some figures, like Moraga and Rodríguez, struggle to retrieve the histories of complexity and contestation without abandoning those myths. Some like Leal repurpose the content of those myths and how we engage with them, in order to find ways to make them useful to the current moment.
But other generations give up on those myths altogether. In 1969, student activists decided to give up on the names they inherited, and they turned to a mythic past in order to create new names for their present. Current students have likewise decided they no longer wish to carry the names they inherited forward. What students of religion around the world should take note of here, however, is the students’ decision to reject the name without creating a finalized alternative. These students were skeptical that any previous tradition might be made usable for the present.
For students of religion in the United States, we may see a familiar lesson in this decision to change MEChA’s name. Sociological studies of religion in the United States have found a similar dramatic decline in youth participation in Christian churches. Many of our students no longer want to associate themselves with inherited traditions that have been mobilized to oppress people. Even as these students have taken much of their vision of social justice from previous generations’ articulations of Aztlán, they wish to move their organization forward without evoking ancient mythic traditions. This decision is one option familiar to those who watch how minoritized populations navigate the competing modernities they have inherited.
Still, a change of name does not necessarily mean students are running away from their history or disavowing the struggles of generations before them. In fact, MEPA students embrace the same desire to self-name that marked previous MEChA generations’ quests for self-determination. They know that names are always ambivalent, contingent, and contested, that utopias are always unfinished works-in-progress. Future generations may someday find MEPA’s new name inadequate, but el movimiento will keep moving then too.
May 2023 Update
Although leadership members voted for a name change in 2019, that name change never took effect as it needed to be voted on the following year. According to participant Diego Sanchez, national leadership ultimately decided to eliminate the acronym approach to MEChA and go by the name Mecha under its meaning of “fuse.” They also adopted a revised constitution preamble with the express goal of centering “Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, Non-binary, and Femme people.”
Children hold hands with their mother in Dago, Indonesia. Photo Credit: Ikhlasul Amal, 2010.
One of the main findings of the Science and the Human Person working group (the larger project to which these essays contribute) is that the discursive traditions of Islam and Catholicism offer valuable insights, but not a full account, of the human person. One of the project’s podcasts (in which I was honored to participate) described debates among Islamic jurists on the permissibility of organ donation. Herein I will weave together these threads, albeit partially, by outlining fundamental questions raised by the science and practice of uterine transplantation. I will further suggest that to better conceptualize, and eventually furnish, ethical guidelines that attend to the bioethics of uterine transplantation a multidisciplinary model is required, one where secular and religious bioethicists partner with social and medical scientists.
Procedurally, uterine transplantation involves removing the uterus from a living individual, or from an individual who fulfills the neurological criteria for death, and grafting this organ into a willing female recipient. Uterus transplantation, like limb and face transplantation, is part of the growing area of research into vascular composite allografts where multiple tissues types are transplanted as one functional unit. Uterus transplantation is unique in that it is a temporary measure; once the transplanted uterus fulfills its function in the donor it is removed and discarded. As with all organ transplants, the viability of the organ depends on a myriad of factors including the condition of the uterus when it is removed from the donor, the medical status of the recipient, the immunological compatibility between the donor and the recipient, the surgical technique utilized, and the efficacy of the immunosuppressive drugs the recipient takes to forestall organ rejection. In order for the donor’s sacrifice, the surgeon’s labor, and the recipient’s daily ministrations to be ethically justified, the ends of the procedure must be righteous and likely to be attained, while the risks and side effects relatively minimal. Accordingly, over the past decade, uterine transplantation has become an increasingly viable procedure with acceptable risk-to-benefit ratios, and the success of carrying to term and delivering an infant via a transplanted uterus increasingly probable. This biomedical advancement births bioethics questions both old and new.
For one, uterine transplantation forces clinicians and ethicists to (re-)examine the ambiguous line between therapy and enhancement; is this purported therapy restoring bodily function, adding a new physiologic capacity, or something in between? Uterus transplantation is an experimental procedure/emerging therapy for women with absolute uterine infertility (AUFI). AUFI refers to the inability to bear children because women either (i) lack a uterus (congenitally or because of surgical removal due to disease), or (ii) have a uterine abnormality that prevents embryo implantation and/or gestation to term. For these women, uterus transplantation holds the possibility of (re-)gaining the ability to gestate and birth a child. If uterus transplantation is judged to be a clinical therapy, then AUFI is termed a disease. To consider the therapy vs. enhancement question ethicists must delve into both the medical and the social bases upon which AUFI becomes a disease and uterus transplantation its treatment, as well as the implications thereof.
As noted above, women with AUFI are not all the same. Some cannot bear children for they were born without a uterus or without one that permits gestation. For this group uterus transplantation is technically not restorative because their bodies innately did not have the capacities theoretically offered by a transplanted uterus. Rather, in these cases uterus transplant offers an opportunity to rectify the body’s perceived deficiency by allowing for childbirth. This fix is based on patient desire, as well as on social expectations of womanhood and cultural notions of the normative body being one that contains reproductive capacity. Certainly, social scientific data will attest to the fact that some women with AUFI, as well as those unable to bear children for other reasons, experience profound loss. This sense of missing out on an essential part of life motivates their seeking procedures like uterus transplant. Yet this sense of something missing does not fully support a claim of uterus transplantation as restorative. It certainly adds meaning, value, and enhances perceived flourishing, but it does not restore an innate ability for someone suffering from AUFI. In one way it is more akin to enhancement in that it provides women without a uterus the chance of having a child of their own, much like a prosthetic extremity allows congenital amputees to gain a limb. The extremity adds a capacity, enhances functioning, but does not replace something that was lost, for the extremity was either not there or not fully formed or functional in the first place. The other group with AUFI, those who have had to undergo uterus removal due to disease are, arguably, different because they lost a capacity their bodies previously contained. For them uterus transplantation may be deemed restorative.
I am certainly not suggesting that clinical therapies must be restorative in order to be ethically justified; there are many genetic therapies and surgical procedures that seek to rectify abnormalities in structure, function, and phenotype that are part and parcel of ethical medical practice. Rather, ethicists (be they secular or religious scholars) must appreciate the ways in which uterus transplant and AUFI makes visible the ways in which social expectations and ideas about the normative body interact with the ethical ends of medicine. A host of bioethical questions arise when uterus transplantation is considered as a social practice: Is the fact that some women with AUFI suffer and are desirous of a solution sufficient enough justification to categorize it as a disease that demands medical remedy? Or does the fact that gestating and birthing is perceived to enhance the flourishing of some women sufficient grounding to make it part of routine medical practice? At present uterus transplantation is a procedure undertaken by willfully consenting adults, but if we could perform it on children with less complications and better success would it be ethically justified? On a related note, would medicine deem women who are born without a uterus diseased at birth or do they become diseased only because the need for a child arises later in life? Is either group, the child or the adult, somehow physiologically deviant due to no fault of their own, therefore making it medicine’s task to graft reproductive capacity upon them?
AUFI illustrates how all diseases are socio-culturally constructed; some have physiological or functional correlates (e.g. coronary artery disease), while others are thus classified because they are deviations from social norms (e.g. idiopathic short stature). Women with AUFI fit into both categories in that they are deemed to have a physiological or functional “disability” based on a “missing” function, and accordingly uterus transplant blurs the line between treatment and enhancement. There is no doubt that women with AUFI suffer considerably because they cannot have offspring. Although uterus transplantation may offer a solution to this suffering there are other potential “therapies” to not having children, such as adoption or gestational surrogacy. The appeal of uterus transplantation may be strong, and the procedure may be ethically justified, but it is also carries greater risk than these alternatives. In this case, as in others, ethicists need to fully consider the social forces that turn atypical anatomy or physiology into malady, and difference into disorder. Scholars may find interesting parallels to draw upon in the deaf community where some opt to not have their deafness (or that of their children) “remedied” because they do not see deafness as a disease and reject such stigmatization.
As religious bioethicists weigh in on the ethics of uterus transplant they need to examine conceptions of the normative body from the lens of tradition. For example, both Islam and Christianity have versions of an imago Dei doctrine. Does this notion offer insight into distinctions between therapy and enhancement when it comes to reconfiguring the body by adding a uterus? When building out conceptions of the normative body based on scriptural indicants, both traditions must confront the issue that in some narrations womankind was generated from the first man. What sort of normativity can be attached to the uterus, an organ only present in female bodies? Similarly, both traditions speak to the value of procreation with scriptural texts that command the faithful to “be fruitful and multiply.” Does this directive envisage women without a uterus as being removed from God’s bounty out of wisdom, or can it ground uterus transplantation as a meritorious deed because of a desire to fulfill this teaching? In addition to these new wrinkles, uterus transplantation livens up “older” debates about organ transplantation in religious traditions. Although organ transplantation is generally permitted by Muslim scholars when it is life-saving, uterus transplantation is not technically life-saving for the individual recipient. Would the fact that it allows for a future generation to exist which would not have otherwise accord it life-saving status or does it have a different merit? Islamic scholars debate organ transplantation’s ethico-legal permissibility because it can, arguably, detract from the honor, dignity, and inviolability accorded to the human being as God’s creation because it reduces the human beings into a mix of interchangeable parts. Does uterine transplantation change this stance appreciably?
Continuing on to other social constructions, uterus transplantation necessarily implicates notions of motherhood. The transplanted uterus, if all goes well, would allow a woman to gestate and give birth to a baby. By definition, it would then appear, that uterus transplantation generates a child-parent relationship. Yet it has always been the case that motherhood is constructed upon social as well as biological foundations. Biomedical advancements have made the biological linkages between offspring and potential parents all the more varied, and uterus transplantation adds to this complexity. At one level, the link between a parent and a child is based on shared DNA, the propagation of these building blocks of life from one organism to another links one generation of a species to another. The DNA provides data on one’s origin and ancestry, generates one’s phenotypic and physiological profiles, and speaks to one’s probabilities for disease and longevity. DNA science has replaced “older” methods of evaluating the linkage between offspring and parents. For example, in the Prophet Muhammad’s time, the science of physiognomy was practiced to certify links between progeny and progenitors; today DNA science has supplanted this practice. Yet, modern biomedicine can now offer multiple other biological claims to parenthood as the chain from progenitor to progeny can be further subdivided. Nowadays the ovum and the sperm cell (either with or without the nuclei that contain the cell’s DNA) can be donated from people other than those who desire a child, and the womb within which the fused zygote is gestated can either be hired from a third party or, in the case of uterine transplant, come from a donor.
Figurine of woman with two infants. Photo credit: Nadia Carol, 2008.
Thus the couple desiring a child can legally claim to be rightful parents of an infant they have no DNA or gestational link to. Perhaps there is no ethical issue with such a claim because adoption provides some precedent. Adoption, in ancient times as well as today, has always been a practice that privileged social over biological bonds where accepting a child into one’s home and rearing them created a parent-child relationship. Contemporary biomedicine seems to have innovated beyond this older method with egg, sperm, embryo, and uterus donation. However it is likely that couples who have children via the method of egg and sperm donation plus gestational surrogacy would not consider themselves to be adoptive parents. Technically, however, they are not biological parents either. Is a new category of parenthood needed to cover this situation? Returning to the matter of uterus transplantation, the same question arises: does the act of gestation ground kinship ties and accompanying ethical claims? Gestational surrogacy arrangements, where they are legal, may provide some precedent, but these are also not without their controversies. Would the uterus donor be able to claim parental rights? Or in the case that the donated uterus was deficient in some way would the gestated child be able to make claims of the “right not to be born” against both the uterus donor and the recipient since the functional issue arose only after the uterus was transplanted into the new body?
A further complication, at least for Muslim thinkers, is that the womb and gestation are particularly significant in Islamic theology. One of God’s names is derived from the Arabic root for the womb; and Muslims are warned not to sever the ties of the womb lest it sever God’s mercy from the individual. Similarly the Qur’an emphatically declares that the “true” mother is the individual who birthed (and gestated) the child. Rearing is an important function but not one that grounds parental rights in this world or the next in the Qur’anic paradigm. As such a uterus donor’s ethico-legal claims of parentage would be harder to dismiss. Moreover, another analogy may be drawn from within the tradition. According to Islamic law, milk maids have parental rights, and some thinkers argued gestational mothers should be treated similarly. Does a uterus donor mother need to be added to the mix? Even if Muslims were to not seek uterus transplantation as a remedy the question is nevertheless pertinent to Muslims and Islamic law. With opt-out policies of organ transplantation gaining momentum in multiple countries, it is possible that a deceased Muslim women’s uterus may be used for transplantation purposes in the future. What would the relationship be between the child born to the recipient of that uterus and the children of the donor? Would kinship ties ensue, and the prohibition of marriage amongst siblings be invoked?
Having marked out several important bioethical questions uterus transplantation gives rise to, and noting how these questions have religious dimensions, I would like to close by discussing, in broad strokes, how social science and religious tradition might work together jointly to address these questions. In my view the project of defining terms such as motherhood and distinguishing between enhancement and restoration is a task religion can take up. Religious texts and scriptural teachings provide theologies and ontologies that provide frameworks upon which to build out such conceptions. At the same time, it is important to note that religious interpretations are not neutral; the way a text is read, understood, and explicated is contextually-dependent. These contexts go back, as well as carry forth, into time and make a tradition lived and always evolving. Hence when the religious frameworks are brought to address contemporary questions, their historicity and weddedness to social contexts must be acknowledged, and the frameworks revised as needed. Moreover, the experiences of motherhood, how notions of motherhood play out in society, and how patients invoke conceptions of restoration and enhancement in seeking healthcare are all topics of social scientific research. Even if the individuals studied are religious actors, their decision-making is also shaped by a myriad of other cultural, political, and social forces. Consequently social science has much to offer religious bioethics; it helps to clarify human experiences, understandings, and contexts, both historical and contemporary.
Scholars on this forum have grappled with the many ways in which biomedical advancements spur the reexamination of religious doctrine and teaching and also have forecast how religious theologies can give fuller meaning to the discoveries of biomedicine. They have further commented on how this bilateral exchange is framed by larger social, political, and economic forces. Attending to the pressing bioethical questions of uterus transplantation requires scholars from all three disciplines—religion, medicine, and social science—to come together in trialogue.
Dr. Padela is an emergency medicine physician, health services researcher, and bioethicist whose scholarship focuses on the intersection of community health, religious tradition, and bioethics. He is Director of the Program on Medicine and Religion at the University of Chicago.
Weeks before Civil Rights icon Angela Davis was to be honored for her unflagging commitment to human rights, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) rescinded the February 2019 award, due to concerns that Davis’ support of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement had been challenged as “anti-Semitic.” In the struggle against modern day racism and oppression, solidarity for Palestinians had yet again been set aside—by a Civil Rights institute no less—as the “exception”: a site of injustice that only one identity group—Jews—might legitimately mobilize for or even discuss, and even then under great stigma. In the past few days, Davis has since been reconfirmed for the award by BCRI, and Michelle Alexander’s “Time to break the silence on Palestine” editorial has placed the issue squarely in the public eye—for the moment.
A year ago, on April 9th-11th, 2018, students from Columbia University and Barnard College held an “Academic Freedom Week” responding to the persecution of progressive academics. Below we share the lecture given on the first day by Columbia University professor and panelist Gil Hochberg on “The Palestinian Exception” (to freedom of speech). In her critique of the forms of censorship performed and enforced by pro- and anti-Zionist Jews and allies, Hochberg identifies the intrinsic narcissism of measuring “real” and “good” Jewish identity with the yardstick of the Palestinian “question.” Discourse and action defining the contours of Palestinian survival become circumscribed to Jews speaking from within Jewish resources about the politics of solidarity—by whom, for whom?—while other identity groups are relegated to a status as secondary allies or excluded from these conversations altogether. As Davis noted, how to navigate these complicated, layered questions of identity, authenticity, and solidarity is a question that strikes at the very heart of the indivisibility of justice.
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April 9, 2018
Columbia University
1. Anti Semitism/Anti Zionism
News doesn’t last long. A quick flipping through the online news sites of Fox News, CNN, ABC but also the New York Times, LA Times and lesser-known papers today reveals that the latest crazed attack on Gaza has already been forgotten. Hardly even mentioned. News moved elsewhere: to Syria, back to Trump and his kids, back to all sorts of questions and places. There is nothing surprising about this, of course. It takes a lot for Palestine to “enter” the news and it is almost impossible for it to stay there. Part of it is simply “news fatigue“ (how many times can you read or see the same thing, witness the same atrocities when nothing follows in the form of actual political change?). But part of it is of course the strong Israeli lobby and the sad bitter and perhaps inevitable “mix” of the Palestinian question with the longer and stronger (in terms of its impact) Jewish question, translating always to the ghost of anti-Semitism: new or old, real or not.
It is by now become a cliché to argue that a critique of Israel, or of Zionism, is anti-Semitism. I say a cliché because this argument is used time and time and again to silence criticism against the Israeli state, the occupation of Palestine, or Zionism as an ethnic-national principle of separatism that is undemocratic by definition (I remind you of the then Knesset member Ahmad Tibi’s brilliant phrasing: “Israel is Jewish and democratic: it is democratic for the Jews and Jewish for the Arabs”).
It is really a tiring argument that I trust many are tired of debating. Many have combated it before so I do not want to spend the whole time doing so again. Let me say a few words about this twisted logic and then move on to what I believe needs to be part of the next step of our public conversations about censorship and the Palestinian exception.
Anti-Zionism, like Zionism, like any -ISM, can take many forms. It can become or take the form of anti-Semitism, and so can Zionism. But there is absolutely nothing inherent in the critique of Zionism as a principle, or the critique of the state of Israel, that is anti-Semitic. The suggestion that any expression of anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is an indication of severe paranoia at best, and a manipulated rhetoric at worst. Unless we agree that Jews are by default hated and that anti-Semitism is a mode of collective subconscious; there is no logic to the argument that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
At times this crude logic takes a particularly vulgar turn, making the entire discourse of freedom in Palestine out to be mask for anti-Semitism. This is a perverse argument that suggests that caring for Palestinians and their wellbeing is somehow really about hating Jews and seeking their destruction.
The issue with this zero-sum game (one is either for and against Jews or Palestinians), is not just that it is so limited but that it is further used as an effective silencing machine, time and time again.
Attack on Gaza, 2018, as presented by IDF. Photo Credit: The Israel Project, from IDF image.
Indeed, the so-called ‘new anti-Semitism’ associated with the critique of Israel or Zionism is used by Israeli state officials, the IDF, and many supporters of Israel to explicitly justify state terror and protect Israel from international and domestic condemnation.
What Israel is fighting, the image at right seems to suggest, is anti-Semitism, represented by the Palestinian flag hugging the swastika. The two are the same. One hugging the other.
This tactic, which aims at silencing critique of occupation, state terror, racism, separatism, and other similar violations, is directed strategically. It aims at Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labor Party, for example, but not at Richard Spencer or Steven Bannon. And it is perhaps most effectively used in attacks against Jewish critics of Israel or Zionism, with the goal, as Judith Butler has noted, not just to silence critique but “to cause pain, to produce shame, to isolate and identify a political position with a personal pathology.”
Jews who criticize Israel or Zionism are thus said to be “self-hating” sell outs, in short: “bad Jews.” And as we shall see, there are bad Jews and good Jews, and real Jews, and all kinds of Jews, all aligned around in different positions vis-à-vis the question of Palestine.
2. Good Jews, Bad Jews
Let me pause for a second and share a bad joke with you. And I warn you in advance of its poor taste. But it is nevertheless quite funny in a dark, bitter way. Or perhaps it is funny because it is in such bad taste, as is often the case with pessimistic jokes. It goes something like this: Why is the Palestinian question really a Jewish question? Because only Jews talk about it, and when they do it is mostly in order to argue among themselves about who is the better Jew.
I introduce this joke which is bitter and funny because it is at once a sad joke about the Palestinian ordeal, which supposedly no one but the Jews care about, and about the Jews who care about Palestine and Palestinians primarily because whatever they say about Palestine determines how they are viewed “as Jews.”
Caption: “Antizionism is simply a thinly veiled seemingly more ‘socially acceptable’ form of antisemitism. They are one and the same.” Photo Credit: The Israel Project, 2017.
In short the joke captures the irony of history: the inevitable collapse of the Palestinian question into the Jewish question, only that in the 21st century, this historical inseparability, about which Edward Said wrote so thoughtfully, has become somewhat of a farce. Now that the so-called “Jewish question” has no current political urgency, its dominance in framing the question of Palestine has become primarily an anachronistic, narcissistic, and essentialist question about what makes a good Jew.
And here we see how much power the question: “Is Zionism anti-Semitism?” has had at least since the early 2000s. I remind you of Lawrence Summers’ words, published while he was president of no less than Harvard University. Addressing what he saw as dangerous growing anti-Zionist sentiments among intellectuals, he wrote back in 2002:
Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.
Here of course we see the complete collapse between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. One is the other. Therefore it also means that one cannot be “for the Jews” or “with the Jews” or a “good Jew” if one is anti-Zionist because if one is anti-Zionist one is (in effect or intention) an anti-Semite.
Responding forcefully to the implied accusations, Judith Butler published her defense of anti-Zionism a year later, in 2003. What is important to notice is the manner by which Butler’s response to Summers centered on undoing the tie between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, primarily by undoing the misguided identification of Zionism with Judaism. I quote from Butler:
What do we make of Jews such as myself, who are emotionally invested in the state of Israel, critical of its current form, and call for a radical restructuring of its economic and juridical basis precisely because we are invested in it? It is always possible to say that such Jews have turned against their own Jewishness. But what if one criticizes Israel in the name of one’s Jewishness […] precisely because such criticisms seem ‘best for the Jews’? Why wouldn’t it always be ‘best for the Jews’ to embrace forms of democracy that extend what is ‘best’ to everyone, Jewish or not?
But what does it mean to criticize Israel in the name of one’s Jewishness?
For Butler this means to develop an understanding of Jewishness itself as a non-identitarian project. In her book Parting Ways she writes: “being a Jew implied taking up an ethical relation to the non Jew.” This definition allows her to elaborate a discourse of “Jewish ethics” that is based on Jewish diasporic existence and history as one that ultimately leads to co-existence with non-Jews, and hence as radically different than the Zionist formation of Israel as a “Jewish State.”
The idea of basing one’s critique of the state of Israel on “Jewish sources,” “Jewish ethics” and “Jewish history” is also a tactic and position promoted by Jewish Voice for Peace. Indeed, one of their principles as outlined on their website reads:
We are inspired by Jewish traditions to work for justice and such work is part of our own liberation. We work to build Jewish communities that reflect the understanding that being Jewish and Judaism are not synonymous with Zionism or support for Israel.
I fully appreciate these efforts and think that as responses to accusations of internalized anti-Semitism and self-hatred these are effective strategies. They are also effective in combating the monopoly Zionism claims over Judaism. But this discourse of “Jewish ethics” has its limits as well, and I want to draw attention to these limits, not as a sign of my disagreement with Butler, JVP or others, as much as an expression of my sense that we must become more carefully attuned to how discourses on the left also function as censorship. These discourses also limit what we can say, how we can say it, and who can say what—for Jews and non-Jews—when we talk about Palestine.
Now, let’s face it. I am speaking partially, not only, but partially, as a Jew. Perhaps I am even here as a kosher guard (always good to invite a Jew when discussing Zionism, anti-Semitism, and Palestine). I by no means am implying that the organizers of the event had such intentions in mind. But I also don’t want to ignore this position from which I am speaking which is a position that comes with specific expectations, privileges, and limitations when it comes to speaking about Palestine.
I cannot but speak from this position, which is already over-determined in this context, but I try, very hard, to also speak across it. Because I come to the question of Palestine, to the question of our ability or inability to speak about Palestine, not just in relation to the censorship imposed on us by the right and by academic institutions, but also by the censorship imposed, directly or less so, by the left. When it comes to the question of Palestine, to the question of speaking about Palestine, or the question of who is allowed to speak about Palestine and how, the left has generated some clear frameworks of policed discourse that I find almost as problematic as the attempts to shut down the discussion about Palestine altogether by the right. One such frame is the one I call the “good Jew, bad Jew” framework. It sets the expectation for Jews to speak as Jews and mobilize “Jewish ethics,” thus inevitably turning the question of Palestine into a Jewish question and a question which is ultimately about Jews.
Protest against US supported Israeli bombings and invasion of Lebanon. Photo Credit: Danny Hammontree, 2006.
Of course the need to distinguish Zionism from Judaism, in light of Israel’s speaking in the name of the Jews, and as a Jewish state, is very important. But that work, I believe, is now mostly done. I am also quite wary of the language of authenticity (“real,” “true,” “authentic”) because it ends up functioning as yet another wall of censorship and identity regulations, once again in the name of “what makes a real Jew”—an essentializing discourse that renders one’s political views about the state of Israel and the occupation of Palestine in exclusively Jewish terms.
The question I generate for us (for some of “us”) today is: Do we want to go on playing the “good Jew, bad Jew” game? Do we need to play the “good Jew, bad Jew” game when we simply want to voice our resistance to state terror, military occupation, and racial segregation?
I end here, leaving you with the words of Mahmoud Darwish. Not with a poem, but with words he shared in an interview held in Amman back in 1996 with the Israeli literary critic and poet, Helit Yeshurun. At the time he was waiting for his permit to return home to Palestine:
Do you know why we, the Palestinians, are famous? Because you are our enemy. Interest in the Palestine problem comes by way of interest in the Jewish problem. . . If our war had been with Pakistan, no one would have heard of me. So we are unlucky that our enemy is Israel, which has so many sympathizers in the world, and we are lucky that Israel is our enemy, because Jews are the center of the world. You have given us defeat, weakness, and publicity.
These words are provocative. They are meant to be. And to take them seriously, I think, is to begin to reconsider and rethink the idea of what it means to be speaking “as a Jew” or from a “Jewish position” or about “Jewish ethics” when speaking or trying to speak about Palestine. Can a Jew speak about Palestine, about the atrocities that take place in Palestine, not as a Jew? Can she speak in the name of solidarity, not in the name of authentic Jewishness or Jewish ethics? Can the question of Palestine ever become something that isn’t already and essentially a Jewish question?
Caption: “Palestinians Collect Belongings from Gaza Ruins.” Photo Credit: United Nations Photo, 2014.
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, the modern Levant, Semitism, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema and art. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination(Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives, and the production of knowledge.
Ollagüe-Uyuni border between Chile and Bolivia. Photo Credit: Francisco Javier Argel, 2013.
The first panel at the Ansari Institute’s inaugural conference brought to the fore a core issue in global politics today: the issue of migration. Alicia Turner (York University), Erin Wilson (University of Groningen), William Canny (U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops), and Atalia Omer (University of Notre Dame) provided us with perspectives into different aspects of forced migration that are located at the intersection of modern nationalisms, racisms, and the presence of global religions.
Rooted in her studies of the genocide of the Rohingyas of Myanmar, Alicia Turner prompted us to question the normative hegemony of borders and to identify the ‘silenced victims’ of the construction and enforcement of borders. Turner eloquently disclosed the intertwining relations between the hegemonic establishment of ‘modernity’ with the formal and informal presence of borders whose sole goal is to maintain control over knowledge production, and thus, over the differentiated ‘valuations’ of humanity. In the context of modern binaries, ‘humanity’ is a reward that can only be attributed to those who are within the border. Meanwhile, those who find themselves outside of the border only serve as ‘others’ to affirm the hegemonic selves of the former.
One epistemological goal of modern hegemonic binaries is to produce an illusion of neat and categorized history, in which ‘us’ and ‘them’ are easily differentiated from each other. This illusion works to sustain a façade of hegemonic stability and erases the inhumane realities of lives outside the border. In other words, those who live outside of the border not only pose a threat to their counterparts within the border, but also pose a significant threat to the order of life itself. Hence, as elaborated by Erin Wilson in her presentation, the acts of ‘border-crossing’ from outside the border into the border have always been designated a ‘crisis’ with all of its senses of danger and unpredictability. The acts of moving from one geopolitical locality to another by marginalized others—acts that are otherwise seen as ‘normal’ when they are taken by White ‘Western’ bodies—become an affront to the supposedly peaceful, normalized way of life maintained by the illusion of modern hegemonic binaries.
Furthermore, William Canny assessed the readiness and contribution of Catholic institutions and organizations in dealing with the issue of forced migration. One important point that deserves further discussion from Canny’s presentation is the problem of insularity among Catholic institutions in responding to the many forms of forced migration. The absence of a strong cooperative network among Catholic institutions has led to siloed and fragmented humanitarian work. A cohesive and systematic network is needed to effectively respond to the issue at hand. The same problem can be found in other major religious institutions around the world and has significantly weakened religious-based responses toward the protection of displaced people, immigrants, and refugees in general. In addition, the stated problem also presents a hurdle to tapping into global religious networks as a resource for the advocacy of the rights of migrants.
All of those different facets of the issue of forced migration were elaborated further in Atalia Omer’s rejoinder and response. Omer illuminated the violent underbelly of modernity by interrogating the contours of exclusivism that come with the erection of borders and boundaries. In addition, inspired by the conference of ‘Bandung of the North’ (Saint-Denis, May 4th-May 7th, 2018), Omer called for the construction of socio-political alliances of decolonized experiences in the Northern Hemisphere.
Views of the Nogales border wall from the north side. Nogales, AZ. Photo Credit: Peg Hunter, 2018.
Another important point that was highlighted in Omer’s rejoinder concerned the ‘securitization of religion’ by the modern institution of the ‘nation-state.’ In this ongoing process of securitization, the presence of religion in public space is seen as yet another example of ‘boundary-crossing’ in which secularism is a norm and religiosity is an exception at best, and a threat at worse. Such a process can be seen clearly in the rise of Islamophobic policies in the US and many parts of Europe where Islam, and by extension Muslims, are relegated to a position of threat to the ‘cultural integrity’ of both regions, whatever that means. In addition to the violent implications against the marginalized-religious other, ‘securitization of religion’ also results in a skewed perspective where state-sponsored violence is justified due to the normativization of secular violence and the demonization of religious-based violence.
What we can infer from this panel is an interlocking presence of borders that are created out of political, racial, and religious differences and are employed to justify violence on marginalized others. These borders are then sustained and legitimated through the hegemonic presence of the ‘nation-state’ as the arbiter of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ violence. If there is one thing that ties these phenomena, it is the fact that the political, racial, and religious markers that compose those borders are also etched and negotiated on the bodies of the marginalized others as ‘border-crossers.’
A Way Forward?
What is left rather unexplored from the conversation on religions and forced migration in the panel are two key areas. First, there is the question of the ways in which external borders are projected onto the bodies of ‘border-crossers.’ Second, I question what alternative forms of plural and hybrid embodiment exist that can be used as models for thinking about the constructedness and fluidity of boundaries.
In this context, looking into how the bodies of women of color accommodate, resist, and reconstruct the various ‘borders’ that are imposed on them would be a fruitful endeavor to undertake. As a case in point, in many discourses surrounding bad/good Muslims in the US (which also automatically translate into bad/good immigrants), one’s decision to wear hijab or not wear hijab is intrinsically associated with one’s position within or outside certain borders. When a Muslim woman wears a hijab, she is both the icon of ‘oppressive Islam’ and the ‘ideal’ figure of the Muslims’ ‘faith.’ Meanwhile, when she does not wear a hijab, she is an ‘enlightened’ (good) Muslim who embraces the mythical gift of ‘agency’ from the ‘Western world,’ and also at once a traitor to her own community of Muslims. In other words, the borders are not only located out there in physical, socio-political, and conceptional forms, but also within the liminal bodies that are located at the forefront of ‘border-claims.’ On the one hand, this fact shows the pervasiveness of patriarchal paradigms that exploit women’s bodies as a benchmark of patriarchal morality. On the other hand, it represents a liminal capacity inherent in women’s bodies that could serve as a model for a microcosm of plurality in today’s world.
Another contemporary example of the fluidity of the ‘liminal self’ can be found in the lives of many Southeast Asian female migrant workers whose jobs as domestic caretakers reflects the hybrid role as ‘mothers’ (to their own kids back at home) and as ‘surrogate mothers’ (to the family that they take care of). This intersectional and violent experience is created in the ‘borderland’ between home and host countries, but is rooted in one embodied experience of motherhood. What the hybrid roles of female migrant workers show is a mode of being that takes on boundaries (with all of their violence) as a site in which to live through the shifting constitutions of selfhood. Using terminology from Muslim feminist theologian Sa’diyya Shaikh, the Southeast Asian female migrant workers are living up ‘moments of resistance’ in which deconstruction of the boundaries is not what counts, but rather their creative survival.
When it does not pose any danger towards the women themselves, the fluidity of borders within the bodies of women of color represents an appreciation of a plurality of living in which borders and boundaries have lost their exclusivist contours. Aware of the violence performed on them by hegemonic boundaries, many women of color embrace the beautiful mess of liminality in which they construct alternative spaces defined by multiple identities. In this context, ‘religion’ functions as one of the languages with which their creative survival is expressed. It serves as a locus for those ‘moments of resistance’ due to its capacity to deconstruct hierarchies and advocate for humanity in the name of the Divine. It is to such hybrid modes of belonging that we must anchor our hopes in a time where ‘humanity’ is seen as a privilege accorded only to those who live inside the border.
Lailatul Fitriyah is a Ph.D candidate and Presidential Fellow at the World Religions and World Church Program, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She holds a MA in International Peace Studies from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her current research is focused on the construction of feminist theologies of resistance in post-colonial Southeast Asia, feminist theologies of migration, and feminist interreligious dialogue.
A global warming-affected farmer in Peru whose village is dependant on the Ausangate glacier. Photo Credit: Oxfam International, 2009.
With the United Nations climate change panel recently releasing a report that stated limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius “would require rapid, far reaching and unprecedentented changes in all aspects of society,” the Ansari Institute’s panel on “Sustainable Habitats: How Religions Can Repair Unsustainable Environments,” proves timely. While we are used to hearing scientists, economists, and politicians weigh in on the environment, it is less common to turn to religious traditions as potential collaborators. Nosheen Ali (Aga Khan University), Daniel Castillo (Loyola Maryland), and Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (University of Buffalo) showed the rich resources these traditions can bring to the conversation. One commonality that ran across each presentation was the importance of reimagining the relationship between humans, other animals, and the earth. Given that we are now in the age of the anthropocene—climate change brought about by human actions—such reimaginings are key for developing a sustainable relationship with the earth.
Daniel Castillo raised dual concerns from the Catholic tradition: how can the life of faith inform both the preferential option for the poor and the option for the earth? Castillo drew our attention to the reality that these two concerns are intimately interlinked: those who will suffer the most from the earth’s rising temperatures are those in the Global South who do not have the economic resources to shield themselves from the effects of climate change. Turning to the Hebrew scriptures, Castillo rejected the harmful anthropocentrism that has arisen in response to the Genesis 1 narrative of man having dominion over the earth. He instead emphasized Genesis 2:15, which calls humanity to cultivation and care. Castillo argued that the symbolic vocation in Genesis 2 is the gardener who lives out the imago dei (image of God) through love of God, neighbor, and the earth. Cultivation and care extends toward both neighbor and the rest of creation, emphasizing our embeddedness within these relationships.
Glacier ceremony celebrating Christ and spirit of the mountain, as part of the Qoyllur Rit’i. Photo Credit: Sebastien Lafont, 2008.
Nosheen Ali spoke from an Islamic perspective and the context of her fieldwork in Shimshal, Pakistan. Ali noted that policies focused on sustainability have become entrenched in the very capitalist system responsible for creating environmental degradation in the first place. We can learn from the people in Shimshal who, because of their view that nature is sacred, have developed forms of human labor that can complement the processes of nature. Yet, Ali noted, often this sacred view of nature is “denied legitimacy in mainstream notions of science.” She underscored the importance of making space for ecology as a spiritual concept. Ali then considered the history of asceticism in Islam, describing Baba Farid (1173-1266), a revered Sufi spiritual leader, who believed a practice of anti-accumulation was essential to his religious life. An ecological spirituality combined with an emphasis on anti-materialism offers a model for sustainable human practices.
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo presented her ethnographic research with impoverished Peruvians who “draw on indigenous traditions to collaborate with sacred, sentient landscapes.” Bacigalupo presented the Peruvian workers’ divinization rituals as a form of resistance against the extractive resource industry. They believe the natural world has its own moral agency and argue that we have angered the earth. This has led to a movement, amongst some Peruvians, demanding the recognition of the legal personhood of nature. Bacigalupo argued that this approach to nature as a sacred, sentient landscape has led to new models of mobilization against climate change.
These three scholars show us that ecological spirituality as an embodied practice has the potential to reorient our relationship with the earth. Practices of caring for a garden, cooperating with nature, and extending solidarity beyond human persons to the rest of the natural world foster a vision of a relationship with the earth grounded in kinship rather than extraction. This allows the human person to see herself as not only embedded in the human community but also in the broader community of the earth and all creatures.
Yet, as we recover and/or develop these ecological, spiritual practices, Ali warned us to guard against universal solutions. Each ecosystem has unique features, and so each community will need to develop their own ways of cooperating with nature. In the words of the American poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry, the over-emphasis on “Think Big,” such as macro-level planning, policies, and laws, has blinded us to the power of “Think Little” and the creative possibilities that emerge when we fully engage in our own backyard and community. Religious actors, traditions, and resources can also help to further develop this point. For instance, within my own Catholic tradition, Pope Francis has emphasized that we require a “lifestyle and spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm,” because technical expertise can only provide, at best, a partial solution to climate change (Laudato Si’ #111). Pope Francis calls for an “ecological conversion” within each of our communities (Laudato Si’ #219). While public policies and laws are important, for Ali, Berry, and Pope Francis these measures alone won’t save us. We must also foster ways of thinking little within our local communities, which as a collective have the transformative power to impact climate change.
St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Memphis, TN. Photo Credit: Gary Bridgman.
The Ansari Institute’s panel offers an important starting point for thinking about religious resources for combating climate change. Moving forward, it is important that panels like this attend to intersectionality at a deeper level. While the intersectionality between the environment and the poor was highlighted, other points of intersectionality, like gender, deserve more attention. During the question and answer period, Harvard Divinity School professor and Director of the Religious Literacy Project Diane Moore raised concerns to Castillo that the same Genesis 2 text being used to safeguard the environment has also been used to suppress women. For example, Genesis 2:18 states: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Historically, this has been used to justify a hierarchical relationship between men and women. The same text used to support a relationship of care with the earth has also been used, in one prevalent reading, to justify the subordination of women. In our attempts to correct a harmful tradition of anthropocentrism, can we use a text that has been used to discount women’s equity?
For the feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, we must address both forms of oppression together because “the subjugation of women has formed the symbolic basis for the subjugation of the earth.” This means that work in ecotheology must also attend to gender. In the case of Genesis 2, the ecotheological reading of the human person as a gardener that images God by nurturing the earth must be in conversation with feminist theological interpretations of Genesis 2 that challenge sexist readings of the text. Otherwise, we risk realizing justice in one dimension only to undermine it in another.
The stakes of incorporating an intersectional lens are more than theoretical; there are substantive practical implications as well. For example, recent studies have shown that women are disproportionately affected by climate change, particularly in communities where they also lack equal access to other resources such as education and economic opportunities. Given this reality, it is necessary to think about how religious resources and ecological spiritualties interact with gender as well as other pertinent issues such as racism and decolonization. Indeed, such a process is necessary in order to build a spiritually informed, holistic vision of climate justice.
Suggested Further Readings:
Theology and Ecology across the Disciplines: On Care for Our Common Home. Edited by Celia Dean-Drummond and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser. London, UK: T&T Clark, 2018.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Moore, Niamh. “Eco/Feminism, Non-Violenc and the Future of Feminism.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 10, no. 3 (2008): 282-98.
Marie-Claire Klassen is a PhD Candidate in Theology with a minor in Peace Studies at Notre Dame. Her research utilizes theological ethnography to study Palestinian liberation theology. She is currently a Dissertation Year Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
The ink of scholars is holier than the blood of martyrs.
–Attributed to the Prophet Muhammad
Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.
–Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
–Albert Einstein
Bright boxes with eager faces lit up the computer screen, revealing a new batch of madrasa graduates from India and Pakistan. A handful of boxes were blank, cameras off to maintain the privacy of veiled female participants. One video feed was pitch dark, not for privacy, but because the power was out in the remote village outside of Delhi; it is a good thing that the laptop was charged and connected through the cell tower. Each of the twenty-six students in class that day logged in from a remote location. The camera of one of the participants, also from India, could be seen bouncing around, as if from the set of a reality show. He had logged in using his mobile device while on a train that had been delayed. One participant from Pakistan joined us from Saudi Arabia. He had not yet returned from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Half way through the customary first-day introductions, a box appeared with what seemed like the inside of Hesburgh library in the background. A Notre Dame student, helping with the project through the peace research lab, had just logged in to take attendance. Thus began the second year of an ambitious effort to advance theological and scientific literacy in Madrasa Discourses (MD).[1]
Professor Ebrahim Moosa, himself a madrasa graduate, initiated MD within the Contending Modernities (CM) research initiative in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies within the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Perception matters: Why is a Catholic institution interested in reforming Madrasa education? Within Notre Dame, MD aligns with the goals of the school and institutes within which it resides. The Keough School of Global Affairs advances “integral human development” through “transformative educational programs”; MD generates “greater understanding of the ways in which religious and secular forces interact in the modern world,” which is the purpose of the CM research initiative; and the activities of MD contribute towards “strengthening the capacity of all for peacebuilding,” which is the mandate of the Kroc Institute. The project is supported with external funding through the John Templeton Foundation, which encourages “civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians, as well as between such experts and the public at large.” The project’s image benefits from the reputation of Notre Dame as a ranked research university in the US that is committed to global engagement for furthering the common good.
Authentic “Insiders” at the Helm
Mahan Mirza (l) and Ebrahim Moosa (r) in the Madrasa Discourses trailer video.
The project also has the advantage of having a strong team of authentic “insiders” at the helm.[2] As the Principal Investigator, Ebrahim Moosa is a world-renowned scholar and himself a madrasa graduate. As the lead faculty responsible for implementing the project, I have a background in the sciences, Islamic studies, and experience working with credible Islamic institutions with global recognition. Like-minded and authoritative partners in India and Pakistan serve as lead faculty to guide and mentor the madrasa participants. MD has no formal institutional partnerships overseas. Instead, MD has contractual agreements with individuals who, in turn, have strong ties to important institutions in their respective local contexts. The lead faculty in India, Waris Mazhari, is a graduate of Darul Uloom Deoband, one of the most prestigious madrasas in India. He serves on the faculty of the Jamia Hamdard, is the founding director of the Institute for Religious and Social Thought, and he has been editing the journal of the Deoband “Old Boys Club” for almost two decades. Dr. Mazhari holds a Ph.D. from Jamia Millia Islamia, a century-old institution of higher learning founded by prominent Indian Muslim leaders.
In Pakistan, our lead faculty Mawlana Ammar Khan Nasir is the associate director of the Al-Sharia Academy where he edits an influential online monthly journal addressing topics at the intersection of Islam and modernity. Mawlana Nasir, also a graduate of the traditional madrasa system, has an MA in English literature, is completing his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Punjab University. He served for several years on the faculty of GIFT University in his hometown of Gujranwala, just outside Lahore. The Sharia Academy is founded and directed by Mawlana Ammar’s father, Mawlana Zahid ur Rashid, who also the head of a traditional Sunni Madrasa, Nusratul Uloom. Our colleagues have provided invaluable support in the recruitment of students, supported curriculum development, taught regularly in the program, established an Urdu public website, and translated curricular and supplementary texts from English into Urdu for the journal. Our partnership helps to allay any concerns that our project has colonial or surreptitious designs through an intimate intellectual kinship forged on trust and mutual respect.
Goals and Methodological Principles of Madrasa Discourses
Credit: Qatar Foundation. Madrasa Discourses 2017 Winter Intensive tour of the Qatar National Library.
The goal of MD is to transform the intellectual culture within madrasa scholarship by bringing it into conversation with contemporary intellectual currents. A fundamental premise of the project is that madrasa education, by and large, is falling short of preparing graduates to meet the intellectual challenges of the day.[3] This failure has resulted in a marginalization of religious scholars (‘ulama’) in society coupled with a collapse of their moral authority. Whereas the ulama were once the intellectual and spiritual guides in Muslim societies, they are now relegated to relics who are largely irrelevant if not ridiculed as being out of step with the times. In order to achieve the goal of raising the level of the intellectual discourse in madrasa circles, MD has recruited a handful of madrasa graduates to participate in a three-year curriculum designed to provide conceptual tools as well as language proficiency to help them better navigate contemporary academic literature in English. Although the instruction takes place in an intimate environment out of the reach of the public largely sequestered from social media, we have launched a public website Tajdīd to allow the conversation that is taking place in the classroom to spill over into the public sphere.
The goal of MD is to transform the intellectual culture within madrasa scholarship by bringing it into conversation with contemporary intellectual currents. A fundamental premise of the project is that madrasa education, by and large, is falling short of preparing graduates to meet the intellectual challenges of the day.”
Guiding MD are two vital methodological principles. The first is that we derive our inspiration to engage critically with new knowledge by appealing to terms or frames of inquiry that are native to the Islamic scholarly tradition. MD draws on the rich textual heritage of Islam to make the case for critical inquiry, dynamism, and creativity as aspects that are native to Islamic religious thought. Although MD is primarily an educational program, it is nonetheless framed within a broader agenda of peacebuilding, affirmation of human dignity, and furthering the common good. Conflict manifests in conceptual categories as well as lived social realities; it can be viewed through the imperfect temporal concepts of “tradition” and “modernity” or perhaps even less perfect cultural/geographic designators of “Islam” and “West.”
The Elicitive Approach
Drawing on theories in conflict resolution, then, and wedding these theories to the educational aspect of MD, our approach is an “elicitive” one. Contrasting with a “prescriptive” approach that “understands the training event as built around the specialized knowledge of the trainer, which is taken to be both transferable and universal”, the elicitive approach “understands training as a process that emerges from already-existing, local knowledge.”[4] The adoption of an elicitive model, which builds on frames of inquiry that are embedded within the vast storehouses of the Islamic scholarly tradition, enables MD to extend the conversations from the past to the present, leading us out from the familiar to the unfamiliar. This not only avoids the shock value of some of our provocations, it also allows us to proceed systematically, taking the familiar ground of the Islamic tradition as the intellectual journey’s point of departure. The elicitive approach allows participants to build on their existing knowledge base and encourages them to make organic connections instead of struggling to assimilate what is foreign in a manner that would be both disorienting and unsettling.
A second methodological imperative of MD is to emphasize from the outset that participants should get used to an intellectual environment characterized by indeterminism and complexity.”
A second methodological imperative of MD is to emphasize from the outset that participants should get used to an intellectual environment characterized by indeterminism and complexity. We do not tell anyone what the answers are, nor do we expect right or wrong answers. Our project is about questions. But we do expect participants to reason well. MD challenges anti-intellectual modes of religious thought that prevail in contemporary madrasa discourses. We do our best to highlight complexity wherever possible so that participants are not able to hide behind formulaic responses transmitted from generation to generation. By working through the rich history of the Islamic scholarly tradition, we emphasize that intelligent people can disagree. In fact, the Islamic scholarly tradition is built on creative tensions. If history is our guide, intelligent students should expect to arrive at different answers to the theological conundrums of our time. When grounded in sound arguments that are accessible to all in a transparent and shared public space, difference is not something to decry. Difference can be something to celebrate.
The Curriculum: History, Science, Theology
The curriculum – designed together by the core faculty – is conceptualized in three parts, one corresponding to each year of study. The first part deals with history. The second with science. And the third with theology. Themes of each of the three parts are interwoven; the core theme of any of the years cannot be treated in isolation from the rest. History provides context for both theology and science; science is informed by history and influences theology; and theology is reconstructed in light of both history and science. Nonetheless, it has been helpful for us to isolate a dominant disciplinary lens through which to enter the conversation in any given year. Poetically, the three years mirror chronology: 1) history (past), 2) science (present), and 3) theology (future). The locus of theology in the future reflects the project’s ambition of “reconstruction” or “renewal” of theology in light of a more expansive view of the past and a receptive attitude toward new knowledge in the present: a kindling of the moral imagination.
The curriculum – designed together by the core faculty – is conceptualized in three parts, one corresponding to each year of study. The first part deals with history. The second with science. And the third with theology. Themes of each of the three parts are interwoven; the core theme of any of the years cannot be treated in isolation from the rest.”
The program begins with confronting the pluralism of beliefs in human cultures. Human beings have always held different views about their origins and destinies. These differences manifest themselves in varieties of myths and religions. The very first class of the program invites students to confront pluralism through creation stories. We have used short and accessible articles published online by National Geographic series on “The Story of God” hosted by Morgan Freeman.[5] The website offers articles on “Creation Myths from around the World,” “Australian Aboriginal Stories,” and “What We Know about Where We Come from.” Unlike the other myths, new knowledge today helps us construct a fresh creation story by integrating the findings of multiple disciplines in the natural sciences. Beginning with pluralism enables us to get to the core scientific and theological questions that undergird our entire program: How do we privilege our beliefs over the beliefs of others? How did the Islamic scholarly tradition address the question of pluralism? What was the role of reason, independent of revelation, in classical Islamic thought, in answering these questions? Is science today adding anything new to the conversation that could be a game-changer for theology?
When the Abrahamic creation story that the Quranic account participates in is juxtaposed to other creation myths, it becomes evident to students almost instantly that our story seems just as “mythical” as the rest: God talks to the first man and woman in a garden with temptations by Satan or a serpent. The humans are deceived and banished to life on earth. On what basis can Muslims claim that their version is truer than the others? It so happens that the founders of one of the major theological schools in Sunni Islam, Abu Mansur Maturidi (d. 944), addresses this very question in his theological Treatise on Divine Unicity or Kitāb al-Tawḥīd.[6] According to Maturidi, if every group were to rely simply on its own traditions as authorities for the truthfulness of their creeds, there would be no way to mediate between them. For that, one must appeal to reason that is universally and independently accessible to all parties. This is why treatises in classical Islamic theology begin with a position statement on theories of knowledge. The fourteenth century theologian Saʿd al-Din Taftazani (d. 1390) informs us that by his time – almost five hundred years after Maturidi –theology (kalām) had become virtually indistinguishable from philosophy (falsafa).[7] Several centuries earlier, the formidable Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) had already declared theology as “the universal science among the Islamic sciences.”[8] This is because “the theologian (mutakallim) is the one who looks into the most basic of all things (aʿamm al-ashyāʾ), which is Being (al-mawjūd).”[9] Seeing that the study of nature was a theological imperative for Muslim scholars of the past, how could it possibly be that insights into nature gained through the various scientific disciplines today are no longer relevant to the foundation of Islamic theology? Should not theologians today engage new knowledge in science and philosophy just as the theological masters of the past had done in their own time?
Our instinct to begin with pluralism is well founded. The sociologist, Peter Berger, affirms: “It is my position that modernity has plunged religion into a very specific crisis, characterized by secularity, to be sure, but characterized more importantly by pluralism.”[10] More recently, a pioneering work in the budding field of Big History entitled Maps of Time offers: “Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.”[11] Ian Markham, dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary, begins his reflections on A Theology of Engagement with the same question.[12] Markham argues that pluralism is a historical fact, that our traditions are heterogeneous, and that the Church might consider reorienting itself to derive lessons from this reality instead of posturing to change the world in her image.
Screenshot from the Madrasa Discourses trailer video.
The connections that the theme of pluralism allows us to make with history, theology, and science are developed in the first semester of the first year through the relationship between epistemology and history. We draw on competing ideas of “reason” used by scholars from across the intellectual spectrum from the likes of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209) to Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). We spend time with Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) to witness beginnings of theoretical approaches to history, but also ponder why such critical approaches were never truly absorbed into the mainstream theological tradition. We switch gears by turning to recent historians like R. G. Collingwood and philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer, which stretches the discussion from the medieval to the modern period. Collingwood defines philosophy as second order reasoning, or “thought about thought.”[13] Collingwood connects history with philosophy by identifying both as concerned with “the science of absolute presuppositions.” History enables us to illuminate the dark corners of our own minds by empathizing with others as we strive to know the causes of events and motivations of actors on the historical stage. Given that historical reports emanate from the subjective vantage of observers, that observations are selective, and that interpretations of observations are theory-laden, it may never be possible for us to fully recover the past, even when we have copious reports about a particular event. This is why, argues Gadamer, every generation must re-interpret the past for itself. Successive communities of interpreters must constantly renegotiate meaning in light of fresh experiences that generate fresh questions.[14] Such notions of historical criticism are entirely new to MD participants, and they are indispensable for text interpretation and retrieval of “tradition” in contemporary academic discourses. The second semester invites students to reflect more deeply on Islamic intellectual history and the meaning of “tradition.” Through writings by historians like Marshal Hodgson and Dimitri Gutas, we attempt to place Islam within the broader spectrum of human history, working with concepts such as Karl Jasper’s “Axial Age,” as well as the Greco-Arabic Translation movement from the ninth to eleventh centuries.[15] Foreign influences on Islamic thought in this formative period do not permit us to speak of the intellectual tradition as being “purely Islamic.” To further the historical sensibilities of students, we trace the divergent reception of Aristotelian cosmology in the works of great scholars like Biruni (d. 1048) and Ibn Sina (d. 1037). Ghazali and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) demonstrate contrasting positions on the relationship between philosophy and theology. Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn ʿArabi (d. 1240) exemplify alternative modes of reasoning from their predecessors. Ibn Taymiyya levels a devastating critique on logic, while the latter decries system of thought altogether, setting sail to the winds of allegory. By the end of the first year, students come to view the Islamic tradition as one that is deeply contested.
Students engage with all this material online in an interactive classroom. In addition to the four core faculty members, we also have the privilege of involving guest instructors from various departments at ND. We have had guest appearances by Gabriel Reynolds in theology, Deborah Tor in history, Rashied Omar in peace studies, Thomas Burman in medieval studies, Hussein Abdulsater in classics, and Adnan Aslan in philosophy. The presence of guest instructors in the online classroom has been tremendously enriching for the participants.
The Second Year: Science
The second year focuses on the history and philosophy of science, contemporary theories in the philosophy of religion, “big history,” and the deep history of humanity as it unfolds through “thresholds of increasing complexity” from the earliest stages of the cognitive revolution to a globally networked technological society. Among the questions that we ask are: Does modern science liberate us from God? Is contemporary science independent of metaphysics? Does science prove things with certainty? Is the method of science universal? Is there such a thing as progress in science? How do we distinguish between science and pseudoscience? What are the laws that govern scientific change? If scientific theories and worldviews change, how can we trust the scientific theories of our time? In order to engage these questions meaningfully, the course introduces students to competing theories of truth, thinking philosophically about “facts,” concepts like realism vs. instrumentalism, the underdetermination of theories, and “worldviews” as an interlocking web of theories comprising of empirical facts, philosophic ideas, and methodological approaches. We then apply these concepts to the history of science by studying the transitions from the Aristotelian-Medieval worldview to the contemporary worldview. Names like Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Darwin come to life in our survey.
Contemporary texts from the Islamic tradition accompany us on the journey. In fall 2017, for example, we dissected an essay published in Urdu that attempts to interpret issues in Islamic scriptural sources that are in apparent conflict with science.”
Contemporary texts from the Islamic tradition accompany us on the journey. In fall 2017, for example, we dissected an essay published in Urdu that attempts to interpret issues in Islamic scriptural sources that are in apparent conflict with science. This article draws our attention to prophetic sayings such as Adam was sixty feet tall, a baby’s gender is selected by whichever partner’s fluid dominates, one wing of a fly has a disease while the other has a cure, and the sun will one day rise from the west. The exercise of close reading and careful analysis helps students identify strategies for interpretation that are useful as well as others that are weak if not downright fallacious.[16]
Another text authored by Anwar Shah Kashmiri (d. 1933), a renowned scholar in madrasa circles from the early twentieth century, argues that Quranic statements about nature and the heavens are not intended to be “realist,” but rather “perspectival,” describing things as experienced by humans rather than “as they truly are” according to the latest theories of science.[17] These arguments echo Galileo’s position in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which was rebutted by Cardinal Bellarmine.[18] In a fascinating twist, Cardinal Bellarmine’s response mirrors a position by another prominent Madrasa scholar of the twentieth century, Ashraf Ali Thanvi (d. 1943).[19] In this way, students are able to witness great debates on science and the interpretation of scripture in their own tradition today that replicate debates that transpired four centuries ago in Europe.
Our treatment of the contemporary worldview includes Einstein’s theory of relativity, Quantum mechanics, and the theory of evolution. According to Richard DeWitt’s Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science, “all of these theories require substantial changes in our worldview.”[20]The changes required by these new perspectives to our intuitions about the nature of reality boggle the mind. According to them, space and time are no longer absolute, actions appear to have influences across distances at speeds faster than light, and we are what the universe becomes when it has a chance to evolve over billions of years.
Credit: Mahan Mirza. Indian Madrasa Discourses students grappled with the relationship between religion and science in April of 2017 as well. Here they meet with Hakim Syed Zillur Rahman at the Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Sciences.
In the spring semester of the second year, we read a coherent account of human history and imaginative account of human future as portrayed in Yuval Noah Harari’s bestsellers, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.[21]Sapiens takes us through a journey that begins with the earliest humans, tracing different theories of their origins and evolution. Drawing on a vast array of sources in innumerable disciplines in the natural and social sciences, Harari expertly weaves religion, psychology, politics, ethics, economics, and empire, even including reflections on the meaning of life and human happiness, into his historical narrative. This narrative is not contested by experts; but it is one of the most coherent ones available that serves our purpose of theological provocation very well. Harari helps us start a conversation, not end it. These first two years of the program thus prepare the foundation for the work of theological reconstruction in the third year.
The Third Year: Constructive Theology
Out of the thirty-four students who began the first year with us, ten to twelve of the most promising students will continue to the final year of the program beginning fall 2018. These students will draw on the concepts and theoretical tools from the first two years to ask research questions and engage in a program of constructive theology. The research cohort of the third year may be clustered thematically into three groups. Let us take a look at the issues that each of these three research groups might deal with, bearing in mind that what is said here is provisional.
“The best of generations is my generation, then those that follow them, then those that follow them.”[22] This saying of the Prophet Muhammad has animated Muslim sensibilities through the centuries. It evokes a sense of loss with every passing generation as our temporal gulf from the lifespan of the beloved Prophet continuously expands with the flow of historical time. In that sense, decline is in-built in the very fabric of Prophetic religion. Devotees fulfill their longing to be near the Prophet – the best of creation –through obedience, emulation, and love. It is natural for the breathtaking changes we witness today in our knowledge of the cosmos, nature, and history, accompanied by new patterns of life dictated by mechanical clocks instead of the rhythms of nature, not to mention our new conceptions on the origin of man and his possible future as an interstellar transhuman species, to be unsettling to adherents of revealed religion. The disorientation, loss, and confusion, is unimaginable yet understandable. The nostalgic tug from a past as we hurl inexorably towards an uncertain future poses a dilemma, if not crisis. Can believers remain faithful to their tradition while at the same time engaged and optimistic in what the future holds, or are they forever condemned to view paradigm-changing shifts in human understanding, technical progress, and social development with suspicion?
According to Islamic teachings, the prophet Muhammad is God’s final messenger to humanity (Q. 33:40). He comes at the end of a succession of prophets – reportedly up to 124,000 –to all peoples in every age for their guidance. One of the reasons that God sent messengers was so that people would have no argument against Him on the Day of Judgment (Q. 4:165). The doctrine of the finality of prophethood is so central that it led the government of Pakistan to declare anyone who does not believe in it a non-Muslim.[23]
The finality of prophethood naturally implies that the Prophet Muhammad’s message is universal; it no longer applies merely to a particular group of people at a given moment in history. Instead, it applies normatively to all people until the end of time. This doctrine fits neatly within a linear framework of history that is common to the Abrahamic traditions. As the narrative goes, God sent messengers aforetime in succession because human society and civilization was in a process of growth and development, much like an individual slowly advancing through various stages from childhood to maturity. The message needed to be renewed or updated with changing times with successive prophets. After the prophet Muhammad, there would be no need for messengers because the guidance and teachings of the final messenger would suffice for future cultural and intellectual contexts – forever. That is why God has taken it upon Himself to safeguard the final scripture (Q. 15:9), and that is why traditionalists have paid scrupulous attention to the transmission of tradition from generation to generation.
The doctrine of the finality of prophethood has made it difficult for Muslims to disentangle Islamic norms from the cultural practices of the Prophet and his Companions in seventh century Arabia. Arabness was subsumed within Islam.[24] Because of the fusion of Arab cultural practices with transcendent divine teachings, Muslim scholars have always been well aware of the need to separate contingent social culture from universal religious norms in the teachings of the prophet Muhammad.[25] This tension, however, has never been fully resolved, with the result that the most venerated of scholars even today gravitate towards seventh century Arab culture, at times erroneously and anachronistically identifying later practices with prophetic norms.
Sherman Jackson offers a riveting critique against this tendency in the American context. Immigrant Muslims, he argues, falsely “universalize the particular” by elevating their particular cultural practices to universal religious norms, a move that effectively extends a system of cultural domination over Blackamerican Muslims who are still feeling the effects of another legacy of oppression in the West.”
Sherman Jackson offers a riveting critique against this tendency in the American context. Immigrant Muslims, he argues, falsely “universalize the particular” by elevating their particular cultural practices to universal religious norms, a move that effectively extends a system of cultural domination over Blackamerican Muslims who are still feeling the effects of another legacy of oppression in the West. Consequently, in adopting Islam and accepting the authority of scholarship whose provenance is in Muslim lands and whose content fuses divine doctrine with foreign culture, Blackamericans become compelled to disregard their own legitimate cultural experiences. But how does one begin to identify the line between cultural experiences and transcendent doctrines?
What happens when Professor Jackson’s critique is extended to more stable doctrinal issues that ostensibly lie beyond culture, “intra-Muslim pluralism” notwithstanding?[26] For example, are issues like slavery, marriage, and war under the purview of “culture” or “doctrine?” Our sensibilities in these areas are very different today than they were at the time of the prophet Muhammad. If the Prophet is the best example for all time, could his personal conduct in these areas be considered universal norms of exemplary conduct today? Even sympathetic observers of the Prophet Muhammad’s life will have a very difficult time considering his behavior as universally normative in these areas. The world has changed. But prophecy has ended. How does one square today’s moral norms with virtues that are anchored in the life of a seventh century Arabian prophet? Participants in the third research year may choose to develop research questions in this area, revisiting this doctrine in light of pressing new questions raised in an age of accelerating change.
The movement of history testifies that history did not end in the seventh century. In fact, with rapid Muslim conquests across much of the inhabited world in the first few centuries of Islam, Arabs encountered vastly diverse ethnic, linguistic, and intellectual worlds that they assimilated into their conceptual universe, interpreting scripture in light of ancient philosophy – the “new knowledge” of the time. Just like Islamic thought interacted with Greek philosophy in the past to forge a scholastic intellectual tradition that has been taught in traditional madrasas for centuries, how must the academic formation of Muslims today change in light of new knowledge about the nature of human beings, their place in the cosmos, and the miracles of techno-science?
Acceleration and Islamic Theology
A contemporary historical concept that helps us convey the urgency of the need to rethink long held assumptions about human nature and the human condition is “acceleration.” The German historian Reinhart Koselleck, speaking about the changing nature of human perception of historical time, writes: “there occurs a temporalization [Verzeitlichung] of history, at the end of which there is the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity.”[27] The columnist Thomas Friedman, in his recent bestseller Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in an Age of Accelerations, speaks of accelerations in three areas, which he identifies as technology, the market, and mother nature.[28]
Cynthia Stokes Brown, scholar in the budding field of “Big History,” places acceleration in the context of cosmic history: “Acceleration, an increase in the rate of change, is occurring both in the universe and in human culture on planet Earth… On the cosmological or geological scale, change is measured in millions or billions of years. On the biological scale, with natural selection setting the pace, change occurs in thousands to millions of years. On the scale of human culture, large-scale change used to occur over millennia or centuries, but now it is taking place in decades or even years.”[29] Friedman observes that acceleration itself is accelerating, noting with sympathy that: “This is dizzying for many people.”[30]
In Homo Deus, the sequel to Sapiens, Harari argues that things are moving so quickly, we are seeing developments today that make it not too farfetched to suggest that human beings are at the threshold of making a bid for divinity:
Homo sapiens is likely to upgrade itself step by step, merging with robots and computers in the process, until our descendants will look back and realize they are no longer the kind of animal that wrote the Bible…This will not happen in a day, or a year. Indeed, it is already happening right now, through innumerable mundane actions…humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human…Calm explanations aside, many people panic when they hear of such possibilities.”[31]
Among the people who panic are theologians who see demonic elements behind all these developments. Acceleration is also part of the end-of-time narrative in Islam. If one believes that one lives – after successive periods of decline – in the end times, one’s attitude to things that are new is grave, optimism in the future of this world is dull, and resolve to participate in science is stunted. What you end up passing down to the next generation is cynicism and closed minded conservatism. What can the outcome of an education that embodies an “end time” mentality be other than graduates who are sideshows on the stage of history—if future history remains to be made? Islamic culture needs to contend with the real possibility that there may be centuries if not millennia ahead of us that will witness the most rapid and sweeping changes to human experiences ever known to human history.
Islamic ideas of human nature are closely associated with terms such as nafs (soul), fitra (nature), ruh (immaterial spirit or divine breath). How are we to understand these terms today in light of modern science? Should science influence and reshape traditional doctrines and views, and to what extent? How much of a role does ancient philosophy play in the interpretation of these terms in the premodern scholarly tradition? Should traditional views guide scientific inquiry, and if so, how? Can religious voices lead in the path to scientific progress, or will they always follow, respond, and restrain? Phrased differently, can there be a scientist, working on the forefront of research and innovation, who is not at the same time a heretic? The cosmic decentering of humanity that began with Copernicus has not yet reached its culmination. Scientists are today contemplating the elimination of the distinction between human life and other kinds of life, whether biological or artificial. Can a religious scientist working in these areas be invested in the preservation of traditional theologies based in premodern interpretations of scripture, or must her lived theologies be as dynamic and fresh as her lived experiences?
The challenge for our research group will be to grapple deeply with new knowledge in science: Should there be limits to human enhancements and genetic engineering? What is the definition of human life, and when does it begin and end? As our knowledge of ourselves changes, along with our ability to manipulate who we are and what we can be, what social and political arrangements will be best suited to maximize human flourishing? When does manipulation of nature become unacceptable tampering with God’s creation, and when does is remain within acceptable boundaries?
Tradition, Traditionalism and the Heretical Imperative?
Questions of science and human nature intersect with ethics, governance, and public policy. This challenges students to think carefully about conflicts between classical Islamic thought and contemporary international norms in the areas of gender relations and human rights.[32] Prominent Muslim scholars from around the world recently came together through the convening power of Morocco’s monarch in a summit to address the issue of the rights of non-Muslims in Muslim lands. Called the Marrakesh Declaration, an executive summary of the resolution that has been published online declares that the provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are in harmony with the principles of Islamic teachings, particularly as they appear in the Charter of Medina.[33] The Charter of Medina was a contract in early Islam in which the prophet Muhammad entered into a constitutional alliance with members of other faith communities. Although noble in its intent, the Marrakesh declaration stops short of offering any explicit legal opinion, instead sticking to principles and objectives of the law to make pronouncements that are aspirational. The declaration leaves the grunt work to others, for it calls “upon Muslim scholars and intellectuals around the world to develop a jurisprudence of the concept of ‘citizenship’ which is inclusive of diverse groups. Such jurisprudence shall be rooted in Islamic tradition and principles and mindful of global changes.”[34] In the terms of Rumee Ahmed, it is a summons to a wholesale “hack” of the legal tradition in the area of minority citizenship in Muslim majority societies.[35] Notably, the Marrakesh declaration does not mention women and gender. It only addresses the rights of religious minorities. Nonetheless, once conversation on equality of citizenship begins in light of emerging international consensus and norms, it will be impossible to exclude the issue of gender in Islamic law from re-examination. This is all the more so because the Marrakesh declaration affirms the values embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in turn affirms the equal rights of both men and women.
As Islamic law attempts to align itself with international norms, triumphalist readings of Islamic history will need to be revised, especially as the question of equality before the law within increasingly plural societies comes center stage. All of the tools and concepts that students will have acquired over the course of Madrasa Discourses will need to be harnessed to think critically and constructively about the present and future of human beings on this planet.”
It has become increasingly difficult to gaze at history as the triumph of orthodoxy over heresy. Rather, the champions of orthodoxy as well as heresy seem to participate equally in a kind of “Great Conversation,” to borrow a term from Robert Maynard Hutchins.[36] Debates between scholars of the past are to be visited in ways that show all sides as not only intelligible but also reasonable, allowing students to faithfully choose between them, without polemics or predetermining the winners and losers in these debates. In allowing students to see the construction of knowledge through the experiences of past scholars, we empower them to take their own experiences seriously in order to add to the conversation, thereby becoming not just consumers but also producers of tradition. This is precisely what the eminent sociologist Peter Berger proposes as being the only viable path for religious traditions today: to “try to uncover and retrieve the experiences embodied in tradition,”[37] which he calls the inductive method in religion.
The shift to history will give students theological choices; having choices, in turn, will strengthen both individualism and pluralism; and including former heresies within the spectrum of acceptable religious possibilities will encourage scholars to develop new intellectual skills and adopt new professional roles that require the power of persuasion in settings that are more in harmony with liberal rather than hierarchical or authoritarian societies. Berger reminds us that “The English word ‘heresy’ comes from the Greek verb hairein, which means ‘to choose.’”[38] “For premodern man,” he continues, “heresy is a possibility, usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity…modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative.”[39]
Can Islamic education embrace “the heretical imperative?” Our educational institutions have become overcome with fear, fortresses for what Ebrahim Moosa calls “Republics of Piety.”[40] Madrasas are in the business of the preservation and guardianship of orthodoxy, afraid that future generations will lose their faith in an ever-changing world. But this is not tradition, it is traditionalism, which historian of religion Jaroslav Pelikan put so eloquently as being “the dead faith of the living,” in contrast to tradition, which is the “living faith of the dead.”[41] Muslim culture and institutions of learning today have lost the dynamic spark that once animated their intellectual culture.
Dynamism in Muslim educational culture will be driven in no small part by developments in techno-science that are accompanied by seismic shifts in conceptual worldviews and social norms. Friedman offers the analogy of riding a bicycle to help us understand how we might adapt to the dizzying changes that are soon to come due to the exponential changes taking place all around us.[42] He says that on a bicycle, although one is in a state of motion, one achieves a balance akin to what may be called a kind of “dynamic stillness.” Another metaphor that I prefer, perhaps because it is closer to home is of the whirling dervish. His center is still while the rest of him twirls endlessly away. I am arguing here that our intellectual culture needs to learn how to ride a bicycle or whirl like the dervish.
The ulama today no longer minister to masses whose faith can be taken for granted. Our educational institutions need to help the ulama adapt to their new roles as research scholars in an age of acceleration, teachers in public and private schools, counselors in times of crisis, pastors and community leaders, politicians shaping public policy, and, perhaps most importantly, public intellectuals interacting with leaders across the spectrum of human activity in civil society. Madrasas must be cognizant of the changing roles of ulama in a brave new world, where believers no longer flock to the faith in conformity to old patterns, but trickle in (or trickle out) by free choice.
If the world does not end soon, it is going to be a very different place for our children and grandchildren. Whether or not we are at the end of time, our engagement with new knowledge must be thorough, and it must allow us to be open to new theological possibilities. We have to be guided by tradition, but we also have to let new knowledge take us where it takes us. Can “innovation” and “choice,” even in matters of religion, become good words in the moral vocabulary of the madrasa?
Conclusions: What Lies Ahead for Madrasa Discourses?
I hope that this survey has provided a good sense of the rich and complex intellectual project of Madrasa Discourses. Our ambition is for the intellectual conversations we generate to have transformative ripple effects across madrasa circles. Before concluding this paper with some final thoughts about the future of MD, I would like to highlight some of our activities, challenges and unexpected developments we have encountered, and future prospects beyond the initial three-year term of the present grant. One of the major challenges we have encountered is the widely differing levels of preparation of students who are participating in the program. Some know English fluently, while others are just starting to learn the language. Some have read widely online, others only narrowly within their own area of study. Some are tech-savvy, others not so much. Some have completed their madrasa education with honors, while others have had a less rigorous formation. Students are only able to commit themselves to the program part-time, while the demands of the program to read and prepare for classes, learn English, and write, can be onerous. Providing individualized support and feedback to students has also been challenging for our mentors and partners in India and Pakistan, who are, like the students, engaged in the program on a part-time basis. That being said, the overall level of engagement has met or exceeded expectations in the first eighteen months of the program. Evidence from exams and essays, classroom interactions, as well as interactions in the onsite intensives, indicates that provocations are leading to a higher level of complexity in the thought process.
On the positive side, the new generation of madrasa graduates is already predisposed to receive and experience the world in way that we did not expect. The presence of technology has preceded the arrival of MD at the doorstep. Technology has penetrated beyond the walls of the madrasa to touch the private lives of individuals. This has been a game-changer. Students have smartphones, Facebook accounts, and they seamlessly navigate the World Wide Web. We have found students to be intellectually open to the world and even curious in ways that the previous generation of Madrasa scholars could not have been, simply due to the wonders of technology. Given that online communities are typically insular, tending to operate within self-affirming bubbles, our task is nonetheless daunting. However, we have both the resources at our disposal and a receptive audience.
Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service. Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive discussion group 2018, Dhulikhel
A second unexpected development has been the involvement of ND undergraduate students in the project, first through a generous grant from Notre Dame International and then through a one-credit Peace Research Lab offered through the Kroc Institute. The lab provides undergraduate students in Peace Studies the opportunity to participate in small group dialogue sessions with the madrasa participants on a weekly basis. Students take the opportunity to discuss contents of the course, talk about cutting-edge ethical issues at the intersection of science and religion, and learn about each other’s worlds. Notre Dame’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values hosts a website that students draw from to engage topics like genetic engineering, artificial wombs, and drone warfare.[43] We also stay on the lookout for relevant topics in the headlines. In one case, for example, students opted to discuss the implications of Saudi Arabia’s granting of citizenship to a female robot named Sophia. To set-up the small group discussions, students typically read a short and accessible article prior to meeting, such as Smithsonian Magazine’s “Why Saudi Arabia Giving a Robot Citizenship is Firing People Up”.”[44] What is going on in Saudi Arabia? How is it related to Islam? What are the implications for having a robotic female citizen in an Islamic country? Is the robot citizen free or owned? If owned, will the relationship be governed by Islamic laws of slavery? Would that include the rights and privileges that male owners have over their female concubines? If the relationship is on the basis of free association of citizens, does the robot have autonomy? Does the robot have any duties towards society? Will the robot have religion and be subject to Islamic law (as a Muslim or non-Muslim)?
Small group interactions of this kind have the added benefit of advancing the English learning objectives of MD. To that end, ND students also rotate in the reading of two chapters of Sophie’s World to all of the madrasa participants once a week. Not only does this further help students in English comprehension, the fictional novel surveys the history of western philosophy, which is valuable, relevant, and interesting for all who partake in the reading. ND students are also invited to help with other aspects of the project based on their availability on an individual basis. For example, a team of three students is working with the CM program manager to make the MD curriculum accessible to the wider public on the Internet.
In addition to the online classes, there are three major activities the program undertakes: production of instructional videos, convening of summer and winter onsite intensives, and publication of a website in Urdu, Tajdīd. The motto of the journal is “where religion meets new knowledge.” The site presents articles and blog posts from students, guest writers invited to address topics of relevance, translations of English language material into Urdu, updates from events and activities related to Madrasa Discourses, and a discussion forum where readers can comment on the website content. The journal was launched in October, 2017 and is managed jointly by the faculty team in India and Pakistan, with Dr. Waris Mazhari, the lead faculty from India, as the editor. The content of the journal is designed to align closely with the material being covered in the curriculum, allowing conversations from our controlled classroom environment to spill over into the wider community of madrasa scholars.
A screenshot from Tajdīd.
The video modules produced by MD are designed as instructional aids for the online classroom. In the first year, MD produced eight videos. The first is a project trailer that has been published on the CM website.[45] Three videos accompany the first semester on “Conceptualizing the Past,” while four videos help us to “Contextualize the Islamic Theological Tradition.” Modules three and four are each introduced by a preview trailer, and the research year is introduced by a video featuring graduate students and young scholars sharing their insights into how to form research questions from different fields of inquiry: history, political science, sociology, theology, and peace studies. These videos involve interviews, animations, conversations, and commentary from experts at Notre Dame, including Ebrahim Moosa and Mahan Mirza from the MD project, Hussein Abdulsater from the department of classics, Celia Deane-Drummond from theology, and Scott Trigg from the history and philosophy of science.
Turning to the onsite intensives, MD brings all participants together twice a year for face-to-face interaction, dialogue, and intensive engagement with a variety of intellectual topics to broaden their intellectual horizons. We have met twice in Nepal for two-week intensives in the summer, and once in Qatar in the winter at the College of Islamic Studies in the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha’s Education City. A second meeting is planned for this winter at the same location in Doha. Topics have included religion, modernity, secularism, and fundamentalism (Scott Appleby), gender equity and social inclusion (Shubham Amatya and Prakash Bhattarai), anthropology, ethics, and plural cosmologies (Leela Prasad), liberal citizenship and the challenge of human rights (Mohammad Fadel), science education and the theory of evolution (Rana Dajani), contested political theologies (Ebrahim Moosa), language, scripture, and interpretation (Ammar Khan Nasir and Waris Mazhari), theology in an age of acceleration (Mahan Mirza), Islamic law and gender (Saadia Yacoob), new horizons of moral imagination (Gerald McKenny), Mulla Sadra’s alternative cosmology (Mahmoud Youness), narrative theology and scriptural reasoning (Jason Springs), and intersectionality and faith-based action for peacebuilding (Atalia Omer). These intense sessions are accompanied by dialogue sessions between the madrasa participants and Notre Dame students where individuals from diverse backgrounds find ways to work through their differences while forging at the same time deep human connections. True to the theory of strategic peacebuilding, the deeper human bond that develops through friendly interaction in a safe space enables participants on both sides to appropriate their differences within a deeper framework of trust that is the bedrock of sustainable peace.
After the first two years of the Madrasa Discourses program, we see sufficient evidence to think the program will continue in some form into the future. The most tangible outcome of the project will be the curriculum of the first two years, the written reports of the research projects in the third year, and a vibrant online journal and discussion forum. If the research activities are even modestly successful, they will be formidable pieces of scholarship that will create a buzz in the madrasa scholarly circles within South Asia and perhaps beyond. Given the global reach of the South Asian madrasa community with Darul Ulooms (another word for Madrasas) present all over the world, including in the West, we hope to thereby initiate a long overdue conversation amongst the ulama on the vital issues of theological change, science, law, and society. Translations of the research papers from Urdu into Arabic and English would extend the conversations to the madrasa scholarly community beyond South Asia.
Credit: Mahan Mirza. Madrasa Discourses students and a Notre Dame peer discuss the day’s lecture below. Conversations on religious identity, politics, secularism, science, and gender spilled over into all activities, as students eagerly engaged in what for many was a unique experience of open exchange with new philosophies, traditions, and people.
The curriculum that we are developing is designed to transform the intellectual culture of traditional Islamic thought. The curriculum can be used by individuals, groups, and institutions, and adapted to local needs and contexts. In time, the curriculum may be translated into different Islamicate languages such as Urdu, Persian, Turkish, or Malay. Faculty from Notre Dame may support the program through instructor training (“teaching the teachers”), leading workshops or intensives of the program in different parts of the world, and convening participants periodically in conferences and symposia to develop research agendas and further the production of new theological knowledge in light of new scientific knowledge. If funding is available, a small cohort of instructors from around the world could participate in a year-long residential program at Notre Dame where they are exposed to research methods in different disciplines, participate in residential life in a leading American university, and engage in Madrasa Discourses seminars on campus. As a capstone project, Residential Madrasa Fellows could design programs with texts and methods to suit their respective local contexts. What better place to house such a transformative educational program than at the Keough School at Notre Dame?
While our future plans remain aspirational, and while the madrasa participants work on their own research projects, the core faculty of MD are also working on research papers that they hope to compile into a research volume. A symposium anticipated for spring/summer2019 will invite scholars to respond to drafts of these papers. A select array of responses will also be incorporated into the final volume, which can model the kind of conversation we hope that MD will generate into the future. Instead of merely provoking and challenging, as the curriculum does, this book will also offer some answers, with the following caveat: renewal of religious thought may not result in a single answer at all. Renewal may provide a set of contending responses in creative tension with each other. MD, then, provides a forum not for us to come to agreement, but to elevate the level of our disagreements. That is how living traditions always are: rich, diverse, and in internal dialogue around the great questions of their time.
*Reposted from The Maydan. This paper was originally written as an internal report to update colleagues at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute about the project (Jan, 2018). Parts of the paper appeared previously in a presentation at the Notre Dame Islamic Studies Colloquium on “Religious Renewal in an Age of Quantum Weirdness” (April, 2017) and at a conference on “Islamic Education in Europe” hosted by the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo (Sep, 2017).
[1] A “madrasa” literally means “place of study.” In the South Asian context, it refers to institutions of religious education and formation.
[2] Elaborate bios of the core faculty are available online here.
[3] This thesis is spelled out clearly in Ebrahim Moosa’s What is a Madrasa? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
[13] Although students receive a copy of Collingwood’s Idea of History as supplementary reading, we discuss the philosophy of history through the introductory chapter of Robert M. Burns and Hugh Rayment-Pickard’s (Eds.) Philosophies of History: From Enlightenment to Post-Modernity, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2007), 1-31.
[22] This is a well-known and well-authenticated prophetic report.
[23] See the wording in the second amendment to the Pakistani constitution: “A person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of The Prophethood of MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him), the last of the Prophets or claims to be a Prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him), or recognizes such a claimant as a Prophet or religious reformer, is not a Muslim for the purposes of the Constitution or law.” One should note that this amendment also carries implications for the ‘unorthodox’ minorities such as the Ahmedis in Pakistan.
[24] Paraphrasing Nasser Rabat’s sentence: “Arabness was thus presumably subsumed within Islam.” On Arabs and Arabness.
[24] See Ibn Ashur’s Treatise on Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah (IIIT, 2013) where he distinguishes between the prophet’s different identities as prophet and lawgiver: “The Companions clearly distinguished between the commands of God’s Messenger that ensued from his position as legislator and those that did not. Statements or actions ensued from God’s Messenger in the following capacities: legislation, issuing edicts (fatwa), adjudication, political leadership of the state, guidance, conciliation, advice to those seeking his opinion, counseling, spiritual inspiration, teaching high and lofty truths, disciplining, and non-instructive ordinary statements,” 4.
[36] Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation, 5th Edition, (University of Chicago Press, 1991); this is the first volume of the originally fifty-four volume set of the Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952.
Mahan Mirza was appointed teaching professor and executive director for the Keough School's Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion on July 1, 2019.
An Islamic studies scholar and expert on religious literacy, Mirza brings extensive pedagogical and administrative experience to his roles at Notre Dame, including serving as dean of faculty at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college. Prior to his appointment as Executive Director of the Ansari Institute, Mirza served as the lead faculty member for Notre Dame's Madrasa Discourses project, which equips Islamic religious leaders in India and Pakistan with the tools to confidently engage with pluralism, modern science, and new philosophies.
Mirza holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. from Hartford Seminary, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University. He has taught courses and lectured on Arabic-Islamic studies, western religions, and the history of science, along with foundational subjects in the liberal arts, including logic, rhetoric, astronomy, ethics, and politics. He has edited two special issues of The Muslim World and served as assistant editor for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (2018).
He is a fellow with the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the Keough School and continues to serve as an advisor for Madrasa Discourses.
Photo Credit: Qatar Foundation. Madrasa Discourses students at the Doha Museum of Islamic Art in December 2017.
Having grown up in a society that fails to appreciate beauty and often condemns its expressions as an act of evil, I am amazed by the dazzling history of Muslim civilization. I always wonder how Muslims, such as the scholars I have encountered in New Delhi and many other parts of northern India, can claim today to be the heirs of their predecessors if they do not value beauty as transcendent and divine with the same vigor and enthusiasm.
Appreciation of beauty stimulates imagination and innovation, and historically Muslims excelled at its expressions. They produced the finest architecture, music, calligraphy, and other crafts. It all began with Muslims setting their feet on the fertile soil of the cradles of ancient civilizations: Egypt, Persia, the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates, etc. They mingled old traditions with the new spirit of iḥsān, a comprehensive concept, writes Oludamini Ogunnaike, denoting the “sense of beauty and excellence—at once aesthetical, ethical, intellectual, and spiritual.” Their understanding of iḥsān drew from the verses of the Quran that give a big picture of the metaphysical beauty of God, and a scenic view of Jannah (Paradise) with its palaces sculptured from gems, surrounded by gardens, where streams of milk and honey flow. As many traditions including Islam assert, ‘God is beautiful and loves beauty.’ Religious inspiration is evident in the designs of the elegant monuments and mosques from Spain to Indonesia. The profound beauty of these structures and decorative art still evokes ecstasy in their beholders.
Ogunnaike defines Islamic art as ‘silent theology’ that successfully holds the picture of Islam intact against contemporary virulent propagandas. He further says, “To many, the silent theology of Islamic art can speak more profoundly and clearly than the most dazzling treatise, and its beauty can be more evident and persuasive than the strongest argument.” I would add to Ogunnaike’s point that past Muslim innovations in beauty serve as a source of inspiration and pride for Muslims even today.
However, some modern Muslim puritanical movements have challenged the role of beauty in Islam. The ideologues of these movements have fomented disregard of Islamic art among the ʿulamā and hence the masses. During my days of madrasa schooling, I heard some of my teachers and peers argue that art is not worth pursuing. It distances man from the remembrance of God and requires an excessive amount of money and resources, it is said. It is no surprise that Aurangzeb, a Mughal Emperor who did not appreciate art very much, is dearer to the ʿulamā than Shāh Jahān, the Emperor who built the Taj Mahal. Sufis are also discredited by these ʿulamā members for their practice of arranging musical gatherings for seeking aesthetic experiences in the presence of the Divine. These reductionist Muslims often view Islam as a sort of strictly ritualistic system and deprive it of its aesthetic heritage.
Photo Credit: Mohammad Rasheed. Pillars at the HBKU College of Islamic Studies.
My experience of Islam has been very diverse between the madrasa and the university. Practicing conventional or ritualized Islam in my days of madrasa schooling seemed very simple. After coming to the university, however, my awareness of Islam grew in complexity with my increasing familiarity with its history and the civilization it produced. My readings about historical and religious understandings of Islam suggested that there is a gap between the way Islamic civilization thrived in the past and how Islam is practiced today. I admire the Muslim genius and fellow citizens of other faiths who contributed to this civilization. But I am also disturbed when I read about the paintings depicting humans on the walls of Qusayr in Jordan built by Walid I, the Umayyad Caliph in the first century of Islam, contrary to the centuries-old fatwa condemning representational art and prohibiting images of living beings (p. 271). This fatwa drew its validity from the hadiths (prophetic traditions) that forbade representational art, considering it a grave sin.[1] The question was whether the Umayyads disregarded the prophetic traditions altogether or if they had a different understanding of them. Debates on representational art developed a new dimension after the invention of the camera. In the Indian subcontinent, the permissibility and impermissibility of photography is still among the most debated religious issues. I faced such contradictions throughout my study of Muslim history. The question was, who should I consider wrong? The conventional view maintained by the orthodox ʿulamā is to perceive the religiosity of the rulers who encouraged and patronized arts with suspicion.
My amazement with Islam deepened as I delved more seriously into the intellectual history of Islam. I found an opportunity to do this in the Madrasa Discourses program, directed by Ebrahim Moosa and Mahan Mirza, Professors of Islamic Studies both based at the University of Notre Dame. This program teaches madrasa graduates modern science and Western philosophy in such a way that the students may develop skills to answer the modern challenges posed to Islam. This past semester we had a long discussion on ‘tradition,’ imagining it as a long rope that connects the past to the present. To keep it going, the people of the tradition have to add new threads to this rope in their respective times. If the people treat tradition otherwise, it will lose its viability. Similarly, Islamic art is one among several threads of Muslim tradition. There is a sense of continuity and progress in it from the very onset up to the modern times. Many of the expressions of this art have been lost, but many are still extant and make us recall the ingenuity and sacredness of the tradition of Islamic art. The best way to perceive it is to experience it personally in art museums, musical concerts, and by visiting renowned sites and monuments.
As a part of the program, select madrasa-educated students from India and Pakistan had a chance to visit the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar during the winter intensive in the last week of December 2017. The museum is located on an artificial island flanked by two huge lawns with a bridge in the middle that connects the old city to the museum. We were told that the architectural design of this museum was inspired by the famous 9th century Ibn Tūlūn Mosque of Cairo. An exquisite edifice, this museum is often portrayed as an example of generating new threads into the old rope of tradition. Inside the museum, it was as if we were visiting our past. A collection of metalwork, glasswork, textiles, manuscripts, and ceramics are housed there representing Islamic arts throughout the centuries. Examining them closely, I admired the inspiration they drew from the world that they lived in and from the tradition with which they were entrusted. Artifacts in the museum such as colorful rugs and silks with figurative designs, griffins crafted on tiles or a sphinx-faced lusterware ewer were evidently the mixture of creative Muslim imagination with the local cultures and civilizations of the lands Muslims came to inhabit.
Photo Credit: Qatar Foundation. Madrasa Discourses at Doha Museum of Islamic Art.
I was surprised again, imagining the past to be so beautiful and so appreciative of arts in comparison to my present society. Questions troubled me: what was it that disconnected the vast majority of South Asian Muslims from this vibrant tradition? Why do we no longer show the same enthusiasm toward the spirit of creativity? Why do we fail to discuss and give due appreciation to aesthetics? There could be many reasons. I had a chance to discuss my concerns with Professor Ebrahim Moosa, who was with us at the time. I had already thought of an explanation for the dissonance I was experiencing: the recent dominance of a ritualistic and ahistorical understanding of Islam that was confined, in great part, to prayers only. I am not sure whether Prof Moosa agreed with my argument, as he added that Muslims no longer feel confident in performing creativity or talking about aesthetics as they did before. This may be one of the factors that killed Islam’s thriving artistic and aesthetic tradition.
Apart from the museum, we also witnessed an extensive display of magnificent architectural designs in the Education City in Doha. I think that Qatar has devoted much of its resources in reviving the aesthetic tradition of Islam and can serve as an example to Muslims of other nations. Muslims have historically seen beauty as sacred and tried to seek perfection in its expressions. Debates about aesthetics, arts, and erstwhile Muslim experiences should be introduced into madrasa education and students should be exposed to the historical meanings of their tradition. We should engage with the questions: What motivated many rulers and elites of Muslim society to patronize such arts, especially the representation of figures that were considered prohibited by orthodox scholars? Was it an act of indifference towards Islamic law or were there some historical and cultural impulses that led the practitioners and patrons of the arts to define the laws differently? There is a need to analyze the seemingly contradictory practices of past Muslims with the dominant contemporary orthodox Islamic tradition. This can help us understand the significance of art in the robust and cosmopolitan nature of Islamic civilizational tradition.
[1] Bukhārī mʿ Fathul Bārī, Vol 10, pp 314, 316, 323. The Hadiths are cited in Tasvīr ke Sharaʿī Aḥkām (The Rulings of Sharia about Making Images and Photography) by Muftī Muhammad Shafīʿ, published by Idāratul Mʿārif, Karachi, Pakistan
Mohammad Ali is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India. He is also a graduate of the Madrasa Discourses program.
Photo Credit: upyernoz. Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, which some Christians believe to be the site of the burial and resurrection of Jesus, as opposed to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Christmas has passed in Jerusalem, or at least two Christmases have. The 25th of December saw Catholic and Protestant Christmas, and the first week of January brought Christmas again—this time Orthodox Christmas. Armenian Christmas will arrive later in the month still. When I first moved to Jerusalem over a decade ago, it took me time to become accustomed to the celebration of Christmas day three times in a single year—remembering to wish Merry Christmas to our friends from respective communities on each different day—but for my children, who have lived their entire lives in the city, there is nothing unusual about it. Three Christmases fall in the season when they wait for sufganiyot, the jelly donuts served in Jewish cafes during Hannukah. This year it fell a few weeks after the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday. This lived diversity—as much if not more than the city’s shrines—is what makes Jerusalem holy.
Photo Credit: DYKT Mohigan. Sufganiyah doughnuts in Jerusalem, served during Hannukah.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about Jerusalem’s diversity ever since President Donald Trump announced that the United States now recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. While the international media has focused in large part on what the decision will mean for the viability of a negotiated peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and whether a two-state solution will still be possible, Palestinians inside of the city have been concerned about something that is far more difficult to talk about: whether the city as they have known it for generations will be wiped away as a result. Public discussions might focus on preserving the status quo over the city’s major holy sites, but private conversations are often about what will happen to the people of East Jerusalem themselves, to their street names and their cafes, their traditions and their holidays, their trees, their memories. As someone who has lived among Palestinians for years, I have had to wrestle with how much of the Palestinian landscape I have watched disappear: even more, I have had to come to terms with all that I have been silent about.
Loss and Memory
It is easy to say that the Palestinians I know are experiencing a trauma now over the potential loss of Jerusalem as their capital city. What is more difficult to acknowledge is that they have been losing Jerusalem for decades, and that this latest blow has left them not only despairing, but exhausted. In 1948, thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes in neighborhoods such as Baq’a and Talbiya, Katamon and Musrara—neighborhoods that are now in Israeli, West Jerusalem. Palestinians lost what we still call “Jerusalem villages”, those villages such as Lifta and Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem whose economies, traditions and identities were intimately tied to the city. They lost ‘Ayn Kerim, a village that Israelis and tourists now experience effortlessly as a charming artistic village of historic old houses on the outskirts of Jerusalem—with little thought of who once lived in those houses. For Palestinians, these losses are still real and sustained, mostly spoken of privately, like a wound you would not like to expose openly. But every now and then they emerge unexpectedly. Last month, I found myself speaking Arabic with an elderly taxi driver, who ferried me across the city on Hebron Road and pointed to houses along the way, telling me the Palestinian families who once lived in each one.
Photo Credit: frauscharff. The new highway and separation wall through Beit Jala. Old olives trees grow beneath the noise and vibrations.
The building of settlements such as Gilo and Har Homa added more displacement, fragmenting the Beit Jala area known for having the finest Palestinian olive oil. The construction of the Separation Barrier, which cut East Jerusalem off from those outlying villages whose identity has always been inextricably tied up with the city, was yet another loss. Suddenly Al-Quds University—“Jerusalem University” in English—located in the neighboring village of Abu Dis, was severed from the city after which it was named. The faculty who lived in Ras al-Amoud at the bottom of the Mount of Olives, accustomed to driving up the hill and arriving at the campus in ten minutes, now had to drive around the wall for three quarters of an hour in order to teach their classes. Residents of the villages of Beit Jala and al-Azzariya found themselves cut off by the wall from their fields, their friends, their places of worship. Christian pilgrims accustomed to following the footsteps of Jesus on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem found themselves at the separation wall after Bethany, cut off from where Jesus entered the city on his donkey in Bethphage.
To pretend that today’s borders of Jerusalem correspond to the porous and complex ways in which lives are lived is to misunderstand the ways in which Jerusalem has been experienced by Palestinians, or in fact the way in which any city—particularly one with such religious significance—is experienced by those who inhabit it and its environs. The most recent loss for my neighbors in the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Safafa came not in the changing of borders but in the building of the Begin Expressway, a process which saw many of them lose land, ancestral olive and hawthorne trees. More importantly and even more intangibly, the roaring of cars made them lose silence—the most profound reminder of their past as a village.
The population itself was transformed by these changes. The Christian population declined dramatically after 1948, and now stands at around 2% of the city’s population. The issuing of permits means that thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank can no longer enter Jerusalem, except by official permission. Arabs from surrounding countries can rarely get visas, which changes the shape of the holidays: almost no Syrian and Lebanese Christian pilgrims on Easter, Muslims forgetting the ancient tradition of visiting Jerusalem after Mecca to bless the Hajj. These are also losses, for how much of a city’s identity is not only its streets, but in those who pass through them and greet one another?
The End of Nablus Road
Despite this, East Jerusalem today remains astoundingly diverse. On Nablus Road, where I lived with my family for seven years, we had neighbors who traced their arrival in the city to the Arab conquest. A few shops down the Abu Khalaf family, who were Kurdish in origin and traced their history to the armies who came with Salahadin, sold dry goods. The Freij grocery store was owned by an old Greek Orthodox family, and the street vendors were from Hebron and spoke with a different dialect. The White Sisters were Franciscan nuns who spoke French and Arabic; the Schmidt’s Girls College across the street taught their Palestinian students German; the nuns beneath us spoke Spanish; the Garden Tomb, where some Protestants believe Jesus had been raised from the dead, was staffed mostly by British volunteers; and the Ecole Biblique housed the French Dominicans. The Syriac Catholic Church’s community on the same street had its origins in thousands who had escaped the Seyfo massacres against Syriacs in Southeastern Turkey in 1915. Further down the road were the Balians, some of the most famous Armenian ceramicists in the city, the American Colony, and the Nusseibeh house—one of the Muslim families who held the keys to the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest site in Christendom. Thousands of Muslims passed down the street on the way to Friday prayers.
Photo Credit: Miriam Mezzera. Kebab and salad vendor in Musrara, East Jerusalem.
Ours was a single street in Musrara, one of the first neighborhoods that had been built outside of the Old City walls in the late 19th century. During the fighting of 1948 the neighborhood had been split in half, with the other half of Musrara—the larger half—eventually ending up in Israel after its mostly Christian Palestinian residents were displaced. Though that half is only a few blocks away from its Palestinian counterpart, nearly all of the Palestinian history has been wiped from its landscape. Today it is inhabited by Jews largely from North Africa and Iraq, a steadily increasing population of ultra-Orthodox Jews, and NGO workers. This population has its own diversity—but there is little room in it for the memory of who was once there. None of the decades-old stories that are part of daily life on Nablus Road are part of their Musrara. The municipality has even gone so far as to change the street names for the neighborhood to Morasha, to create the impression that it has always been Israeli.
Are Palestinians naïve to fear that the same might happen to the rest of the city, or is that fear rooted in lived experience? Nablus Road is a single street, but in the Palestinian Quarters of the Old City there is a similar complexity—churches ancient and new, mosques and Sufi shrines, gypsy communities and African communities that speak Arabic, Greek and Armenian and Syriac speakers. The Holy Sepulchre and al-Aqsa mosque are entered often and freely by locals, organically part of the lived environment. I used to slip into the Holy Sepulchre on the way to buy vegetables. What will happen if those textures, those stories, those people become part of an Israeli, Jewish capital? Will they be allowed to remain in all of their diversity?
One thinks of this excerpt from Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah, which began circulating on social media immediately after Trump’s declaration:
Photo Credit: Flavio. Ancient olive tree in Beit Jamal.
All that the world knows of Jerusalem is the power of the symbol. The Dome of the Rock is what the eye sees, and so it sees Jerusalem and is satisfied. The Jerusalem of religions, the Jerusalem of politics, the Jerusalem of conflict is the Jerusalem of the world. But the world does not care for our Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of the people. The Jerusalem of houses and cobbled streets and spice markets, the Jerusalem of the Arab College, the Rashidiya School, and the ‘Omariya School. The Jerusalem of the porters and the tourist guides who know just enough of every language to guarantee them three reasonable meals a day. The oil market and the sellers of antiques and mother-of-pearl and sesame cakes. The library, the doctor, the lawyer, the engineer, and the dressers of brides with high dowries. The terminals of the buses that trundle in every morning from all the villages with peasants come to buy and to sell. The Jerusalem of the white cheese, of oil and olives and thyme, of baskets of figs and necklaces and leather and Salah al-Din Street. Our neighbor the nun, and her neighbor, the muezzin who was always in a hurry…The Jerusalem that we walk in without much noticing its “sacredness”, because we are in it, because it is us (142-3).
Silence and Imperfect Language
As the crisis of Jerusalem has come to a head, I have had to confront the fact that I have been watching the slow erasure of much in the city for over a decade and have said relatively little about it until now. In part it is because the term most often used to describe the process—Judaization, seems unhelpful and even problematic to me—for it is not the imposition of a specifically Jewish identity onto the city that is the issue, but the imposition of any dominant identity onto a city with such multiplicities. If I do not suggest other terms here, it is because they, too are imperfect—and I have learned that to speak of this conflict with imperfect language is to have everything else that we argue dismissed in the process because of these imperfections. Because I have never found the language to discuss what is happening, I have largely refused to speak or write about it, for fear of offending, of misspeaking. As writers, we are called to invent new language if we must: I have not.
Photo Credit: Dvorit Ben Shaul (c) 2017. Ein Karem home with Islamic-style Seal of Solomon pattern, perhaps built during the pre-1948 Palestinian days in ‘Ayn Kerim, before it was depopulated and absorbed into Israel under a new name.
But even if I were to invent new language, my suspicion is that this language, too, would only briefly suffice. This is a conflict in which we have who have witnessed Palestinian lives have lost control even of the language in which we tell our stories. I have become accustomed to well-meaning friends sitting me down and explaining that what I call a “settlement” is in fact only a “neighborhood”, that what I call “Musrara” is in fact really “Morasha.” Among the many things we do not control in Jerusalem is even the vocabulary in which we can describe what we have witnessed with our own eyes: knowing this, I have chosen to remain silent.
By my refusal, I have helped to perpetuate the fallacy of how we talk about Jerusalem. The main difference between the way people outside of Jerusalem and Palestinians within Jerusalem are engaging in the current crisis is that outsiders discuss it within the boundaries of a hypothetical future. For them, Trump’s declaration marked the end of the possibility of a two-state solution with a shared capital, something that had not yet been accomplished.
Palestinians discuss it in terms of what has already happened and what is ongoing—as a culmination of what has been lost. Refusing to give space to this discourse is to deny the depth, history, and complexity of their attachment to the city, to erase from the conversation the texture of human relationships, of trees and flowers, of houses in neighborhoods, of feast day pilgrimages—it is to deny the legitimacy of the pain they have already felt and the loss they have already endured. It is also to deny the complexity of what is at stake in the present.
And what is at stake? The diversity of Jerusalem’s population tells the story of its history and its universality—it makes the city’s holiness about its people, not just its stones, and is a reflection that the city belongs to the entire world. It assures that Armenian pilgrims will find a piece of themselves in its people, that Greek pilgrims will stumble upon an old community of Greek speakers across from the Patriarchate, that Muslim visitors who shop at the Abu Khalaf shop will unknowingly continue a relationship with the family who once organized the Hajj to Mecca, that when they speak to a Dajani in the street they will be chatting with the old guardians of David’s Tomb. It assures that the city remembers the love of Jerusalem in the Jews of Kurdistan, who brought their delicious soup to the Mahane Yehuda Market; devotion to the city among Aleppo’s Jews, who brought their distinctive liturgy to their synagogue in Nachlaot; and of the Jews of Eastern Europe, who still speak Yiddish in the streets. It assures that liturgy will still be practiced in the language that Jesus spoke, in the city in which he died. It assures that Jerusalem will not lose its Friday prayer, its Saturday Shabbat, its Sunday church bells, its languages, its silences.
Stephanie Saldaña received a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College and a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. Now a resident of Jerusalem, Saldaña teaches at the Honors College for Liberal Arts and Sciences, a partnership of Bard College and Al-Quds University. She has written two books, The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faithand A Country Between: Making a Home Where Both Sides of Jerusalem Collide, and is the founder of Mosaic Stories, a project to preserve the threatened cultural heritage of the Middle East through research and storytelling.
Photo Credit: Alaina Anderson. Seven Notre Dame undergraduates joined Madrasa Discourses students in Kathmandu, Nepal. Here they pose in a temple courtyard with a Pakistani madrasa graduate: (L-R) Sumera Rabia, Jebraune Chambers, Maggie Feighery, Alaina Anderson, Nabila Mourad, Kirsten Hanlon, Molly Burton, and Alice Treuth.
“How was Nepal? What exactly were you doing there?” Since I’ve been back in the United States, I’ve struggled to answer these questions. There’s no simple and cohesive answer to describe all of my experiences at the Madrasa Discourses Kathmandu Summer Intensive. What is even harder is trying to explain the context the madrasa graduates are coming from and the need for the Discourses project without reinforcing many people’s perspective that Islam lends itself to extremism and fundamentalism. As soon as I try to describe madrasas (Islamic seminaries), with their intense focus on the Qur’an and often outdated syllabi, I can see some people solidifying their ideas that madrasas create terrorists or all Muslim communities are ultra-conservative at best. I have to rush to explain the warm welcome I received as soon as I arrived, how I was immediately treated as a sister, how every one of the madrasa students wanted to hear the Notre Dame girls’ opinions in discussions, and explain that madrasas are not breeding grounds for terrorism. My incredible time at the Kathmandu Summer Intensive introduced me to many amazing, kind scholars as well as to the strengths and weaknesses of their education. I was able to understand the need to update the framework in which Islam is interpreted and studied around the world in a fuller context because of the people I met and the stories I heard. This juxtaposition of an education system in need of reform and incredibly intelligent scholars is hard to explain, especially when you mix in a currently (and unfortunately) politically charged subject like Islam.
Photo Credit: Alaina Anderson. Re-Entry to the United States, Los Angeles Airport.
I’d like to share all of my experiences, good and bad, but worry about how my stories will be interpreted hold me back at times, fearing I will inadvertently solidify simplistic, anti-Muslim views. The vast majority of my friends and family are very tolerant, open-minded people who choose to see the good in the world. It’s easy to tell them what happened in Nepal without trying to use a filter or without needing to overemphasize the good things. However, there are some people that I’m close to that are not as open. For example, I have a family member who, while she is a good person, has been previously misinformed and has unfortunately stuck to that misinformation. So, with her, it has been great sharing the many good things that happened. However, as soon as I start trying to explain the importance of the project, she cuts in and asks if madrasas create a lot of terrorists or if Muslim societies are typically fundamentalist. Even after I assure her that the answer to both of those questions is a definite no, she seems suspicious. As soon as I start talking about my frustrations with a lot of the gender discussions that took place in Kathmandu, I can practically see her more negative view of Muslim cultures hardening.
A few nights after my return, the topic of my trip to Nepal came up, and this family member mentioned that one of the participants from the Madrasa Discourses sent her a friend request on Facebook. Her first thought was, “ISIS.” When she told me that, I had to force myself not to walk away from her mid-conversation. I was shocked and repulsed that someone in my own family could say something like that. I hate that there are people out there whose minds immediately jump to terrorism when they see bearded and/or traditionally dressed Muslims, but it kills me that someone so close to me could think this, even after I had explained how wonderful all of the Madrasa Discourses participants were. It’s so hard for me to change my family member’s mindset. I try to balance out the negatives by pointing out the need for change but also trying to explain the good intentions behind them. For this, I always return to my conversations on gender with Hafiz Abdul Rehman (Hafiz), with whom I formed a strong friendship.
Hafiz is a fairly quiet Pakistani school teacher. He’s a devout Muslim who joined these Discourses to learn about different approaches to the Islamic faith. He’s one person I know will bring the things he learns through the Madrasa Discourses back with him to share with others. He is a kind person to the core, is eternally well-meaning, and has so much love to give to the world. I had some amazing conversations with Hafiz the first couple of days, and he really helped me understand the madrasa graduates’ perspectives on the day the lectures focused on gender equality and social inclusion. While I did not agree with his (and most of the other madrasa students’) stance on gender “equality” or how women and men should be seen, he never got annoyed at my many questions. He heard me out every time, and he really tried to understand what I was saying and where I was coming from. In return, he helped me to see that the gender roles in their society help to create strong family units and are upheld by many out of a sense of love and respect. He liked to tell me, “people think we don’t love women in our society. But I think it is that we love women more than men.” He would cite passages in the Qur’an where Mohammed talks about how a mother’s love is unmeasurable or how the mother is most worthy of “good companionship,” even three times over the father. He shared his belief that the separation of men and women and women’s modest dress was to protect women. He told me, and I really feel he believes, that his society values women so much that it wants to protect and provide for women. He explained that the reasons women need to stay home are to raise the children and run the household; he used to laugh at that part and tell me, “really, the women are the bosses of the men, Alaina.” He said that men had to go work in order to give money to their parents and then to their wives. Through all of my conversations with Hafiz, it was very hard for me to voice my disagreements, not because he didn’t let me (he welcomed the opportunity to hear another opinion) but because I knew that everything he did and believed came from a place of love and respect.
Photo Credit: Jebraune Chambers. Madrasa Discourses students Waqas Khan and Hafiz Muhammad Bilal photograph the Kathmandu skyline.
These are the things that I want to share with people. I want to show them that even the negative aspects of my experience (like my frustrations with many madrasa graduates’ beliefs about gender dynamics) had positive parts. Most of the time, I found that participants perpetuated these lifestyles out of a place of love. Other times, it seemed that lifestyles continued because of a lack of understanding of other viable options or because they didn’t know how to challenge the status quo. Back in the US, my struggle is that some people stop listening after they hear that traditional or gender-segregated lifestyles are being perpetuated in the madrasa graduates’ communities. (By the way, these lifestyles are culturally grounded and vary vastly among Muslim societies globally.) I can’t figure out how to reach people with an anti-Muslim bias in an effective manner. For some, I choose only to share the positive aspects of my experience. For others, I allude to some of my frustrations surrounding certain conversations in Kathmandu without going into detail. But really, I want to tell everyone the whole story. And, to me, the positives of my Nepal story vastly outweigh the negatives. Yes, there is a huge need for change and for updating, as I learned, but there is also so much good and so much love that I encountered. There is so much in my Nepal experience that gives me hope for the future and for a positive change and updating in Islamic scholarship/madrasa education, however quickly or slowly it may happen.
I loved my Nepal experience. I’m not going to say that I enjoyed the entire thing, the food was sometimes unrecognizable and I put my foot in my mouth far too many times to claim constant enjoyment, but overall, the feelings I take away from my two weeks in Nepal are love and enlightenment. I learned so much, and I met so many incredible, impressive people. I want to share this experience, this entire experience, with others. The fact that I will come across more intolerant or misinformed individuals is a given. Thus far, I have not found an easy way to break open that dialogue with those individuals, but I hope that the more I share my experience, the easier it will be for me to navigate those tricky conversations with a cool head. Sharing my experience has already helped my family member see a little better the world the madrasa graduates I met live in, and I’d like to think that little by little, my stories will help others become more understanding, too.
From left to right, Pakistani Madrasa Discourses students Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Tayyab Usmani, Zaid Hassan, Hafiz Muhammad Bilal, Lead Faculty Ammar Khan Nasir, and students Hafiz Muhammad Rasheed, Waqar Ahmed, and Hafiz Abdul Rehman on a cultural field trip in Lalitpur (Patan), outside of Kathmandu, Nepal.
Alaina Anderson is pursuing majors in psychology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. She joined the Madrasa Discourses project for the 2017 Kathmandu Summer Intensive.
Aadil Affan presents on education in Bihar, India, at the well of the UN General Assembly.
Before joining Notre Dame’s Madrasa Discourses project, Indian madrasa graduate Aadil Affan would have told you that accommodating or accepting other cultures was a heresy (bid’ah) unacceptable to his version of Islam.
Educated in a madrasa, an Islamic religious school, for most of his formative years, Affan is a young religious scholar, a member of the ulama, and his word carries weight in his community. His perspective on Islam’s approach towards different religio-ethnic groups, on scientific innovations, and many other things, may one day guide the position of the co-religionists around him.
Yet after six months in the Madrasa Discourses project, this recent MA graduate in Arabic from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, shared a remarkable about face, in no less an esteemed location than the United Nations (UN). Affan’s essay on global citizenship, language, and cultural understanding was selected among 2,000 submissions to the UN’s “Many Languages, One World” youth competition. He writes in his essay:
There are some religious values and cultural norms that we all share, which are acceptable to all. The contemporary world in its present situation needs dialogue among diverse peoples and communities. Such inter-religious dialogue can help to eradicate hatred between people of different faiths which is spread by evil elements. When people start connecting over common human values it leads to mutual cooperation and understanding.
UN headquarters, New York City.
On July 21st, 2017, he presented at the well of the United Nations General Assembly, proposing a solution to the grave paucity of education in his home state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest and most underdeveloped regions. No less remarkable was the fact that his essay, attached below, is written in Arabic, a second language for the young Indian. After visiting the UN, Affan joined his classmates at the Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive in Kathmandu, Nepal, where his colleagues had been involved in a rigorous exploration of how concepts such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism intersect with Islamic thought today.
When asked about how the project has influenced him, Affan points to an essay he read in the course by Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah on Islam in the United States called, “Islam and the Cultural Imperative”. “Islam is like a “crystal clear river… Its waters [] are pure, sweet, and life-giving but—having no color of their own—reflect the bedrock (indigenous culture) over which they flow” writes Abd-Allah (1). Assigned in a Madrasa Discourses module that shed light on the encounter and exchange between Muslims and other societies, such as Greek philosophy and Persian courtly culture, students explored the flexibility of Islam in welcoming new practices and modes of behavior. The openness that Muslim societies showed to the variety of human experience enabled them to organically plant roots in new places, and humankind has benefitted as a result, not least through the “epoch-making” translation of millions of important Greek texts to Arabic that preserved Aristotelian and other works for posterity (Gutas, 8).
Madrasa Discourses course in Kathmandu, July 2017. Here Pakistani student Waqas Khan poses a question to the lecturer.
Channeling what he learned in an online session from Notre Dame’s Professor Rashied Omar, Affan noted that Islam is a “culture friendly” religion, and that many other religions today appreciate diverse forms of good conduct and behavior. This does not mean “blind acceptance,” Dr. Omar notes in a 2015 sermon students also read: “The process of adopting sound customary practices from local cultures was facilitated by Islamic jurisprudence through the technical process known as al-‘urf or al-‘adah” (7).[1] Yet this friendliness and openness is important because “culture governs everything about us, molding our instinctive actions and natural inclinations,” Affan went on. “It’s human nature to love peace and hate disorder.”
Originally taught a strict interpretation of Islamic tradition, which left little if any room to question the authenticity of material, or to consider the possibility of different and equally legitimate perspectives, Affan tells us the Madrasa Discourses program “has changed my way of thinking…. I am now enjoying navigating uncovered areas of Islam that were previously hidden from me.”
In his sermon, Dr. Omar enjoins: “This new reality requires a shift in mindset from an inward-looking disposition that seeks to preserve culture such that it becomes fossilized, to a disposition that is embracing of cultural transformation and growth” (10). Affan took that message to heart and applied it to his role and place in India. Through teaching and service in their respective homelands, many other Madrasa Discourses students are also actively involved in creating and strengthening Muslim identities which are deeply rooted in the Islamic intellectual tradition and influential in shaping positive and relevant Muslim discourses in the modern world. Aadil Affan’s successful essay is but one prominent example.
Congratulations, Aadil!
Biography: Aadil Affan is a graduate of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he recently completed a Master’s in Arabic Language and Literature. Originally from Katihar Bihar India, Affan learned the value of education early and received his primary and secondary education at Nadwatul Ulama Lucknow. He plans to continue his higher education in the hopes of one day becoming a professor. He is also an avid cricket player and enjoys reading.
Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies, with a focus on public policy, monitoring and evaluation, and organizational management. As part of her program she conducted an ethnographic evaluation of a local South Bend organization applying dialogue to intergroup conflict, and benchmarked the use of restorative justice on North American college campuses for Notre Dame. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Hunger cloth from the Misereor humanitarian aid community in Wernberg Monastery, Villach Land district, Carinthia, Austria, EU. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I never met Enrique Dussel. Although he shared many spaces with my godmother and father, both Mexican academics themselves, I have no memory of ever meeting him as a child. I once heard him give a public lecture, and, like most Mexican citizens, I followed his activities in national leftist politics from a distance. Moreover, as a thinker and theologian, I am removed from the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers, who were the teachers of my teachers, and I am a student of their students. Despite this proximal distance, I do not think I speak in hyperbole when I say that the death of Dussel, an important figure in this first generation, represents a major moment for students of Latin American thought. His death marks the end of one era, although the next has already long begun. In this post, I reflect on how the continual reception of his work is shaping and will shape Latin American liberation theologies (LATL) in light of the decolonial turn.
In some ways, el giro decolonial (the decolonial turn) as later articulated by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, was an inevitability for LATL scholars writing in the middle of the last century. From its very inception, the thinkers, activists, and ecclesial and civic agents who shaped LATL worked to shift the epistemological centers of theology. In naming “the poor” as privileged subjects and emphasizing anew the practical dimensions of Christian theology, the very method of doing theology began to be transformed. The so-called “eruption of the poor” also led to prototypical theories on the history of coloniality/modernity. Early critiques of structures that created a dependency of impoverished countries on wealthier countries, often but not always vis-à-vis Marx, positioned them to critique globalizing economic structures.
However, if el giro decolonial does indeed consist of changing directions, not all liberation theologians followed their turn signals. While some have argued that LATL have formed integral parts of decolonial thought, still other Latin American (especially feminist) theologians and thinkers have critiqued earlier liberation theologies for their inability or unwillingness to problematize Eurocentrism in meaningful ways. These intricate (and, I will mention, necessary) debates among followers or inheritors of decolonial thought and LATL notwithstanding, Dussel’s legacy and influence in LATL can be seen most clearly in those that generally follow the “decolonial turn.” In the following two sections, I will focus on two ways that the methods and epistemologies of LATL scholars and activists both have and will continue to benefit from engagement with Dussel’s work. These are necessarily reductive, both together and individually. The first focus is on the importance of history in the context of praxis and the second is on how Dussel’s conception of the “Other” opens LALT to further epistemic frameworks.
The Turn to History
At a talk given at the Boston University School of Theology in 2019, Dussel, speaking in English, said that the claim that America was “discovered” is an “ethical mistake.” He followed up with “I will not say historical, I will say ethical.” Dussel’s transdisciplinary thinking was on full display here as he weaved together historical analysis and philosophical thought. Speaking to a group of students and faculty of theology, Dussel made the further claim that Eurocentric thinking has skewed our view of Christianity itself. The Christianity of the colonists, Dussel argued, was a double inversion of an original messianic Christianity (an argument he writes out fully in an article in Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives). In Dussel, theologians find a voice that insists that we inspect unquestioned historical analyses not only as a matter of exactitude but of ethics. He provides us with tools to problematize Eurocentric accounts of religion/secularism broadly, Christianity more specifically, and most fundamentally, the entire discipline of theology. He wrote, “it will be necessary to redo theology as a whole” (42).
The “redoing of theology” started in LATL early on when its practitioners began situating praxis—that is, practice that is enacted because of theory or theology—within history. Ignacio Ellacuría, a Salvadoran liberation theologian, elaborated on what he referred to as “historical reality,” where history marked the fundamental possibility of salvation. Ellacuría sought to undo stubborn dichotomies, such as nature vs. grace, and bring the Kingdom of God back into theology as a central part of eschatology. Praxis took place in this historical reality, as each person chose to either bring about or work against the Reign of God (80). Dussel, who is sometimes referred to as the “Hegel of Coyoacán” because of his impossibly large thinking, explored multiple disciplines in this search for an understanding of “historical reality,” although he kept, for the most part, the divisions of labor separate.
In Dussel, theologians find a voice that insists that we inspect unquestioned historical analyses not only as a matter of exactitude but of ethics.
Theologian Peter C. Phan argues that it is this ability to extend beyond theology to understand the reality of the world that united liberation theologies in carrying out the critical reflection of historical praxis. The move to transdisciplinary studies has not gone uncontested within theology broadly speaking, but it has largely been defended by LATL thinkers who see in the social sciences tools for rethinking Christian theological concepts. In other words, their aim was not to just say new things about such concepts but to reformulate the dialogue around them (i.e., sin, salvation, divine transcendence).
In a volume entitled Decolonizing Liberation Theology, Nicolás Panotto explains, “The theme of history is fundamental within LALT, especially as a scenario for rethinking divine revelation and the liberating dimension of faith.” He argues for a historicism that moves from a hallowed out, homogenizing history towards a fuller history of marginality and heterogeneity. He continues:
… the divine as a universality that traverses and comes from history implies a questioning of any idolatrous practice that attempts to absolutize a particular image of the theological, even in the name of a particular model or form of liberation and emancipation. This is not achieved through a singular form, but through the deconstruction of the epistemic boundaries that enable the mobility of every practice, body, knowledge, and politics. (231)
Salvation found in this history of alterity, rather than homogeneity, unsettles normative claims of theology. It pushes against the European epistemic hegemony that is pervasive in theological thinking. To rethink history is to reconsider where it is that God communicates Godself, reconsider where the Divine has communicated to human beings. That is, to rethink history may indeed be to reconsider theology altogether.
Dussel’s modeling of historical recovery as a means of theological discovery does just that: it does theology anew by doing history anew. Decolonizing history means uncovering marginality throughout history. Doing so is an act of recovering traditions within Tradition and is an exposing of the paradox of pluriverses with a universal God. To understand how it is that praxis takes place in history in a decolonial key, therefore, LATL can begin to ask “What history, and who is telling it?” Following Dussel’s lead, we recognize that this is not only a historical question, but also an ethical one. The ethical concern of incorporating the pushing of epistemic boundaries leads us to the next section, which focuses on the openness to epistemological frameworks by the category of “Other.”
The “Other” and the Expansion of Epistemological Frameworks in Theology
Despite claims to the contrary, decolonial theologians are not shy or insistent against using European thinkers. This is a sentiment that underestimates the constructive nature of decolonial thought and one that risks further diminishing the creative and fruitful work of many thinkers and activists who found camaraderie in the projects of those for whom Europe (as the center of power, rather than merely geographical region) was a hostile home. Dussel’s use of French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish descent Emmanuel Levinas, who was “a victim of the Jewish holocaust in the heart of Modernity” (125) is one such example. Dussel wrote a lot about his encounter with Levinas, both about Levinas’s writings and personal interactions. When Dussel asked Levinas during a gathering at Louvain about the Indigenous people slaughtered in the Americas, “Aren’t they the other you’re speaking about?” Levinas answered, “That’s something for you to think about.”
Dussel’s subsequent appropriation of Levinas was fundamental to his theorizing on the construction of modernity. For LATL, one vital result of this encounter between Dussel and Levinas was the idea of the Other as epiphany of an incomprehensible exteriority (123). Dussel used Levinas’s understanding of the “asymmetrical problem” of the encounter between colonizer and colonized to go beyond colonial logic. Instead of the savage Other of the colonial imagination, the face of the Other in Levinas and Dussel becomes the face of an ethical revelation, thus the epiphany. In order for this to be the case, the Other has to be truly other. Dussel points out that the face-to-face exposure can happen between multiple levels of relationship, but the ethical demand happens at its strongest in the case where the Other is truly outside of myself, unable to be placed within an “us” (145). The widow is beyond the wife, the orphan beyond the child, the foreigner beyond the known, the poor beyond equality. Dussel argues therefore for an unwavering politicization of Other, which comes from this infinite exterritoriality by means of being truly other, outside of us. To love, be benevolent towards, be in relationship with Other in their totality is to love, be benevolent towards, and be in relationship with their alterity. This is why Dussel refers to this as the logic of alterity (la lógica de la alteridad).
While “the poor” represented one such politicized Other in the LATL vocabulary, the Dusselian category of the “Other” is a category of colonial alterity much better equipped to leave behind economic determinism. Dussel’s articulation of the Other aids LATL in moving forward with an open disposition towards a variety of epistemological frameworks because it opens it up to an alterity that refuses rigidity in the categories of analysis it deploys. In a different book chapter than the one cited above that, in part, responds to a focus essay written by Dussel himself, Panotto argues for “an internal critique of [LATL’s] own methodological axes” to be able to accommodate the “inclusion of alternative worldviews, and in deep deconstruction of the notion of God from the locus of divine otherness that makes visible the historical fissures inscribed within its diversity” (232).
While “the poor” represented one such politicized Other in the LATL vocabulary, the Dusselian category of the “Other” is a category of colonial alterity much better equipped to leave behind economic determinism.
In Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz and the mujerista theology she founded, we begin to see the pay-offs of an extended category of “Other.” She wrote in one of her final published works before her premature death, “If we claim to be about unveiling and enabling subjugated knowledges, definitely a liberation and decolonial move, then we have to enter into the world where that knowledge is produced, for there is no knowledge without ‘encountering’ the reality we claim to know” (55). These “subjugated knowledges” are unleashed through the logic of alterity that Dussel proposed, face-to-face with the Other, whose exteriority is wholly transcendent and whose reality places ethical demands on my reality. There is a constant need, then, to expand the epistemological horizons of LATL to configure a robust epistemological shift. More than new content, LATL provides new ways of thinking beyond colonial matrices—“an Otherwise-knowledge,”as Panotto refers to it (219).
Dussel, as an early contributor to LATL and liberation philosophies, will have a long and extensive reception. His work gives those of us living and thinking in the light of the earliest communities of ecclesial, civil, and academic agents of LATL tools to extend our thoughts through to the decolonial turn. His category of Other and his transdisciplinary understanding of what it means to practice theology allow us to further complexify and enrich our theological method.
Amirah Orozco is a PhD student in the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame with a subdiscipline of Systematic Theology and a minor in Gender Studies. She is originally from the Border between El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Chihuahua. She comes to academic theology through questions of liberation and emancipation of the poor and marginalized. She is most interested in feminist as well as decolonial theologies. Her doctoral research at Notre Dame will focus on feminist movements in the Catholic Church and how they relate to other social movements.
“King Billy’s on the Wall” mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo Credit: Flickr User aa440. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland—more commonly known as the Orange Order—describes itself as “a membership organisation…committed to the protection of the principles of the Protestant Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which enshrined civil and religious liberty for all.” Yet, the history of the Order raises questions about such commitments as it was, at various times, seen to advocate a political union with Britain that denied Irish Catholics civil, religious, and political liberties. The Orange Order has historically struggled to align its stated “liberal” values with its desire to protect the idea of a “Protestant Britain.”
These contradictions are not often acknowledged by members of the Order who continue to view the organization in an almost entirely positive light and as representing a truer form of liberty that it believes stands in stark contrast to the “sectarian” politics of their Other—the Catholic, nationalist population. The development of the peace process in Northern Ireland, however, has served to once again shine a light on the Order and generated an internal debate as to how it should respond to growing criticisms from both within and without. Some within the institution, pointing to a declining membership amid controversies associated with parading disputes, have subsequently called for a new direction that better reflects wider social and political realities. Although efforts have been made to this effect, progress has been minimal due to a failure to overcome fears and suspicions of the Other; a failure largely explained by the fact that the narratives and traditions of the Institution continue to emphasize the perceived threat posed by the Catholic/nationalist population.
As such, the Orange Order is a useful case study for understanding how groups struggle to overcome long established processes of othering that reinforce the divisions from a turbulent past at a time when new and alternative futures are being sought.
“Othering” through “Constructed Perceptions of Reality”
In the words of Anthony J. Marsella, culture “influences and impacts conflicts and their resolution” (652). At the heart of his argument is the need to better understand “the power of culture” in constructing what he describes as an in-group’s “perceptions of reality” which “shape and construct our realities (i.e., they contribute to our world views, perceptions, orientations) and with this ideas, morals, and preferences” (657).
Two key outcomes of this process are crucial: (1) the constructed “perception of self as self-righteous, moral, justified, and ‘good’ by virtue of religion, history, identity”; (2) the perception of the Other as being “evil, dangerous, threatening” and therefore a “danger to national or group survival, identity [and] well-being” (653). Furthermore, these constructed realities provide an in-group with a degree of certainty about themselves and, as such, there will be a “reluctance” to “tolerate challenges to these realities” (653).
The Orange Order and Othering
The processes described above are evident across the history and evolution of the Orange Order which was founded in 1795 amid the increased sectarian tensions brought about by growing demands for social and political reform in Ireland, and a broader international crisis stemming from the upheaval of the French Revolution.
That international crisis had convinced many in the British political establishment that there was a pragmatic need to placate Irish Catholics as a means of preventing potential alliances with revolutionary France. The reforms being sought, however, were anathema for many in the Irish Protestant community who believed they went against everything that the Reformation stood for. In the short term the British (Protestant) state would be providing funds to support the education of Irish Catholic clergy via a newly established seminary at Maynooth, but more symbolically the state would essentially be providing a degree of legitimacy to Catholicism. Consequently, many Irish Protestants believed the proposed measures would threaten the social, political, and economic order they had fought hard to establish over the previous two centuries. Religion and politics in Ireland could not be separated.
King William III mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo Credit: Flickr user Jay Galvin. CC BY 2.0. DEED
Within the Protestant community the linkage between religion and politics was fed by negative popular representations of what the Catholic Church sought to achieve. In his history of the Order, Richard Niven (a member of the Orange) writing in the late nineteenth century, described the belief of members that “ever since the Reformation Protestants have been the subjects of persecution, and more particularly in our own land have been held up to every species of contempt” by “their bitter foe,” Catholicism, which sought a political “ascendancy.” The Orange Order, however, stood firm against this and was “the only organisation that has ever been able to cope successfully with Popery; not by secret conspiracy, but by open opposition and telling arguments” (3).
Popular written histories of the Institution, such as that by Niven and that by Michael Dewar, John Brown and Samuel Long, present long and detailed chronologies of persecution by their Catholic Other. Particular moments of Irish history are put forward as evidence of the constant threat Protestants have faced and continue to live with—from the rebellion and massacres of 1641 to the Williamite Wars of 1689-91; and from the 1798 rebellion, through the Easter Rising of 1916 down to the most recent conflict in Northern Ireland.
This selective use of the past entirely ignores historical complexities, and the narrative of the Orange becomes confined to a simplistic “Good vs Bad” form. Members of the Order are socialized in the history through a popularized retelling that is not confined to books and pamphlets that many members may never read, but which is depicted visually on the banners that adorn their gathering halls and are carried on parades. Similarly, these key moments are memorialized in songs that are central to important social events such as the traditional July 12th celebrations. Through such mechanisms members of the Order construct a reality about both the righteousness of the in-group and the ever-present threat posed by the Other.
“Othering” and Conflict Transformation
Perhaps unsurprisingly these processes of othering have raised questions about the Orange Order within the context of Northern Ireland’s peace process, which has sought a reconciliation between the communities in conflict. Critics of the Order argue that it is, by its very nature, a sectarian organization incapable of change or of playing a positive role in the search for stability. But is this necessarily the case? Is it possible for the Orange to reimagine itself in a manner that allows it to protect its core principles but at the same time become a force for political, cultural, and religious reconciliation?
Members of the Order tend to believe that it has never been a block to progressing peace but rather that it is merely misunderstood by wider society. To this end, the Orange has prioritized efforts to reach out across the political divide to form better understandings of what they claim the Institution is and stands for. This has, in the main, focused on educational initiatives with members of the Order often visiting Catholic schools to give presentations and engage with students.
The Portadown District Loyal Orange Lodge return from the “Demonstration Field” along the Hamiltonsbawn Road in Armagh during the County Armagh the July 12th parades in 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Yet, some members (and former members) of the Order have argued that these efforts are insufficient and that more needs to be done to confront the realities of a rising sectarianism within. The Rev. Brian Kennaway, in particular, has argued that the core values of the Order have been betrayed by elements of its own rank and file and that this has led to a decline in membership and public standing across the wider Protestant community. He maintains that the Orange needs to acknowledge a growing gulf between what the Institution claims to be and the practice of its members, with a particular requirement for the rank and file to better reflect the “Qualifications” for membership they signed up to. Kennaway, in his book on the subject, maintains that “far from being a sectarian, controversial and divisive body, the Order, properly reformed, could be a force for good and reconciliation in Northern Ireland’s deeply divided society” (xiii). He argues that the “Qualifications of an Orangeman,” which state that members “should strenuously oppose the fatal errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome” (4–5), should not be “judged to be any more ‘anti-Catholic’ than the doctrinal standards of the three main Protestant Churches in Ireland” (5), and points to the fact that the “Basis of the Loyal Orange Institution of Ireland” stresses that it should not “admit into its brotherhood persons whom an intolerant spirit leads to persecute, injure, or upbraid any man on account of his religious beliefs” (6). Kennaway maintains that the Order has become detached from such principles and that this has been to the detriment of the Institution. He argues that if the Orange is to have a future it needs better leadership capable of upholding what he has described as the “traditional and authentic values of Orangeism” (264).
Although this points to the possibility for reform by simply adhering to its own established principles, it must also be questioned as to the extent to which the Order has ever successfully lived up to these values as is stated by Kennaway. The fears of the Catholic Other have historically ensured that such values have, in the main, remained aspirational rather than practical. This leads to the further question: Has the peace process created an opening for the Orange to become the organization it claims to be?
One thing is increasingly clear, the fears generated by the processes of othering will not be overcome if the latter remains embedded in the traditions and the historical narratives people live by. For meaningful reconciliation in a post-conflict society, there is a need to engage more critically with history and the representation of that history—to acknowledge that our own roles in that story have not always been “glorious.” There is a need to better understand different interpretations and explore how conflicting narratives might be better reconciled or understood. If, however, groups such as the Orange continue to simply do what has always been done, how can alternative futures unfold?
Cathal McManus is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work (SSESW) and Queen’s University Belfast and a Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He is interested in processes of Othering and how these contribute to the development and maintenance of social divisions and conflict. Related to this he is interested in identity formation and nationalism. His work has been published in journals such as Nations and Nationalism, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Ethnopolitics.
Picture of books in Spanish written by Enrique Dussel. Image via Wikimedia Commons
We might be approaching a time when we will speak of the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers as ancestors. Since the late-1960s, theologians and philosophers in this tradition have created pathways for a radical rethinking of theology and religious studies, for the theological critique of modernity and of capitalism, and for theorizing the liberative power that religious communities can exercise. This generation is passing on, leaving an irreplaceable void in liberationist and decolonial thinking and activism. On November 5, 2023, the Argentine Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel passed away, joining a cloud of ancestral witnesses that will continue to demand from the living that we do not let go of the call to liberation. Undoubtably, the commitment to liberation is the signature trait of Dussel’s intellectual and political work. It informed a double gesture that integrates the political demand to stand in solidarity with the oppressed as well as a form of epistemic solidarity that integrates non-hegemonic ways of knowing for the sake of decolonization.
Ever since Dussel’s passing, I have been reflecting on how impossible it is to overstate the force of his claim in The Invention of the Americas that there could not have been a Cartesian I think, therefore I am, without Hernán Cortés’ I conquer, therefore I am. Who could forget that remarkable preface and its strong delineation of modernity? “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European” (12). There is not descubrimiento (discovery) without encubrimiento (effacement, covering over). Dussel shaped generations of thinkers whose starting point was this framing of modernity as a sacrificial project. For theologians like myself, Dussel contributed to the inception of liberation theology through his books on the history of Latin American Christianity, which emphasized the passage from colonial Christianity to a Christianity of liberation. And Dussel should also be situated as a key figure in the development of the theological critique of capitalism alongside figures like Franz Hinkelammert, who also passed away in 2023.
Dussel’s commitment to provincializing European philosophy as well as to establishing the grounds for a Latin American philosophy of liberation date back to some of his earliest texts. In his 1968 lectures on philosophical anthropology, for example, Dussel framed his project by juxtaposing Heidegger’s concept of “ontological forgetting” with the axis of colonial modernity. Dussel understood that an open task for philosophy was to identify the historical situations and cultural patterns that have been forgotten—more like erased—by colonial epistemologies (194). These forgotten fragments, as it were, form the substance of Dussel’s initial articulation of a philosophy of liberation. According to Alejandro A. Vallega and Ramón Grosfoguel, Dussel finds in Heidegger’s “appropriative de-struction of the history of Western philosophy elements that will be useful for the destruction of Western colonialist systems of oppression” (11).
Dussel understood that an open task for philosophy was to identify the historical situations and cultural patterns that have been forgotten—more like erased—by colonial epistemologies.
Early on as well, Dussel encountered Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, a work that caused in him a “subversive disorientation” and led him to question “all that he [had] learned thus far” (7). Levinas instigated Dussel to consider the dimension of exteriority and the fundamental category of the “Other.” These are concepts that Dussel quickly appropriated to theorize a passage beyond the logic of colonial modernity. While “disorientating,” Dussel’s encounter with Levinas confirmed to him something he had intuited during the time he spent in Israel, between 1959 and 1961. And that is: that the Hebrew tradition may be said to present an alternative view of humanity, one that affirms the historicity of the human subject and that places a special emphasis on justice, the moral agency of the oppressed, and the political imperative of liberation. This type of commitment, formulated in Dussel’s 1969 book, El humanismo semita, remained with him throughout his career. Dussel concluded his response to Levinas by situating the Levinasian call to the face of the other in the context of the colonial conquering ego. Dussel pushed for a historicization and a politization of the Other, naming it in its historical enfleshment as a “Native American, an African, or an Asian” (8).
It is possible to say Dussel’s incipient efforts in decolonization were marked by his investigations of existentialist philosophy and phenomenology, his knowledge of the history of Latin America, his encounter with Levinas, and his participating in the formulation of Latin American liberation philosophy and theology. A defining element of his thought would be added later on.
San Miguel de Tucumán, July 8, 2015 – Within the framework of the “National and Latin American Forum for a New Independence” that took place at the San Martín Theater, the panel “The Return of Politics” was held with the presence by Ricardo Forster, Jorge Alemán, Enrique Dussel, Horacio González, and Roberto Caballero. Image Credit: Romina Santarelli / Ministry of Culture of the Nation.
In 1975, Dussel was forced to leave his native Argentina after receiving death threats from the military junta that ruled the country. He sought refuge in Mexico, where he remained for the rest of his life. Dussel tells that his move introduced him to an intellectual circle with deep ties to Marxism. That marked an important passage in Dussel’s trajectory that eventually led him to a deep exploration of the Marx archives. The result of that research were four books, published between 1985 and 1993. Dussel’s reception of Marx was marked by his previous political and philosophical commitments to liberation and to the category of the Other. According to Eduardo Mendieta, Dussel read Marx’s Capital as an ethical book based on a radical critique of capitalism as a system that creates wealth at the expense of human suffering and exploitation (8–9). These claims are made explicit in Dussel’s final book on Marx, The Theological Metaphors of Marx (whose English translation will be published for the first time soon). In it, Dussel refers to Capital as a theological work that sought to expose the historical and material bases of an idolatrous system of accumulation and exploitation, a true demonic system that deifies injustice (175). For Dussel, Marx was an “implicit theologian” who put theological metaphors to use in the task of exposing capitalist exploitation (131).[1]
The path I have sketched in Dussel’s thought suggests a necessary alliance, what I’m inclined to call an epistemic solidarity between decoloniality, the critique of capitalism, and theology. That is to say, Dussel’s commitment to liberation is what guided him in the path of decoloniality but he walked this path precisely because he understood the task of decolonization under a certain theological register. That register was a certain allegiance to the image of a liberator God, a God with whom one stands “more or less as a comrade,” to cite an intriguing formulation once given by Paulo Freire. Enlisting God as such a comrade, Dussel interrupted the “holy alliance” (Marx) between the religious establishment and coloniality. But he also pushed for a renewed understanding of religion as an active force in the shaping of a world beyond colonialism. Dussel’s work in theology and religious studies embodies the task of decolonization by building upon the suppressed histories and ways of knowing of colonized communities and their spiritualities. Epistemic solidarity, as Dussel modeled so well in his writings, integrates multiple forms of suppressed knowledge for the sake of justice and liberation.
These are tasks that remain open for those of us who have learned so much from Dussel’s texts and teaching. There is therefore grief for his passing. As the grief for, and the farewells to, the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers continue to meet us, the living will need to develop strategies to enlist these ancestors as sources for our efforts in the direction of decolonization. The task of mourning, always labor intensive, is now open for newer generations to whom the project of decolonial thought and of Latin American liberation philosophy and theology has always been associated with Dussel’s name.
[1] I explore this claim as well as Dussel’s intellectual trajectory leading up to his encounter with Marx in an upcoming essay, “The Haunting of Liberation: Derrida and Dussel, Three Decades Later,” under review with the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Filipe Maia is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University School of Theology. He is co-chair of the Liberation Theologies Unit at the American Academy of Religion and co-convener of the World Parish webinar, a gathering of Wesleyan and Methodist scholars and leaders committed to the decolonization of the tradition. He is the author of Trading Futures: a Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism and co-editor of Methodism and American Empire.
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