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Scholars theorizing the connections among nationalism, religion, and violence have presented a wide range of perspectives. Atalia Omer and Jason A. Springs’s co-authored reference handbook on religious nationalism provides an overview of the subject with attention to critical analyses of secularism, modernity, and orientalism. Whereas Benedict Anderson’s influential work on the origins of nationalism—which defines the “nation” as an “imagined community” that evokes a sense of collectivity, communion, and common history across a people group—argues that nationalism developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Omer and Springs contend that “nationalism is not strictly a modern phenomenon” (26). They also argue that religious forms of nationalism are not inherently more volatile or “irrational” than presumably “secular” forms of nationalism, and further, that “secular” and “religious” forms of nationalism cannot be clearly distinguished from or contrasted with each other. Omer and Springs introduce the term “ethnoreligious nationalism” to describe the need for examining nationalism, religion, and ethnicity together, particularly in cases in which “religious identity markers blur or merge with ethnic identity markers” (15) and the language of authenticity and purity is mobilized in support of violence. This module takes Omer and Springs’ definition of religious nationalism as a starting point for an investigation across geographies, disciplines, and conceptual terrains that have been explored in blogs on the CM site.

Omer and Springs’s critical approach to “secularism” resonates with the influential works of anthropologist Talal Asad, which highlight the dynamic and ongoing construction of “religion” and the “secular” as categories and critique the use of  the “secular” as a designation for that which is considered rational and acceptable in public spheres. Asad challenges the ways that the “secular” is often imagined as a modern successor to “religion,” arguing in particular against the idea that nationalism should be understood as secularized religion. Further complicating the presumed “religious”/“secular” divide, Asad writes that secular states should be understood in terms of their efforts to regulate—not eliminate—violence and intolerance directed against “religious minorities.” Similarly, historians of religion such as Tisa Wenger have described the ways that discourses of religious freedom, pluralism, and tolerance—particularly in the context of the ostensibly “secular” U.S. empire—have been mobilized by the dominant White Christian population to naturalize and reinforce White Christian norms, which in Omer and Springs’s terminology may be understood as a form of ethnoreligious nationalism. Wenger notes, however, that discourses of religious freedom have also been reappropriated by minoritized and colonized groups to challenge racial and religious forms of violence and exclusion. These studies question assumptions of particular, bounded, stable “religions”; complicate the division between “secular” and “religious”; and discuss the divergent political uses of presumably tolerant approaches to religion in “secular” national contexts.

Informed by these critical approaches, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and religious studies scholars have offered focused analyses of diverse manifestations of ethnoreligious nationalism. These include Hindu nationalism in the Indian subcontinent, Arab and Muslim nationalisms, Zionism and the reshaping of Jewish memory in the construction of an Israeli national tradition, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, and U.S.-based White Christian nationalism. Additionally, scholarship on religion, conflict, and peacebuilding has engaged analyses of religious nationalism in order to offer a nuanced theorization of the relationship between religion and violence, while simultaneously exploring the constructive roles that religion can play in political life, conflict transformation, and peacebuilding.

This educational module introduces teachers, students, and practitioners to three major themes pertaining to religion, nationalism, and conflict: the deployment of narratives of victimization to support a dominant ethnoreligious group’s maintenance of power within a particular context, the mobilization of various Islamophobic discourses across geographies, and proposals for interreligious conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The examination of such themes provides an assessment of how religious nationalisms shape global politics and allows readers to examine the convergences and divergences among various forms of religious nationalism in diverse contexts. This module also highlights constructive postcolonial/decolonial efforts towards religious pluralism and peacebuilding.

Theme 1: Religious Nationalism and Narratives of Victimization

These pieces explore the role that narratives of victimization serve in various manifestations of religious nationalism. Philip Gorski’s post identifies victimization narratives as one key element of religious nationalism, particularly in “western” contexts, but which are also applicable elsewhere. Jason A. Springs’s post describes narratives of persecution and marginalization that inform White evangelical Christian ethnoreligious nationalism in the United States. Raz Segal discusses the weaponization of discourses of antisemitism to silence legitimate critiques of apartheid in Israel/Palestine. Ather Zia’s post reveals how Hindu nationalists construct Muslims as threatening “invaders” in order to maintain a position of dominance in the Indian subcontinent. Lastly, Gladys Ganiel’s piece addresses competing narratives of victimization between Protestant-Unionist-Loyalists and Catholic-Nationalist-Republicans in Northern Ireland. Together, these pieces offer diverse examples of the ways that religious nationalisms from different contexts mobilize narratives of victimization in order to construct a threatening ethnoreligious “other” and to justify violence against this “other.” Importantly, claims of victimization, marginalization, and oppression are not always false. These pieces, however, point to the ways that a community that in fact comprises a dominant ethno-cultural majority might employ narratives of victimization to justify their own moral superiority and maintenance of power and domination within a particular context—a phenomenon that Gorski’s post identifies as a key element of religious nationalism.

Religious Nationalism and Right Wing Populism: Trumpism and Beyond

This post by Philip Gorski examines the nature of right-wing populism and its affinity with religious nationalism. Although Gorski begins by considering White evangelical Christian nationalism and Trump’s ascendancy in the American right, he notes that connections between religious conservatism and right-wing populism go beyond and before Trumpism in the United States (with Hindu nationalism in the Indian subcontinent being an example from another context). While nationalism was once theorized as a secular, modern version of religion, Gorski argues that religious nationalism is a distinctive variant of modern nationalism—a perspective that contrasts with that presented in Omer and Springs’s reference handbook—and that connections between religion and nationalism also existed before modernity. He identifies blood tropes, apocalyptic narratives, victimization narratives, and messianic expectations as four key elements of “western” versions of religious nationalism, which are historically rooted in Jewish and Christian scriptures, but notes that these elements are also commonly found in “non-western” Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist religious nationalisms. Gorski then describes right-wing populism as a narrative in which a “pure” people are betrayed by a “corrupt” elite who has allied with an undeserving other. Because of this narrative of corruption, they place hope in a messianic leader who “promises to restore the people to its birthright.” Significant overlaps between this populist victimization narrative and the key elements of religious nationalism—which are evident, for instance, in the portrayal of the dominant ethno-cultural majority as a supposedly morally pure yet persecuted religious minority—may explain the attraction of religious nationalists to right-wing populist movements and of right-wing populists to religious nationalism.

While Gorski notes that further comparative work is needed to contend with other forms of religious nationalism, he writes that much of this framework could apply in “non-western” contexts shaped by other religious discourses. His discussion of narratives of victimization can be applied to White evangelical Christian nationalism, as Jason A. Springs’s post details further, but also to other examples of religious nationalism that are discussed throughout this educational module. While Gorski’s emphasis on the distinctness of religious nationalism—implying an acceptance of the separability of “religious” and “secular” forms of nationalism—might be critiqued by other schools of thought regarding the relationship between nationalism, religion, and violence, his framework provides a useful analysis of the connections between particular religious discourses and the key elements of populist, nationalist narratives.

QAnon, Conspiracy, and White Evangelical Apocalypse

This post by Jason A. Springs examines the role of apocalypticism and messianism in White Christian evangelical nationalism. While elaborating on his concept of “zombie nationalism”, Springs writes that the continual reoccurrence and reanimation of this form of religious nationalism is driven 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” and imagining themselves as a “perennially marginalized—and progressively more endangered—victims of an aggressively anti-Christian ‘secular’ society.” This post contends that the tropes employed by QAnon—particularly its assertions that the Democratic party is controlled by an anti-Christian elite, that Trump is a messianic figure whose actions have apocalyptic significance, and that America’s “true” Christian identity must be retrieved—have precedents in the White evangelical movement in the United States. Springs argues that “QAnon conspiracy ideology symbiotically feeds upon populist White evangelical impulses toward apocalypticism and messianism” and fuses them with Republican political ideology.

Springs’s attention to the recurrent pattern of White evangelical Christian nationalists conceptualizing themselves as a “victimized-yet-faithful and long-suffering” chosen people elucidates the role that narratives of victimization serve in the context of U.S.-based White Christian nationalism. This post and others in Springs’s series on “zombie nationalism,” such as “Race, Ressentiment, and Nihilism in White Evangelical Christian Nationalism,” show how narratives of White Christian victimization—particularly in relation to anxieties around White majority status diminishing, America’s “Christian values” being lost, and heteronormative sexual politics being challenged—are mobilized as “a covert means of conjuring and asserting power” and maintaining a position of ethno-cultural dominance.

Israel Apartheid and Its Apologists

In this post, Raz Segal uses the 2022 confirmation hearing of Dr. Deborah Lipstadt for the role of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism as a case study in how apologists of the Israeli state reframe critiques of Israel’s policies as antisemitic attacks. Segal, who studies the Holocaust, Jewish history, and antisemitism, argues that those who defend Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians “distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel [and not in the case of criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example], as an attack against a people.” In response, Segal provides evidence to support Amnesty International’s claim that Israel has created and maintained a system of apartheid against Palestinians, and to show that critiques of Israeli state violence are legitimate. He writes that the weaponization of discourses of antisemitism to silence criticism of the Israeli state “abus[es] the historical struggle of a vulnerable people, Jews, under attack by powerful states to blur the attack of a state, Israel, against a vulnerable people, Palestinians.” Segal argues that such conflations lead not only to a false picture of the reality faced by Palestinians, but also risk reinforcing the segregationist logic of antisemitism that the apologists claim to combat—that is, the idea that Jewish people belong in Israel and only in Israel.

In this context, the use of narratives of victimization—specifically, the weaponization of the charge of antisemitism in discussions of Palestine/Israel—serves to conceal realities of settler-colonialism and apartheid and to actually reinforce antisemitic logics. For more information about this topic, see posts by Atalia Omer and Moshe Behar that critique how the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has weaponized discourses of antisemitism in ways that stifle legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel and cause important manifestations of antisemitism to go overlooked. Also see Brian Klug’s posts on Europe’s “Jewish Question” and the need for its “unasking.” Klug argues that shielding Israel and Zionism from critique positions Jewish people as “the valorized Other of Europe” (thus reinforcing Jewish otherness and failing to treat Jewish people as normal human beings). He also asserts that critiques of Israel and Zionism must contend with histories of antisemitism in Europe rather than “fold[ing] Zionism completely, without remainder, into the history of European hegemony over the Global South, as if this were the whole story.” Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s and Raef Zreik’s contributions to the book symposium on When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism also address Zionism and Palestine/Israel.

The Hindu Rashtra Comes of Age

This post by Ather Zia details how the 2019 revocation of Article 370—which had previously acknowledged the special status of Indian-administrated Kashmir and maintained the autonomy of the region in formulating laws—serves the Hindu nationalist agenda, which envisions a unified social fabric built on a conception of “Hinduness.” Zia notes that the ideology of Hindu indigeneity in the Indian subcontinent “casts Muslims living in India as invaders and foreigners”; thus, “Kashmiri Muslims are doubly marked as the demonized other: first as Muslims, and second as Kashmiris who are longstanding dissidents committed to the fight for a UN [United Nations]-mandated plebiscite, democratic sovereignty, and freedom from India.”

The post also provides a brief overview of Kashmir’s recent history and religious demographics and explores how past events and recurrent narratives of victimization shape the current conflict dynamics. Zia covers the 1846 Amritsar Treaty in which the British Empire sold the land and people of Kashmir to a Hindu warlord, the Kashmiri movement for sovereignty and independence that first rose in prominence around 1931, the UN-arbitrated bifurcation of Kashmir into Indian- and Pakistan-administered territories around 1947–1948, and the drafting and later revocation of Article 370. Zia writes that the RSS (Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh)—a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization—had rejected the special autonomous status of historically-Muslim-majority Kashmir because they viewed it “as an appeasement of Muslims and a threat to Indian unity.” Zia’s account shows how narratives of victimization (or anticipated/feared victimization) have enabled Hindu nationalists in the subcontinent to construct Muslims as threatening others, to justify Indian settler colonialism, and to support the passage of legislation that discriminates against Muslims.

Northern Ireland’s Troubled Relationship with Religion: Structures, Practices, and Definitions

In this post, which is part of a book symposium on Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian’s edited volume When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, Gladys Ganiel analyzes examples of religious nationalism in diverse contexts and shows how states have invoked religious claims in order to justify assertions of sovereignty and legitimize violence. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) Ganiel’s post focuses on Northern Ireland’s Troubles and points out that, although some scholarship on this issue downplays the role of colonialism and religion, When Politics are Sacralized helpfully foregrounds settler colonialism (particularly the role of the British state as a colonial power that informs Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist versus Catholic-Nationalist-Republican conflicts) and religious claims.

Ganiel’s post recognizes that conflicting narratives of victimization shape interpretations of the conflict in Northern Ireland: “Loyalists [Protestant, Unionist] identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans [Catholic, Nationalist] identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.” Her contribution valuably explores the complexities of victimization narratives that are mobilized on both sides of a conflict, while emphasizing that such narratives must be evaluated through an awareness of historical power dynamics. Although one must acknowledge the migration of some Protestants to Northern Ireland as a result of their experience of structural violence in Catholic-dominated Republic of Ireland, it is also true that Protestant Unionist elites have constructed colonial political structures in Northern Ireland since its creation in 1921. (For more on the latter, see Cathal McManus’s discussion of the Orange Order.) Like the Hindu nationalists explored in the previous post by Ather Zia, Unionists in Northern Ireland also fear future victimization and have drawn on that narrative to sustain their position. Here, their fear is that a unification with the Republic of Ireland will result in their oppression as a Protestant minority in a Catholic-majority state. For more information on the complexities of colonialism and decolonial thought in the context of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, see this post by Maxwell Woods, which shows that decolonization alone is not sufficient for guaranteeing justice.

Theme 2: Religious Nationalism and Islamophobia

These pieces examine the ways that longstanding, global discourses of Islamophobia and more recent deployments of language of “terrorism” have functioned to support religious nationalisms in various contexts. Jason A. Springs’s post points to the subtle manifestations of Islamophobic European nationalisms in presumably “secular” laws that advance anti-Muslim discrimination. Similarly, Uzma Jamil critiques the ways that the idealization of “secularism” within White Quebecois nationalism contributes to both a systemic context of Islamophobia and a determined refusal to acknowledge this Islamophobia. Julia Kowalski shows how Muslim women protesters in India have challenged the stereotypes about Islam and gender that Hindu nationalists have promoted. Rachel Harris discusses the Chinese government’s campaign of cultural cleansing against the Turkic Muslims of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, which has drawn upon the United States’ post-9/11 rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism as well as Islamophobic discourses from other sources. Perin Gürel also discusses violence against Uyghurs, but focuses on complicating the idea of a unified “Muslim world” by examining the ways that different Muslim-majority countries have responded to the oppression of Uyghur Muslim communities in China. Together, these posts address multiple discourses and manifestations of Islamophobia—including and beyond the U.S.-led “war on terror”—and the ways that images of Islam being incompatible with both secular modernity and notions of cultural/national authenticity have informed religious nationalisms in different contexts.

Tentacles of the Leviathan? Nationalism, Islamophobia, and the Insufficiency-yet-Indispensability of Human Rights for Religious Freedom in Contemporary Europe

In this post, which is an abbreviated overview of an article that was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Jason A. Springs observes how many rulings by the European Court of Human Rights point to the idea that “the expanding presence of Islam throughout Europe presents a pronounced challenge to Western conceptions of secular law and human rights.” He writes that European nationalisms identifying and scapegoating an inassimilable Muslim “other” seem to underlie this idea. Noting that the consideration of only the most extreme or radical manifestations of Islamophobic European nationalisms can obscure more surreptitious and pervasive varieties, Springs attends to subtle European ethnoreligious nationalisms that occur as modes of anti-Muslim “exclusion, inequality, and humiliation.”

Springs warns that human rights discourses have been mobilized in Islamophobic European nationalist ways. Turning to recent French headscarf bans as a case study, he shows that even some avowedly secularist state laws represent subtle forms of ethnoreligious nationalism that advance anti-Muslim discrimination. At the same time, Springs presents international human rights norms and institutions as insufficient yet indispensable sites of potential for guarding against religious nationalism and protecting religious freedom in contemporary European contexts. He argues for a corrective approach to human rights discourse which would contend with the political and cultural power dynamics “that inevitably influence adjudication of human rights cases,” and in response, intentionally incorporate “analytical tools that guard against [human rights discourse’s] unjust applications.”

Islamophobia and Epistemological Ignorance

In this post, Uzma Jamil critiques the systemic context of Islamophobia reinforced by Quebec’s idealization of “secularism,” focusing particularly on the tendency of White politicians and citizens to deny the role of Quebec’s secularist Bill 21 in creating conditions for Islamophobic violence elsewhere in Canada. Such denials indicate a “refusal to know and to see Islamophobia,” which Jamil argues “is ultimately a refusal to accept the political claim by Muslims to be treated as equal citizens” and “a refusal to see how Islamophobia is sustained through its connection to Whiteness in Quebec.”

Jamil explains that Bill 21, a 2019 Quebec law which prohibits people who wear religious symbols from working in the public sector or engaging with public services, “disproportionately excludes Muslim women who wear hijabs.” She discusses the law’s rootedness in key aspects of “modern” Quebecois nationalism—which since the 1960s–70s Quiet Revolution that resulted in the Catholic Church’s removal from its previous prominent role in the public sphere—has been centered around secularism, gender equality, and the French language. Muslim women who wear hijabs and niqabs are frequently represented as threats to these nationalist ideals of secularism and gender equality. As Jamil argues, the maintenance of Quebec’s nationalist “secularism” rests upon “the erasure of Muslim religiosity from public space”—an erasure which ultimately serves to legitimize acts of Islamophobic violence.

Jamil writes that victimization narratives that focus exclusively on French Quebec’s minority position in relation to English Canada also inform denials of Bill 21’s role in reinforcing Islamophobia in other parts of Canada. Such victimization narratives are incomplete and ignore the fact that both are White settler societies which hold a position of dominance in relation to racialized, non-White minorities. Refusals to see Islamophobia and White supremacy indicate an “epistemology of ignorance”: anti-racist philosopher Charles Mills’s term for the ways that an intentional failure to see Whiteness is “a necessary requirement for the structure of White supremacy to exist and to endure.” Like the Islamophobic European nationalism identified by Springs, White Quebecois nationalism is a form of ethnoreligious nationalism that conceals itself through secularist language and various “refusals to see” Islamophobia and White supremacy. Against this epistemology of ignorance, expressions of Muslim political consciousness and agency—seen in rising efforts to name and combat Islamophobia—have the potential to reshape conversations around Islamophobia, Whiteness, and ethnoreligious nationalism in Quebec.

Remaking Indian Secularism: The Fearless Grannies (Dadis) of Shaheen Bagh

In this post, Julia Kowalski discusses protests that took place in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood of Delhi from 2019–2020 in resistance to the combined effects of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). She writes that these protests—attended mostly by middle-class, middle-aged-or-older women wearing hijab—represented acts of subversion against stereotypes about Islam and gender that the ruling Bharatya Janata Party in India has deployed to advance Islamophobic legislation. (For more information about the CAA and NRC as discriminatory against Muslims, see this post by Susan Ostermann.) Kowalski argues that Muslim women protestors innovatively mobilized representations of female kinship (including by referring to older protesters as dabaang dadis—“fearless grannies”) and home while promoting the vision of a secular, inclusive democracy and of religiously pluralistic national belonging in India.

When contextualizing stereotypes about Islam and gender in India, Kowalski notes that “[s]ince 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.” She connects these moves to longer, global histories of Islamophobic discourses that have promulgated notions of “oppressed Muslim women” in order to condemn Islam as “uncivilized” and justify Western colonial and imperial intervention in majority-Muslim contexts. In India, the Hindu right has co-opted critiques of gender inequality in order to advance these notions of “oppressed Muslim women” and “undermin[e] the status of Muslims in India more broadly.” Against these Islamophobic discourses, Kowalski’s post shows how Muslim women protesters in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood have contested right-wing Hindu nationalism, countered narratives of Muslim non-belonging in India, and subverted sexist and Islamophobic representations of Muslim women.

(Note: a different exposition of this post appears within the “Politics of the Gender, Sexuality, and Religion Nexus” module, since Kowalski’s analysis focuses on the intersections among Islamophobia, gender, colonialism, and religious nationalism.)

Uyghur Religious Heritage under China’s “Anti-Religious Extremism” Campaigns

This post by Rachel Harris discusses the Chinese government’s escalating “counterterrorism” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China—or, more accurately, cultural cleansing driven by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s campaign to control the region and its natural resources. Harris explains that the strategic management and positioning of cultural heritage “serves as a resource for political legitimacy and soft power and is used as an asset to boost local economic development”—for instance, by driving tourism and Han Chinese settlement in the Uyghur region. Despite the listing of sites of Uyghur religious heritage on local and international protected heritage lists, Harris points to “the large-scale destruction of sacred sites, prohibitions on Uyghur language and literature, and disruption of Uyghur communities since 2017” as evidence that “the biggest threats to Uyghur heritage and culture are the policies of the Chinese government itself.”

Harris writes that by the 1990s, “strike hard” campaigns led by Xinjiang authorities began to repress religious practices central to Uyghur culture, such as by designating pilgrimages to shrines as “illegal religious activities.” Beginning in the 2000s, the Chinese government drew from global Islamophobic discourses and from the rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism deployed within the U.S.’s “Global War on Terror” in order to re-categorize such Uyghur religious practices as acts of “religious extremism” and “to justify its actions against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities: actions which were increasingly taking the form of cultural cleansing.” The anti-religious extremism campaign in Xinjiang has involved the demolition of thousands of mosques, shrines, and cemeteries important to Turkic Muslim Uyghurs’ religious heritage, accompanied by heavy securitization, mass incarceration, and attacks on Uyghur language in the region. Harris contextualizes these repressive acts as “a part of the national campaign to ‘Sinicize’ religion” in China and warns that the systematic destruction of a people’s cultural and religious heritage frequently functions as a precursor to genocide.

Whose People? The Oppression of Uyghurs and the Idea of the Muslim World

This post by Perin Gürel challenges monolithic ideas of Islam and the “Muslim world” that dominate Western discourse on Uyghur issues, focusing on the ways that Muslim-majority countries are often expected “to respond to the oppression of Muslims across state boundaries [and particularly to condemn the oppression of Uyghurs] in a way that is not expected from Christian-majority countries.” Gürel emphasizes the heterogeneous policies within Muslim-majority countries and the existence of disunity among them in order to push for more nuanced and contextually informed understandings of how countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Türkiye respond differently to the treatment of Uyghur communities in China. She notes that although the Turkish government did issue a statement condemning the Chinese government’s violation of the human rights of Uyghur Turks and other Uyghur Muslim communities, international politics and economic relations shape governments’ decisions. She contends that those who uphold the idea of a presumably unified “Muslim world” must recognize that “the failure to condemn international human rights abuse despite cultural, linguistic, and religious ties with its victims is not unusual.”

Theme 3: Constructive Proposals for Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Peacebuilding

These posts introduce frameworks for envisioning religious pluralism and justice-oriented peacebuilding in contexts that have been impacted by violence and religious nationalism(s). Abir Bazaz discusses ideas of religious tolerance, respect, and freedom in Kashmiri history and literary culture in order to propose certain visions of Kashmiri religious pluralism as productive alternatives to Indian secularism in South Asian contexts. Bashir Bashir proposes egalitarian binationalism as a constructive ethical principle that can be applied to Israel/Palestine. Kwok Pui Lan shows how postcolonial scholarship can dismantle colonial myths that impede discussions within the field of religion and peacebuilding and offer constructive criticisms of the field. Jenna Streich, although not explicitly focused on religious nationalism, offers reflections on the ways that Catholic schools might combat religious perpetrations of violence, move away from a conversion model and towards one which honors students’ diverse religious and cultural traditions, and work towards justice-oriented peacebuilding in their communities. Her post demonstrates the on-the-ground educational work required to resist exclusionary religious nationalisms. Through cultural/literary, political/governmental, religious/social, and educational registers, these four posts offer distinct frameworks for responding to religious nationalism, addressing violence and conflict, and working towards religious pluralism and peacebuilding.

What is so Special about Kashmir’s Special Status?

In this post, Abir Bazaz traces the deployment of the idea of Kashmir as a “special place” over time, including in the popular movement for Kashmiri sovereignty (joined by Kashmiri Muslims and Hindus and supported by Indian nationalists) against Dogra rule in the 1920s–40s, and in the recognition of the region’s “special status” through Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The provisions of Article 370 were slowly eroded, however, as Hindu nationalists accused them of representing “nothing other than yet another shameful capitulation by the ruling Indian National Congress Party to Muslims,” and in 2019, Article 370 was revoked entirely. (For more information about Article 370 and Kashmir’s recent history, see this post by Ather Zia  discussed earlier in this module.) Bazaz warns that “cancelling Kashmiri autonomy … could return Kashmir to being narrowly imagined as a site of sectarian Hindu-Muslim conflict.”

Referring to the mobilization of religion and culture in the political claims of India and Pakistan on Kashmir, Bazaz writes that “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.” He turns to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century examples of Saiva-bhakti-Sufi-tantric poetry in Kashmir to show how ideas of religious tolerance and caste equality have a long history within Kashmiri literary culture. Such visions of Kashmiri religious pluralism are already “affirmed by many Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims” and, if attended to more deeply in the present, might open up new ways of thinking about democracy, freedom, and interreligious respect in South Asia. This unique vision of religious pluralism is “[w]hat is, and remains, special about Kashmir,” and offers a justice- and peace-centered alternative vision for the future of the region in contrast to the exclusionary chauvinist nationalism of the Modi government in India.

Interrogating Modernity and Egalitarian Binationalism in Palestine/Israel

This post by Bashir Bashir, co-editor of The Arab and Jewish Questions alongside Leila Farsakh, introduces a symposium on the book by describing the wider research projects that gave rise to it. (This post by Farsakh, which co-introduces the book symposium, focuses more on describing the book’s thesis and contents.) Bashir provides an overview of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, alternatives to partition, memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba, and the connections between antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe that have informed these prior projects and publications.

Based on his participation in research on the conceptual and historical links among the “question of Israel/Palestine,” the “Arab-Muslim question,” and the “Jewish question”—and among the dynamics of colonialism, Orientalism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism—Bashir proposes egalitarian binationalism as an ethical frame for challenging colonialism, promoting historical reconciliation, and dismantling Jewish Israeli supremacy in Palestine/Israel. He defines egalitarian binationalism as “a principle that recognizes and promotes the existence of two national groups with equal rights to self-determination … while insisting that this right ought to not be realized in the form of an exclusive ethnic state.” Bashir writes that some analyses of settler colonialism—though importantly drawing attention to power asymmetries between Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to the centrality of land in Palestine/Israel conflicts—are “underdetermined regarding what would be the ultimate outcome of decolonization.” As an alternative theoretical framework, Bashir argues that the principle of egalitarian binationalism “offers rich resources for a decolonizing project in Israel/Palestine that seeks to establish a polity based on the principles of justice and equality, coming to terms with historical injustices, and imagining alternative pasts, presents, and futures based on Palestinian-Israeli relationships.”

For more information about the “Jewish Question,” histories of antisemitism in Europe, and political Zionism, see Brian Klug’s post “Why is the Jewish Question Different from All Similar Questions?” Klug discusses the “Jewish Question” as a European question about the Jewish people, who (in one reading of this question) were positioned as Europe’s antithesis: Europe defined itself first as Christian (as opposed to “Jewish”) and later as a bastion of post-Enlightenment universalism (as opposed to Jewish “particularism”). Additionally, other contributions to the book symposium on The Arab and Jewish Questions contend with European colonialism, histories of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and the relationships among Europe’s “Jewish” and “Arab-Muslim” questions.

Religion and Peacebuilding: A Postcolonial Perspective

In this post, Kwok Pui Lan begins by challenging three dominant myths that are rooted in European and Euro-American colonialism and that tend to impede discussions on religion and peacebuilding: Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” myth that explains wars and conflicts in terms of clashes between homogeneous, bounded, religiously based civilizations; the secularist myth which views religion as irrational, incompatible with modernity, and an obstacle to conflict resolution; and the Islamophobic myth that sees some religions (like Christianity) as inherently peaceful and other religions (especially Islam) as inherently violent—a myth that, as posts included in the previous theme have shown, has informed Islamophobic forms of religious nationalism. She shows how postcolonial criticism helps debunk these myths and also challenges the legacies of racist and colonialist dynamics that have shaped the field of religious studies.

Kwok Pui Lan then presents the ways that constructive criticism from postcolonial studies might help 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”—to attend to subaltern religious actors and grassroots efforts towards peace, to highlight women’s participation in peacebuilding, and to apply a lens of hybridity to the understanding of religious traditions and identities. Kwok Pui Lan’s critical analysis of religion and “secularism” draws from Talal Asad and resonates with the framing provided within Omer and Springs’s reference handbook, and her focus on practices of peacebuilding offers constructive steps towards combatting religious nationalism.

Faith-Based Education & Peacebuilding: A Teacher’s Call for Further Collaboration

In this post, Jenna Streich reflects upon her experience of teaching at a Catholic high school in North Philadelphia, PA, and calls the disciplines and practitioners of religion, education, and peacebuilding to collaborate in efforts to build peace and justice. Streich writes that working with students impacted by gun violence, poverty, and racism in their communities pushed her to explore how Catholic schools might “draw on their theological roots to maximize their potential as religious peacebuilding institutions” and support students’ formation and empowerment as co-creators of justice and peace, particularly when such students are themselves non-Catholic or non-religious.

Streich emphasizes that in order to take on a positive peacebuilding role, Catholic schools must first acknowledge and combat the forms of violence that have been perpetrated by Catholic institutions, including abuse and cultural violence at Catholic boarding schools for Indigenous children and instances of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy more broadly. She also calls for a “bottom-up” approach to peacebuilding that—rather than pushing students to fit their experiences into existing Catholic frameworks—would ground religious peace education in students’ lived realities, values, and efforts to advance peace and justice in their communities. Ultimately, Streich argues that by shifting “the primary focus of a Catholic school away from conversion or indoctrination towards a theological imperative of care”—for example, by taking students’ experiences and struggles seriously, valuing their cultural and religious traditions, replacing punitive practices of discipline with restorative justice models, and empowering students as co-creators of peace in their classrooms and communities—Catholic schools can participate in the work of justice-oriented peacebuilding.

Streich’s reflections on religious peacebuilding offer a vision of religious pluralism, encounters across difference, and the co-creation of a culture of justice and peace as it might be lived out in the daily interactions among students, teachers, and their surrounding communities. Although rooted in the specific experience of teaching at a Catholic school, Streich’s post also points more broadly to the ways that religious institutions might draw from the resources of their traditions to challenge religious perpetrations of violence, work towards justice and healing, and collaborate with peacebuilding efforts rooted in other religious traditions. In this way, her argument offers a counterexample to the right-wing religious nationalisms critiqued by other posts in this module, which draw on violent and reactionary practices in pursuit of their ends.

Discussion Questions

The contributions featured within this educational module have provided means of theorizing and responding to religious nationalism; understanding histories of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and European colonialism; and turning constructively to religious resources for justice and peacebuilding. The questions below highlight some areas of ongoing scholarly debate; invite critical reflection on discourses of “secularism” and “terrorism”/“extremism”; and encourage the further exploration of pathways towards conflict transformation in interreligious contexts.

1. 1. Religion, Nationalism, and Secularism

      Scholars such as Philip Gorski present religious nationalism as a distinctive variant of modern nationalism, but Atalia Omer and Jason A. Springs (in their co-authored reference handbook on religious nationalism) intentionally trouble the lines of distinction between “religious” and secular (or “non-religious”) forms of nationalism. To what extent is it useful to theorize religious nationalism as a distinct form of nationalism? How ought analyses of religion inform the examination of forms of nationalism that are not typically categorized as “religious”?

   2. Insidious Nationalisms

      Scholars such as Uzma Jamil and Jason Springs have emphasized the concealed operation of ethnoreligious nationalisms in presumably “secular” contexts. How does religious nationalism appear in contexts such as the United States, Canada, or Europe that are typically imagined as “secular” or as safeguarding “religious freedom”? How do Orientalist and other colonialist discourses lead to “religious nationalism” being imagined in association with particular religions, geographies, or ethnic groups rather than others? Specifically, how do the posts included in this module help trouble the idea that certain religions are “peaceful” (Buddhism) or particularly compatible with “secularism” (Christianity) whereas others are inherently violent (Islam)?

   3. Islamophobia and the Discourse of Terrorism

      What makes the threat of “Islamic terrorism” and “religious extremism” such a compelling mobilizing force in European and American religious nationalisms, and how do these discourses of “terrorism” transform when adopted in other contexts (such as China)? How do discourses of “terrorism” differ from or reinforce Islamophobic discourses from other sources or contexts? How is the violence enacted by a state—particularly against an ethnoreligious minority group—constructed differently from forms of violence (actual, anticipated, or imagined through narratives of victimization) enacted by other actors?

   4. Religious Peacebuilding

      How might the constructive proposals for interreligious peacebuilding offered by Bazaz, Bashir, Kwok, or Streich apply (or not apply) to various contexts impacted by religious, cultural, ethnic, and political conflict? How do these proposals differ from the secularist myth (critiqued within Kwok Pui Lan’s post) that imagines religion as irrational, a hindrance to conflict transformation, and properly transcended by “secularism”?

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso Books, 2016.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. New Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

de Silva Wijeyeratne, Roshan. Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014.

Gorski, Philip S. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Edited by Christophe Jaffrelot. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Omer, Atalia and Jason A. Springs. Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.

The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding. Edited by Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Wenger, Tisa. Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

White, Jenny. Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Updated Edition. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2014.

Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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.

Remaking Indian Secularism: The Fearless Grannies (Dadis) of Shaheen Bagh

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. 

Hierarchy, Interdependence, and Islamic Ethics

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.”

Taking it Back from the Global Catholic Right: Reclaiming the Underworld of the Religious Imagination

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.

Evading Masculinized Modernity

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.

The Sexual Politics of Ethno-Religious Nationalism

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.

Fear and Mourning in the Shadow of Orlando

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.

They Say “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” Look, We Are All over Palestine

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.”

Fighting Transphobia: Analyzing the Pakistani Fatwa on Transgender Marriage

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.

On Decolonizing Queer Studies

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.

Love Bites

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.

Côte d’Ivoire’s Working Definition of Gender Empowers and Excludes

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.

Modernity, Women, and War: Struggles for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East

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.

Beyond Aztlán: Latina/o/x Students Let Go of Their Mythic Homeland

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.

1. 1. 1. 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?

      2. 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?

      3. 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?

      4. 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?

      5.  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.

Lugones, María. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 742-759.

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.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 631-660. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173834.

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/.