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Theorizing Modernities article

Love, Power, and Justice: Reflections on Katongole’s Who Are My People?


“No justice, no peace”, written on the walls of Malé. “No justice, no peace” is a political slogan born during the protests against the acts of ethnic violence against African Americans. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC By-SA 4.0.

In Who are my People?: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa Emmanuel Katangole lays out how possibilities for transformation begin in the gathering of people together in communities, small-scale though they may be. In the communities he describes, love positions as its diametric opposite the power of the western state interlopers, the developed nation-underwritten development agencies and development community, and of the successor of the colonial powers’ presence, the African states. 

The communities in question emerge from their members’ shared recognition of the sacrificial suffering love of Jesus as portrayed in the Christian scriptures. Specifically, the Gospel stories’ portrayal of a love that calls those who follow Jesus to a self-sacrificing love for the good of others provide the vision that orients these communities. Katongole conveys the genesis of these communities through the theological portraitures he sets forth throughout the book. In these ways, Katongole’s book strikes me as an exercise in narrative theology that complements the work of another African ethicist and religious thinker, Charles Villa-Vincencio—entitled Walk with Us and Listen: Political Reconciliation in Africa. In this post, I’ll juxtapose the two books in order to bring the ethical significance of Katongole’s into greater relief. Comparing and contrasting the two will illuminate the vital, if unspoken, role that justice can and ought to play in the interaction of love and power in the vision of peaceable community set forth in Who Are My People? The result should illuminate themes and implications that are present in Katongole’s book, but hover in the background, and deserve to be brought into our discussion.

Reading Katongole with Villa-Vicencio

At the heart of Villa-Vicencio’s book was the instruction to would-be do-gooders and global crusaders from the U.S., the European Union, the International Community of political and economic elites, and the international NGO community to do what the title of the book commands: “walk with us and listen.” At the time, Villa-Vicencio described himself as partaking in the practice of “frank and fearless speech.” This purpose referred to Michel Foucault’s posthumously published lectures examining the Ancient Greek concept of Parrhesia which concerns “who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power.” Foucault contrasted the Greek account with the predominant modern conception of “telling the truth” as an abstract speech act in which any person’s verbal assertion is perceived to be true in so far as it corresponds to a state of affairs in the world. The parrhetic understanding of “truth-telling” is a socially embodied and historically situated ethical practice that required the cultivation of the sensibilities and capacities of “truth-tellers.” Not just anyone can tell the truth on this account. “Truth-telling” requires understanding the context and historical circumstances, and critical assessment of the deeper causes and conditions of the state of affairs that one has in view.   He explained, “[W]ith the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the ‘critical’ tradition in the West” (170).

At one level, the “parrhetic” upshot of Villa-Vincencio’s exercise of “frank and fearless speech” was to say “walk with us and listen.” Or, to translate it into the ethical terms that infuse the title of that book—“Learn and practice the art of accompaniment. Accompany us! Walk along-side. Do not come to us to give us answers, or to rescue us. Often, we already know what we need. Enter into a relationship of mutuality with us. Open yourselves to the possibility that you will learn something that actually affects who you are and what you do, and makes some meaningful difference—some meaningful change—in who you are, and thus, how you understand and go about your efforts to aid others, to reduce suffering, and to help meet needs.  Assist communities and societies invested in liberating and transforming themselves.” For Villa-Vicencio, any proposed aid or assistance or support from the international development or NGO communities must pass through the “eye of the needle” of the local (176). “The local” is not beyond scrutiny, of course, and must be engaged in a dialectical back-and-forth of critical dialogue. But proposed assistance, or administration of justice and/or humanitarianism from elsewhere (“from outside,” “from above,” or “top-down”) must always work in concert with, with critical input from, and indeed, seek to support, amplify, and center the agency—even follow the lead—of the people it aims to aid. We might say, it must pass through principles and practices of subsidiarity—the idea, with deep roots in Catholic social teaching, that matters should be handled at the level closest and most immediate to, and with input and guidance from, the people they most directly affect. Villa-Vicencio’s point was even stronger. He construed such subsidiarity as a kind of critical “brook of fire” that can bring to light and smelt away impurities like the hubris of pity or the rescuing mentality of a savior complex. 

Paedeia is teachability that impacts who one is, what one is becoming, and how one sees and interacts with the world. 

Katongole’s book opens up precisely the kind of spaces and occasions for encounter that Villa-Vicencio called for. That is, it opens up opportunities for readers outside these African contexts, readers in seminaries and universities, in schools of global development, in church and religious communities across the U.S., but elsewhere as well, to listen and follow along—to assume a posture of teachability in the deep and formative sense of another Greek concept, that of paedeia. This is not listening that seeks instruction for instrumental purposes so that one can better implement the technocratic expertise one is garnering in policy and rendering in development services. Here the catchphrase is: “I can integratively solve your problem.” Paedeia is teachability that impacts who one is, what one is becoming, and how one sees and interacts with the world. 

Katongole’s book opens occasions for this kind of listening and teachability. This kind of walking along-side and accompaniment impacts who we—his readers—are, and what we are becoming. This must occur at multiple levels, including, and perhaps most importantly, in the development industry and development education contexts (such as, for example, Notre Dame’s very own Keough School of Global Affairs), if we aim to become teachers, researchers, and reflective practitioners oriented toward “global development” in a way that actually reflects the framework of integral human development. Katongole gives us this through a textured portraiture born of, and interwoven throughout with, theological reflection.   

Interesting, and consistent with Villa-Vicencio’s effort, is Katongole’s willingness to engage in frank and fearless speech—a work of “truth telling.” Katongole tells his readers that the truth of the stories in the book are not put forward in any neutral sense. Rather, he forwards them on the basis of his conviction that “the truth of a story is judged by the reality it creates and the lives it shapes” (173).  In other words, one can recognize and come to know the truth and integrity of these stories in virtue of the fruits that they bear (Matthew 7:15-20)—namely, the ways that they both model and inspire sacrificial love, and the cultivation of community oriented by such love. This approach speaks back to many audiences who, most likely, are in some way, at some level, captivated by—held captive to—the rejective myth about Africa. This is the myth that Africa is an essentially violent and uncivilized place from which nothing good can come, and thus in need of Western benevolence (172). Katongole identifies and debunks this myth. It is prevalent among even the most well-meaning of European and North American people though we may not be aware of it. Indeed, I would say that that myth is so pervasive that if we are not actively interrogating our thinking and presuppositions for traces of that myth, it is probably operative to some degree, and at some level, in the background. The book opens spaces for encountering these truthful stories and their effects, by “showing the possibility, indeed the reality, of an alternative—a nonviolent—Africa, one shaped by the story of God’s self-sacrificing love” (173). 

Intriguingly, the central purpose and function of the book fits naturally with theology as an exercise of parrhesia, which, as I noted earlier, is a sustained exercise in the practices of truth-telling. This work operates in the spirit of critical theory that Foucault describes in his exposition of frank and fearless speech as a practice of truth-telling—a kind of “critical narrative theology” (though, clearly, without mimicking the actual genre and style of theoretical “critique”). Of course, Foucault saw the end point of such an enterprise as the exposition of the operations of “power,” whereas Katongole sees his end point as love. 

Farmers in Kenya gather in community together after a 2011 drought. Image via Flickr user World Bank Photo Collection. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Consider, for example, Katongole’s concept of “the violence of love.” The phrase does not mince words. We have here an instance of frank, fearless speaking as a component of the practice of truth-telling. The “violence of love” emerges as a logical extension of the portraiture of Christian activists throughout the book who are acting against the “devaluation and wanton sacrifice of African lives” (173). They discover that healing from “the burden of Africa’s history” entails suffering “the violence of love” in which the activists discover, embrace, and orient their work by the self-sacrificing love of God. This heals their own suffering, Katongole explains, but also “liberates them to invent new communities and practices through which they seek to heal, restore, and renew God’s love for other victims of violence” (174). In the Afterword, Katongole details some of the practices of community that embody and facilitate this transformation—practices like working in the fields together to grow crops, eating together, worshipping together, celebrating feast days and wedding ceremonies together, and building up friendships that can heal and transform the kinds of divisions and divisiveness that have been inflicted by Africa’s modernity.

With this, Katongole intentionally side-steps prescriptive social ethics, and even (as he anticipates some pointing out) “the task of ‘Christian social responsibility'” (174). He refuses to make specific claims about how to make Africa more peaceful and more democratic. Katongole says instead that he is working in a different kind of politics, in that he is refusing to deal with politics in relation to state power and instead engaging in politics understood as the ordering of bodies in space and time. This is politics that occurs in the form of relationships situated in community. They pertain to what those relationships require to cultivate, sustain self-sacrifice, and thereby, the transformation of harms and the transformation of community (172). This is the politics of love. As he quotes the former archbishop of Bukavu— “the only response to the excess of evil is the excess of love . . . the logic of the Gospel is a not a logic of power, but of the cross” (175). 

The Necessity of Justice

As far as this goes, I find myself persuaded. I do wonder, however, if to end at this point and embrace the politics of “an excess of love” as, in effect, one horn of an apparent dilemma between the politics of love and the politics of social responsibility may tempt unwitting readers toward a kind of “ethical and political quietism”—that is, a quietism that risks refusing questions of “Christian social responsibility” altogether, instead embracing a (putatively) totalizingly different conception of the politics of love. 

The risk is that leaving love and power as opponents may keep their untransformed essences intact. For the logic of the cross does not reject power, it transforms it, just like it transforms love as we humans know it and practice it. The exclusion of power in its untransformed version, ironically, therefore, leaves a third term occluded—a term that mediates love and power in virtue of the transformation of both terms by the logic of the cross. That mediating term is “justice.”  In the portraitures that Katongole offers us justice is present, hovering over his exposition of the “violence of love and suffering.” But it is not explicitly spoken there. 

Allow me to clarify by way of an example: the opposition of power and love by the former archbishop of Bakuva brought to my mind a pivotal point in the narrative arc of a class that I teach—a class entitled (apropos of many of the claims of Katongole’s book) “Love and Violence.” The class traces the impact of, and resistance to, French colonialism in Algeria, the impact of, and resistance to, British colonialism in India, and the influence of both these resistance movements upon the resistances marshalled by the civil rights movement in the U.S. In particular, I am reminded of the moment when Martin Luther King, Jr., in his appeal to the transformational capacity of the sacrificial love of Christ manifest through non-violent direct action ran headlong into a wall of refusal by many younger civil rights activists who believed it to be simply a “violence of love.” The response took its most pointed opposition in the form of Stokely Carmichael’s call for “Black power.” Power and love, Carmichael argued, were intrinsically opposed. You must choose one: either the violence of love or the violence of power. Carmichael vied for power.[1]

In the portraitures that Katongole offers us justice is present, hovering over his exposition of the ‘violence of love and suffering’ . . . but it bears making this explicit, integrating, and developing further.

King responded by refusing the terms of the opposition. He did this, textually, by reading theological mis-interpretations of Jesus’s teaching in the Gospels about love against Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of the will to power. In effect, King’s biblical analysis argued that the subsumption and transformation of both love and power in the agapic love at the heart of “the logic of the cross” transforms both, mediating them through the concept and practices of justice. He wrote, “What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best [power transformed by the logic of the cross, we might say] is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love” (37–39).

I don’t see this at odds with the communally embodied politics of love that Katongole sets before his readers as the upshot of Who are My People? But I do think it bears making explicit, integrating, and developing further. And I invite his reflections on how he might articulate what these communities might have to say about the role of justice. This is especially important to interloping readers like myself, who aspire to listen, to accompany (as Villa-Vincencio urges us), and be taught in ways that might genuinely impact and alter who we are, how we engage with one another, and our work together here and now.


[1] This opposition erupted most starkly during Carmichael’s first invocation of “Black power” on the James Meredith march.  For helpful exposition of this encounter, and its impact on the movement, see King in the Wilderness (2018; mins. 20–30).

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Jason Springs
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Identity, Theology, and Friendship in Sub-Saharan Africa and Beyond


Rehearsal for the Beatification ceremony of Sister Irene Stefani. Nyeri, Kenya, May 2015. Image via Flickr user Make it Kenya. Public Domain.

Emmanuel Katongole’s Who Are My People?: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa explores the question of African and Christian identity through a rich blend of theory and storytelling. While Katongole touches on prominent themes that drive his previous work, such as violence and Christianity on the African continent, his new book approaches these issues in a fresh way through explicitly centering the theme of identity through the question: who are my people? Katongole’s answer emerges through explorations in philosophy, literature, and the stories of individuals and communities in the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, and Benin. In this post, I will attend to Katongole’s discussion of identity through three dimensions of the book: (1) the structure of the work, (2) the thematic exploration of wounds, and (3) the genre of the sermon. Alongside this exploration of identity in Katongole’s work I will also consider the important contributions Katongole makes to the method of portraiture and the role of friendship in social and political transformation. 

Structure and Methodology: Considerations of Identity

Those familiar with Katongole’s work will have encountered his method of theological portraiture, which he develops by drawing on the work of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis, who describe portraiture as an approach which blends aesthetics, the social sciences, and ethnographic methods to prioritize attending to goodness—without excluding critique—in regards to their subject. Like an artist painting a portrait, portraiture is attentive to how research is communicated, emphasizing the importance of integrating an artistic dimension into academic writing. In Who Are My People? Katongole uses portraiture in two distinctive ways: (1) by taking up narrative portraits of exemplary individuals to communicate theological meaning, and (2) by incorporating his own narrative into these portraits. The distinctively theological dimension of Katongole’s use of portraiture will be taken up in the next section. Here, I would like to comment further on Katongole’s use of his own story in the text and how this impacts the structure of the text. 

One of the challenges of engaging in both complex theoretical discussion and attending to the stories of exemplary individuals is avoiding the pitfall of a strict division between theory and experience, in which the initial articulation of theory is presumed to shape practice, rather than theory and practice mutually informing one another. Katongole avoids this potential shortcoming in the way he integrates his method of portraiture, creatively incorporating his own personal narrative and journey throughout the book as a whole. While the book is divided into two parts, the first attending to philosophical and theological considerations of identity and the second focused on exemplars, in part one we do not simply encounter the theoretical underpinnings for his exploration of identity in Africa, we meet Katongole in 1994, as a student in Leuven, Belgium and follow him on his philosophical and theological journey as he seeks to understand what it means to be African and Christian in his own life.

What strikes me is that in this first section we encounter, for the first time in Katongole’s writing, a theological portrait of himself. This portrait emerges in small sketches, short narratives, and brief moments of internal reflection that begin in part one as he invites us into his own intellectual journey from Valentine Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge to Virgilio Elizondo’s concept of mestizo identity in The Future Is Mestizo. Katonogle’s journey continues in part two as he encounters people whose lives exemplify love’s reinvention in the midst of Africa’s modernity: the reinvention of identity with Maggie’s Maison Shalom in Burundi, the reinvention of politics in the Central African Republic with organizations like Fr. Kinvi’s mission hospital, and the reinvention of relationship to the land at Songhai Center in Benin.

The result is that Katongole situates his philosophical and theological foundations in a concrete location—the context of his own life’s journey. It also means that theological portraiture underpins the work, including his more theoretical reflections. In other words, bringing in pieces of his own story into the method of theological portraiture allows for theory to be embedded in experience and narrative from the beginning of the book. The ways Katongole integrates his own narrative in the most theoretically dense sections of his work breaks with a conventional style of academic writing, which often ignores or only addresses in a superficial way how the author’s personal experience concretely shapes their engagement with theory. In experimenting with portraiture in this way, Katongole provides a creative example for how academics can concretely integrate experience into their work, allowing experience to inform all elements of their project.

Portraiture and Identity as Theological: An Exploration of Wounds 

Statue of Mary holding the wounded Jesus in the pietà tradition. Agulu Lake Cultural Museum, Agulu, Nigeria. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

As in his previous work in The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa and Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa, in Who are My People? Katongole draws our attention to the way extraordinary acts of love emerge in unlikely contexts of immense suffering and violence. In Who Are My People? Katongole uses the imagery of wounds. From the wounds of colonialism that laid the foundations for the wounds of genocide in Rwanda, to the wounds of a polluted earth, wounds are a recurring image. In the chapter titled “Conclusion: The Logic of the Cross” he explicitly connects this image to the logic of the cross in order to explore this intersection of love and suffering in a distinctly theological modality—providing the theological dimension of his theological portraiture. Throughout the book we see the various ways people can respond to wounds either by participating in the cycle of violence and exclusion or with an excess of love that breaks with this cycle. It is to these second set of responses—those grounded in love—to which Katongole is particularly attentive. We see examples of such responses in Fr. Godfrey Nzamujo at Songhai Center seeking ways to heal the earth and in Maggie’s Maison Shalom in Burundi seeking to heal the divisions between Hutus and Tutsis. Each of these portraits, in some way, participates in the excess of love represented in the wounds of Christ. In each story, there is an encounter with suffering and death out of which springs—despite the seeming impossibility—new life.

Here, feminist and womanist theologians who address the issue of suffering in the Christian tradition could be fruitful dialogue partners. Many feminists and womanists critique the ways in which valorizing suffering as salvific can be used to silence voices that resist injustice and justify the status quo. Yet, within this discourse there are a variety of responses to the suffering of Christ and the cross. For womanist theologian Delores Williams it is ultimately Jesus’ life as a whole, which exemplifies a commitment to working against injustice and solidarity with the oppressed that is salvific, not his suffering and death.  On the other hand feminist theologian Dorothee Sölle identifies Christ in the person at the margins who is suffering like Christ on the cross, and womanist theologian Shawn Copeland argues that the dangerous memory of the cross —a concept drawn from Johannes Baptist Metz—must not be neglected. Copeland explicitly connects the suffering of Jesus to the suffering of Black women’s bodies in the context of slavery in the U.S. Despite differences in the specifics of their theological approaches, what these feminist and womanist theologians share is a commitment to justice realized through solidarity that confronts unjust political regimes in order to transform oppressive conditions. As Dorothee Sölle argues in Against The Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian, “I must say first: God is Justice. To know God means to do justice” (116). 

Feminist and womanist theologians would be enriching dialogue partners for Katongole’s work because of their shared commitment to prioritize voices from the margins and their shared aim of transforming systems of violence. Importantly, Katongole’s theological portraiture is careful not to misuse stories of hope to justify or diminish suffering. Rather, Katongole responds to oppressive political and social realities through stories that invite us to recognize that another way of doing things—another world—is possible even in the midst of violence and suffering. One place feminist and womanist interlocuters might expand Katongole’s work is with regards to the role of justice in creating new communities of belonging—a topic Jason Springs points out in his post for Contending Modernities Katongole does not engage in-depth. I think underlying the affirmation from feminist and womanist theologians that “God is justice” is the claim that one of the ways we honor that the image of God is in each one of us is through holding one another to account when there is a failure to uphold an individual’s or community’s dignity. The demand for justice is not eclipsed by love—though the ultimate end of justice refracted through practices of forgiveness and love is restoration and transformation, rather than retribution. Here, I would like to raise the question: How does a theology of justice intersect with the “excess of love” Katongole emphasizes in Who Are My People? One way to answer this question would be to take one of the portraits in Katongole’s book, such as his exploration of healing and creating a new community after the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi though the lives of Father Jean Baptiste Mvukiyehe and Maggy Barankitse, and explore where God’s justice fits within their lives and work as well as how justice and love mutually shape each other in these contexts. 

The Genre of the Sermon: A Call to Transform Identity through Friendship

Katongole chooses to end his book with an afterword in a genre that is not typical in academic work: a sermon. His choice to conclude with a sermon is fitting for two reasons. First, a central thread that runs through the book is Katongole’s own journey. Most of what we encounter in earlier sections of the book are Katongole’s intellectual explorations of identity prompted by the Rwandan genocide, vignettes of the different geographical locations Katongole has lived and worked in, and reflections on identity that are raised in response to the exemplary individuals he encounters in the second half of the book. Yet, another component of Katongole’s identity is his negotiation of being both an academic and priest. We get a brief glimpse into Katongole’s identity as a priest in Chapter 2, when he shares that at his ordination his Muslim teacher, Elias, presented him to the bishop alongside his mother. However, Katongole as priest largely recedes into the background until the sermon that appears in the Afterward. In these final pages we encounter Katongole negotiating what it means to be a Catholic priest in the ecumenical context of his work at Duke University (2001–2012), which has Methodist roots and students and faculty from a wide variety of protestant denominations. Here, he encounters a different wound—the history of division in the Church. This leads to an expanded understanding of identity—to a new sense of “we”—that embraces the gifts of ecumenism. For Katongole, this extension of identity happens in and through unlikely friendships in our midst that trouble and expand our sense of self.  

Second, concluding with a sermon can also be understood as an invitation to readers to consider his book not only in terms of its intellectual implications, but also in terms of its spiritual and practical implications. Katongole has shared his own journey towards a new sense of “we” and now his readers are invited to reflect on our own identity. Importantly, in the pluralistic context of modernity, reflecting on our own journey will not mean replicating Katongole’s particular journey navigating his African and Christian identities. Rather, it means critically reflecting on what makes up our own identity, what religious or spiritual sources we draw on, where we draw boundaries between ourselves and others, and how the expression of our identity might unwittingly participate in violence. 

Prayer in The Democratic Republic of Congo. Image via Flickr user Steve Evans. CC-BY-NC 2.0

In the final paragraph, Katongole addresses us, exhorting, “This Odd God who became our friend invites us—nay, pushes us—into strange places and friendships, friendships that are not supposed to be. Through these odd friendship, and only through them, can we get a glimpse of God’s exciting new future…” (187). Katongole’s call goes beyond the intellectual exercise of talking across disciplines in the academy. Here, there is an invitation to us to embrace friendship—the concrete sharing of life with the other—with those who we do not usually consider to be “our people.” For Katongole it is ultimately through these concrete relationships that our identity can expand to embrace a new sense of we, a new sense of belonging, and that genuine transformation can become possible. 

Not every reader will identify with Katongole’s Christian articulation of God’s call to friendship across divisions. In this regard, it is important to consider that Katongole is writing as a Christian theologian about his own specific journey as an African Catholic coming to this realization. Here, I would encourage readers from other religious traditions and cultural backgrounds to ask how their own tradition and culture might envision such a crossing of boundaries through friendship and where there might be both productive sites of resonance and disagreement with Katongole’s claim.  

Through utilizing portraiture in a theological modality, Who Are My People? explores the intersection of theory and experience to address the question of identity. Ultimately, the identity Katongole describes is not static but a journey, and it is not the identity of an autonomous individual, but one formed through relationships. Katongole’s final reflections on friendship challenge us to move beyond mere intellectual considerations of identity and call for concrete action to build relationships across the boundaries that typically divide us. Engaging with Katongole’s book from my own context studying theology in the U.S., I would like to raise one final question: What would universities look like if academics and students had a sustained commitment to building genuine friendships across ideological lines (both inside and outside the academy), keeping in mind that Katongole does not view these friendships as maintaining the status quo but rather as radically transforming both ourselves and our society?

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Marie-Claire Klassen
Marie-Claire Klassen is a PhD Candidate in Theology with a minor in Peace Studies at Notre Dame. Her research utilizes theological ethnography to study Palestinian liberation theology. She is currently a Dissertation Year Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Theorizing Modernities article

Theology, Ethnography, and the Question of Genre: A Response to Emmanuel Katongole’s Who Are My People?


Bishops outside of a church in Uganda. Taken by the author on a fieldwork trip. Image via Todd Whitmore.


Reading Emmanuel Katongole’s Who are my People?: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa was like listening to a longtime friend, and that it was. It is a lucid, beautifully written book. I will focus my response on the question of genre. Just what genre—or, rather, mix of genres—is Who Are My People?  There are elements of social science, the theology of Stanley Hauerwas, and confession literature. The question is whether these elements constitute robust genres in the book.

Social Science (Qualitative Sociology/Social and Cultural Anthropology)

There is an early gesture in the book towards being in the genre of qualitative social science research, and being, more specifically, a study in qualitative sociology or cultural anthropology. (Side note: I don’t have a dog in the fight over whether qualitative sociology and cultural anthropology are themselves truly sciences; it depends on what one means by “science.”) It is possible, in my judgment, to be at the same time a theologian and a cultural anthropologist or qualitative sociologist—to mix the two constellations of genres without the loss of either—so the gesture towards these disciplines caught my attention. 

Katongole refers early on to his “decision to do ethnographic research” (7). And in the conclusion, he refers to his work as “a unique blend of analysis and ethnography” (173). But if by “ethnographic research” and “ethnography” one means what is most often meant in cultural anthropology—extended time spent on the ground living with the subjects of research, engaging in participant observation supplemented by other field methods, then in Who Are My People? we seem to have something else. The anthropologist Alpa Shah articulates the most common understanding of participant observation: “Duration . . . is important because it takes a long time to become a part of people’s lives. . . . Participant observation, it is typically suggested, should . . . be conducted over at least a year, preferably living with the people one is studying” (51). There is payoff for such work: the upending of our theoretical presuppositions. “Participant observation is potentially revolutionary because it forces one to question one’s theoretical presuppositions about the world by an intimate long-term engagement with, and participation in the lives of strangers” (49).

With the exception of the mention of a two-week trip to the Central African Republic, there is little indication of duration in the three countries—CAR, Rwanda, and Benin—featured in Who Are My People?, so it is hard to know to what degree the work fits the genre of ethnographic research. More, the book is structured such that the theoretical work is set up in the first two chapters before the display of the time in the field in the following three chapters. For this reason, it is difficult to get a sense of a disruption of theoretical presuppositions, as Shah suggests is one of the most important payoffs of participant observation.

Katongole also refers to “extensive interviews and structured conversations,” and cites the influence of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s method of “portraiture.” However, after this one brief citing, there is not another mention of Lawrence-Lightfoot, or even of portraiture, until there is again brief mention in the conclusion (173–74).  

There are extensive debates about the genre of the interview: what form it should take, and how many are necessary for purposes of rigor, such that a standard part of the research genre is for the author to state what kind of and how many interviews she conducted. There are few such genre markers in Who Are My People? In one instance in the book that does pay attention to interview method, Katongole, like with “ethnography,” uses a key term in a way not used by social scientists. He states that he “conducted a random series of interviews” in slums on the outskirts of Kampala (149), but it is evident that the selection of interviewees was quite different from what is meant by “random sampling” in social science procedure. (He directly selected, in his words, a “cross section” of people rather than randomly sampled in the statistical sense.) 

My point about the use of the terms like “ethnography” and “random” is not that the fieldwork in Who Are My People? does not have value; on the contrary, in a moment, I will argue just the opposite. And the book is far more than anecdotal. But the terms and methods theologians use to describe our work are important in part because one of the criticisms made of theologians claiming to do some form of social scientific inquiry is that our work lacks adequate accountability in the claims we make, and thus is thin methodologically and substantively. (“Thin” is a word that social scientists use to swear at each other.)     

There will likely always be social scientists who reject as a matter of principle theological modes of reasoning. But if theologians want to be in conversation as also scholars doing social science with qualitative sociologists and cultural anthropologists, then we need to use their terms in ways recognizable to at least those among them who do not rule theological modes of reflection out of court a priori. 

Given the number of times Katongole uses the terms “story” or “narrative”—my informal count is that the words appear on 33 pages with as many as 11 mentions on a page—we might expect some engagement with narrative sociology and anthropology. But there is no such engagement in Who are My People?

More important than even the number or kind of interviews or which social scientists Katongole engages with is the place of narrative in Who Are My People?: it is at the opposite end of the research project from that in qualitative sociology or cultural anthropology. In Who Are My People?, the specification of the Christian account comes in the second chapter, subtitled, “The Journey of Christian Identity.” It is only in the chapters that follow that Katongole displays specific instances of living that narrative in contexts of violence. In Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis’ The Art and Science of Portraiture, the turn to the building of narrative comes in the last chapter: “Composing the narrative” they write, is “the last and most comprehensive feature of portraiture” (261). 

But if theologians want to be in conversation as also scholars doing social science with qualitative sociologists and cultural anthropologists, then we need to use their terms in ways recognizable to at least those among them who do not rule theological modes of reflection out of court a priori. 

In other words, for qualitative sociologists, the ultimately definitive narrative for a study is retrospective. This does not mean that a researcher does not bring theories and narratives to the field; one cannot help but do so. All qualitative researchers that I know of reject any idea of observational neutrality as a chimera. But the aim is to hold such theories and narratives lightly enough that they can be fundamentally challenged and even changed, and this goes even for whatever ultimate convictions the researcher might have, Christian or otherwise. To be clear: for a researcher to do both Christian theology and qualitative social science accountably is to necessarily risk that she will convert to a different—that is, other than Christian—way of construing God and the world by the end of the study. There is no way around this possibility. (Of course, the reverse is also true: intensive fieldwork might lead the researcher deeper into her faith tradition in a way that significantly reconstitutes her previous understanding of it. But this, too, she cannot know except retrospectively.)

Whatever narrative that the qualitative researcher constructs in grant proposals is subject to radical alteration such that the final framing narrative can turn out to be drastically different from the first one. This is particularly the case in more immersive forms of qualitative inquiry, and is Alpa Shah’s point. The structure of Who Are My People? indicates that the framing narrative used to interpret events is and remains prospective: it is formulated in the early, more theoretical chapters; the later chapters constituting a search for illustrations or instantiations to populate it.

In other words, from a qualitative sociological perspective, but in a way that makes sense (hear me out) in a particular kind of theology, Who Are My People? is unapologetically confirmation-biased: its primary aim is to seek confirmation of the Christian story. Thus, at the end of the second theoretical chapter, where Katongole works out what it means to be a Christian—narrated as accepting God’s invitation to self-sacrificing love—and just before the field chapters, he writes, “But what does . . . God’s self-sacrificing love look like?” (64). And the ensuing chapters provide illustrations or instantiations (for instance, 136 and 173). Here, one or two or three instantiations is sufficient. 

And, from a particular kind of theological perspective, this approach makes full sense. The Christian story is that God has redeemed forever the world and has promised both that such redemption will come to full realization and that, in the meantime, the presence of the Holy Spirit will assure that there will be at least some contemporary instantiations of it. The Christian faith is a faith of prospective hope. In a world where Reinhold Niebuhr can say, “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith,” it makes theological sense to search for and lift up counterfactuals, even if this establishes the ultimate narrative construction at the opposite end of research as does the qualitative sociologist. Katongole writes, “Throughout my time in CAR, the question of hope was foremost on my mind. . . . What visible signs of hope might there be in the aftermath of the Séléka and anti-balaka violence?” (118). 

From a qualitative sociological perspective, but in a way that makes sense in a particular kind of theology, Who Are My People? is unapologetically confirmation-biased: its primary aim is to seek confirmation of the Christian story.

Pre-narrated prospective hope turns what would be a vice in social science—confirmation bias—into a virtue. There does not need to be a preponderant number of positive cases for there to be hope. Read this way, Who Are My People is a kind of Lives of the (Contemporary) Saints. And if the researcher can find no such cases, well then, following Paul’s letter to the Hebrews (11:1), that very hope is for “things unseen.” The prospective bias therefore cannot be overturned.

In my reading, then, the fundamental aim and primary achievement of the book is to offer empirical grounds for hope, and in this it succeeds tremendously. In a world full of violence and Reinhold Niebuhrs, this is no small accomplishment.

So if it is not qualitative sociology or cultural anthropology, what are the deep influences in play in Who Are My People?

Theology in the Hauerwasian Tradition: Prospective Narration 

The terms “story” and “narrative” are central to the theology of Stanley Hauerwas. Katongole’s first book, Beyond Universal Reason, made the case for Hauerwas’ theology. The influence clearly remains in this most recent book. Katongole states in Who Are My People?, “Through Hauerwas’s work I had already come to appreciate the role that stories play in shaping individual and communal identities” (28, emphasis added).

For lack of a specific genre term, we can call this “theology in the Hauerwasian tradition.” But Who are My People? moves beyond Hauerwas’s work in important ways. Hauerwas refers to Christians as “resident aliens,” meaning that they are fundamentally different from those around them. He therefore argues that different religions “produce fundamentally different experiences of what it is to be human” (2–3).  

However, Katongole writes in the first, more theoretical part of the book, “We never have (or are) one identity . . . Christian life and identity cannot but be a life of constant negotiation and boundary crossing” (47). And he displays this claim clearly in the second part of the book, where sometimes particular Muslims serve as exemplars of faith. They influence Christians and vice versa. Instead of Hauerwas, Katongole here turns to Virgilio Elizondo’s understanding of Christian identity as “mestizo,” where, in Elizondo’s words, “I am always both kin (at home) and a foreigner at the same time” (56). This is a quite different vision than that of the resident alien. It offers greater complexity in its accounts, and leavens the books as a whole.

Thus the second important contribution of Who Are My People? is that it moves narrative theological ethics past the work of Stanley Hauerwas. Katongole illustrates this in part through his own life story, which is full of negotiation and boundary crossing. This leads me to my final genre observation. 

Confession as Retrospective Narrative

Threaded throughout the book, in both the early more theoretical chapters and the later chapters that display the theory, are autobiographical vignettes and personal life overviews. Taken as a whole, these vignettes and overviews begin with Katongole’s childhood in Uganda as the son of a Hutu mother and Tutsi father; extend through his graduate studies in Belgium, where he witnessed in befuddlement through television the Rwandan genocide; and lead finally up to his recent trips to Rwanda, the Central African Republic, and Benin. The writing here is among the most elegant in an elegantly written book.

Though there is not enough in the autobiographical moments to call the book an autobiography or autoethnography, there is enough to say that there are elements, at the very least, of the theological genre of the confession. In the tradition of Augustine and Dorothy Day, the confession places the author in the center of the story not to convey primarily the self, but—through the self—the world, and the God who made it. And the confession as a genre is a form of retrospective narrative, a looking back on a life of change, of conversion. The book’s overall structure, with the ultimate theoretical framing presented as preceding the time in the field, then, can be misleading, and perhaps does not do the author justice. Who Are My People? may not be retrospective in the way that qualitative sociology seeks to be, but significant aspects of it are retrospective nonetheless.   

Looking Forward to Further Retrospection: Can Theology Speak to Social Science?

Late in Who Are My People?, Katongole refers in one sentence to his co-founding in 2012 of the Bethany Land Institute, “to address the challenges of food insecurity, deforestation, and poverty in the rural communities” in the diocese of Luweero, Uganda (177). In response to the duration and intensity of immersion suggested even by this short statement, I scrawled in the page margin, “This could be an ethnog.”  Shortly thereafter, in a presentation to some colleagues, Katongole indicated that he planned to follow some of the graduates of the Institute’s training program for five years.  This could definitely become a (theological) ethnography.  

Again, in my judgment, one can be at once both a theologian and a social scientist, and given the rise of autoethnography, this can be done in the confessional mode.  For the work to become recognized as an ethnography would require deeper engagement with the literature and methods of the social sciences. I suggest that for it to become a theology that might be received by social scientists, it would do well to pick up and carry further an argument that some social scientists are already making as a result of their fieldwork. For instance, anthropologists Amira Mittermaier, China Scherz, and George Mpanga make the case through their fieldwork that spiritual beings can and do intervene in persons’ lives precisely by coming, in Mittermaier’s words, “from elsewhere” than the mundane world. The advantage of grounding this observation in fieldwork rather than (or at least in addition to) received doctrine is that it keeps the narrative far more open-ended than received doctrine does. Mittermaier, Scherz, and Mpanga all stress the relative unpredictability, for the recipients at least, of such interventions by spirits. The outcome of such interventions is also unpredictable. Whatever meaning arises from the intervention can only be discerned, in a way fitting with the social sciences, retrospectively.

Importantly, and in conclusion, one can make this point in terms of Christian doctrine as well: when theologians do ethnography, they need to have more confidence in the activity— however unpredictable—of the Holy Spirit speaking and working through the words and lives of the persons encountered in the field. This is the case even when—or rather particularly when— the Spirit speaking and working appears to challenge received doctrine. This, in fact, is what faith looks like. We creatures do not know and cannot know beforehand the work of the Spirit. That is for the Creator alone. 

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Todd Whitmore
Todd Whitmore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and a Concurrent Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.  His work draws upon ethnographic methods to raise moral and theological questions.  He is the author of Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2019). Dr. Whitmore's present fieldwork focuses on the opioid and methamphetamine epidemic in northern Indiana, where he works as a Certified Addiction Peer Recovery Coach.  
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Who Are My People?


It is tempting to think of telling stories as the opposite of deep philosophical or theological reflection. Stories, after all, deal in the particularities and contingencies of lives, whereas philosophical and theological reflection deal in universals. In Who Are My People: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Emmanuel Katongole claims that “reality is constituted through stories,” which he rightly notes is a metaphysical claim (173). For this reason, we (that is scholars) cannot access peoples’ reality by positing abstract theories about it, but can only do so by listening to the stories they tell about themselves and those around them. We cannot, in other words, act in a top-down manner, explaining the lives of people only with scientific, sociological, or psychological theories. We must plant our feet on the same ground as those we write about if our desire is to truly understand them. This leads Katongole to adopt, borrowing from Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis, a method of analysis called “theological portraiture.” This method, importantly, entails not only “listening to a story, but [also] listening for a story” (Katongole, 7, emphasis in original).

Katongole listens not only to the stories people tell, but listens for the patterns enfolded within them, and the larger tapestry those patterns make up. In doing so, he weaves a story—which is sometimes also autobiographical—about the necessity of Christian love to act as a remedy to the violence in sub-Saharan Africa, a violence which more often than not stems from the earlier violence of European colonialism and modernity. In weaving this story, Katongole does not reject all theory. In the first two chapters of the book, he draws on significant figures in critical research on Africa to demonstrate how racism and colonialism were initiated on the continent by European powers, and how these features remain present even after the era of formal colonialism ended. These theories, however, are used to frame the portraits that Kantongole wants to paint, rather than to act as centerpieces themselves.

Following these opening chapters, Katongole reveals in intimate detail the devastation of violence in sub-Saharan Africa by listening to the stories of others. He recounts narratives from the Rwandan genocide, the political turmoil of the Central African Republic, and the challenges of climate change and ecological violence in Uganda. Katongole finds much to despair about in these contexts where violence has led people to, at times, turn on their own countrymen and countrywomen. Yet, he does not allow himself to be drowned in this despair. Rather, buoyed by the people he encounters who have sought to provide refuge from this violence, he is able to find a message of hope. Katongole’s answer to: Who are my people? is found in overcoming the logic of the national, ethnic, and racial division in favor of a Christian reconfiguration of identity into “God’s new people.” Here the earthly markers of identity are not transcended (in supersessionist fashion). Instead, they are reoriented by love into a “recognizable community, a social body whose unique mission and membership cuts across, not just mystically but concretely and visibly, the boundaries of race, ethnicity, tribe, and nation” (44).

The contributions to the symposium take up Katongole’s book in a variety of ways. Todd Whitmore asks how we should classify the genre of Katongole’s book: Is it an ethnography? A theological treatise? Or a confession? Or some combination of these? And what difference does it make to settle on one (or none) of these? Marie Claire-Klassen likewise explores the genre of the book, focusing especially on its structure in the first half of her response. In the second part of her contribution, Klassen suggests that Katongole’s work would benefit from engagement with feminist and womanist theologians, who draw our attention to the importance of considerations of justice in addition to love. Jason Springs, another contributor to this symposium, is also invested in the concept of justice. Springs places Katongole’s book into conversation with Charles Villa-Vincencio to bring into stronger relief the complementary role of justice in relation to love that is necessary when a society recovers from conflict. Cecelia Lynch, meanwhile, draws on her own experience working in different African contexts to reflect on the history of missionizing work in its countries. She also does so to point to the necessity of prioritizing Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies when confronting the climate crisis in Africa and around the world.

The final two responses focus on identity. In his contribution, William Orbih reminds us that the people’s stories Kantongole recounts in the book are not the stories of saints, but rather the stories of witnesses to the possibility of a Christianity community that is oriented beyond the signifiers of race, ethnicity, and nationality. In doing so, Orbih shows, Katongole reveals “new frontiers” in Christian theological discourse. Emmanuel Ojeifo likewise explores identity, noting that for Kantongole identity is not a theoretical, but a practical matter, one that orients the everyday lives of Africans. Ojeifo, like Klassen, also wonders what a more robust accounting of gender might have added to Katongole’s book.

Across these responses, the contributors engage religion not as part of the private, inner world of beliefs, but rather as part of the public and political work of social practices and narratives. In doing so, they reveal the folly of the secular bias in political theories which would relegate religion to a secondary role in political life. Katongole’s book reminds us why the segregation of religion in our intellectual, political, and social imaginaries not only fails to grasp the reality of the violent situations in which people find themselves, but also cuts us off from imaginaries that might envision new ways beyond them.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Injured Body: Palestine, Mizrahi Jews, and the Imperial Politics of Color

and
Screenshot from Paradise Lost. Used with permission of director.

This conversation was born out of Mara Ahmed and Shirly Bahar’s rapport and friendship over the past 3 years. In November, they were invited by their friend and interlocutor, Santiago Slabodsky, to discuss and show their work at Hofstra University. This is a continuation of that conversation, extending what transpired between them in person and in writing, and further elaborating on their ideas about the links between Palestine, Mizrahi Jews, and the imperial politics of color. The image and concept of the injured body capture these connections.

***

Mara Ahmed: As an activist filmmaker, I attempt to spark discussions across differences and boundaries. Whether addressing anti-Muslim racism, the partition of India, or political questions related to the so-called War on Terror, I’ve relied on vox pops to gather public opinions and complicate interviews featured in my documentaries, as well as the dialogue that occurs naturally between film and audience.

In 2017, I gave a Tedx talk about colonial borders, the making of nation-states, and the absurdity of fixed national identities that flatten human multiplicities. The title of my talk, The Edges that Blur, was inspired by Adrienne Rich’s poetry. In Your Native Land, Your Life, she understands pain as a cudgel that maintains divisions but also as a bond that enables reconnection:

remember:     the body’s pain and the pain on the streets

are not the same     but you can learn

from the edges that blur     O you who love clear edges

more than anything     watch the edges that blur

I became more invested in this pairing of “the body’s pain” and “the pain on the streets,” as I began work on The Injured Body, a film project activated by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a stunning book of poetry that stitches together narrative prose, art, and politics. As Jonathan Farmer notes in his review, the book traces Black people’s lived, deeply embodied experiences of racial microaggressions and “the ways in which the harm done by language turns to flesh, enduring at an almost cellular level.”

Rankine’s book encouraged me to document racism in America by focusing on microaggressions, what Cathy Park Hong describes as “minor feelings” or “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed” (55).

I interviewed 17 women of color to discuss the cumulative effects of relentless microaggressions and their impact on our bodies and collective breath. The body is central. Since breath is also the gateway to expressivity in movement, I worked closely with Mariko Yamada and Rosalie “Daystar” Jones to choreograph a complementary narrative told through dance.

With embodied oppression in the forefront of my mind (as I continue to edit the film), imagine my emotion upon coming across these lines in Shirly’s book, Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home:

Unpacking messy entanglements and negotiations of Palestinians and Mizrahim with Zionism and Israel, the documentaries [examined in this book] politicize pain… The documentary performances of Palestinians and Mizrahim convey what Zionism and Israel look like on their skins, scalps, and faces, and sound like in their voices, speeches, and silences, portraying the structures of feeling of their pain. (2-3)

For me as a reader, there were countless such moments of recognition. And so I must start by asking you, Shirly, to tell us the story of how you came to write this incredible book.

Shirly Bahar: Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine is primarily anchored in three watershed moments that shifted how we view and talk about Palestine. The first moment is the early 2000s. In my book, I characterized the wave of documentaries by and about Palestinians and Mizrahim mostly living in 1948 Palestine/Israel that came out during the first decade of the 2000s, especially since 2002. Then, there is the present moment—the moment of the reception of the book. This moment in the making is a time of collective reflection on how representations of Palestine/Israel are in flux: I am thinking especially of the discourse shift we have been seeing since May 2021, when global solidarity with the Palestinian resistance to Israeli attacks outpoured on social media, at times infiltrating mainstream media too. And finally, there was the year 2014, when I wrote much of this book. Non-coincidentally, that moment of heightened awareness about how our movements have been connecting and relating to each other across struggles, and showing solidarity globally for a very long time, inspired my writing.

In the time between 2014 and now, I have been carried by hopeful pulls tightening the theoretical understandings and human bonds between those who are leading struggles for liberation around the world. One such major pull emanated from the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and the official founding of the Black Lives Matter movement. The messages of support and encouragement pouring in from Palestine to Ferguson brought about a reinvigorated examination of the historical ties between US-based and global Black and Palestinian-led movements, and anticolonial, antiracist movements at large, as  powerfully articulated by Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill, as well as Angela Davis, and many others. I wrote this book as a Mizrahi Turkish-Israeli scholar. It was driven by my wish to enhance Mizrahi solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return.

As you well know, 2014 also saw the publication of Claudia Rankine’s groundbreaking Citizen: An American Lyric. Citizen is such a special book, right? No wonder it is so highly celebrated. “Yes, and the body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through…” Rankine writes (37); I know that’s one of your favorite quotes too! Because I was deeply inspired by her writing and this quote, I made it the opening epigraph for my book. Following Rankine, and other writers committed to examining the power dynamics as well as the shared fabric of life revealed in human interactions, my book explores the deep relationalities embedded in the representations of oppression and pain of Palestinians and Mizrahim as seen in documentaries: indeed, our living conditions are unequal, yet our realities are interconnected. I love that Citizen inspired our work so much, and especially this quote. It speaks to the power of this book, as well as to how closely connected our work is.

I wrote this book as a Mizrahi Turkish-Israeli scholar. It was driven by my wish to enhance Mizrahi solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return.

In 2014, I also flew to Istanbul to spend my first summer there since I was a child. The access that I have always had to Turkey means the world to me—it is a window into my family’s 500-year history there. That summer, my access to the Turkish language also facilitated my daily encounters with numerous visceral, visualized reports from Gaza in the Turkish media—reports that humanized Palestinian pain. What I found out, and later crafted into my argument, is that reconnecting to my home of Istanbul while sensing excessive rage, agony, and empathy when regarding the pain of others in occupied Jerusalem or in besieged Gaza, did not amount to politicization single-handedly. Rather, it takes perpetual learning and unlearning, and visual and sensorial training in reading cultural texts—it takes endless emotional labor—to try and relate to the pain of others in a deeply personal and politically committed manner.

Mara: Being a filmmaker, I am fascinated by how you use documentary film as a lens to unpack so much. You say that although oppression and racialization have impacted Palestinians and Mizrahim unequally and differently, the documentaries you discuss in the book share a political commitment and performative affinities. They defy the historical removal of the pain of Israel’s marginalized people from public visibility. You discuss how documentary performances of pain by Palestinians and Mizrahim, when seen together, invite us to contest the segregation of pain and consider reconnection. I am particularly interested in the word “performance” as it applies to the documentary form, which is supposed to be objective, an outgrowth of journalism. Could you elaborate on that?

Shirly: I wanted to analyze Palestinian and Mizrahi documentaries side by side and articulate what I thought they had in common, and the framework of “documentary performances” was just right for me to describe the affinities I identified in that corpus of work. What I saw were first-person testimonies of Palestinians’ and Mizrahim’s experiences of pain and oppression in their own words, voices, and bodies, and those were crafted visually, cinematically, as documentary performances. I used the term “documentary performance” to refer to an audio-visualized, mediated, documented, and cinematized appearance of a person in front of a camera and on a screen as part of a cinematic scene. It is a term used by Elizabeth Marquis in “Conceptualizing the Documentary Performance,” where she builds on both sociology and documentary film studies to offer “a framework for understanding and discussing the documentary actor’s work … which takes into account everyday performative activity, the impact of the camera, and the influence of specific documentary film frame-works (45). The book engages an approach mostly drawing on visual culture and performance studies, thinking through a person’s performance as a human medium in constant conversation with the filmmaker, filmmaking apparatus, and mechanisms, and teases out some of the most quintessential questions informing film and documentary studies as a whole—questions about authenticity, mediation, and the construction of reality in representation.

I was interested and wanted to participate in the efforts to revisit the term “performance” by documentary scholars studying reenactments, such as Jonathan Kahana and Bill Nichols. But it is important to note and celebrate—and I do in the book—that the complex, inspiring understandings of “performance” and “performativity” in all of their overlaps, have been theorized by queer and feminist scholars firstly, emerging at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies and critical race studies since the 1990s. Diana Taylor taught us that performance “function[s] as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity,” that operates as part of the overall “aesthetics of everyday life” (2–3) Judith Butler’s landmark theorizations of “performance” and “performativity” heavily drew on J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things with Words. Along similar lines, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Andrew Parker differentiated between the theatrical “performance,” and the linguistic, discursive term of the “performative.” Crucially, Sayidia Hartman illuminated the need to consider performance and performativity together (alongside her theorization of pain as relational): “the interchangeable usage of performance and performativity is intended to be inclusive of displays of power, the punitive and theatrical embodiment of racial norms … the entanglements of dominant and subordinate enunciations … and the difficulty of distinguishing between [them]” (5). This interdisciplinary push is required where documentaries are concerned, and especially in the digital age of accelerated visual popular culture defining our contemporary everyday.

Above all the performative trends that the documentaries share, I found, is their invitation to understand pain as relational through taking in and connecting to the embodied documentary performance we are viewing. As interactive sites of testimony, the documentary performances powerfully politicize pain by shaping it as a relational event that took place between the performing person and the state, and is lingering in the person’s body and ways of speaking, expressing, and representing themselves to this day. The documentary performances are multilayered encounters between bodies, affective states, speeches, and filmic apparatuses, in which the films’ participants return to the past, formative painful experiences that they still embody and endure. The hit of the bullet, the demolished home, the lost carob tree, the dried fountain, the unattainable moon, the imposed mask, the interior of the home, the fence of the camp—are all imagery communicating particular ways of living, hurting, being in, resisting, and becoming through political conditions of oppression. Sharing their told, filmed performances, the participants invite us to feel the trajectories of an oppression that became pain with them, and relate to their experience of living on.

Mara: There is one sentence in your book which hit me hard. It is the commonly held notion that you cite, claiming that “the trauma of witnessing destruction directly harms the usage of language about it” (30). To me this means that the credibility of language (and therefore people’s testimony) is damaged by violence. Consequently, those who are occupied (on whose minds and bodies violence is constantly enacted) are never seen as credible witnesses of their own pain, of their own lived experiences, based on dominant codes of credibility. Many of the women I interviewed for The Injured Body, for example, spoke about gaslighting—microinvalidations which make them second guess themselves and question their own sanity. You take issue with this notion. Could you tell us more?

The documentary performances powerfully politicize pain by shaping it as a relational event that took place between the performing person and the state, and is lingering in the person’s body and ways of speaking, expressing, and representing themselves to this day.

Shirly: You’re absolutely right, I agree that the idea that trauma directly harms expression runs the risk of dismissing and gaslighting those who underwent and/or witnessed it. And I have always been struck with how commonplace it is in Freudian psychoanalysis, and in literary and film theories that employ psychoanalytic frameworks. Critical thinkers, especially in gender and queer studies, such as Lauren Berlant have contested this idea; thinkers such as Sara Ahmed even use the word “pain” rather than trauma to politicize harm and injury—I think intentionally. I follow these thinkers in taking issue with that idea and apply my criticism to film analysis, especially in chapter 1, when I analyze the documentaries Jenin Jenin (Mohammad Bakri, 2002) and Arna’s Children (Juliano Mer Khamis, 2003). There, I show that when testifying to horrors that they have witnessed, the witnesses in the documentaries do not guarantee to posit “what had exactly happened” with any measure of empirical accuracy. Rather, the documentaries’ approach underlines whose pain gets to be filmed and shared depending on the circumstances of power informing the distribution of representation.

Yes, it has been established, the trauma of witnessing destruction directly harms the usage of language about it. But—and that’s a big but—on top of running the risk of unifying and depoliticizing the diversely positioned human experience, the Freudian genealogy of trauma carries harmful legacies of disbelief toward survivors. In this chapter, I harness a politicized view of both the testimony of trauma and of documentary distribution in Palestine/Israel to show that the precise ways in which their testimonies have been performed and cinematized, including the testifiers’ bodily gestures, chosen words, silences, and general edited sequences, provide spectators with poignant clarity regarding how pain hit their bodies when the bullet hit the executed person. Additionally and no less importantly, the testimonies communicate how the conditions of the military occupation that pulled the trigger also made it difficult to communicate the pain of that experience outside the camp, by depriving them of audiovisual means of communication, and painting all the camp residents as unreliable speakers perforce, who were responsible for their own suffering. When testifying in the films, the witnesses’ reenactments of the pain of witnessing destruction politicize their pain, framing it collectively and relationally—as injuring their bodies and mental and affective states, as well as recovering by their very telling of their stories of embodied and psychic pain. In that way, they transform from racialized and potentially targeted innate “terrorists”—whose pain is their own fault—to survivors with agency over their own becomings, personally and collectively.

Mara: I would also like to bring up the constant threat of violence—of the military mainly in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the police within the 1948 boundaries. You talk about documentaries showing Palestinian children experiencing “withheld violence,” and lingering on the threshold of death long before they die. Your words reminded me of Frantz Fanon and the “muscular contraction” of the colonized body. In fact, we shot a dance sequence titled Emancipated Breath (a prelude to The Injured Body) which addresses the policing of bodies, the containment of their breathable atmosphere, and the yearning for release. Could you explain what this implies in the Palestine/Israel context?

Shirly: It is something I observed when analyzing Arna’s Children which I mentioned above. Arna’s Children extends the message that Bakri put out there, of resisting the Israeli silencing and gaslighting of Palestinian pain. This documentary does so especially by delving into the structure of feeling of living with potential death—of a beloved one, or one’s own—throughout life. The documentary follows the wonderfully inspiring children and teenage theater students of the Freedom Theater, run by Arna Mer, Juliano’s mother, and himself. The documentary traces how these young people lived with the encompassing threat of death under military occupation much before many of them died. The formative, horrific experience of knowing the probability of death intimately in life is not only collective, but also one that challenges the temporal understanding of pain: rather than a past event, the pain of living with death is present and constant and projects onto the future, all at the same time.

In a very different way, and while they have access to Jewish privilege and supremacy, Mizrahim have been experiencing the heavy hand of police brutality too. I write about those experiences when analyzing films exploring the massive crackdown on the Mizrahi Black Panthers in Jerusalem in the 1970s—films such as Kaddim Wind (David Ben Chetrit, 2002), Have You Heard of the Black Panthers? (Nissim Mosak, 2002), and The Black Panthers Speak (Sami Shalom Chetrit and Eli Hamo, 2003). Beloved filmmaker David Ben Chetrit died of complications in the aftermath of an atrocious battering by military security forces, in the heart of Tel Aviv. But even before the first Black Panthers’ demonstration, young Mizrahi leaders of this groundbreaking movement have had to deal with police brutality, basically all throughout their upbringing: many of them would get beaten up and/or sent to juvenile prison upon merely entering the public sphere. For young Mizrahim, walking down the streets was prohibited regularly regardless of any crime they might have committed. These beatings mark the criminalization of Mizrahim’s appearance in the highly policed public sphere, thus enforcing and enabling their exclusion from it. The testimonies in the documentaries about the police’s continuous criminalization and repeated public battering paint a larger picture of the state’s racialization that Mizrahi bodies have been enduring ever since they arrived in Palestine/Israel.

Arna’s Children from Trabelsi Productions on Vimeo.

Unlike Palestinians, Mizrahim’s access to Jewish privilege generally allows them to dodge the constant threat of death. To earn this privilege and enter the Jewish fold, however, Mizrahim are forced to go through a process of assimilation that involves shedding any connection to Arabness and becoming as “purely” Jewish as possible. Palestinians and Mizrahim were historically differentially positioned in relation to Jewish supremacy, society, and Israel’s system of state security—positions that are further instigated at times of heightened violence, as the films show. Sadly, Mizrahim actively participate and often lead the work of the military and police to enhance violence towards Palestinians. They have been intentionally recruited into the police since the 1950s, not unlike the intentional recruitment of people of color into the police in the US. There have also been rare, yet deeply inspiring, cases of Mizrahi organizing in solidarity with Palestinians. Kaddim Wind follows organizer Oved Abutbul who, as part of his grassroots campaign against the eviction of Mizrahi residents from Mevaseret Tzion in 1997, joined a community of activists who rented a bus to Jericho, in the territory of the Palestinian Authority, to seek asylum. Additionally, the activists sent a letter to the king of Morocco, asking to return there with his blessing.

Mara: I would like to end with something you say in the book, that “more often than not, those who care for the pain of others are found in relative vulnerability themselves—political, physical, mental—thus chancing their becoming further undone” (26). Meaning that many times, those who feel the pain of others most deeply are themselves living precarious lives. I think of the Black Lives Matter movement and its principled support for justice in Palestine. I would love for you to expand on this important point.

Shirly: I thought the same, and it’s at the heart of my writing! As I started saying above, I feel hopeful when I see those who are leading struggles for civility and liberation around the world, express and act in solidarity. After 2014, we saw these connections nourished further over the years, perhaps most notably in 2020, as demonstrations to protest the killing of George Floyd and so many other Black people in the United States throughout history and right now, swept across the world—a world hit by a global pandemic disproportionately harming the most vulnerable and racialized populations. Understanding the interconnectedness of Palestinian struggles and Black movements reaffirms them as core inspiration for many historical anticolonial and antiracist movements around the world, including the Mizrahi struggles in Israel/Palestine, especially those that emerged from the 1970s Black Panthers movement in Jerusalem. Yet, as Mizrahim, we have to reckon with our position of privilege and proactively acknowledge it. In the introduction to the book, I positioned myself in the field as a Turkish Israeli Mizrahi scholar with Jewish privilege in the Jewish state of Israel—where I am from—and with the privilege of visiting Turkey, also where I am from, unlike many of my fellow Arab Jewish Mizrahim. This attempt to transparently explicate my identification and viewpoint from the outset fuels my intersectional intervention of considering interrelated oppressions and relational pain.

In acknowledging our indebtedness to interconnected, anticolonial and antiracist movements, especially Black and Palestinian ones, and in endorsing our solidarity with them, I am encouraging more Mizrahi filmmakers, scholars, and organizers to also step forward. To that end, my book advocates for the transformative power of relating to another fellow human’s mediated vulnerability and taking on the risk of complicating, confusing, and even adding to our immediate experience of our own pain, for the sake of holding space for their humanity in ourselves. That quote from my introduction you mentioned above, comes right before I myself quote Tourmaline, who writes in her preface to the gorgeous new edition of The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions: “If we are to ever make it to the next revolution, it will be through becoming undone, an undoing that touches ourselves and touches each other and all the brokenness we are … to become undone is the greatest gift to ourselves” ( viii). Documentary Cinema from Israel-Palestine hopes to be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand their own feelings of powerlessness as not one with them privately and naturally but, rather, as public, political, relatable, and changeable.

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Mara Ahmed
Mara Ahmed is an interdisciplinary artist and activist filmmaker based on Long Island, New York. She was born in Lahore and educated in Belgium, Pakistan, and the US. Mara’s work aims to trespass political, linguistic, and geographic borders and challenges colonial binaries. She has directed and produced three films, including The Muslims I Know (2008), Pakistan One on One (2011), and A Thin Wall (2015). Her films have been broadcast on PBS and screened at international film festivals. She is currently working on The Injured Body, a documentary about racism in America that focuses exclusively on the voices of women of color. Mara’s artwork has been exhibited at galleries in New York and California. She was recently awarded a NYSCA grant for her multimedia project, Return to Sender: Women of color in colonial postcards and the politics of representation. Her websites are www.NeelumFilms.com and www.MaraAhmedStudio.com
Shirly Bahar
Shirly Bahar’s writing and curatorial work explores the relationships between representation, politics, and the body. Shirly’s first book, Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home came out in July 2021 with Bloomsbury/IB Tauris. Shirly has published articles about film, performance art, literature, gender and queer representation from Israel/Palestine, Turkey, and the US. Since 2013, Shirly has been curating art shows, public programs, and community events in New York City and across the US. Shirly earned her PhD from New York University (2017), MA from Brandeis University (2010), and her BFA/Ed from Hamidrasha School of Arts (2006), where she specialized in sculpture and video installation. 
Field Notes article

Mosques and Muslims in the “Evergreen City of India”: Exploring India’s Pluralism


Beemapally daragh entrance, Thiruvananthapuram. Image courtesy of author.

Minarets are a vital part of mosque structures. Their primary objective is to amplify a muazzin’s call to prayer. However, they also serve as visible markers of the presence of Muslims and their culture in a society. As our plane descended towards the Thiruvananthapuram airport, our eyes zoomed in on the city’s surface. This descent in a plane is always a sort of mystical experience for me: as if I am becoming a part of something bigger than myself. Soon, my friend and I who were on the journey together could discern the structures amidst the thick web of palm trees. Some minarets and domes, in their striking colors, stood out. The distinct structure of these minarets and domes hinted at their beautiful architectural style. These views piqued my interest in exploring the mosque structures and Muslim culture in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, also known as Trivandrum. 

This was my first visit to a city in South India. I have many Muslim friends from this region who currently live in New Delhi, where I also live. They come from racially and culturally distinct backgrounds, yet share many similarities with those native to North India. Even North Indian Muslims, who have lived for many years in India, have not fully assimilated into the local traditions, at least psychologically. As per my own observations, the North Indian Muslims are still proud of their foreign ancestry and culture and the distinct traditions that they developed after their arrival, which persist in the lives of local converts still today. In contrast to this, the South Indian Muslims’ cultural ancestry germinated from their native place in India and seems to have more strongly affected their religious identity. I have always been fascinated with these striking differences. So, when my friend invited me to join him on this trip, I saw it as an opportunity to witness firsthand and explore it by myself.

Thiruvananthapuram is the capital city of the state of Kerala. Like many other Indian cities, it is also a home for multiple religious communities, but here they are all blended in a similar ethnic tradition. However, the specific religious affiliations of its people cast a distinguishable tinge on their cultural identity. The city is dotted with magnificent temples, mosques, and churches, the monuments of history narrating an age-old story of the diversity and coexistence within the city. When I arrived here, I realized that I wanted to explore how the pluralistic nature of the city had impacted its Muslim inhabitants and their culture. I was drawn to the city’s pluralism because it was on such clear display in the architecture, dress, and customs of the people living in it. For me, pluralism not only denotes a tolerance towards others, but also offers an opportunity to intermingle and exchange and thus mitigate differences. Because they are pluralistic, societies like those in Kerala tend to be more welcoming of societal changes. As I will discuss later, it is this pluralism that led Keralite Muslims to be the first in India to introduce changes to their madrasa curricula. I believe that the Muslims of India, and India herself, need this kind of pluralism today, rather than the kind of split between different cultures and communities that the current political climate is promoting. 

Early Muslim Interactions in Kerala

The seaside of the region where the state of Kerala is located has been inhabited since antiquity. And Islam, soon after its birth, found a home here. Historians believe that even before the emergence of Islam in Arabia, Arabs had established trade relations with the people of southern India. The trade between the two communities might have precipitated civilizational transactions as well. Arabs respected Indian people, and many Muslim travelers who traveled to India have admired the country and its people in their travelogues. Sulaiman, an Arab merchant, was one of the earliest writers who wrote about the coast of Malabar, which he is believed to have visited in 851 AD. He observed that Quilon (Kollam) was “the most considerable port in South India at that time” (11–12). The port of Quilon is around 67 km (about 42 miles) from Thiruvananthapuram. The most illustrious Muslim traveler, Ibn Battuta visited the Malabar region multiple times and provides a detailed account of its kings, people, their customs, markets, and trades. Ibn Battuta mentions that there were no Muslim residents in Malabar. Therefore, Muslims traveling to the region had to rely on the natives for food and lodging. However, as per the customs, neither were Muslims allowed to dine with the natives nor were they welcomed in their houses. The Prophet Muhammad is also reported in a weak tradition to have said that he felt a divine (rabbānī) fragrance coming from India (3). According to a popular Muslim tradition, the first man, Adam, descended from Heaven to the Indian peninsula. Such traditions have always inspired love and reverence in the hearts of Muslims for the country. The trade relationships between Arabs and South Indians continued flourishing after the conversion of Arabs to Islam. The story goes that these traders were the first people who introduced Islam to India, long before the advent of Islam in the northern parts of the subcontinent, which is now seen as its home in the nation. Islam was introduced to South India through peaceful means facilitated by the already established trade relationships, but in North India, Islam was introduced by invading armies and imperialist forces. The different ways in which Islam came into the country would later play a crucial role in determining the relationship of Muslims to their fellow countrymen in terms of social and political coexistence in both pre-colonial and post-colonial India.  

For me, pluralism not only denotes a tolerance towards others, but also offers an opportunity to intermingle and exchange and thus mitigate differences. Because they are pluralistic, societies like those in Kerala tend to be more welcoming of societal changes. 

I believe it was the nature of their arrival in the region of Kerala that allowed these Arab Muslim traders to assimilate into the local culture. Those who converted to Islam also followed the acculturated Muslims by retaining their unique ethnic and linguistic identities. They lived with their countrymen peacefully and prospered for centuries. These Muslims rose to high positions and participated in social and political life. Even today, one cannot distinguish a Keralite Muslim only by his or her looks and language unless he or she is either wearing a hijab/burqa or coming from an ulama class. Many ulama in Kerala wear a white turban, which is very different from the turban that some ulama and Sufis wear in North India. These North Indian ulama and Sufis do not limit themselves to the white color only. It should also be noted that not all ʿUlamāʾin Kerala wear a white turban and not every woman wears a hijab or burqa. In Thiruvananthapuram, I saw very few people observing this type of dress code. Wearing a turban is not a mandatory practice in Islam. It is believed to be a voluntary sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad, which some Muslims (especially ulama and Sufis) observe in an attempt to imitate the Prophet as much as possible. Not only does the turban signify their supplementary commitment to piety, it also differentiates them from the non-ulama class. Other than the turban and the hijab/burqa, there are no noticeable features that could contrast the Muslims in this region with other Keralites. This cultural and linguistic continuity across religious differences in Kerala society is remarkable and makes it unique in our country.

Kerala’s Diverse Architecture

This sense of rootedness and belonging is also reflected in the modern and elegant structures of mosques in Trivandrum, many of which were designed by a Hindu architect, Govindan Gopalakrishnan, who is also known as the “Mosque Man.” Gopalakrishnan worked with his father in the reconstruction of Trivandrum’s famous mosque, Masjid-e-Jahan Numa (commonly known as Palayam Pally or Palayam Mosque), and designed by himself another beautiful mosque in Beemapally. The designs of both mosques are exquisite examples of the Indo-Islamic architectural style. In what follows, I describe this architecture by drawing on the information I gathered while visiting the mosques and the people I spoke to there.

Masjid-e-Jahan Numa (Palayam Pally), Thiruvananthapuram. Image courtesy of the author.

On my way to Beemapally, I spotted the Palayam Mosque. Facing a busy road, the sight of the mosque is a treat for sore eyes. Its majestic façade accentuated by slender columns and a double arch fills its beholder with excitement. The towering minarets standing on the two corners of the façade further contribute to its grandeur. Through the middle of the arch, one can also see a chhajja hanging on the inner wall, which is used as an ornament of the arch. Chajja originated in India as an architectural element and was widely used in mosques and palaces during the Mughal period. The heads of the minarets are adorned with chhatri, another Indian architectural element, and their body with lotus petals. The Lotus flower has religious significance in Hindu culture and architecture. One of the Hindu goddesses, Lakshmi is usually depicted standing on a lotus flower. It also has an elegant white onion dome in the middle of the mosque, whose base is also embellished with lotus petals. The edges of the roof and the walls of the mosque are decorated with chhatris and chajjas. This eclectic design of the mosque, which incorporates the Hindu and native cultural and religious symbols, expresses an inclusive tradition of the Muslims in southern India. 

Beemapally is a coastal region in the district of Thiruvananthapuram. It is the home of one of the most prominent and elegant religious structures in the state: a mosque and a dargah, the resting place of a saint or saints where people come and pay their respects. Even though the foundation stones of the current buildings were laid in 1967, the shrine and the mosque have been there for almost 800 years. According to local tradition, the dargah enshrines the grave of two saints, one of whom is female, Syedunnisa Beema Beevi, and the other is her son, Syedu Shuhada Maheen Abubacker. “Beemapally” means “the Mosque of Beema,” signifying the affiliation of the place with this female saint. Now the whole place is referred to by the same name. It is said that Beema Beevi came from Mecca to this region along with her son 800 years ago and settled there, becoming one of the first Muslims who preached Islam to the people living here. 

For hundreds of years, the mosque and the dargah were housed in small buildings, which almost 50 years ago were replaced by the current grander structure. Designed in a T-shaped plan, the mosque and the dargah are two independent structures, with the entrance of the mosque facing towards the east, and the dargah towards the south. The central doorway of the dargah leads through a projected full-height façade positioned between two recessed front doorways, which are ornamented by pointed arches, slender columns, elegant motifs, and Arabic calligraphy. Two lofty minarets are placed on the corners of the façade. The dargah has four onion domes, three of them, beautifully proportioned, are situated on the front, and the fourth, the big one, is in the middle of the structure indicating the place of the burial of the two saints. Both buildings are painted in pink and white, an unusual combination that is hard to find in northern India. Together, these elements exhibit a graceful and astonishing view. Even though the mosque structure does not have any dome, it does have a colossal front. Flanked by two massive minarets, the front of the mosque is adorned with two arches and a chajja on the inner wall. Like the Palayam Mosque, the walls and edges of the roof are decorated with a series of chajjas and chhatris and lotus flowers. 

As much as the exterior of these structures offers a sight of magnificent craftsmanship, the bleak atmosphere of the inside of the buildings leaves their visitors disappointed. The inside of the mosque and dargah is structured into huge plain halls. As I entered them one after the other, I found devotees and worshipers scattered around the halls, sitting, worshipping, or just lying on the floors. I tried to talk to some of them, but I could not because they could speak neither Hindi or English nor did I know Malayalam, the native language of Kerala. I stared at the lifeless walls of the halls, interspersed by large dark-colored windows, and I wondered how they could not make the interior of the buildings as elegant as their exterior. Religious places are not merely places of worship. They are supposed to inspire the imagination of the followers of the religion they are devoted to. A mosque should be meant to offer an experience of the two aspects of the divine, which according to Muslim tradition, are referred to as Jalal, the glory, the greatness, and Jamal, the beauty, of the divine. If a mosque fails to offer such an experience to the worshippers, it loses a substantial part of the purpose of its existence. Muslims in medieval India were aware of the aesthetic importance of religious places in influencing the spiritual experiences of worshippers. They built exquisite mosques and decorated them with elaborate artistic expressions. Modern mosque structures in India miss the old complex creativity. Sometimes, the outward appearance of these structures captivates their beholders. But their insides, as in the case of Beemapally, seem to be deprived of any imagination. Aside from distinct features, such as niches or arches, the interiors are just combinations of walls, beams, and roofs. Such comparison forces one to ask about the reason behind this withering of the once beautiful tradition. I believe it is because of the dominance of the ritualistic puritanical understanding of Islam which insists on viewing a mosque merely as a place of worship. This theological position, puritanical in the sense that it views the accretion of other cultures into an Islamic one as unorthodox, to some extent is also opposed to pluralism. It has led to a cultural bankruptcy whereby Indian Muslims lack confidence in creatively engaging with their tradition and their past. 

Religious places are not merely places of worship. They are supposed to inspire the imagination of the followers of the religion they are devoted to.

The dargahs in North India, such as the dargah of Nizamuddin in Delhi, or the dargah of Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, have as their central parts the places of the burials of the saints, and these are accessible to devotees to offer their tributes to the saints. However, the graves of the saints in the dargah of Beemapally are off-limits to devotees. Instead, these devotees are mediated by some individuals, who in North India we call mujabir or khadim. They stand at the gate of the chamber which contains the graves of the saints and offer a spoonful of water and oil to the people who reach them. But they do not allow them inside to pay their respects to the saints. Near the dargah is a well, whose water is believed to have healing qualities. The dargah and the masjid of Beemapalli are managed by a trust, which also runs a madrasa outside the campus of the dargah.

After these mosques, I planned to visit a small local madrasa that is run inside an al-Rifa Sunni Jamia Masjid, Tholicode, Thiruvananthapuram.

Visiting the Madrasa

The building of the Madrasa located on the premises of al-Rifa. Image courtesy of author.

I have found that talking to authorities in masjids and madrasas is a challenging task during my many visits around India. Often, they are suspicious and refuse to talk. In this madrasa, however, I found some senior-year students who seemed interested in talking to me. I asked questions about the curriculum they were studying and we discussed some contemporary issues that are challenging the classical madrasa system. I learned that they have been studying some classical key texts on Islamic sciences along with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE, a national-level board of education in India for public and private schools controlled by the Government of India) curriculum and have cleared the Secondary School Examination (10th) and are preparing for Senior School Examination (12th). They told me that their madrasa runs classes for both curriculums so that after graduating from the madrasa they can pursue higher studies in universities as well, which many of them expressed interest in doing. 

The curriculum of the madrasa in Tholicode is not exceptional in Kerala: Other madrasas are treading the same path. One of my friends, who studied in one of the famous madrasas of Kerala, Darul Huda, in Malappuram, explained to me how this conjoined system of modern and classical curriculum functions. From the morning till the late afternoon, classes are conducted on Qur’an, Hadith, jurisprudence, Arabic, and modern subjects. He also told me that after graduation, most of the students of his madrasa studied social sciences in central and state universities and were able to obtain the highest degrees in education. 

The Entrance Gate of al-Rifa Sunni Jamia Masjid, Tholicode, Thiruvananthapuram. Image courtesy of author.

As I mentioned earlier, pluralistic societies, in their nature, are more welcoming of changes. A religious society interacts with others as far as its theological doctrines allow. The more the theological doctrines are flexible the more the society in which it is located tends to be adaptable. The religious societies that are pluralistic today have maneuvered through their theological doctrines, developing them to be more open and accommodating. Conversely, non-pluralistic societies tend to be rigid and unaccepting of changes since they have developed their theology in ways that do not allow them to be so. This distinction can be observed in terms of culture and education, which I have discussed in this essay, in the two different societies that Muslims inhabit and help create in northern and southern India. 

The visit to Tholicode concluded my trip. I spent four days in the city. During this short duration, I could visit only a few places. But many times, a little peek through the windows of mosques, churches, and temples was enough to cause a sensation. Many mosques in white, green, blue, and pink colors, which I caught glimpses of on my way are still circling in my head. It was an enlightening adventure. I learned so many things in just a few days.  I learned about the eclectic nature of the Muslims of Thiruvananthapuram, which is represented in their culture, architecture, and even in their religious education system. Madrasas in these regions are trying to bridge the chasm between their classical curriculum and the needs of modern times. The eclectic model of the Muslims of the city can offer great lessons to the Muslims of North India and help them reduce their cultural differences and introduce reform to their madrasa education. 



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Mohammad Ali
Mohammad Ali is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India. He is also a graduate of the Madrasa Discourses program.
Theorizing Modernities article

Reason’s Idols: A Response to Khan Asfandyar Shairani and Joshua S. Lupo


I am grateful to Khan Asfandyar Shairani for raising a series of points about my book, Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science. Here I will focus on two of them. As for the first, Shairani illustrates why Redeeming Anthropology is not only for anthropologists. After all, anthropology, so my argument goes, is but one instance of the exercise of sovereign secular reason in the modern university. While I seek to articulate a particular critique of a particular discipline inhabiting a state of “Anthropodom,” I contend that any intellectual “beneficiary” of Europe’s reason stands to benefit from interrogating its complex relationship with theology.

Relating Redeeming to his home discipline of history, Shairani asks about the “idols” that may obstruct historians’ access to understanding their own motivations. He formulates a particularly sensitive question, indeed an aporia: “I find it difficult to imagine that the choice of historical queries, the topics of our interest are somehow simultaneously ‘interests’ and yet paradoxically disinterested.” Shairani asks that historians probe who they are and who can they become by digging into their reasons for digging up the past.

As a Muslim historian and student of peace studies, Shairani also seems to contend with this very question in investigating the “cosmologies that oriented thinkers in the pre-modern past” of India. Here Shairani admits that he must address “the theological within the limits of historical reason,” which he faces when confronting questions such as: What can historians do with their historical subjects’ dreams and visions? Invoking Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s concept of falatāt (the unexpected), Ebrahim Moosa here offers an answer: “The unexpected is perhaps the most fertile ground of history.” In thinking about “the limits” set to and by historical “reason,” I also wish to recommend as a resource Amira Mittermaier’s excellent ethnography exploring the place of “un-real” in the making of the ethical and political “real,” Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Yet in doing so, I worry that historians may fear digging up “imagination” (and certainly the imagination of those vanquished by victorious History) or “divine wonder” as falling outside their rightful purview. Perhaps my concern could be mollified should, for example, art historians more regularly teach in “proper” history departments.

Shairani concludes his comments with a call for “epistemic humility,” which he sees my book as inviting. Perhaps his sense follows from my aim to find a language other than that of sovereign power (principally of the state and its secular reason). Yet, I cannot help but wonder in what ways such a venture as Shairani proposes (historians finding legitimate reasons to study dreams) requires not only humility, but boldness as well. Such boldness would have us bring those forsaken by sanctioned History (e.g., poets, prophets, and our grandmothers) back into the reality of existence in whose making historical time participates. Might academic historians who include dreams (“signs”?) in their materials of study (and thereby heed an “extra-historical” sense of time) appall their secular profession with such heretical pursuits?

This question brings me to reflect on the next set of comments by Joshua S. Lupo for whose sentient reading of Redeeming I am also grateful. Lupo begins where in some sense Shairani concludes. Lupo rightly notices a risk I took in inviting theology to the proverbial table, a risk compounded by an absence of specification as to the type of theology I welcome. In response to this concern, I wish to say that I am neither capable nor interested in defining what type of theology may or may not join the conversation. This is because “theology” in my account serves to signal a space in which: (1) something that we might call “theistic reason” can find a home; and (2) secular reason claiming itself sovereign can face itself. I see this space, I think Lupo would agree, offering freedom and risk at once. Freedom comes by “opening up” to the voice of the Other of a given authoritative discourse, entering a long-prohibited conversation, while taking the risk (among surely countless others) of not being sure what might also find its way in.

Lupo leaves me with two good questions that require further thought. The first asks about the “added value,” analytically speaking, of the concept of “idolatry,” as I use it, over the “fallibilism” concept he associates with the American school of philosophical pragmatism. While I must learn more about “fallibilism” to properly consider whether “idolatry” offers any analytical advantage, I hope that I make it clear that in evoking idolatry, I also aim to recognize an error that exceeds mere “cognitive fallacy” or a “mistaken state of mind.” Rather, recognizing and rectifying this error could induce a form of life whose allegiances, trust, alertness, and fear would be continually shaped by this recognition.

The second question asks about the type of criteria that, consciously or not, I apply when drawing upon this or that concept from theology. Quite honestly, I have no ready answer. As far as I can recognize, I did not work with any select set of concepts to the exclusion of others from theology, with one exception. A concept contending with “revelation” as a potential “sovereignty-slayer” (epistemically speaking), that I consciously excised from my argument is “tradition.” To make a banal point, my reason was because there is nothing decidedly nor inherently theological about tradition, even if such ascriptions might be part of its vast disavowal by social sciences and humanities.

Lupo concludes his commentary hoping that reason and revelation can be “co-inhabitants of a common world” wherein theology and anthropology could humble each other. I wish to express two responses to this hope. First, in Redeeming I was barely able to muster a word or two about how anthropology might be humbled by theology; I can hardly imagine how the modern discipline of anthropology might humble theology (which is not to say that the discipline of theology does not need humbling). By extension, if revelation is arguably the humbler of reason, when might we reasonably expect reason to be capable of humbling revelation? When might a rock humble the rain?

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Khaled Furani
Khaled Furani is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. He researches and teaches in the areas of language, literature, secularism, the history of anthropology, theology, sovereignty, and Palestine. His current research focuses on the relation between reason and revelation. He co-edited, with Yara Sa'adi-Ibraheem, Fi Jawf al-Hut: Tajarub Filasteeniyyah fi al-Jami'aat al-Israeliyyah [Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences at Israeli Universities](Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute & Dar Leila, ‘Akka, 2022 [in Arabic]).
Theorizing Modernities article

Mining for Theology: The Limits of the Postsecular in Khaled Furani’s Redeeming Anthropology


View of the walled city of Babylon. Within the city walls are houses, the Hanging Gardens, palaces, and the Tower of Babel. Numbered top left: XXIV, and top right: P. 296. C. The print is part of an album. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Khaled Furani’s Redeeming Anthropology is an incisive, bold, and polemical book which asks anthropologists to re-examine their attempted severing of ties from theology. While aimed primarily at the field of anthropology, the book poses questions that are relevant to the wider humanities. I see Furani’s book as an intervention that will push scholars of religion, literary theorists, theologians, and others to re-examine the fundamental theoretical tools with which they engage their disciplines. Drawing on interviews and archival research, Furani uses anthropologists’ own words to challenge the idea that the field has ever been as distinct from theology as it claims. It has constructed what he calls an “anthropodom” via various metaphorical “panes” and attempted to seal itself off from theology. It has done so primarily by claiming reason as its sovereign guide and culture as the object of its study. This claim, of course, has not gone uncontested. And yet, even those who argue that theological residues or resonances remain in the anthropological project have never seemed to escape the appeal of secular reason as a guidepost.

Drawing on interviews and archival research, Furani uses anthropologists’ own words to challenge the idea that the field has ever been as distinct from theology as it claims.

The book can be divided into roughly two parts. The first deals with how anthropologists have erected and maintained the anthropodom via various strategies. The second deals with how opening anthropology up to theology as a critical tool might prove useful. While the first part of the book proves fascinating in its details and erudite in its scholarship—particularly relevant and interesting for scholars of religion is Furani’s interview with Talal Asad, where the latter reveals the importance of his mother’s religious practice as part of the impetus for his critique of Geertz’s belief-centered approach to religion—I want to focus in this brief post on the second half of the book. Here Furani shows how anthropologists might draw on theology to enable them to dethrone secular reason in favor, if not of theology per se, then a theology inflected vision of the world that is willing to extend itself beyond the modern secular sciences. I’ll argue that this vision of theology is (1) welcome insofar as it breaks down artificial barriers between the humanities, social sciences, and theology; and (2) risky insofar as it does not delimit what kind of theology it might bring into these fields when it does so.

Fallibility and Idolatry

For Furani, it is the concept of idolatry, born out of the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that proves most useful for his purposes. Idolatry is the mistaking of the finite for the infinite; God for an idol; the representation for the real. In the case of anthropology, Furani argues,

To recognize idolatry in anthropodom, constituted as a particular disciplinary application of secular sovereign reason, means in part to recognize ways in which modern anthropology builds itself upon false worship, misplaced trust, and categorical conflation when taking the Cultural (or its categorical cognates) to be all that there is to multiplicity in and of the world. (149)

In other words, in setting reason up as the means by which the anthropologist understands the culture of the “other,” anthropology necessarily limits the way it encounters diversity in the world. Everything the anthropologist sets his sights on becomes subsumed under the category of culture and is deciphered by reason. A ritual sacrifice, for example, is read as a means of establishing a hierarchical social order rather than an act done to appease God. The anthropologist can see this through her interpretive lens, even if the practitioner does not—indeed the practitioner is more likely focused on establishing a relationship to God rather than the social outcomes of the practice.

This way of incorporating theology into the field of anthropology, in my mind, is a welcome intervention. Given the persuasiveness of genealogical accounts from anthropologists like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood and scholars of political theology like Bonnie Honig and Paul Khan, it seems that such a move is a logical next step for those who do not wish to remain beholden to the false God of secular reason.

Yet, as I read these pages, I began to wonder if the category of idolatry, while offering a heft to the critical approach that Furani is advocating, is all that different from the less provocative, though similarly oriented, concept of fallibility. Indeed, fallibility is built into the exercise of secular reason, at least it is when it is practiced well. Pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, for example, held up fallibility as an epistemic virtue that was necessary in light of our finitude as human beings. Truth for the pragmatist is contestable and unresolved. And it is the lack of settlement that makes it possible for the pursuit of knowledge in various fields to continue. A doubt arises about some settled truth, we form a hypothesis that might change our understanding of what is true, and then we test this hypothesis.

Why, then, do we need idolatry to recognize our false claims to possess the absolute when fallibilism will do? Is it just to offer religious people a piece of the secular pie? Or is it a concept that bears more weight upon further investigation?

Whose Revelation?

This leads me to the second point that I want to make, which concerns the kind of theology we are letting into the humanities when we take this route. The idolatry that Furani wishes to mobilize against the sovereignty of secular reason is one I imagine will sit comfortably with the current postsecular moment in the academy. Furani’s claim in the conclusion, however, that we should also be more attentive to revelation, is one that I think might ruffle the feathers of the more sensitive seculars among us.

On the value of revelation, Furani writes:

Theology offers revelation as a chief means for averting confusion as to where sovereignty justifiably belongs, for precluding it from realms where all is finite and transient, where none can ultimately be self-sufficient. I see revelation as a possible resource in revitalizing anthropology’s forms of reasoning, by helping it first to recognize and then retrace its steps, this time away from sovereignty’s stalemates and degrading entrapments, where all that is asked is only what—in sovereignscape—can safely be answered (180).

To allow revelation to speak for itself rather than to try to discipline it via secular reason is a task that Furani sets before us. To do so would allow for a kind of multiplicity that is currently taboo not only in anthropology but also in the wider humanities. Using religious studies as an example, to employ revelation as an analytical concept would be considered by most scholars of religion to cross over from the field of religious studies to theology—to violate a boundary marking an epistemic divide. Following Furani, I think we would be right to be suspicious of the claim that the two were ever as sealed off from one another as we might think. Yet what this means for how we engage theology requires more scrutiny.

Why, then, do we need idolatry to recognize our false claims to possess the absolute, when fallibilism will do? Is it just to offer religious people a piece of the secular pie? Or is it a concept that bears more weight upon further investigation?

My worry here though is not that we will allow the kind of theology Furani describes throughout the book—this is one that can humble claims of the secular human sciences. Indeed this is a theology that I have suggested is pragmatic. It is fallible, open to multiplicity, and suspicious of claims to sovereignty. But what of the more controversial concepts that theology might bring to bear on anthropology?

In the conclusion of the book, Furani writes, “one is not to suppose that all [theology’s] lessons merit heeding.” But exactly how we make the judgment as to which theology is worth heeding and which is not requires the use of reason, adjudication, and interpretation. It requires an interpretation of theology that picks up what it finds useful and discards what it does not. However, Furani does not really explain his criteria for letting in some theological concepts and not others. In advocating the importation of theology without the burden of secular reason, Furani does open up space to let in forms of theology many I suspect would be less comfortable with. The risk of allowing, for example, dogma, gender complementarity, patriarchy, and other “theological” concepts is not foreclosed in Furani’s analysis.

At the End of the World

I want to move toward a conclusion via an allegorical story from the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. I do this in the spirit of both Furani’s book, which I think is beautifully written and employs analogical thinking usefully in making its argument, and in the spirit of Ebrahim Moosa, whose inauguration as Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies is the occasion for this symposium on Furani’s work, and for whom literature has often served as a guide for his thinking.

In “The Tower of Babylon” (from Stories of Your Life and Others) Chiang reimagines the story of the tower of babel from the perspective of a miner who is employed to climb the tower and dig upward into the vault of heaven, a vault that it turns out is made of granite and requires human ingenuity to crack open. Along the journey up the tower many of his fellow workers wonder if what they are being employed to do is an act of hubris. There is story of a flood that led to a great deal of destruction which resulted from previous attempts to crack open the vault. Further, as they climb they pass by all the features that make the natural world humans inhabit familiar, including the sun, stars, and villages that people have built along the path up the tower. They are treading in unfamiliar and dangerous territory. Nonetheless, the miners proceed up the tower, finally arriving just below the vault to heaven in order to complete their work. Over the span of many years they slowly chip away at the granite by warming it with fire so that it will crake more easily. They then employ their pickaxes to break up the loosened granite. Eventually our protagonist miner cracks open the vault and is nearly drowned when a deluge of water follows. He finds himself trapped with a few other workers as those left behind seal them off in the tunnel to avoid being caught in the deluge. After swimming up through the tunnel that has burst open, he awakens to find himself on the ground. For some time he struggles through this new space, unsure of where he has arrived. Eventually he runs into a caravan. He is told by a man in the caravan that he is in the land of Shinar, exactly where he began his journey. The protagonist reaches the conclusion that the world is not arranged vertically with the natural world and humans living below and God above in the heavens. Rather the world is arranged like a seal cylinder where heaven and Earth are not separated but exist alongside one other. Without getting into exactly how this world looks—one can spend plenty of time on reddit looking at various people’s attempts to describe what this world looks like—the conclusion seems to be that when we look into the heavens we are in fact looking at ourselves, albeit from a different vantage point.

Black hematite cylinder seal. Main scene: three deities approach a seated figure, probably a king, the storm god holding his lightning fork and standing on the back of a bull, the moon god holding a crescent standard and standing in a boat, and an interceding goddess. Old Assyrian period, ca 1920-1740 BC. British Museum ME 22963. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

I could not help but think of Chiang’s work as I read Furani’s book, especially given the metaphorical description of the anthropodom which its inhabitants have attempted to construct to separate themselves from theology, i.e. the heavens. Reading Furani and Chiang together I wonder if we might begin to think of the anthropodom and theology not as separate spheres arranged vertically but as overlapping and indeed inseparable ones. Here, rather than leaks of theology showing up in the anthropodom we might imagine theology and the secular as already breathing the same air, so to speak; immanence and transcendence are not above and below but intermixed and porous.

And here we might also find ourselves in a position where sovereignty does not reign as there is neither an “above” or “below” and neither reason nor theology is king. Rather both exist alongside us as fallible sciences.

This is perhaps not so far from where Furani wants us to go as we reach the end of the book. And yet, I want to push here the metaphorical distinction between theology and reason to say that they have never really been separate. If this is the case, then the distinction between theology and anthropology falls away all the more and reason and revelation become co-inhabitants of a common world, where the desire for the purely secular or the purely theological both fall by the wayside. Perhaps then what is possible is not only the humbling of anthropology by theology, as seems to be Furani’s aim, but a mutual humbling that requires that we use practical reason in any given situation to determine which concepts to employ, and how.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Smashing Modernity’s Idols and Redeeming our Past(s)


Turkish Muslims are seen performing the first Friday prayer during Ramadan through a balcony railing, April 16, 2021, in the Sabancı Merkez Mosque in Adana, Turkey. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Alexander Cook. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Redeeming Anthropology

Academics can learn much from the trans-disciplinary work fundamental to Khaled Furani’s book on disciplinarity and the limitations of western epistemologies. Redeeming Anthropology allows us to see beyond the blinders we wear as we trot along the path carved out by an Enlightenment reason. Some of us can’t see the forest for the trees, while some of us might see the forest, but miss the horizon. Others of us are in the cave still watching shadows on walls, perhaps even unaware of the light of the sun itself. Simply put, secular reason limits and defines objects worthy of human knowledge and subsequently leads to a meager and unsatisfying relationship to the fullness of reality and human experience. Perspectives coming from different religious traditions such as the Islamic tradition are different kinds of knowledge. Yet, Islamic knowledge is only valid or acceptable for modern disciplines once it is curated by Reason with a capital R; Reason with a very particular and Eurocentric, and I would say, colonial, genealogy. Furani’s work shows us that the sovereignty given to secular reason maintains hegemonic control of knowledge. Thus, western knowledge gives itself the authority to narrate the stories of “Others” in the past, and tries to shape their present and future.

From my perspective as an Islamic historian and peace studies scholar, I found in Furani’s book an affirmation of the values of interdisciplinarity. We look at the same issue from the vantage point of different disciplines and sometimes it leads to a valuable critique of our own discipline. This fresh view can help us articulate questions that have haunted our work without us being aware of them, as ghosts on the peripheries of our vision. Furani defines anthropology as the study of alterity, or difference, in a world where the role of the divine has been significantly reduced in our politics and social lives; a condition that Nietzsche defined as modernity. In place of the divine, the categories of Reason, Culture, and State become idols for worship, placed on altars to the “infinite” when they are, in fact, finite and limited. 

Historical Reasoning vs. the Past

Fundamentally, Furani reminds us that our idols ultimately reflect ourselves and our relationship to our past. Thus, we find ourselves thinking about how to resolve global problems with deep historical roots from reasonable premises. But we find that others disagree about the facts, historical and otherwise, that we think are perfectly obvious, logical, and reasonable. Furani’s engagement with theology reminds us that “talking about God, the infinite,” as anthropology’s Other is a valuable tool for critiquing the unthinking worship of finite idols that not only do not deserve worship but also dismiss valuable and essential parts of our own humanity as beyond the scope of knowledge itself. Such aspects of humanity include value, truth, aesthetics, and practices of peace and justice. In particular, it includes those humans whose knowledge has been denigrated as irrational, and they themselves  as incapable of producing knowledge at all, never mind that their perspectives may point towards lacunae or aporia in our own assumptions about reason.

Furani’s engagement with theology reminds us that ‘talking about God, the infinite,’ as anthropology’s Other is a valuable tool for critiquing the unthinking worship of finite idols that not only do not deserve worship but also dismiss valuable and essential parts of our own humanity as beyond the scope of knowledge itself.

My own work also deals with the theological within the limits of historical reason. I study cosmologies that oriented thinkers in the pre-modern past, before the secular came into being and formed our disciplines. Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, a Muslim scholar in 18th century Mughal India, was not “modern” because he was not forced to limit the role of the divine within the scope of his own intellectual tradition. Yet, he was a rare liminal figure whose intellectual oeuvre asked questions of Islamic history that had broad ethical, aesthetic, and social outcomes. He dealt with questions of religious and cultural alterity within the Islamic tradition by engaging the ideas of Greek philosophers, Islamic theologians, and Sufi mystics. Yet, for a modern historian in the academy, there are values and reasonings that Wali Allah holds that create epistemic difficulties. How, for example, does the modern historian read hagiographical material that ascribes true visions to such a figure when oneiromancy in our worldview reflects the interiority of individuals rather than having external causes and consequences? The limits of our reading makes only certain questions possible to answer historically. The texture of the dreams of an eighteenth century mystic lies beyond the scope of historical research, and his solutions to friction between different kinds of Muslim communities are value-laden and inadmissible. Yet, Wali Allah’s work offers rare insights into potential critiques of fundamental values, such as his insistence that the divine cannot be thought of in terms of universals and particulars because these are fundamentally human constructs. [1]

Living Scholars and Living Traditions

What makes working on Muslim thinkers even more fraught is that they are not simply figures of the past; they are constantly referenced and constitute a major anchor for South Asian scholars to this day. In other words, I am writing about a living tradition through a western epistemological lens. There are scholars of Shah Wali Allah in the subcontinent that I rely on, yet their work is categorized as “theological work” and thus can only be selectively included in the Western academy through citations. This is an example of an epistemic injustice for scholars that help buttress the modern academy in invisible ways, on the peripheries of our vision, yet are denied access to it. The historical and the theological are cousins to the anthropological and the sociological. But the family of knowledge is much, much broader than our modern disciplines, and the scope of knowledge is open and infinite.

Furani’s text reminds us that as anthropologists search for difference abroad, historians delve into the past. One is a spatial quest, the other primarily temporal. The questions that arise, however, resonate deeply, because we are all asking a simple question: “Who are we, and even more importantly, who can we be?” For historians who have often fallen prostrate before the state, producing nationalist discourse that deifies the state for the purposes of national unity, that question was answered differently than it is for historians today. [2] From framing India as historically beset by “Muslim invaders” to the trope of secular Indian nationhood being the natural arbiter of “communal” violence between Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, the state has effectively birthed modernity in South Asia, midwifed by the British presence starting in Shah Wali Allah’s lifetime. It is certainly not the case that there were “pure indigeneous ideas” polluted by “modern British ideas.” Rather, it is that a violent relationship between British and indigenous peoples premised on Western notions of human nature and politics imposed these ideas and organized the subcontinent anew, and that violence continues to express itself in moments of crisis according to the historical logics that gave birth to the state in the first place.[3]

History and Secular Methodology

But if we write a history that decenters the state, what kind of history would we produce? This is a question that historians have taken very seriously in the last twenty years. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe tries to encapsulate the shortcomings of history in precisely this mode when it tries to focus attention on the agency of non-Europeans in writing their own history. Rather than an obsession with objective Truth, or the “laws of history” and the “rise and fall of civilizations,” a new kind of history tries to engage Indigenous critiques of Euro-American mores, the ethics and aesthetics that these people held that reified a particular human relationship to the environment, and the irresponsibility of modern humans to others. 

Yet calls for Enlightenment reason continue to reverberate in our temples to Reason, the modern university, not only in the United States, but around the world. That view of teleological Reason, one which culminates in carbon copies of Euro-American ideals, limits historians’ perspective on the past. Rather than taking a good hard look in the mirror of history, we end up staring into a funhouse mirror instead, one shaped primarily by a limited view of human nature, the environment, and the divine. This is largely due to the fact that anachronistic modern reason reduces the motivations of a plethora of Others in the past to self-interest, economic profit, religious bigotry, and irrationality. These narratives limit the motivations of humans, suffocates the spirit, and gives meager sustenance to human creativity. These explanations speak much more to our demons today than they offer a candid and impartial view of people in the past. For a richer history that also allows us to become more than we are, historians as well as anthropologists need to smash some idols.

Rather than taking a good hard look in the mirror of history, we end up staring into a funhouse mirror instead, one shaped primarily by a limited view of human nature, the environment, and the divine.

Historians are motivated to dig up the past. Some do it because they apparently just like digging, regardless of where or when they are digging. However, I find it difficult to imagine that the choice of historical queries, the topics of our interests are somehow simultaneously “interests” and yet paradoxically disinterested. Recent generations of historians have thus started digging with an ear towards finding a useful story, a thoughtful parable or allegory, in service to our collective futures. Historians’ work has to engage with the present because their work, in fact, never reaches the past. It is written for living and breathing people today and in the future. Removing misconceptions and misapprehensions of the past and breaking the idols of the present is an admirable part of the work of historians precisely because many historians’ work is deployed in the service of power and ideology.

It is, however, something many historians have long disavowed, saying instead that they represent the Truth as it was, a positivistic conceit that is slowly unravelling in the face of the infinite complexity of the past and our limited ability to access it. [4] Anthropologists, in a similar vein, immerse themselves in the soil of foreign lands. Some of us even excavate the ground for a necromantic fuel made of the long-dead living things: petroleum. All of this digging, albeit “productive,” comes with a series of both epistemic and, importantly, ethical pitfalls. What do anthropologists owe their subjects? How strongly should the historian hammer the idol of the state and whose history do they rewrite? Fossil fuel use allows for unimaginably complex human systems but it causes climate change, endangering the most disadvantaged among us. Who has to bear the burdens of our choices in the world that we live in today? Who reaps the benefits and who has to pay up when those costs come due?

Conclusion: Going Beyond the Limits of Secular Reason

All of us can learn from these epistemic and ethical challenges that Furani places before us. The sovereignty of secular reason limits the questions that can be asked in the modern academy, and binds scholars to a meager and frail view of reality and humanity. What we sacrifice is a complex and creative engagement with our world, but hope is not lost. Even within the sovereign secular dome of modernity, the “theosphere” seeps in, bringing with it alternatives, and glimpses of a world where our disciplines are not entangled within the “epistemic intestines of the modern state.” But with this hope come many new puzzles, quandaries, and contemplations that Furani might guide us through. 

The first question I pose is: Does the concept of idolatry, defined as “a confusion of ends worthy of life’s devotion,” offers us a view of what non-idolatrous worship would look like? Put simply, how would breaking the hold of the State and Reason free us from the plights that we face as a global community? Secondly, what do other disciplines like history, for example, offer anthropology in dismantling the sovereign(s) in modern societies? Are other disciplines less idolatrous than anthropology? Finally, my last question is diagnostic. I think about the issue of idolatrous reason in terms of coloniality. Claude Levi-Strauss notes that “humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk,” and reminds us that monoculture was not the express choice of much of humanity (39). These idols/ideals are most often imposed through education and cultural production, and many of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, especially from the Global South, were educated at elite institutions in Europe and North America. That in itself raises many ethical questions, but to revisit the diagnosis: How can institutions decolonize their methods in order to not convert people to the religion of Enlightenment Reason and still retain value in the education that it offers students?

To begin, our curricula will have to engage more honestly with Indigenous critiques of Euro-American values and assumptions. We need to broader our framework for how we understand people’s actions in both the past and the present, and think about the goals of human communities as a naturally diverse and complex set. To think beyond the state, we also need to think about the value and impact of non-state actors in the making of their own history. This means thinking about history as defined by the people that made the decisions, not based on the impact that it had on Euro-Americans’ ideas of self and Other. Not only will epistemic humility and centering of Indigenous voices enrich the disciplines, it may bring about possibilities of mutual learning and self-critique that leads to more enduring and peaceful societies.


[1] Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, Al-Khayr al-Kathīr (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, 2008),19-20.

[2] For classical arguments about the unchanging nature of Hindus under the British, the Muslims as rapacious
invaders with fundamental differences, see Stanley Lane-Poole, Medieval India under Mohammedan Rule (1903).

[3] See Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (2020).

[4] For a high-quality example of early twentieth century scholarship on India, see the work of the Jadunath Sarkar,
Fall of the Mughal Empire (1971).

 

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Khan Shairani
Khan Shairani is a doctoral candidate in Peace Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame. Interested in the intersection between religion and peace, his work ranges from historical to modern engagements with Islamic tradition. His dissertation examines the intellectual legacy of two eighteenth-century Islamic scholars from the Mughal and the Ottoman empires who transformed the epistemologies of classical Islamic thought in response to internal and colonial challenges. In particular, he explores how Muslims can navigate tumultuous times by re-engaging and reviving their tradition. His other research interests include colonialism and post-colonialism, Islamic theosophy and, representations of Muslims in film.

Khan received his undergraduate degree in Arabic Studies and Chinese Studies from Williams College and his Master’s degree in Islamic Studies from Harvard Divinity School. While at Notre Dame, he has been a translator and instructor for the Madrasa Discourses program, an initiative funded by the Templeton Foundation that teaches science and philosophy to Islamic seminary graduates in India and Pakistan. He has also co-founded the Graduate Film Club (FLIC), which attempts to introduce intersectional and diverse cinema to students.

Khan's research has been supported by the Critical Language Scholarship, the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, as well as Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He has also received the Qasid Annual Scholarship for the study of Qur'anic Arabic in Amman, Jordan. His professional affiliations include the American Academy of Religion and the American Oriental Society.
Theorizing Modernities article

Response to Mirza Inaugural Symposium Essays on the Muslim Question


Behind, beyond, before every policy paper, every plan, every dry account of the mechanics of governance, is a vision driving practice forward. It is not “in reality only,” as Mahmoud Youness observes in his response, but “in the imaginaries” that we should look to overcome civilizational conflict. “At the end of reasons comes persuasion,” Wittgenstein wrote, but we should also see that vision furnishes the ends of reason.

The observations of Mahmoud Youness and Atalia Omer send my mind back to the celebration of the Mirza Chair at Notre Dame, and the inauguration of Ebrahim Moosa as the first holder of the chair. That event showed me more places where our own Andalusias are coming into being. There are great resources in Youness’s and Omer’s comments on my book. I will foreground two lines of inquiry and critique: imaginaries and the sacred.

Youness puts me on difficult terrain with Richard Bulleit, Thomas Bauer, and Zygmunt Bauman. All these accounts rely on a conception of cultural unity I do not share. The idea that a culture is marked by, united by, a single trait—a tolerance of ambiguity for example—seems wrong to me historically and theoretically. I have no difficulty in finding historical moments when Muslims have sought “thorough disambiguation” or westerners have sheltered in a tolerant ambiguity. I can find as much rigidity in Ibn Taymiyya as in Cotton Mather or John Rawls. I have found tolerance—even solidarity—in western schools and on western streets. Perhaps most importantly—I am on firm theoretical ground here—cultures are not constructed in this way. Look to Wittgenstein, as Youness does, or to Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, or a host of others. As they all point out, meaning is made in difference. Every cultural affirmation calls forth its own distinctive dissents and refusals. Every trait proliferates variants. There are broad zones of ambiguity and aporia in every culture. And it is in those zones that one can find promise and potential.

There is, however, one point in Bauer that, as Youness suggests, I would absolutely affirm. It is in the moments when the west embraces ambiguity that it achieves the democratic. Democracy is founded in ambiguity, proliferates ambiguity, and requires the capacity to navigate ambiguity, uncertainty, and the unknowable. This accounts as well for my agreements with Youness on questions of solidarity, identity politics, and the political. As Adolph Reed would testify, I am less critical of identity politics than Youness believes. Identities are tools that can be used by many hands, for many purposes. I think they have, for the moment, had their day. They served to strengthen solidarities. They have given voice to the silenced. They have confronted those who were (who are) complicit and complacent. But, as Youness notes, they have been commodified and co-opted by neoliberal discourses and institutions.

Every cultural affirmation calls forth its own distinctive dissents and refusals. Every trait proliferates variants. There are broad zones of ambiguity and aporia in every culture. And it is in those zones that one can find promise and potential.

This is one reason I have been drawn to what Youness so aptly terms the “more raw kind of solidarity” in Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun’s account of asabiyya gives us solidarity at it barest. The people on the frontiers are independent, resourceful, with little refinement and fewer possessions. They are tough and self-reliant. They are also drawn, out of the need that defines their bare existence, to reliance on one another. Need makes them self-reliant, but it also drives them to solidarity. I differ from Youness in the weight I give to the possibility of anger and ressentiment. The presumption that “white middle class voters” will necessarily ally with elites against minority populations runs counter to the history of nineteenth century populism. Though populism has been distorted (principally by European elites) into a term for anti-pluralist politics, it is animated throughout the Americas by a radically democratic and redistributionist impulse. The People’s Party in the United States gave us transracial unionism. Though it faltered, that work still teaches.

I follow, with Youness, the ethical imperative that commands us to take responsibility for the wrongs done in our name. I am concerned, however, that this imperative, unleavened by the recognition that the good also has a history, distorts a more ambiguous past. The demand that only wrong be acknowledged erases the work of those who struggled for justice before us, and in doing so, lends currency to the belief that we (whoever we are) are either bad to the bone or caught in an inescapably linear historical progress. Both lead to quietism and self-exculpation.

Taking responsibility for wrongs done in our name is often little more than a desultory mea culpa and a few tears. To honestly come to terms with the work and memories of those who fought for justice in the past requires the work of recovery, analysis, reparation, and emulation. That work is easier when we remember not only our sins but the moments of struggle and success that came before us. Out of the ambiguous materials of the past it is possible to craft not just a good story but a vision, a plan for building. None of this requires emulsification. On the contrary, it is the preservation of difference that makes for strength in building. Different materials, even different aesthetics, are needed for the work.

It is for this reason that I continue to look for fragments of Andalusias to build with. In studying them, I have learned that there is no clash of civilizations. Huntington has been, as Omer, points out, a curiously insistent and perduring figure. Omer’s reading enables us to see what Huntington offers his disciples with this error.

First, this is a discourse of resentment. This is not the ressentiment of the marginalized, but the resentments of the powerful, who see their prestige waning. The deference they once commanded commands no more; the power they once wielded is falling away. The problem with affirmative action has never been the extension of “special privileges,” from this perspective, but the denial of special privileges to those who have long enjoyed them. Huntington also endures, I suspect, because he speaks to the arrogance of liberals as well as conservatives. His smug insistence that the problem with all religion is sexual repression speaks to those whose faith rests in an unnuanced understanding of science or to the narrowest apostles of the Enlightenment, as well as to latter-day crusaders.

The Andalusias I have found refute Huntington’s thesis. They testify to the possibility of common lives built on respect, to be sure, but also to the love of difference and a desire for it to proliferate. These Andalusias speak not only to the possibility of a common life together, but to the possibility, indeed, the necessity, of many common lives, the many different ways people find to live together and apart. They also put the claims of an arrogant secularism in question.

There are, as many have noted, two (at least two) forms of the secular. There is the determined, generally fictive, neutrality of laïcité, in which a republican state, laic or laïklik seeks to cleanse the public square of all signs of faith. The pretended neutrality of the secular state, so understood, has been effectively critiqued. When the streets and time itself are marked with the signs of a faith, once cannot justly claim public neutrality. That is not, however, the only problem with laïcité. This vision aims at uniformity, at the confinement, if not the erasure, of difference. Another model of secularism invites, and has proliferated, difference. On this model, the presence of other faiths guarantees the safety of all the faithful.

There is another problem with the secular that goes beyond these two.

One of the ambivalent gifts of the Enlightenment to Europe was the Enlightenment settlement. The terms of the settlement, under which we continue to live, are simple. Philosophers, academics, intellectuals, can proceed with their work: experimenting, reflecting, writing, and they will not be harmed. They will not be imprisoned, they will not be tortured, they will not be burned, but they must be silent on faith, on the doctrines of religion, on the divine. They may speak of the sacred only as one speaks of the alien. That agreement brought safety to generations of scholars, but at a price. The divine refuses boundaries and resists confinement.

These Andalusias speak not only to the possibility of a common life together, but to the possibility, indeed, the necessity, of many common lives, the many different ways people find to live together and apart. They also put the claims of an arrogant secularism in question.

At the close of her essay, Omer recalls Ebrahim Moosa’s characterization of himself as a “critical traditionalist” and asks: “What does it mean to be a critical traditionalist within the modern/secular world, but in an Andalusian frame?” An Andalusian secularism, open to all faiths, and to the doubting and faithless, cultivates both tradition and critique. Critical traditionalists hold fast to solidarities and belief. They are faced with questions, with doubts that though they may not be their own, demand their attention. They are protected from the sins of pride and blasphemy, reminded that the fullness of the divine is beyond their grasp. They are cautioned not to pretend to knowledge they do not possess, not to take pride in knowledge they believe is theirs alone. If they are wise, they will rejoice in the beauty of the forms divinity takes in the world, and learn from one another. This is very far indeed from the cold and confining secularism sought in laïcité. There is room here for many faiths and none, room for question and reflection, room for the many ways the divine speaks to the people.

The inauguration of the Mirza Chair and the work of those at the conference speaks to the possibility of faith reaching out to faith, of an unbounded longing for the divine.

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Anne Norton
Anne Norton is the Stacey and Henry Jackson President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to On the Muslim Question her books include Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2005) and 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method (Yale, 2003).