The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal). Photo Credit: Daniel Foster, via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
It is not easy to summarize the rich, highly nuanced, and very timely The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians, by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor. This book sets out to understand the knotted relationship between Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in the cosmopolitan city of Berlin in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It is a very important book because, as it notes, Berlin’s Palestinian community has become in recent years the largest in Europe, while the Israeli community is one of the largest outside Israel and probably the youngest (demographically). Hence the book’s attempt to present this complicated relationship systematically and “from below”—essentially by means of a series of interviews with Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians living in Berlin, which are discussed within broad political and cultural contexts—is extremely important.
In this short essay, I will not review or summarize the book, but rather “think with” it. What emerges from this engagement, at least from my perspective as an Israeli Jew reading it in Jerusalem, is a deep split in current German liberal identity. This split seems to cast some doubt on the alleged success of the big post-world-war German identity formation project of “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung).
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
On the one hand Germany (and particularly Berlin), viewed from Jerusalem, seems to be a stronghold of freedom and liberal-democratic culture and politics, and on certain issues (such as LGBTQ+ cultural and social inclusion, and climate change), even progressive. Germany’s strength and democratic stability are particularly evident when viewed (despite the rising of the AfD in recent years) against the backdrop of rising right-wing populist regimes both within and outside Europe. Germany is also seen as the unifying element in the European Union at a time of crisis in which it is in danger of breaking up. It is this liberal image of Germany (together with other more materialistic reasons) that has turned it, since the 1990s, into a desirable destination for tens of thousands of young Jewish Israeli migrants many of whom see it as a tolerant and open alternative to Israel. Generally speaking, these migrants have felt very welcome by Germany, especially in Berlin. At the same time, Germany has become an attractive destination for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from the MENA region, particularly following the citizenship reforms that were put into place at the beginning of the 2000s. Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to take in a million refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, made Germany exemplary. And although, as the book portrays, these refugees were often met with implicit and explicit racist and Islamophobic attitudes, as the book also asserts: “Despite the significant increase in xenophobia and criticism of Merkel’s policy […] a tangible welcoming culture has emerged in Germany and more specifically in Berlin” (45). Holocaust survivor and literary scholar Ruth Kluger, who spoke at the German Bundestag to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2016, praised Merkel’s decision, calling her slogan Wir schaffen das, “we can do this” (absorb that many refugees, see 42), heroic. The connection she made to the Holocaust and the admiration she expressed were shared by many.
Meanwhile, it seems that in everything relating to the Palestinian criticism of Israel’s colonialism and occupation, Germany’s conduct—at official levels and also in civil society and even academia—is the most reactionary in all of Europe and the west. This too, as is evident in many of the book’s sections, is framed as learning the lessons of the Holocaust, lessons which have fashioned the DNA of the country’s political culture since the nineties and culminated in Merkel’s 2008 Knesset address asserting that due to its past, Israel’s security is Germany’s “reason of state” (Staatsräson) (36).
It might be enough to recall some of the events of recent years. In May 2019, the German parliament voted for a motion equating the BDS movement—which enjoys an overwhelming support among Palestinians—with antisemitism, and thus implicitly criminalizing all Palestinians as antisemites. Practically speaking, this motion made it very difficult for BDS supporters to get access to public spaces or funding in Germany (see also, 95–96). In a distortive way, the boycott of the state of Israel (a nuclear power, an occupier, an oppressor trampling the rights of others) reminds many Germans of the boycott of Jewish businesses in the 1930s by the oppressive Nazi state (see 151 – this association was explicitly included in the motion itself). Nowhere in Europe or indeed the world are anti-Israel stances or criticism of Israel identified so strongly with antisemitism as in Germany. This tendency is consolidated by, among others, Felix Klein, who since 2018 has been the federal commissioner for combatting antisemitism and strengthening Jewish life in Germany. He has done so with the encouraging support of Israeli officials. (Thus, for example the Israeli spokesperson of the Israeli Embassy in Berlin is quoted saying that it is in Israel’s “interest to maintain German guilt about the Holocaust” [150].)
Atshan and Galor describe well in their book the oppressive and antidemocratic outcomes of this atmosphere. Atshan, a Palestinian from Ramallah, was himself a victim of a persecutory position of this sort when, in August 2018, his invitation to lecture at the Jewish Museum in Berlin was cancelled. These tendencies reached a grotesque level of absurdity, when, following Felix Klein’s charge of antisemitism against the German-Jewish left wing and BDS-supporting organization Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East), the German Bank for Social Economy (Bank für Sozialwirtschaft) decided to close their bank account (109).
These policies effect all spheres of life and effectively shape a very biased public discourse. But perhaps the most extreme example of this German trend towards discriminatory and antidemocratic behavior, intolerance, and racism, occurred after Atshan and Galor’s book was published. In September 2021, the broadcasting station WDR decided to cancel an employment contract with the physician and journalist Nemi Al-Hassan, who was supposed to present a popular TV programme on science. El-Hassan, the German-born daughter of Palestinian refugees, was accused of antisemitism because in 2014 she took part in the Al Quds march against Operation Protective Edge in Gaza (during which according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem 2202 Palestinians were killed, 1391 of who were unarmed and 526 of whom were under the age of 18), and because she “liked” a post by the US anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace at the time of the “Guardian of the Walls” operation in Gaza in May 2021 (in which 256 Palestinians were killed, 66 of whom were children and at least 128 of whom were civilians). She was also a target of a vicious public attack led by the Bild tabloid and was subject to numerous death threats.
This then is the German split. On the one hand, it is a state with liberal-democratic and even progressive tendencies which attracts Israeli and Palestinian migrants. On the other hand, it is a reactionary state that cancels and criminalizes as antisemitic Palestinian protest and actually the very Palestinian discourse and narrative, and shields the state of Israel from any substantial criticism, even as the latter engages in occupation, expulsion, and systematic violation of Palestinians national, human, and civil rights. This split is to my understanding what constitutes the infrastructure of The Moral Triangle.
The Split between Two Global Narratives
In my mind, this split is related to a more general, perhaps global, narrative split. As the historian Charles Maier points out, the end of the twentieth century saw the development and proliferation of what he calls two great “moral historical narratives” in the west and beyond to explain modernity. Both are stories of historical catastrophe: the story of the Holocaust and the story of anti-/post-colonialism and imperialism. According to Maier, the former focuses mostly on issues of memory, whereas the latter centers on issues of (ongoing) domination and exploitation.
Most Israelis and Germans understand Israel and Zionism through the prism of the story of the Holocaust and paradoxically it functions as a story of redemption. For the Israelis, the state of Israel is the Jewish people’s decisive answer to the Holocaust and to antisemitism, the place where Holocaust survivors were able to rehabilitate their lives and their human dignity. For them, it is the only guarantee that a further Holocaust won’t happen in the future. It’s a redemptive story of “Holocaust and rebirth,” as the Zionist slogan puts it. For the Germans too—as the German-Israeli psychoanalyst Iris Hefetz has recently portrayed in a very nuanced article in the Berliner Zeitung—the story of the Holocaust is a part of a drama of redemption. The support for the state of Israel, ever since the Reparations Agreement, has been a way for the Germans to redeem themselves from their past and gain recognition as the new Germany. As a story of redemption, it is fundamental to the national identities of the two peoples, and any opposition to it is met by a very harsh response.
The Palestinians and many progressives around the world, meanwhile, understand the political reality in Palestine-Israel in the frame of the post-/anti-colonial narrative, which, like the Holocaust narrative, has also become global since the 1990s. Israel figures in this story mainly as the perpetrator of cruelty and violence in a story of settler colonialism where indigenous Palestinian inhabitants are the victims. This narrative holds that under the protection of the imperial powers, and in order to solve Europe’s antisemitism problem, Palestine was stolen from its original inhabitants, who underwent ethnic cleansing (the Nakba), becoming a minority in their homeland. These processes didn’t end in 1948 and are ongoing.
The Palestinian intellectual Raef Zreik articulated this rift very precisely: “The Europeans see the back of the Jewish refugee fleeing for his life. The Palestinian sees the face of the settler colonialist taking over his land.” These two perspectives cannot be more remote from each other than in the German case. Most Germans find it very difficult to accept the legitimacy, let alone the relevance, of the anticolonial perspective in relation to Israel, despite a prodigious historical research literature about it. For many Germans, referring to Israel as a settler colonial state, even as a historical analytic perspective, is a form of antisemitism that negates the lessons of the Holocaust. The abyss between these two historical narratives in general and with regard to Israel in particular seems unbridgeable in Germany, though the urgent challenge is indeed to bridge them. In my own work with Bashir Bashir we tried to suggest a way to bridge this rift.
Coming to Terms with the Past while Denying the Present
Recently the philosopher Susan Neiman published a much-discussed book, Learning from the Germans (2019). In it, she praised the Germans for their Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), which includes taking moral responsibility for the past and compensating its victims. She further suggests that Germany should serve as a model for the Americans in coming to terms with their own dark past. Indeed, this national project that emerged from Germany’s politics after the war, but also from admirable grassroots activism during the eighties and nineties, seemed for many years to set a model for the whole world to show how nations should deal with their own criminal past. However, The Moral Triangle, portraying the complex situation in Germany of the second decade of the twenty first century, casts some doubt on this often-celebrated Vergangenheitsbewältigung (a doubt, which I think Neiman has recently also come to share). The various dichotomic unbridgeable gaps and splits which emerge so forcefully from The Moral Triangle are to my mind anything but an indication of a successful process of working through the past.
A current unfolding affair in Germany seems to prove this point. The Alliance Against Anti-Semitism Kassel (supported by some mainstream liberal media) accused some artists who were supposed to present in Documenta—one of Germany’s most important and prestigious international contemporary art events in Kassel—as being antisemitic. One of the “sins” attached to a Palestinian artist—Yazan al-Khalili—was that he was associated in the past with a cultural center in Ramallah named after the Palestinian intellectual Khalil Al-Sakakini. Al-Sakakini, who had fled his home in Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba, indeed sympathized (like many other anti-colonial leaders and intellectuals around the world—from Africa to India) with Nazi Germany in its war against imperial Great Britain. In fact, Al-Sakakini was a much more complex figure, but this is really beside the point. Because as Elke Buhr noted, it was not Sakakini—who died in 1953—who was invited to Kassel. Nor was it the cultural center named after him. An artist who was associated with the center was the invitee—and that was enough to declare him antisemitic and create a havoc. This does not seem to me a healthy process of “coming to terms with the past.” This looks to me more like a very dangerous ritual of exorcism, de-contamination, and scapegoating.
Personal and collective identities always hold tensions, ambivalences, paradoxes, and even contradictions. But when these become so extreme that the gaps cannot be negotiated, mitigated, bridged, or even discussed, they become a reason for deep (political) concern. To my mind, as a Jewish Israeli, this is characteristic of Zionism and of current Jewish Israeli identity. The contradiction between being “Jewish” and being “democratic” has become apparent and unbridgeable. What I have learned from Atshan and Galor’s book is that despite the nuances and complexities they portray, this can also be said, to a large extent, for Germany. Its democratic values and its alleged pro-Israelism—both lessons learned from the Holocaust—cannot be reconciled anymore.
I wish to thank Yehudit Yinhar and Prof. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum for their helpful comments. Obviously, I bare the sole responsibility for everything written in this essay.
Professor Amos Goldberg teaches Holocaust Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Goldberg's work is interdisciplinary in nature, combining history, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. Among his recent publications is his book Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017) and his co-edited volume together with Bashir Bashir The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018). Goldberg is active in fighting the abuse of “the fight against antisemitism” for suppressing Palestinian rights. His recently co-authored article together with Alon Confino and Raz Segal was published in the Berliner Zeitung.
In The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians, Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor explore how Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians living in Berlin contend with violences of the past and present—most notably the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the ongoing occupation of Palestinians in Israel—in their moral and political lives. In rich ethnographic detail, the authors recount how interviewees from each of these groups understand their relationship to their own communities and to the others in this moral triangle. What readers will discern in these pages is that the historical traumas experienced by one group can occlude the realities of violence and oppression in another. This is most clearly on display in how Germans, even on the radical left, are unable to acknowledge the oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli state. (Ironically, many Israelis living in Berlin are to the left of the German left on this matter.) For many Berliners, offering unflinching support for the State of Israel even when it commits human rights violations is a way to redeem previous generations’ responsibility for the Holocaust. This comes at the expense of the Palestinian people, however, who were not responsible for the Shoah and whose experience of the Nakba is ongoing. The equation of Jewish identity with the State of Israel, is of course, fallacious and ideological. And yet, it remains a potent force in German politics and the country’s social grappling with its Nazi past. It has even led to Jews who speak out against the State of Israel in Germany being labelled antisemitic by non-Jews. Further, it leads Palestinians living in Berlin to avoid speaking out against the actions of Israel for fear of being further marginalized via the label of antisemitism.
Perhaps the greatest virtue of Atshan and Galor’s book is that it forces us to confront the moral realities of people on the ground in Berlin. As the authors note early on, their interviewees range from a psychoanalyst, to a janitor, to a teacher, to a small business owner (see page 6 for a full list of the professions of the interviewees). This range of subjects provides us a glimpse into the complex moral lives of people without the distance that academic analysis of these issues often affords. The result is a moral triangle that is threaded together by an intersectional web. Here identities sometimes overlap where we might expect them to depart (think here of the critiques of the State of Israel by both Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin) and depart where we might expect them to conjoin (think here of the inability to acknowledge the Nakba among German Berliners). The result is an empirical study that invites us to acknowledge the challenges that the lived realities of humans on the ground present to our normative positions.
The essays collected in this symposium grapple with the intersections and divergences among these groups, and their ramifications both in and beyond Germany. Amos Goldberg explores what he calls the “split in current German liberal identity.” This split, he contends, is between a liberal state that attracts migrants like those from Israel and Palestine and a state that sanctions any criticisms of the State of Israel. He argues that this split is reflective of a more general one between anti-/post-colonialism and the story of the Holocaust, where the former is focused on current oppression and the latter on memory. He concludes by noting that, unfortunately, the current oppression of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine has eroded the likelihood of bringing these perspectives together in a way that might lead to peace. Sultan Doughan, meanwhile, reflects on how the category of perpetrator has come to define what it means to be a German citizen. This category, Doughan notes, is bound up with a Protestant-inflected way of conceptualizing moral responsibility that continues to resonate, even in “secular” Berlin.
In their essay, Hannah Tzuberi and Nahed Samour contend that the German state’s “anti-antisemitism,” rather than combatting the logic of antisemitism actually reinforces it. This is because it continues to rely on the image of the Jew as vulnerable and in need of protection. Without this image, the German state’s image of itself as morally righteous could not exist. Thus, paradoxically, the Jew—and in the German political/moral imagination, the (always Jewish) Israeli—must remain a victim in order for the German state to preserve itself, with tragic results for those who suffer under oppression from Israeli state violence. The figure of the Palestinian here emerges as the crucial prism through which the multiple layers of legitimatized, moral violence in Germany must be recognized. Finally, Sabine von Mering puts her own experiences as a non-Jewish and non-Palestinian German into conversation with Atshan’s and Galor’s findings. By interweaving her own experiences of growing up as a Lutheran in Germany and of German-Jewish dialogues that took place at Brandeis in the late 1990s, von Mering shows the possibility of a German standing in solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians.
These essays demonstrate that oppression is not static and that how we remember past oppressive violence cannot be disentangled from current injustices. An even wider lens on this situation reminds us that the forces of secularism and modernity continue to remain potent drivers of political and social strife. Concepts like the nation, religion, or the secular did not appear out of thin air. Rather they are the products of human history. As such, reckoning with their violences, and potentialities, is a collective human responsibility, one with which The Moral Triangle invites us to more fully grapple.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Frantz Fanon and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
A common error in conceiving decolonial theorizing as a standard form of critical theory or as an extension of mainstream postcolonial studies is the assumption that its approach to religion or spirituality is bounded by secularism. It is often forgotten that while the emergence of postcolonial studies is connected to theories of literature and culture in the secular humanities, what is typically recognized as decolonial theorizing came into being in largely inter- and trans-disciplinary contexts that included scholars, artists, activists, and community organizers who were critical of modern western secular ideologies.[1] Some of them also openly drew from and sought to contribute to the study of religion and religious thought.
Often the result of limited engagement with only very few authors in the field, the idea of decolonial thought as an intellectual production that can only consider “the religious” or “the spiritual” through the lenses of western secularism appears to be a convenient trope in the effort to reassert the authority and contemporary relevance of certain forms of scholarship, particularly religious studies, as well as some forms of philosophy and theology. The result is a reduction in the possibilities of profound engagement between these areas and decolonial thought, even as this work has already been taking place among those of us who have been trained in or have been contributing to areas such as religious studies, philosophy, and decoloniality for more than a short time.
One would only have to take a quick look at works of senior and distinguished figures in decolonial thinking, such as Enrique Dussel and Sylvia Marcos, to identify profound critiques of secularism and sophisticated ways to approach religion and spirituality. Related critiques of secularism appear in the works of Eduardo Mendieta, who has a long trajectory of making contributions to philosophy and religious studies, and of the intelectual-militanteCatherine Walsh, who draws from African diaspora and Indigenous views in her account of community formation, decolonization, and the overcoming of the binary between the natural and the human.
It is also important to recognize the impact of African diaspora spiritualities in the works and perspectives of Afro-Caribbean decolonial thinkers such as Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso and Agustín Lao-Montes, and the contributions of the also Caribbean Ramón Grosfoguel to the enrichment of Critical Muslim Studies and the critique of Islamophobia. More recent, but already well established and leading scholars engaging religion and decoloniality include Mayra Rivera, Santiago Slabodsky, and An Yountae, among others.
The idea of decolonial thought as an intellectual production that can only consider ‘the religious’ or ‘the spiritual’ through the lenses of western secularism appears to be a convenient trope in the effort to reassert the authority and contemporary relevance of certain forms of scholarship.
My own work on decolonial theorizing, the decolonial theory and philosophy of religion, and the critique of modern western secular ideologies and the coloniality of secularism, is rooted in conversations and exchanges about related topics with friends, teachers, and mentors before and during my college years in the “unincorporated territory”/colony of Puerto Rico.[2] In conversations on the island-colony with scholars such as the late Jesuit priest and historian Fernando Picó and the theologian and humanities professor Luis N. Rivera Pagán, it was clear that the critique of colonialism could not be consistently carried out without the critique of secularism and vice-versa. I took this to be a foundation already established long before I became interested in it, even if kept in a marginal position within and by a largely secular (and Eurocentric) left, as well as the hegemonic liberal—modern/colonial and secular—arts and sciences.
I was fortunate to find a similar conviction in important teachers and interlocutors while a doctoral student in religious studies, philosophy, and Africana studies in the 1990s. They included the Caribbean and Afro-Jewish philosopher Lewis R. Gordon and Enrique Dussel. Gordon held a PhD in philosophy and was appointed in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. He offered undergraduate and graduate courses that engaged the three areas simultaneously. Challenging the divide between “the religious” and “the secular,” while also critically engaging colonialism and antiblack racism was a given in this context. It was similar in my work with Enrique Dussel, also while a graduate student, and later on in my exchanges with Sylvia Marcos, which started when I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Duke University. At Duke, I worked closely with Walter Mignolo, who is sometimes taken as a poster person for secularism even as his work makes important contributions to the critique of western modernity, including the coloniality of its secularism, as I have pointed out elsewhere.[3]
In short, neither the critique of secularism and the concern with understanding the relevance of spirituality for decolonization, nor the effort to decolonize philosophy and religious studies as fields of study are new. Making it appear so strengthens the coloniality of the liberal arts and sciences.
Lessons from Frantz Fanon 60 Years after His Passing
It won’t be difficult to include many more references to scholars of decolonization who challenge in various ways the coloniality of the secular/religious divide, or whose work contributes to the decolonization of religious studies. Some authors are very explicit in their critique of secularism and their appraisal of the role of spirituality in their searches for decolonization—take Gloria Anzaldúa or M. Jacqui Alexander, for example—while others are less explicit or even suspicious about highlighting the links between decolonization and anything “religious.” However, one can often find contributions to the critique of the coloniality of secularism even among authors who would otherwise appear to be indifferent or critical of religion or spirituality. In this essay, I will share some reflections about contributions to the critique of secularism in the work of Frantz Fanon.
Frantz Fanon represents the FLN (National Liberation Front) and Algeria in the war of independence at the Pan African conference at the Palais de la Culture in Léopoldville, August 27, 1960, in the former Belgian Congo. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Fanon’s work is a major reference in Black and Africana studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thought, among other areas. His work preceded, anticipated, prepared the ground, and continues to serve as guide and inspiration for many contemporary theorists of antiblackness, coloniality, and decoloniality. One of my main arguments here is that Fanon’s work offers valuable lessons in the task of critiquing the coloniality of secularism and that these lessons remain relevant today. One important part of these lessons is that decoloniality is not simply a topic of investigation, but part of a more encompassing decolonial turn that involves the comprehensive decolonization of knowledge, power, and being.
It is already well known that Fanon engaged in and contributed to the projects of decolonizing philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. I propose here that his work offers important considerations for decolonizing religious studies as well. In that sense, this essay continues a central topic in my previous contribution to this space.
I turn to Frantz Fanon here in the context of celebrating the 70th anniversary of the publication of his massively influential work Black Skin, White Masks, originally published in 1952, and of the recent commemoration of the 60th year of his passing and the publication of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon is often depicted as a thoroughly secularist author with little more than suspicion or disdain for anything religious or spiritual. This caricature makes him a good figure through which to demonstrate the limits of secularist interpretations of decolonial thought. Fanon’s work provides important considerations in the exploration of the coloniality of secularism and religious studies while also indicating the generative possibilities that emerge in challenging the strict divide between the religious and the secular.[4]
I refer to Fanon as a decolonial thinker, a designation that he did not use, because he carefully developed the concept of decolonization as a creative process of unthinking and rethinking, as well as undoing and redoing, in the path towards a new idea and practice of being human. He understood this practice as a reconstitution of the open-ended web of human interrelationalities and as the amplification of relations of uninhibited and free giving and receiving that are part of what Fanon refers to as the “world of you,” which is at the core of the idea of decoloniality.[5]
Lesson 1: Understanding the Catastrophe of Modernity/Coloniality
One important contribution of Fanon’s work to the study of religion, philosophy, and theology concerns the entanglement between modernity and coloniality. Fanon’s theorizing reflects an awareness of the overwhelming colonial dimension and effects of modernity. He was conscious that the globalization of western modernity and its connection with the rationalization and naturalization of colonialism and racial slavery represented a veritable catastrophe for societies across the world and for humanity as a whole.[6] This catastrophe has had profound impacts on even the most basic of human activities, such as linguistic and erotic relationships, as Fanon sought to demonstrate in the initial chapters of his classic Black Skin, White Masks.[7]
Using contemporary concepts, one might say that for Fanon, modernity/coloniality has always already shaped the subject, the object, and the context of any potential academic investigation. This means that decolonization is not simply a political practice that is separate from academic work, but the very condition of possibility for countering the coloniality of the human sciences. Since hegemonic academic disciplines, including philosophy and religious studies, are grounded on dominant views of modernity, the critique of modernity should serve not only as a preamble to any academic study, but also as an ongoing activity.
Using contemporary concepts, one might say that for Fanon, modernity/coloniality has always already shaped the subject, the object, and the context of any potential academic investigation.
Fanon’s references to “religion” or spiritual practices in his work cannot be disentangled from his insight about the active role of colonialism and the impact of modern/colonial catastrophe. For example, under modern/colonial catastrophe, the concept of religion can be used at one moment to minimize the standing of one group in one context—e.g., “you are merely religious”—while at another moment serving as a form of “whitening”—e.g., “I am also religious.”[8] Sometimes the two apparently opposite views appear in the same context but are held as true by different parties, or sometimes even by the same party. That is, Fanon never finds “religion” purely out there: he finds “religion” always in context of colonization and global coloniality; always taking unique forms in varied contexts of catastrophe.
Lesson 2: Fanon’s Decolonial Turn against the Coloniality of the Human Sciences
One implication of Fanon’s profound awareness of the impact of coloniality and its creation of shifting and multiple layers of meaning is that one cannot take at face value his statements about religion, among many other topics. Perhaps because he was a psychiatrist and a militant, rather than a traditional scholar of philosophy or religion, the theoretical dimension of Fanon’s texts cannot be disentangled from practice. As a result, what Fanon wrote at any given point is often more complex than what it appears at first sight.
Approaching Fanon’s texts as traditional works in the liberal arts and sciences is a common mistake, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the incorporation of his writings into the academy, but one that can and should be corrected. What Fanon seeks to do with his writing is connected to his therapeutic and revolutionary work and frequently different from what any specific statement in his written work indicates. Often when reading Fanon, it is as if his writing suggests that more important than what it says is the process of thinking and doing that gave birth to it, as well as the unfinished project of which it was and continues to be part. If so, the best way to engage Fanon’s texts is not by seeking to have the “right” interpretation of them—in fact, his writings often resist these efforts—but participating in the practice of decolonial thinking/doing and doing/thinking that was predominant in Fanon’s practical/theoretical and theoretical/practical work.
Pavillon de l’Administration de l’Hôpital Psychiatrique de Blida-Joinville, 1933. Frantz Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in this hospital in the 1950s before joining the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the Algerian revolution. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
This is one important dimension of the project of countering the coloniality of the human sciences, including religious studies: decolonizing knowledge is not the same as simply writing about decoloniality or decolonization. Decolonizing philosophy, religious studies, or theology is likewise not only a matter of diversifying theoretical sources or engaging new topics.
Reducing the project of epistemic decolonization to a question of diversifying topics and sources leads to a reassertion of the priorities and ethos of the modern/colonial and secular liberal arts and sciences, even in projects that describe themselves as decolonial. This is a dangerous path that privileges the position of the presumed “expert” on decoloniality over the multiple actors, agents, creators, and thinkers engaged in decolonial thinking and practice.
Fanon proposes a substantive decolonial turn, one that transcends the limits and that counters the coloniality of the established liberal arts and sciences. His work teaches that decolonizing knowledge involves not only refusing to ignore the role of coloniality in shaping the object of one’s investigation, but also redefining the tasks and priorities of the scholar and the intellectual.[9] This means that the decolonization of religious studies and other fields cannot take place without a challenge to the model of the scholar, the organization of scholars—e.g. departments, centers, institutes, and professional associations—and the training of scholars within the liberal arts and sciences.
Lesson 3: Countering the Coloniality of the Religion/Secularism Divide
A third lesson from Fanon’s work concerns the coloniality of the religious/secularism divide and the need to overcome it in decolonization struggles. Fanon fought for decolonization, understood as generative counter-catastrophic activities in the effort to create “the world of you,” a view that is connected to his conception of healing.[10] One cannot forget that Fanon was a trained psychiatrist and that his preferred method was social therapy, a form of therapy that sought to bring mental health through the process of creating normal—by which it should be understood non-catastrophic—social relations and a social environment.
As a paper written by Fanon and his intern Jacques Azoulay while Fanon was the Director of the Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, indicates, Fanon entirely rejected the thesis that there is something inherently problematic with practices or ideas that are often referred to as spiritual or religious. Indeed, even if beyond the scope of this piece, Fanon’s work with Azoulay speaks to Fanon’s multicultural and multireligious view of a decolonized Algeria, and of the ways in which the French empire approached and managed racial hierarchies in France and its colonies. This explains how a Black person from the Caribbean could be appointed as doctor and hospital director, and an Algerian Jewish person could become his first intern in a psychiatric hospital, where the Arab and Berber locals were for the most part patients and nurses.[11]
Fanon entirely rejected the thesis that there is something inherently problematic with practices or ideas that are often referred to as spiritual or religious.
For the purpose of this essay, I underscore that Fanon did not subscribe to the belief that overcoming religion is necessary for decolonization to take place, or to the notion that decolonization would lead to a religionless society. This is reflected in Fanon’s and Azoulay’s warning to psychiatrists and other scientists of epistemic arrogance and epistemic racism that “some conducts, some reactions can appear ‘primitive’ to us, but that is only a value judgment, one that is both questionable and bears on poorly defined characteristics.”[12] They were particularly referring to the idea that “genies” produced madness, a concept that was normal in Algeria as opposed to other contexts where a different perception of the world was held or where social behavior revolved around different premises.
In short, Fanon invited the critical study of human reality, including what we often call religion, with attention to the massive effects of modern/colonial catastrophe. From a Fanonian point of view, Marx’s dictum that “For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism” could perhaps be reformulated as follows: “For Africa, the African diaspora, the Global South, and the entire world, the critique of modern/colonial catastrophe remains unfinished, and its critique is the prerequisite of all criticism.” Neither Fanon’s view of criticism nor his conception of a healthy individual or society imply the idea that religion or spirituality must be eradicated. Quite the contrary, Fanon believed that activities that are often called religious, like the “regular celebration of Muslim feasts” and the establishment of “a Moorish café” in the context of his work with male Muslim patients, played an important role in their healing process.[13] The other side of this practice was the rejection of the simple implantation and uncritical adaptation of European therapeutical techniques in Algeria. That is, for Fanon the problem sometimes lies with the “science” or scholarly approach rather than with any specific “religion” or similar object of investigation. The decolonization of knowledge, and, along with that, the decolonization of being and power, remain at the forefront of Fanon’s knowledge producing activities.
Lesson 4: Fanon’s Unlearning, Relearning, and Post-Secular Epistemic Practices
Fanon not only learned about Islam and developed insights about the study of religion in the context of his psychiatric hospital and his visits to Algerian towns. He also learned about Islam from Muslim intellectuals and recognized the potential contributions of Islam to the struggle for decoloniality. His words to the Iranian thinker ‘Ali Shari‘ati are illuminating in this context: “I would like to emphasize, more than you do yourself, your remark that Islam harbours, more than any other social powers of ideological alternatives in the third world (or, with your permission, the Near and Middle-East), both an anticolonialist capacity and anti-western character” (Alienation and Freedom, 668).
Justice for All March in Washington DC, December 13, 2014. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
In his letter to Shari‘ati, Fanon also highlights the importance of what he considers to be the “mission” of Shari‘ati and other Muslim intellectuals to “make good use of the immense cultural and social resources harboured in Muslim societies and minds, with the aim of emancipation and the founding of another humanity and another civilization” (668–69). Here Fanon is anticipating his notes about combative decolonial intellectual activity in The Wretched of the Earth, a theme that, as the Frantz Fanon Foundation has recently made clear, is as relevant today as ever.[14]
Fanon also shared with Shari‘ati his concerns about the risks and limits of “reviving sectarian and religious mindsets,” and of any project that sought to bring populations closer to their past more than to promote the birth of an “ideal future.” While Fanon took a different path from Shari‘ati, Fanon concludes his letter by noting that he is “persuaded that both paths will ultimately join up towards that destination where humanity lives well” (Alienation and Freedom, 669).
It is also important to recognize that, while every indication is that Fanon was an atheist, his own work is infused with religious thought and contains a considerable number of religious metaphors. In Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, I reflect on and build upon the relationship between Fanon’s work and those of Christian philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers, as well as the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. I seek to demonstrate that Fanon conceives of subjectivity as a gift and that he views the damnés as those who cannot give because of what had been taken from them. This means that decoloniality is about the restoration of circles of giving and receiving in contexts of catastrophe, which opens up considerable new questions and considerations, including ethical, political, religious/spiritual, and theological ones.
Lesson 5: Open Paths in Conversation with a Post-Secular Fanon
Fanon’s conception of subjectivity, damnation, and decolonization challenge the premises of Cartesian rationalism, Enlightened foundationalism, and modern western political theory—all of which serve as the basis to certain forms of western secularisms. His view of the self as a gift and his intersubjective account of healthy individuality and social relations draw from and are compatible with a large variety of sources, including so-called religious or spiritual formations. This consideration calls for more explorations of connections between Fanon’s view of decolonization and non-secular or post-secular accounts of reality, including the African diaspora spiritualities that are found in Fanon’s own island of Martinique and through the Caribbean, some of which probably informed Fanon’s thinking and worldview too.
I am aware of the argument that Fanon seemed to make concessions to Catholicism and Islam that he did not extend to African diaspora practices.[15] One could debate the extent to which Fanon’s statements about any specific religions are meant to be a description of such religions per se, or if they are meant as a critical analysis of the entanglement between specific religious practices and certain colonial projects. One could also debate whether Fanon had a specific view about African diaspora religions, or whether his approach to local religious practices in Algeria offers an example of approaching religious practices everywhere that would lead to a different conceptualization of other religions, including settings with African diaspora religious practices. This goes back to the points about how to approach Fanon’s writings that I raised earlier.
For Fanon the problem sometimes lies with the “science” or scholarly approach rather than with any specific “religion” or similar object of investigation. The decolonization of knowledge, and, along with that, the decolonization of being and power, remain at the forefront of Fanon’s knowledge producing activities.
My suggestion here is that even if negative comments about African diaspora religions proved to be definitive about Fanon’s interpretation of these practices at any given point in time, this does not entail that parts of his thinking were not positively impacted by the Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices on the island of Martinique. I doubt that only Catholicism influenced Fanon’s sensibilities, but even if that were true, this also does not mean that there are not elements in Fanon’s thought that are significantly enriched when approached from African diaspora epistemologies and spiritualities. The thought of an author is often richer than the various opinions of the author. An exploration of the various ways in which Fanon’s thought might be and could still be entangled with African diaspora views would require work with practitioners. That is, practitioners of African diaspora spiritualities who have mobilized Fanon’s thought in their struggle against racism and colonization might be the best teachers here. The path is thus open for a continued post-secular process of unlearning and relearning as part of the unfinished project of decolonization, and Fanon remains an important companion.[16]
The author wishes to thank Atalia Omer for the invitation to contribute and thank both her and Joshua Lupo for their editorial suggestions.
[3] I expand on my view of Mignolo’s contributions to the decolonial theory of religion in “Religion, Modernity, and Coloniality.”
[4] Others have commented on Fanon’s conception of religion as it appears in his writings. Perhaps the most systematic account is Federico Settler’s 2009 doctoral dissertation at the University of Cape Town, entitled “Religion in the Work of Frantz Fanon.” Settler’s main arguments in the dissertation also appear in his 2012 article “Frantz Fanon’s Ambivalence Towards Religion.” My analysis here is based primarily on texts that appear in Fanon’s Alienation and Freedom, which was published after Settler’s dissertation and article, but this is not where the main difference between his careful study and my reflection here lies. This essay approaches the question of Fanon and religion in terms of the contributions of Fanon’s thinking to decolonizing religious studies and to critically engaging the religious/secular divide. In that sense, it does not aim to be an analysis of the various ways in which Fanon referred to religion in his work, which is Settler’s main focus. I am interested in the possibilities that Fanon’s thought opens up or invites the reader to consider more than on whether Fanon himself believed something or other to be the case. This is what I have taken to be a project of Fanonian meditations, which is different from scholarship on Fanon. This does not mean that this scholarship cannot make contributions to such Fanonian meditations.
[8] Lilia Ben Salem’s notes that a course that Fanon offered in Tunis included the following sentence in the context of discussing racism in the United States: “Religion is often conceived as a way of ‘becoming-white’.” See Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 524.
[9] I thank the Aymara militant-intellectual Esteban Ticona Alejo for his acute observations about this many years ago. Ticona Alejo is the author of various works on Fanon and the “father of Indianism” in Bolivia, Fausto Reinaga, as well as the editor of Bolivia en el inicio del Pachakuti: la larga lucha anticolonial de los pueblos aimara y quechua. I also thank Walter Altino and members of the Atitude Quilombola movement in Brazil, with whom I learned important aspects of this lesson in theory and practice.
[11] Citing an interview with Azoulay in 1998, Alice Cherki writes that: “Almost fifty years later, Jacques Azoulay reports that as an Algerian Jew he only became aware of Algeria ‘in Blida, while working with Fanon. That’s when I realized that there were Muslims—Muslims and a Muslim culture’” (Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 51). In an interview in 2007 with Numa Murard, Azoulay adds that “He [Fanon] sought first to inform himself about the specific culture of Algerian Arabs” and that “he was very active, I less so, although he dragged me along to ceremonies for treating hysteria in Kabylian villages, in which women having cathartic fits were chained down for entire nights” (quoted in Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 191). Azoulay also stated that “Fanon’s intellectual approach enabled me to apprehend a content that I would otherwise have considered folkloric, and from the moment of that realization, I understood it wasn’t” (Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 52). Azoulay’s severed disconnection with the Algerian Arab community recalls Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s analysis of “how France forced Arab Jews to adopt the European persona of Jew as citizen and see Arabs and Muslims as others” (see “Algerian Jews Have Not Forgotten France’s Colonial Crimes,”) and her thesis that, “The conversion of Algerian Jews into French citizenship destroyed thousands of years of Jewish life in North Africa” (“Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues”).
[13] See Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 371. Azoulay reported that Fanon was “very active” in getting to know “the specific culture of Algerian Arabs” and of Algerian society, and that the organization of the Moorish café “provoked sarcastic criticism from the other doctors” (Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 191). Numa Murard, who interviewed Azoulay in 2007, notes that “Fanon permet aussi de redonner vie aux pratique religieuses, que l’hôpital…a tendance à détruire.” See Numa Murard, “Psycothérapie institutionnelle à Blida.”
[16] Learning about this with and from these practitioners will be part of my own efforts in a project that I am leading with Carter Mathes on “Understanding Spirit: Black Religious Practice and the Search for Racial Justice,” hosted by the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies and funded by The Henry Luce Foundation. The three-year project starts in May 2022 and will include the participation of Arts for Art in New York, Nana Sula Spirit in New Orleans, and Corredor Afro as well as the Corporación Piñones se Integra in Puerto Rico. There may be another example here of decolonizing religious studies (as well as philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology) in theory and practice, which could provide material for one or more reflections that continue the discussion in “Religious Studies and/in the Decolonial Turn” and this entry.
In the course of my recent research in Iran, I read informative studies of mysticism in Iran and found Ata Anzali’s history of Mysticism in Iran (see Anzali’s contribution to this symposium here) especially compelling. His and other studies led me to ask: How should we think about modern ideas that were thought up by poets, writers, theologians, scholars, and scientists who lived in pre-modern times? What kinds of blind spots has this division of modern/pre-modern created in our thinking? I would say that there are possibilities that we do not think about because our whole intellectual edifice is so invested in a version of western modernity that is eloquently and methodically critiqued by Robert Orsi in his book on History and Presence.
One of the major blind spots has to do with the rather impoverished way in which we have come to think of language. We make certain kinds of assumptions that prevent us from understanding the many ways language shapes experience. For example, we assume that the relationship between form and meaning always holds, is always relevant, is predictable, and is constant regardless of the kind of text and kind of activity that we are engaged in; that semantic meaning is of utmost importance in our encountering of texts; that memorization, repetition, and regular recitation that result inevitably in internalization make no difference in how language transforms experience. In short, we have an implicit but very consequential idea of the modern sign that is in part a result of how we imagine a modern religion to be.
A modern religion is one where hermeneutic activity with regard to scripture and all similar texts dominates. It is the most important factor in understanding “belief.” Interaction between such texts and individuals is an intellectual give and take where meaning is only the semantic/interpretive one; and believers must operate in their vernacular as opposed to a sacred language associated with their religion (hence Islam and Judaism are not modern).[1] Believers must engage with scripture in their vernacular because they must “understand” what they read. This is all very Protestant, though when we actually look at Protestant church services, for example, and their recitation of Psalms, we realize that we are living with a stereotype of modern religion that even Protestants do not follow. Monique Scheer addresses this point while asking what a modern religion is in the first place, a question close to my heart.
Ferdinand de Saussure, who grew up in Calvinist Geneva (with a few years in Paris and Leipzig), is repeatedly referred to as the “father of modern linguistics.” What in particular was “modern” about his intellectual contribution was that, for him, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Language is a system where everything coheres, according to him. It does not matter where the sign is located; in the Qur’an, the Torah or in psalms, or poems and prayers. Nor does it matter how we use the sign; that relationship is still arbitrary. The problem is that this view does not help us understand why centuries-old texts come to have such a sway over believers, reciters, performers, listeners, spectators, and interpreters. The arbitrariness of the sign leaves us with no answer to this question. That the relationship between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, not logical, nor natural, is true but where does this take us? It could be objected that de Saussure did not set out to theorize language from the point of view of the speaker and her experience, but what he called “the nature of language.” This is true but we are heirs to his conception of language, a conception that has been fed by the Protestant Reformation leading to the idea that any text can be translated and the experience ought not to matter because, whether in or out of translation, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. If there are important texts, it is their interpretation that matters. Bringing what Orsi says, that modernity is premised on absence to bear on this discussion, one could say that the thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign is premised on the speaker’s absence, on the absence of a voice (whether divine or not) (62).
In the Saussurian framework, language leaves religion intact because in the performance of religious rituals and in engaging with religious texts, the dominance of the idea of the modern sign and the singular centrality of the semantic/interpretive does not allow for a different imagination of what language can do to the experience of religion.
One other crucial factor in our implicit assumptions about modern religion is that only when we use our own words to pray and talk to God is it possible for us to be sincere in that act. But if we use someone else’s words in the form of a prayer or poem, that language lies outside of us and sincerity is harder to achieve if not impossible (Webb Keane’s Christian Moderns elaborates on this view). How can we use others’ words to address God and still be sincere? Here there is also an idea of “freedom of speech” that is lurking in the background. If we recite a prayer that we have not authored, our freedom is somehow constrained because we have agreed to use the constraints of someone else’s words.
When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others and matters other than semantic meaning give meaning to and shape such experiences. Kabir Tambar’s piece articulates this point quite well. Hence, when we carefully examine what happens in the recitation of prayers, poems, the psalms, and so on we see that so much of what I just described is wholly inadequate to an analysis where repetition, recitation from memory, and embodiment are at the center of what we are trying to understand and analyze.
One of the major discoveries I had during my fieldwork that truly shook my thinking had to do with what I was told about the recitation of the obligatory ritual prayer, namāz, whose verses are from Qur’anic suras (chapters) that are recited 5 times a day (varying in length) everyday. I was told by many of the women whom I talked to that each time one stands to pray, all kinds of factors affect what one ends up actually communicating to God. I had started out by asking whether doing the namāz is communication and everyone showed surprise at the question. Of course it was communication, they said. Becoming adept at doing this prayer while making efforts not to treat it as a rote activity means in large part to use the words that belong to God to tell Him what the reciter wants to communicate, what she has in mind—questions, worries, gratitude and so on. Hence, the relationship between form and meaning in the act of namāz is not necessary, predictable, or constant. It is crucial to incorporate this into our efforts to understand the work of rituals. In short, the namāz, like many other rituals that involve language, is a recitational act, not a hermeneutic one.
When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others and matters other than semantic meaning give meaning to and shape such experiences.
A related matter brought up by Amy Hollywood has to do with formality and its association with what she calls “religion of the heart” vs. “religion of the law.” Perhaps if we were to change our idea of formality, we would not associate it with law. Namāz is formal in that it has prescribed body postures, has a set sequence of acts, and the words are from the Qur’an. Yet, because individuals use the words to tell God what they want, and because it unfolds in time so that its outcome (degree of concentration, feelings of closeness or distance with God, and so on) is unpredictable, it is not perceived as rigid. This unpredictability is part of the challenge and the attraction of doing the namāz so that its formality does not foreclose the involvement of the heart.
Both Amy Hollywood and Ahoo Najafian bring up the matter of the relationship between religion and literature. I cannot agree more with what they say. We are moved by language, reach various difficult to account for understandings, and experience heightened awareness without being able to categorize these as “secular” or “religious.” I find this to be the promise of the world of poetry and of literature more broadly. Without paying attention to such adjacent and overlapping worlds to religion, we are stuck with the binary of religious and secular as Joshua Lupo puts it, and we isolate religion from neighbors that it clearly exchanges with, albeit often in challenging ways.
Related to the two pieces just mentioned is Brenna Moore’s discussion of Islamic mysticism and making Muslims’ forms of religiosity understandable without orientalizing them. Finally, I agree with Setrag Manoukian, as I elaborate in this piece and in my book, that what we have paid little attention to is that language is not always there for “communication” purposes between a sender and a receiver. Both prayer and poetry show this quite well.
I am grateful to all the authors of the blogs on my book. Each brings up points that I would like to discuss at greater length. I also want to thank the editors of Contending Modernities for organizing this symposium on my book and offering me much food for thought.
[1] Although Latin was not the original language of the Bible, it came to be regarded as sacred for many centuries and so as many other scholars have pointed out, the use of Latin figures prominently in Catholicism being regarded as a “backward” religion.
This image, along with the additional images below, provide a glimpse into a Catholic high school in North Philadelphia where the author taught science. This image is of a hallway mural painted by students. Photo Courtesy of the author.
In September of 2019, I embarked upon my first year of teaching science at a small Catholic high school in the heart of North Philadelphia. Leading into the school year, I had assumed that the scientific and theological aspects of my undergraduate education would be most relevant to my new position, but as I navigated the ups and downs of being a first-year teacher (and eventually a first-year teacher amidst a global pandemic and a national reckoning with racial injustice), I soon came to realize that it was my background in peace studies that had most prepared me for what I would encounter in the classroom.
As the year progressed and I built relationships with my students, I became acutely attuned to the ways that violence in their communities impacted them and their ability to learn. My background in peace studies guided me as I supported and learned from my students as they lived amidst classmates lost to gun violence, food insecurity, poverty, racism, and homelessness. This background, along with my studies in theology, also pushed me to wonder how Catholic schools can most effectively draw on their theological roots to maximize their potential as religious peacebuilding institutions. What specifically can Catholic and religious schools (and by extension, the teachers who work there) do to be active agents of peace and support students living in contexts dominated by violence? This question was made even more intriguing because the vast majority of students at my school were not Catholic, and many were not religious at all.
While beginning my teaching career, I was simultaneously enrolled in a master’s-level teacher education program. My coursework addressed topics such as inquiry-based instruction, appropriate ways to assess student progress, and how to accommodate students with learning differences. For the most part, however, it did not attempt to engage with the reality of violence that encapsulates many students’ lives, the possibility that schools and education are an essential part of building a more peaceful and just society, nor the inherent reality of religion’s interplay with these ideas in the context of a faith-based educational institution. I was left to ponder and engage with these ideas on my own in real time in the classroom. Being an educator that values, above all else, building affirming relationships with students, meeting them where they are, and walking together on a path of growth demands that I listen and engage with the lived experiences of the students in front of me.
An image of the author’s classroom. Photo courtesy of the author.
The questions I had hoped to explore in graduate school were questions that seemed important and relevant given my experiences teaching in North Philadelphia, and are relevant today as I teach at a privileged Catholic high school in the Midwest that is increasingly more diverse both racially and socioeconomically. How can teachers and students co-create peace? How can religious schools draw on the theological richness of their tradition and charism to maximize their potential as religious peacebuilding institutions? In what ways have students’ experiences in religious schools shaped their conceptions of peace, violence, and their own ability to be peacebuilders, regardless of students’ faith traditions? These are the questions drive me as an educator-peacebuilder.
I firmly believe that education should play an essential role in an intersectional approach to justice-oriented peacebuilding. It should affirm human dignity, dismantle systems of oppression, and empower people to be the fullest versions of themselves. Schools and teachers should foster cultures of peace and accompany students whose lives are encapsulated by violence. Their classrooms should be places where peace and justice come alive in real time. Religious schools are poised to be particularly powerful peacebuilding institutions if they can weave a theology and pedagogy of peace accompanied by justice into a school’s culture and the relationships built there. They can become places of encounter by employing spiritual beliefs, practices, and dispositions that can build peace at all levels of society. Catholic schools in particular are called to respond to the Gospel’s explicit demand to be peacebuilders, to stand with those otherwise cast aside, and to build a society that emanates God’s goodness, love, and mercy to all people.
This being said, to truly build positive peace, religious schools need to acknowledge that in certain cases, religion has played a role in perpetrating violence. Catholic schools are not exempt from this legacy. There have been many instances of sexual abuse by clergy in Catholic educational settings. Furthermore, many boarding schools for indigenous children in North America were run by Catholics. These boarding schools tore children away from their families, were ripe with abuse, and inflicted cultural violence by forcing children to abandon their indigenous heritage.
Beyond simply recognizing these and other histories of violence, Catholic schools should actively seek to combat violence perpetrated by religious institutions, schools included, and cycles of violence that religion might have begun. This requires that schools be cognizant of causes of direct, structural, and cultural violence and self-reflective about how their own practices have contributed to these forms of violence. In order to effectively counter any potential violence inflicted by religious schools, it is necessary that educator-peacebuilders in these institutions root themselves in the context of the school community and the lived experiences of the students and their families.
Any peacebuilding happening in the context of religiously affiliated schools must be grounded in a bottom-up, rather than a top-down, approach. A top-down model would begin with the religious tradition itself, then take students’ experiences and attempt to fit them within the framework of the tradition, doing away with anything and anyone that does not fit. A bottom-up model, however, begins with the students’ and community’s experiences, struggles, what brings them joy, the things that inspire them, how violence and injustice have impacted them, and their values and aspirations. Then, mindful of and informed by these things, the school and its faculty and staff can then discern how to best integrate the religious tradition in such a way that affirms what a student has lived through, offers support and encouragement, and invites students to advocate for peace and justice in their communities.
This shift in power dynamic grounds religious peace education in students’ lived experiences and is necessary given that many religious schools in communities impacted by direct and structural violence serve students who might not identify with the school’s faith tradition or any faith tradition at all. The only way for schools to effectively utilize their religious identity to build peace in these communities is to make their peacebuilding efforts accessible to students outside of the school’s own tradition. This approach also builds a bridge between Catholic education and the modern world, creating avenues of interaction and opportunities for growth.
There are multiple ways religious peacebuilding can play out in the space of Catholic education. Teachers can ask students to relate stories of liberation and redemption found in Christian scripture to their own lives, stories, and experiences, and can also integrate scripture from other traditions into the classroom. Schools can cultivate a prayer life that is inclusive, honors students’ faith traditions, and is rooted in their culture. Faith can offer a perspective on human dignity grounded in the Christian belief that each person is made in the image and likeness of God. If this perspective imbues a school culture in a profound way, it will have a positive impact on policies and procedures as well as on how the school interacts with its surrounding community. Christian teachings on mercy and reconciliation can inform discipline policies and procedures, shifting them towards restorative justice and away from strictly punitive practices. These teachings can also motivate Catholic schools to acknowledge violence inflicted by religious educational institutions and actively play a role in healing and justice. Many religious orders that sponsor schools offer frameworks and charisms to ground conversation and action in the classroom and beyond, such as the Critical Concerns of the Sisters of Mercy or the “Grad at Grad” profile used by Jesuit schools.
An image outside of the school where the author taught. Image courtesy of the author.
Catholic schools must meet students where they are at and truly know them and love them as they are. Encounter and relationship are essential elements of both effective peacebuilding and effective pedagogy. Employing a peacebuilding lens on Catholic education shifts the primary focus of a Catholic school away from conversion or indoctrination towards a theological imperative of care, with the primary goal being active accompaniment and the creation of a more just world.
Having at separate times inhabited the spaces of teacher education programs, formal theological study, communities immersed in direct and structural violence, Catholic school classrooms, and the study of peace and justice, I cannot help but wonder what each of these spaces can learn from each other. How can peace studies inform the work that is happening in schools and classrooms? How can the religious dimensions of one’s school increase its ability to build peace accompanied by justice? How can education and pedagogical practices be leveraged to engage in peacebuilding work in faith-based institutions?
As I continue my career as a Catholic-educator-peacebuilder, it is my hope that others will join me in an endeavor to draw on the richness of faith traditions, in Catholic contexts and otherwise, to make classrooms and schools places where true peace flourishes, grows, and overflows into the world, and places where students who live amidst violence can find comfort and hope. This post does not seek to provide definitive answers to the questions it poses nor cover every scholarly examination of these topics that already exists. Rather, inspired by my students, their experiences, and the relationships we built, it merely calls upon the disciplines and practitioners of religion, education, and peacebuilding to come together and learn from each other. It is my hope that together, these disciplines can collaboratively create something more beautiful than any of them could accomplish on their own.
Jenna Streich is a biology teacher at Saint Joseph High School in South Bend, IN. Prior to the 2021–2022 school year, she taught physical science and geoscience at Mercy Career & Technical High School in Philadelphia, PA, where she also founded Debate Club and was a member of the school’s technology team. Jenna has designed and implemented culturally relevant, inquiry-based pedagogy for diverse student populations and is passionate about integrating Catholic education and peacebuilding. She also has experience as a music teacher, co-directing a middle school band program in South Bend and interning with the Artane School of Music in Dublin, Ireland. Jenna holds an M.S. in secondary education from Saint Joseph’s University and a B.A. in theology and pre-health studies with a minor in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame.
Leaf of Calligraphy from Poems by Sa’di. Via The Met Museum. Public Domain.
In the fall of 1997, when I was living in Shiraz, a city in the south of Iran famous for its poets and its mystics, a few times I woke up early enough to join a small group of women who at dawn went for walks up one of the barren hills surrounding the city. Once the abode of saints and the source of subterranean water springs, these hills were already menaced by urban expansion back then, but still constituted for Shirazis an exit route from the concerns of everyday life and an opening towards a separate domain of experience. One of the women, a grandmother who lived first-hand Iran’s social and political upheavals, told me that while ascending the hills at dawn, she composed instant poems about God, nature, and her feelings. Words would come to her and the rhythm of her steps, intertwining with the embodied memory of the few verses she had learned in school, generated a sound pattern that weaved these words into composite expressions. She felt a connection with the universe and a correlate sense of emotional relief. At times, if she remembered these short compositions or had scribbled them on scraps of paper, she recited them to her family or friends in a self-joking halfway manner. Her position as an old woman allowed her to both inhabit and disavow these “poems.” Her “poems” certainly would not have been considered such by any of the innumerable literati of the city, but, precisely for this reason, they stood out for me as capturing something of a specific mode of existence that made irrelevant the distinction between communication with a transcendent God and a sensation of being one with the universe. Defying presumed differentiations between compositional rules and free improvisation, between argumentation and feeling, her “un-poems” were at once metaphysical and immediate. Their triviality was an act of profanation of every religious and poetic order. “Sprung at dawn on the hills, the irreverent micro-epiphanies of an old woman of Shiraz displaced centuries of sophisticated elaborations of theologians, mystics, and poets,” I scribbled in my notes. But I had to interrupt the walks, could not retrieve any of the un-poems, and lost touch with my acquaintance. This mode of existence remained an undeveloped comment in my notebook.
Now many years later, Haeri’s new important book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires helps me understand better the early morning Shirazi un-poems of my lost acquaintance and the mode of existence they delineated. The world of the women of Tehran Haeri vividly describes is twenty years more recent and hundreds of kilometers away from the barren hills of Shiraz. The Tehrani women’s engagement with prayer and poetry seems to me far from the ways of my Shirazi acquaintance. But what the Tehrani women do, as narrated by Haeri, helps clarify how the Shirazi un-poems weren’t a simplistic and irreflexive blurring of prayer and poetry, as they might have appeared to some Shirazi, but also Tehrani or international learned observers. Rather, following Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who I take as a guide in this short essay, they were an act of profanation that made communication with the transcendent inoperative by opening up a different relationship between language, life, and the world.
To understand how such profanation can happen, in conversation with Haeri’s findings, I examine three aspects of the complex relationship between prayer and poetry. Discussing how women in the Iranian capital Tehran pray, read poetry, and take classes in Qur‘an and Persian mystical literature, Haeri explains that the women she frequented reappropriate institutionalized, state sponsored Islam by performing prayers as an intimate engagement with God, drawing in equal measure on their relationship with the divine and the poetic. The relationship between prayer and poetry in these women’s practices is far from simple. Prayer and poetry are too similar to be separated, but too different to be equated. Their interconnection is also what sets them apart.
The first point of divergent convergence between prayer and poetry is the bilingualism that defines their practice. In Iran, Arabic is the language of the Qur‘an and prescribed prayers (salat in Arabic, namaz in Persian—the bilingualism starts here). Persian is the language of mystical poetry and everyday use. Iranians usually study Arabic in school, but they often rely on Persian translations to read the Qur‘an for its meaning, and use Persian for voluntary prayers (do‘a), though collections of Arabic prayers are also widely used. Mystical Persian poetry is full of Qur‘anic references, and while written in a language intelligible to any Persian speaker, its metaphors and rhetorical figures require long term engagement and socialization to be appreciated. This intertwining of the two languages makes it such that, as Haeri explains, Arabic is seen as the sacred language in which one fulfills one’s religious duties. Arabic resonates with the divine even if (or precisely because) one doesn’t immediately understand its meanings but remains one step removed from the joys and pains of everyday life. Persian instead is the vernacular that offers the women a repertoire of mystical verses to put into words their spiritual and existential attachments. Persian is the everyday language that allows them to address God as a close confidant in informal prayers, even though in these conversations they can never quite fully inhabit the transcendent plane of Arabic. This bilingualism is no simple opposition between a religious language and a secular one because the interplay between Arabic and Persian opens and closes intersecting sacred and profane domains of experience. At the limit, the two languages tend to converge towards something more indistinct, at once enlightening and frightening. Though according to some religious scholars, Persian can be used in certain sections of the namaz, using lines of Persian poetry in the prayer sequence one might risk diverging from procedure. Probing such linguistic intersections, moving back and forth between intimacy and transcendence, as Haeri narrates, the Tehran women at times tend to expand linguistic boundaries and devotional rules to create a space that in their view makes communication effective and gives them the sense that they have performed a “good” prayer. Combining the planes of expression of Arabic and Persian, the women reconfigure the established order of things through a linguistic experience that makes the power of words cosmological.
The second point of divergent convergence between prayer and poetry is the relationship between rules and desires. In conversation with Haeri, the women seem to suggest that instituted Islam is an affair of prescribed rules and regulations that, while necessary, makes one’s relationship to God distant and anonymous, turning prayer into a dull repetition of empty formulas. They contrast this rigidity with poetry, a speech act that they see as translating inner feelings into words. As in the case of bilingualism, this is no simple juxtaposition. To start with, as Haeri shows, rules in prayers are crucial for establishing the ground of devotional effectiveness: it is the embodied reiteration of words and movements that gives them meaning. But rules and manners are only one dimension of prayer. Its success is also predicated on an appropriate disposition, itself a matter of self-cultivation perhaps, but one that is not dependent upon the application of an abstract rule to a routine performance. Success in prayer depends on how one inhabits the rule and therefore feels it: the heartless pronunciation of prayer will not lead you very far, say the Tehrani women, this time agreeing with what religious scholars say in the media. Poetry, indirectly, helps in developing the proper intention and disposition in prayer because with its figures and associations poetry makes the world of spiritual imagination vivid and concrete: it offers a descriptive language of desire. But poetry is made of rules and manners no less than prayer. Aesthetic pleasure in Persian poetry is achieved via the appropriate assembling of different elements: proper meter, rhyme, and rhetorical figures are essential to poetry. One can take as an example the verse by the famous 13th century mystical poet Jalal ad-din Rumi that Haeri uses as the title of her book in her own beautiful translation. The verse, composed of two lines, is pronounced by the Prophet Moses addressing a shepherd on how to pray:
Hiç ādābi o tartibi maju har çe mikhāhad del-e tang-at begu
“Don’t search for manners and rules
Say what your longing heart desires”
The verse states that in prayer one should relinquish manners and rules (ādāb and tartib) and simply express one’s feelings and desires. However, this intimation is articulated through the very poetic conventions the verse incites readers to leave aside. For example, sound alliterations such as the one between the terms ādāb and tartib are fundamental in poetic compositions. In fact, the entire verse is an exercise in parallelism. Appearing at the end of the verse, the two imperatives maju/begu (“don’t search/say,”) highlight the negative/positive contrastive injunction that defines the two lines that make up the verse. In its apparent simplicity—these imperative forms are part of everyday vernacular in contemporary Iran—this parallelism exhibits complete mastery of conventions via phonemic (m/b, a/e, j/g) and semantic (don’t/do) oppositions, while also enfolding, hidden in the rhyme at the end of the verse, the object of the prayer’s desire. The ending of the two imperatives, the vowel u, is also in Persian the third person pronoun which might refer, as Haeri explains, both to the beloved (who makes one’s heart long) as well as to God. The pronoun u is gender neutral and can be translated in English as either he, she, or it. The opposition between a negation (“don’t search”) and an affirmation (“say”) finds its resolution in a neutral desire which also constitutes the verse’s rhyme. Poetry works here as a device that by contrasting what it declares with how it works asserts its own self-referentiality. By exhibiting rules and manners but negating their relevance the verse demonstrates its own power of expression: this is what poetry can do. Despite the women’s tendency to see them as opposite, rules and desires in prayer and poetry are not mutually exclusive. However, while in prayer rules need to be internalized in order for them to feel as desirable, in poetry the rules need to be explicitly exhibited in order to make poetry itself the object of desire.
The third point of convergence between prayer and poetry also marks their ultimate divergence. The Tehrani women conceive prayers as acts of communication. For them, Haeri tells us, prayers are the linguistic medium to address God. Whether their performance is perceived as successful or not, prayers, as rituals, renew and reinforce the transcendent distance that separates God and humans by establishing a communication channel between them. (Haeri suggests that the women see their successful prayers as producing a state of “presence” a sense of intimate nearness with God, and this is certainly appropriate, but such presence is the correlate effect of an act of communication with the distant Other. In other words, in prayer presence can be felt only as the opposite of the necessary absence that establishes the act of communication). When women feel that God is not answering their calls, the communication channel of prayer is no less effective, to the extent that women stop praying, even for long periods, because they expect a response. Eventually they often come to realize that such a response is dependent on their own disposition, because God always answers, either by triggering events in a person’s life, or by not responding.
Poetry is as transformative a speech act as prayer is, however, the power of poetry does not rest on communication but, as I mentioned, on self-referentiality. Persian poems, as the verse quoted above shows, often address something or someone, but their effectiveness does not rest on the speech act reaching the addressee (whose identity is therefore ultimately irrelevant from this perspective). The success of poems is not predicated on an answer to the call. A Persian poem works when its assemblage, drawing attention to the expressive power of language via linguistic means, generates an intransitive desire, a desire of desiring, thus reorienting its direction away from a transcendent order towards the poem itself: poetry is self-sufficient. In so doing, verses trespass any circumscribed domain of experience, undo any sacred separation between a metaphysical order and the here and now, making temporarily irrelevant the distinction between presence and absence. Certainly, as the Tehrani women seem to do, this power of poetry can be retooled to supplement prayer with an uncommunicative dimension, but ultimately prayer requires the re-inscription of language into a separate order that is beyond it, otherwise its own efficacy as an act of communication is compromised, and its distinction with ordinary language neutralized.
A (Shirazi) poetic mode of existence instead is predicated on this very indistinction. The immanent power of poetry of not-communicating is what makes possible to experience language and life differently. In these moments, losing its function of saying something, language is exposed as pure event, revealing its own power of expression. After all, this is also what at times life is: life and nothing else. There are times when, walking at dawn, distinctions between life as it is and life as it should be are suspended. This is the power of poetry and its mode of existence, at least as I had the fortune to encounter it on the hills of Shiraz. This is the “faith of the old women of Shiraz” as I came to understand it.
Setrag Manoukian is a cultural anthropologist interested in knowledge and its relationship with power. His area of specialty is Iran. He is the author of essays on Iran’s society and culture, and of City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History, Poetry (Routledge, 2012). He teaches in the Institute of Islamic Studies and the Department of Anthropology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Riza-yi `Abbasi (ca. 1565–1635), The Old man and the Youth, second quarter 17th century, Islamic, Safavid period (1501–1722). Ink, transparent and opaque watercolor, and gold on paper; 5 in. high 2.12 in. wide (12.7 cm high 5.4 cm wide). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1925 (25.68.5). Public Domain.
Given the complicated and sometimes dangerous political reality that scholars and journalists face on the ground, there is a dearth of in-depth studies that shed light on the dynamics of lived religion in Iran. Niloofar Haeri’s new book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires is the latest among less than a dozen books that have been published in the past decade on the topic. Other examples include works from Alireza Doostdar, Narges Bajoghli, and Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi. The book offers us a fascinating window into the religious lives of a group of women through the lens of prayer and poetry. As a good anthropologist, Haeri is forthcoming with her own positionality at the very beginning of the book. “Having grown up in a religious family in Iran,” she says in the preface, “and having lived through the 1979 revolution, I spent many years of my life running the other way whenever the subject of religion came up. I was uninterested and at times even quietly hostile.” After a crucial encounter with a religious relative who tells her about how well her prayers had gone one evening the author begins to understand that—in spite of living many years in the company of men and women who prayed—she “did not understand the most basic ritual that Muslims must perform every day”—an honest and brave admission that many secular scholars would not easily make (xi).
Despite this very modest starting point, Haeri succeeds in positioning herself in the field among a group of educated women who are brought together by their love of Persian mystical poetry. She listens empathetically, asks important questions, and develops an analytical framework that is informed by some of the best studies done in the field of anthropology of religion. The book succeeds exceedingly well in its primary mission: to demonstrate to the western reader (especially the secular ones) that despite the way that Islamic piety is often associated with rigid formalism, rituals like prayer (namāz in Persian) are complex and dynamic phenomena deeply connected to the inner spiritual life of the faithful and, in the case of her interlocuters, intertwined with a mystical understanding of religion.
Two concepts stand out as crucial for Haeri’s analysis of namāz as performed and understood by her interlocuters: ʿerfān and hāl. A close analysis of the two concepts, I believe, is very helpful in unsettling some of the dominant binaries through which religion is often understood in Iran. These binaries include secular/religious, hegemonic/marginalized, and traditional/modern. This is the theme I would like to explore a bit more in depth in this piece.
ʿErfān, which is usually translated to “mysticism” in English literature, is a widely used concept in contemporary Persian discourse. While the concept was invented in late seventeenth century as an alternative to the traditional term tasawwuf (Sufism) as I have shown in my own work, it was only during the second half of the twentieth century that it began to be widely used as a staple of public discourse on religion, a trend that only accelerated in the aftermath of the Revolution. Haeri is aware of this historical contingency and, as such, she tries to situate her interlocuters’ understanding and practice of ʿerfān in the context of Iran’s recent history, especially after the Revolution. She notes the influence that the Islamic Revolution had on drawing the attention of the women she worked with to religion (xiv, 23) and the broader interest in religious topics among the public. In the aftermath of the Revolution, Iranians have been engaged in extremely vital, fascinating, and rigorous public (and private) debates about religion which cannot be simply reduced to a debate between “believers and nonbelievers, pro-Islam and anti-Islam, pro-regime and anti-regime” (4). When it comes to the tradition of ʿerfān, especially as understood through the lens of Persian mystical poetry, there has been an exponential increase in its practice after the Revolution. As Haeri correctly notes, the popularity of the tradition of ʿerfān is not confined to classes and gatherings focused on reading and discussing the mystical poetry of Rumi and Hafez—like the focus group with whom Haeri worked. Rather, it encompasses a broad spectrum of people from different religious persuasions, from seculars who won’t identify as religious, to the Islamist proponents of the Islamic Republic. To quote Haeri, “[T]he depth and breadth of the mystic tradition in Iran is such that it divides even individuals, groups, and institutions that are, to one degree or another, proponents of the Islamic republic” (18). Interest and investment in the tradition of ʿerfān, in other words, defies the usual binaries such as religious/secular or hegemonic/minoritized (61–64).
While the concept of ʿerfān has been the subject of some scholarly analysis in the past, Haeri’s focus on the concept of hāl is both original and thought provoking. Like ʿerfān, this is also a widely used term in contemporary Persian discourse that is “meant to capture a sudden, fleeting, and unpredictable change in one’s emotional state, a moment when one feels an overwhelming sense of connection to the divine (to nature, to the universe)—a sense of ecstasy, joy, or even deep sorrow” (13). The term can literally mean either “present moment,” or “[someone or something’s] state of affairs” (either physically or mentally), but its use in Sufi literature is more technical. Al-Qushayri (d. 1074), in his famous al-Risālah defines hāl as “something that descends upon the hearts [of the mystics] regardless of their intentions, their [attempts] to attract it, or their [desire to] earn it. This can be [the states of] joy, grief, expansion, contraction, passionate longing, vexation, awe or need.”[1] This latter meaning or something close to it, as Haeri notes, is widely used in contemporary Iran among religious people in reference to the experiential aspects of their piety. The concept of hāl in this meaning is central to Haeri’s analysis because it is directly related to the question she begins the book with: How can a prayer go well? The answer is simple: if it is accompanied by good hāl. Along with other central concepts such as ekhlās (sincerity) and hozūr (presence), therefore, hāl is the backbone of a pietistic discourse that spotlights the subjective dynamics involved in the act of prayer rather than its ritual formalism.
By dwelling on concepts like hāl, Haeri’s analysis puts a premium on the experiential aspect of religion. Yet, as she notes in passing, this emphasis runs against the pervasive “mistrust of the experiential” in the study of religion and beyond (81). The author foregoes any discussion of the theoretical roots of this mistrust and its ramifications for her work. I do think, however, that this would have been a fruitful engagement. It is important to note that this mistrust was primarily a corrective re-action to a popularized conception of religion promoted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Protestant theologians and scholars like Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834), William James (d. 1910), and Rudolf Otto (d. 1937). In this lineage of thinking, religion is primarily understood and analyzed as a matter of personal direct experience with the “Infinite” or the “Divine,” which comes at the expense of taking ritual and communal aspects of religion seriously. Interestingly, while Haeri’s interlocutors are very comfortable with the ritual of namāz performed in private, they seem to share this suspicion of the communal, which manifests in their dislike of communal settings for prayer. According to her, they “mostly expressed a preference for praying at home, in their own rooms or in a space where they can be alone….[P]raying in crowded areas such as a mosque was spoken of as not being conducive to concentration, which is necessary for a good namāz but a state that is hard to achieve and a constant struggle” (81–82).
While one might find pre-modern predecessors for this negative attitude towards public performance of namāz, I would argue that it has no precursors. It is true that one can find a critique of publicly performed acts of piety through the themes of ostentation (tazāhor) and insincerity (riyā) in Persian poetry (80). This critique, however, is not really what these women seem to be concerned with in the above quote. Rather, they seem to see a publicly performed namāz to be less than ideal because it is not conducive to a good hāl. My preliminary impression of pre-modern sources is that the use of the term hāl, especially when it is used in its mystical sense, is not as extensive and widespread as Haeri seems to suggest (21). Rather, I would suggest that the early- to mid-twentieth century developments play a much more pronounced role in the formation of modern conceptions of piety in Iran, including the concept of hāl. I would argue that, similar to the wide-ranging appeal of ʿerfān in modern Iran, the focus on the experiential aspect of piety is something that pervades the contemporary religious landscape—from the older generation of liberal-minded individuals (like Haeri’s interlocutors) to the younger Islamist supporters of the Revolution (like the basījīs, members of paramilitary umbrella organization associated with the Revolutionary Guards). In other words, while the latter group might oppose the former as “secularists” and the former denounce the latter as “fundamentalists,” deeper currents of modernity constitute them both. An anecdote from the book might shed more light on this point. “Many of these women believe,” Haeri says “that their mothers and fathers rarely talked to God in the ways that they do…They characterized their parents’ approach and that of the generation before them as mowrūsi (inherited) and ābā va ajdādi (fathers and ancestors) …They did not do ‘their own research’” (116–17). Here, Haeri’s interlocutors portray their parents’ mode of piety as rote ritualism and blind obedience to ancestral traditions. In contrast, they are proud to identify with a mode of piety that is self-conscious, choice-driven, rational, and experience-centered. This is exactly the type of piety the Islamist ideologies of the Revolution have promoted for decades now.
My remarks here, of course, are tentative and should be taken with a grain of salt. A robust genealogical study of concepts like hāl is necessary to arrive at a proper understanding of this important aspect of religious experience in Iran. In the meantime, we can thank Haeri and her wonderful book for prompting us to think about how we might be able to rehabilitate the experiential without sacrificing the ritual or the communal.
Ata Anzali is an Associate Professor of Religion at Middlebury College where he teaches courses on Islamic traditions and comparative religion. He received his PhD from Rice University after studying in multiple institutions of higher education in Iran. He holds an MA in Islamic philosophy and Kalam from Tehran University and has extensively studied the philosophical and the mystical traditions of Islam at the Qom Seminary. He is the author of “Mysticism” in Iran: the Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept. His research interests include social and intellectual history of Iran since the sixteenth century. He is particularly interested in the genealogy of modern religious concepts in Persian.
Calvary Cemetery (Queens, New York) set against the modern Manhattan skyline. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
It is no secret that many former European Christian theologians who became students of world religions drew on phenomenology in their work. The philosophical tradition of phenomenology they in part drew on began in the early twentieth century with Edmund Husserl’s attempt to understand how humans experience the world prior to that experience’s redescription via the social and “hard” sciences. To study religion phenomenologically for scholars of world religions—whom, among others, include Rudolf Otto (d. 1937), Gerardus van der Leeuw (d. 1950), and Mircea Eliade (d. 1986)—meant to bracket one’s own assumptions about the world and, as best as one could, empathetically describe what religious experiences are like for other persons and the manifold ways they are expressed across the various religious traditions of the world. While partially an attempt at understanding and arranging the various features of the world’s religion for the purposes of scholarly analysis, for many of these scholars, phenomenology of religion was also part of a quasi-divine quest to articulate an alternative to the modern world. They saw the latter as fragmented, alienated, and devoid of meaning; to articulate the deep meaning of religion was to offer an antidote to this disease of nihilism.
It is also no secret that this method of studying religion is now seen as passé and lacking in nuance, self-reflexivity, and attention to the dynamics of power in shaping the lives of religious actors and those who study them. Yet, even several decades following the demise of this theoretical and methodological approach, a scholar like Tim Murphy still felt the need in 2010 to write: “I study phenomenology of religion only to bury it,” an ambition in which he is not alone (34).
Murphy’s desire to bury phenomenology is the culmination of critiques of phenomenology of religion that began in the 1990s. During that decade scholars styling themselves as critical students of religion—rather than its “caretakers”—sought to dismantle phenomenology and in its place construct a theoretical approach to religion grounded in genealogical approaches inherited from Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. Rarely has this involved, however, uncovering the philosophical foundations of phenomenology in philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the impact of those philosophies on the study of religion. It has instead treated them as purveyors of an uncritical approach to examining social formations that should be discarded in favor of more “critical” methods.
The announcement of the death of phenomenology is premature, and in this brief post I show that its premature announcement has resulted in a vision of the critical study of religion that is anything but critical. This is because the critical study of religion has imagined itself as a detached form of engagement that does not take into account its own situatedness in a particular historical moment and the first-person perspective that critical inquiry takes. I do not advocate a return to the phenomenology of Eliade or Otto in staking out this position, but instead suggest that we might utilize the insights of philosophical phenomenology on these subjects to reimagine the practice of scholarship today. This call to engage classical sources in philosophical phenomenology, in other words, is not a call to return to them uncritically. Indeed, as decolonial critics in the Contending Modernities series have shown, these philosophers were often steeped in European nativism and exclusivism. This critical reappropriation is instead intended to contribute to philosophical accounts that prioritize the agency of the marginalized who challenge racism, coloniality, and misogyny in our politics and culture.
Phenomenology and Religion
As an initial counter to Murphy, a reader might expect me to employ the William Faulkner line made famous by Barack Obama, that the “past is never past, it is not even past.” On this account, the past cannot be buried because it remains present in how we experience the world today. But this line would be inadequate because it fails to capture the subjective way in which the past lives in us. I would offer instead the following lines from the Israeli TV drama, Shtisel, which focuses on the everyday lives of Hasidic Jews living in Jerusalem:
The dead don’t go anywhere. They are always here. Every man is a cemetery. An actual cemetery, in whom lie all our grandmothers and grandfathers. The father, the mother, the wife the child. Everyone is here all the time.
I prefer these lines, which are attributed to writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, because they remind us that the past is not something that lives outside of us—it is not something we can peer out at or down at from an objective position—rather, it is something carried within us; it fills us with possibility even as it weighs us down. This poetic description of the past is one that can be philosophically articulated via the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, as I will suggest later, history is the contingent source out of which our very subjectivity, and thus our agency in the world, is formed. Further, a critical reappropriation of Heidegger’s phenomenology provides scholars with a vision of critique that values history, contingency, and emancipatory horizons. There are many ways to practice phenomenology, in other words, and in advising against particular reductive approaches we need not abandon the philosophy altogether.
For instance, to embrace aspects of Heidegger’s thought need not mean embracing Eliade’s. The latter would find Heidegger’s historical phenomenology unacceptable. For Eliade, the modern approach to history—with its emphasis on contingencies rather than universals, the particular rather than the general—risked erasing from human existence the power of meaning, order, and a connection to something larger than our individual existence. Eliade saw his task as being to rescue us from such a vision of history—away from modernity—and to return it to a more authentic mode of being, one that was sacred rather than profane, meaningful rather than nihilistic. In nostalgically longing for a past where the burdens of history could be discarded, Eliade, as critics have rightly pointed out, buttressed an uncritical approach to studying religion that often reified patriarchal, heteronormative, colonialist, and racialized visions of religion. For example, in setting up the experience of “archaic societies” as the norm by which all other societies should be governed, he also took their social structures as natural and normatively binding.[1] Thus, for him, traditional gender roles that may restrain the flourishing of individuals were baked into the very essence of the cosmos. Oppression here is naturalized and normalized in such a way that it appears unchanging (See McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion).
I argue that this kind of phenomenology is indeed both intellectually and ethically troubling. But in discarding all of phenomenology along with it, we have lost insight into the breakthroughs philosophical phenomenology made in understanding how it is we come to know the world through our conscious experience of it, and indeed how we are able to question and critique this knowledge.
The philosophical tools for articulating how it is we are able to make critical claims about the world—that is, claims that challenge the seeming naturalness of the normative order and the political, social, and economic institutions that support that order—can be found in the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger.[2] For Heidegger, our existence in the present is part of a continuum from the past. As such, authenticity is not realized in recovering an idealized past, as it is for Eliade, but in taking it up in the present via historical traditions to which we can be held responsible. This “critical phenomenology” has seeds in Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, which Heidegger developed in more historicist directions. For Husserl, the ego’s knowledge of the world is structured intentionally, that is, it is already directed outward away from itself. Husserl saw this as a universal feature of consciousness that would make it possible to articulate a unified and universal human account knowledge. While agreeing with Husserl’s notion of intentionality, Heidegger went further in embedding intentionality in the contingent world. He contended that the human being was indeed structured outwardly toward the world (what he called Being-in-the-world) but that this outward orientation meant that our very way of understanding the world was shaped by the history into which we were born. He further showed how the practice of critical engagement with the world could only come about through our confrontation with the possibility that our way of living in and understanding the world might come to an end. In realizing that my world is contingent in this way, it becomes possible to see my own responsibility to that world, as well as those with whom I share a community in it.
For Heidegger, our existence in the present is part of a continuum from the past. As such, authenticity is not realized in recovering an idealized past, as it is for Eliade, but in taking it up in the present via historical traditions to which we can be held responsible.
Scholars like Russell McCutcheon and Timothy Fitzgerald have assumed that the phenomenological tradition associated with Heidegger and his teacher Husserl committed the same sins as Eliade: highlighting the importance of cosmic meaning over contingency and history. In other words, Husserl emphasized the efficaciousness of meaning for individual flourishing over the way meaning is bound up with structures of domination. As such, self-described critical scholars of religion have rejected phenomenological approaches in favor of genealogical ones. Borrowing from Foucault and other poststructuralists, these critical scholars contend that the genealogical method best preserves a critical edge to analyses of religious traditions. While beyond the scope of this blog essay, I note briefly here that genealogy and phenomenology are not in essence opposed to one another. Indeed, both Heideggerian phenomenology and Foucauldian genealogy emphasize the importance of contingency and history. Where they perhaps differ is in their orientation towards constructing a future. For Heidegger, the self was not so restrained by contingency that it could not act in the world, whereas for Foucault if often appeared it was (even if in Foucault’s later work he shifted towards a more robust account of individual agency).
It would be easy to dismiss this turn as one that is simply based on a misreading of the history of the relationship between philosophical phenomenology and phenomenology of religion. To some extent, it is. But there is a deeper concern that motivates the turn to genealogy as well. And this is that even among philosophical phenomenologists, there is an emphasis on subjective experience and meaning that is suspect to scholars of religion. Why?
Theology, Critique, and the First-Person Perspective
As previously noted, the study of religion, in which phenomenology of religion was for many years a dominant force, often relied on concepts like subjective experience and meaning. As critics have noted, this often led phenomenologists of religion to implicitly or explicitly forward their own Christian theological assumptions about the world. If the past of religious studies lays in the particularity of the Christian theological tradition, so the logic goes, then any critical study of religion in the present must reject that past. Otherwise, scholarship on religion risks simply being another form of theology, and the very reason for the existence of the discipline of religious studies and the departments in which it is studied are thrown into question. Turning to Foucault or Derrida in the past has allowed scholars to claim a critical stance towards religion that bypasses the question of their own subjective relationship to their object of study. Recent developments within the humanities, however, have pointed to the limits of these genealogical approaches and provide an opening to return to phenomenology with fresh eyes.
One proponent of the postcritical turn in the humanities is Rita Felski, who in The Limits of Critique suggests that the critical approach taken by scholars in the humanities no longer offers the resources necessary to meet the needs of students or the wider scholarly community. Following Paul Ricoeur, she describes the critical approach that is now dominant in the humanities as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” characterized by a Sherlock Holmesian “detective-like” approach to examining texts. It is “an attitude of vigilance, detachment, wariness (suspicion) with identifiable conventions of commentary (hermeneutics)” (3). Such an approach pushes to the wayside how a text might affect me, challenge me, or move me. It leaves aside, in other words, the affective ways in which I might meaningfully relate to the text. In detaching myself from my object of study, I repress the ways that I subjectively relate to the text.
Still from the American drama film Sherlock Holmes (1922) with John Barrymore, on page 41 of the May 13, 1922 Exhibitors Herald. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Detachment is often treated as a virtue, rather than a vice, in the study of religion. Detachment, we are taught, is necessary especially because of the subject matter we study. To be too attached is to risk becoming religious, i.e. failing to separate oneself from the object of study that is necessary for “academic” work. It is to become again a theologian, like the phenomenologists of old. We, that is “scholars of religion” rather than “apologists,” implement the tools of theory and in doing so set aside our “experience” and “first-person” perspective in order to practice detachment and sharpen our critical acumen. When we do so, however, I would contend that we risk—contra Felski—not becoming too critical, but uncritical. This is because criticism is always made from a first-person perspective, from a person who is indeed a cemetery of the past and is attached to what they study in a variety of ways.
How can we take account of our attachment to the world in ways that preserve the practice of critique? Phenomenology offers a—though not the—resource for sorting out such issues. When Heidegger and Husserl were analyzing the first-person perspective they were doing so not naively, but with the question of how it is that we have knowledge about the world, and thus how something like a critical stance towards the world was possible. For Heidegger, it is the human capacity to engage with the world in a way that does not merely accept what others say about it—the anonymous “they” (Das Man)—that makes it possible to say that there is something like an “I” that stands apart from the world. This is not the radically independent “I” that stands at the center of libertarian political philosophy or even the “I” that is restrained by the moral law in Kantian philosophy. This is an I enmeshed in history, one that defines itself necessarily through categories handed down to it from the past—Heidegger describes this as its fallen nature. The “I” is bound to a history not of its own choosing, and yet, in recognizing that it is an “I” who takes up that history, sets itself apart from it. For Heidegger, as mentioned previously, this most concretely happens when I am confronted by the possible “death” of the conceptual world that makes my life possible. This might occur, for example, when my concepts fail to make sense of the world—one might think here of the failure of stereotypical gender categories to match up to people’s experience—and thus their contingency, and ultimately their dependence upon me to take them up as meaningful (or not) becomes clear. To return to the earlier example, here we can see why Heideggerian phenomenology is unlike Eliadean phenomenology. Where the latter cements stereotypical gender roles into the cosmic order of the universe, the former treats them as contingent norms that we can take over, re-define, and re-signify.
It is ultimately the dependence of categories upon agents acting within history that makes critical thought possible. Otherwise, the distinction between the world that is known to me and the world itself vanishes, leaving the very possibility of questioning how one understands the world impossible to give an account of. For me to take on any historically constituted normative identity, whether “father,” “colleague,” “brother,” or “teammate,” presupposes an I who takes it up, and therefore cannot be reduced to it. And it is my ability to take these categories up and examine their imbrication in certain political, economic, and social systems, that makes it possible for me to critique them, revise them, or advocate for their abandonment. A more concrete example of this kind of engagement are the recent calls to reimagine what constitutes “public safety” beyond the current conceptual framework that centers on policing. It is thus taking historically constituted norms up from the first-person perspective that makes a critical relationship to the world possible.
Conclusion
How might this aid scholars who want to reconfigure the study of religion as a critical enterprise? First, it helpfully reminds us that a critical disposition toward the world should not be conflated with the desire for objectivity. For even objectivity has a history that spoils such a desire. We are all enmeshed in histories not of our choosing. Our focus should be on how we take up those histories rather than on the naïve assumption that we can abandon them. This requires that, in part, we take responsibility for our own past in the study of religion as a discipline that has always been attached to theology and that in order to self-consciously move forward cannot bury that history. The recent work of Noreen Khawaja is exemplary in this regard. Second, it also suggests that we can think more capaciously about what critical work in the study of religion might look like. Rather than disinterested studies of “other people” who might do theology, unlike those of us in the social sciences or humanities, we might imagine those whom we study as fellow travelers with whom we share a world. This might not mean we always agree with the claims of those we study, but it might mean we see ourselves as bound up with them in ways that cannot be undone by speaking and writing in jargon that distances us from them. Indeed, this is a claim that postcolonial and decolonial critics have for too long been suggesting is necessary if we are to be honest about the reasons for our methodological orientation. While scholars have been rightly eager to take up the tools of these fields, too often our own relationship to religion, theology, and the past of religious studies has remained occluded in our own analyses. In engaging with its phenomenological past in the way I outline here, religious studies might exhume the past and in so doing, learn to live with it even as those in the field set out on new paths beyond it.
[1] I do not mean here to imply that these societies were as oppressive and unchanging as Eliade’s construction suggests, but rather that his construction of them that he drew on using his own cultural presuppositions were.
[2] This is not of course to say that Heidegger’s own political commitments should evade scrutiny. Indeed, as has been carefully demonstrated by numerous scholars, Heidegger’s allegiance to the Nazi party in the 1930s was an allegiance he saw as bearing out the critique of liberalism embodied in his other philosophical work. Nonetheless, following Heidegger scholar Gregory Fried, I would contend that the philosophical problems he raised are ones that still require our coming to terms with and that indeed by interpreting Heidegger through a critical lens, we can excavate a liberatory potential in his thought he himself would not have endorsed. This is part of what it means to take responsibility for the phenomenological tradition of which he is a part.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Anthology of Persian Poetry. Author: Hafiz (Iranian, Shiraz ca. 1325–1390 Shiraz). Date: 17th century. Via Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.
Self-proclaimed “secular” Iranians often criticize their fellow “religious” compatriots of blindly following laws of a “foreign” religion, especially when it comes to the performance of the daily prayers which is dismissed as parroting Arabic words without even trying to understand their meanings. The act of repeating foreign words day in, day out—i.e. the performance of ritual prayer (namāz)—comes to represent the irrationality of religion and the stagnation of its followers for the rational forward-moving seculars whose speech and act (as well as speech acts) are always meaningful. The perceived absence of agency on the part of the ritual-performers is reinforced by another perception, namely, the theocratic state overloading the public space with its hegemonic vision of Islam that inevitably seeps through every nook and cranny, including the private sphere of the religious individual’s mind. Niloofar Haeri’s,Say What your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iranmasterfully paints a far more complex picture, one which illustrates creativity in bounded acts and ingenuity in repetition.
Focusing on the practices of a group of Shi’ite women, Haeri practices the “anthropology of Islam” à la Talal Asad by showing how her interlocutors strive to make sense of the discursive traditions of their time, understand and reformulate their shifting relationships, and achieve coherence in the face of contradictory narratives and discourses. As such, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires illustrates the amount of thinking, creativity, and negotiation that goes into understanding what it means to be a regular Muslim in the Islamic Republic of Iran in the twenty-first century. In the process, the boundaries between the religious and secular, public and private, and religion and literature are constantly crossed and undermined. It is the latter contribution on which I would like to focus further here.
In my own work, I refer to Iran as a “poetic nation” and claim that the modern discourse on the Iranian nation has been built around a perceived continuity and coherence of classical Persian poetry. It does not matter if the birthplace of the poet falls outside the modern geography of Iran—e.g. Rumi in Afghanistan or Nizami in Azerbaijan—they are the national treasures of Iran whose poems have acted and will continue to act as moral guides throughout the ages. Haeri demonstrates the importance of poetry in the daily lives of people and how much it is intertwined with every aspect of being. “Iranians do a lot with poetry: they learn to think about certain ethical values, ways of being and conducting themselves; they become literate through it; they build friendships; […] they use it to express their feelings” (45). But more importantly, “they learn to think about religion in imaginative and paradoxical ways” (ibid.).
The latter point is crucial in understanding Islam as it is lived in Iran. One of the main contributions of the academic study of religion is illustrating how the religious and secular are co-constitutive rather than two separate opposing realms (see, for example, Talal Asad’s, Formations of the Secular). Haeri further illustrates that in Iran, religion is constituted by poetry and that in the public imagination, poetry plays an authoritative role in defining, destabilizing, and pushing the boundaries of religion. Even more worthwhile, it is through ritual, that misunderstood by-product of religion, that Haeri finds the innovations and interventions informed by classical poetry. In the Iranian case, poets act as the acknowledged “legislators of the world,” if I am allowed to distort Shelley’s assertion in defense of poetry; they are the interpreters of the Qur’an.
“Mystical” poetry (sheʿr-e ʿerfāni) is where the marriage of religion and literature is most noticeable; however, howʿerfān is understood in the modern context complicates these matters further. As a modern concept whose roots go back to the Safavid period (aptly studied by Ata Anzali, another contributor to this symposium),ʿerfan troubles the religious/secular binary as an alternative “spirituality” (spirituality without religion) that can accommodate individualistic quests without the communal restrictions associated with “orthodox” Islam. ʿErfāni poetry, in this understanding, is the vehicle to express an intimate and direct relationship of human beings with the Divine. It is in this sense that poetry creates a type of (mystical?) experience, similar to Haeri’s concept of “presence.”
Haeri further illustrates that in Iran, religion is constituted by poetry and that in the public imagination, poetry plays an authoritative role in defining, destabilizing, and pushing the boundaries of religion.
ʿErfāni poetry expresses the ineffable and as such, signifies something beyond its literal meaning. It is not just the rhythm and rhyme that leave the listener with that indescribable feeling, but what is said through the unsaid, the intertextual play with the tropes of the poetic discourse, the ways the words and letters are combined and set in the assigned meter. No matter how many times one reads or hears or recites a poem by Rumi, Hafez, Saʿdi, and many others associated correctly or incorrectly to the mystical tradition, one can feel that state (hāl) which cannot be explained through words. Similarly, Haeri demonstrates how this group of Shiʿite women pour their own meanings into the scripted text of ritual prayer to “make a connection to the divine so that they may be co-present” (66). For a long time ritual prayer has been understood as meaningless, “pure actions without any function beyond their definition as obligatory acts of worship” (Steinfels, 308). But for these women, as well as for many practicing Muslims all around the world, the formal aspect of ritual prayer is a limited if not marginal concern; valid performance of the prayer is not enough. By aestheticizing the ritual, they make “the sign a more complex matter than a pairing of meaning and abstract sound image” (67).
Haeri illustrates how her interlocutors turn qāl into hāl, authoring the authorless acts of prayer each time they repeat the same words and deeds, and in the process, create a ritual of their own.
I am left with a few questions of my own after reading this thought-provoking work. We are trying to move beyond the “universal” categories that shape our discipline; we teach “religion” fully conscious (hopefully) that it is “not a native category,” but it is the category that we have. Works like Haeri’s historicize and politicize some of our analytical categories such as religion, literature, and mysticism and show that the local practitioners reconfigure these categories and take part in their global formations. If we accept this premise, can we imagine a reverse direction in this constant reconstitution of religion as we teach it in academia? Can we, for example, theorize/translate the meaning-making process at work through the companionship of poetry and prayer in Iran for the larger context in the study of religion? In a similar vein, how can the modern concept of ʿerfān, as practiced and understood by both “religious” and “secular” camps in Iran, be juxtaposed to “mysticism” as an analytical category in religious studies, anthropology, literature, philosophy, etc.? In other words, should ʿerfān be an independent category used only for studying debates in modern Iran or should we extend our signifier, i.e. mysticism, to be capable of signifying the complexities of ʿerfān within it as well?
Ahoo Najafian is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the Religious Studies Department at Macalester College. Her studies focus on Persianate Islam and the intersection of religion, literature, and politics in contemporary Iran. Her current project is a book about 20th Century interpretations of the works by Hafez, the famed 14th Century Persian poet, entitled “Poetic Nation: Iranian Soul and Historical Continuity.” She teaches courses such as Introduction to Islam, Gender Relations in Islam, Muslims and the Imaginal Realm, and Islamic Republic: Explorations in Religion and Nationalism. From 2018 to 2020, she taught at Carleton College as an Ira T. Wender Postdoctoral Scholar in Middle East Studies and Religion. Born and raised in Iran, Prof. Najafian earned a BA and MA in English literature from Tehran University, an MA in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of British Columbia, and a doctorate in Religious Studies from Stanford University.
Iqra Afzal, a vaccinator gives the covid-19 vaccine to Nurhidayah Luding who is a foreign student from Thailand studying at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan on September 1, 2021. IMF Photo/Saiyna Bashir, September 1, 2021, Islamabad, Pakistan. CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The coronavirus pandemic has impacted nearly every individual across the planet. It has ended and upended lives, forced people to make decisions that just a few years before would have seemed unimaginable, and completely, perhaps forever, altered the way people live and go about their daily lives. The following post will explore differing attitudes towards the pandemic across groups from around the world, the sources of pandemic conspiracy theories, and how religious dynamics tie into these two components. This reflection arose from the collaborative discussions between students of the Madrasa Discourses program and a Notre Dame student during the summer of 2021.
Pandemic Perceptions Across Identity Groups
At the outset, we note that attitudes towards the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination against the disease have varied across the socio-political fabrics of different countries. There has been no linear or singular trend in how people have responded to the pandemic. This should not be surprising. Any group of people—whether grouped by religion, social strata, or political affiliation—will have a different response. There is no one way to respond to the pandemic because people have diverse religious and cultural identities that lead them to respond in different ways. Across the globe, though, there are categories of responses that people fall into concerning the pandemic and the vaccine. Most people are welcoming of the vaccine and ready to receive it. Others are happy that a vaccine exists but are skeptical of what they have been hearing and coming across in some news sources regarding (rare) side effects and other potentially dangerous consequences. They worry, for example, that they are lab rats who are being given a vaccine with unproven effectiveness, or that they are likely to receive expired or adulterated vaccines. There are also those who refuse to receive the vaccine for personal, religious, political, and/or other reasons. There are even some who do not even believe that the coronavirus and thus the pandemic are real at all. They think COVID-19 is a fabricated disease and that the soaring number of deaths is nothing out of the ordinary.
Our group discussions focused on this third group, namely those who do not believe in vaccines or the pandemic. These perceptions can at times be driven by different myths, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. Perhaps one of the most prominent drivers of COVID-19 skepticism and conspiracy theories are social media platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok. Some vaccine conspiracy theories that have been widely circulated in India, the US, and Pakistan include the belief that the vaccine will cause you to grow an extra body part, will cause you to “glitch,” will turn you into a werewolf, or will make you infertile. Others believe that the vaccine is actually a microchip tracking device (see some of these myths dispelled here). Still others believe that the vaccine causes autism or a possible DNA gene mutation. While most of these conspiracy theories are created for mere laughs, they nonetheless reveal that people’s beliefs about the vaccine, especially skepticism, fear, or denial, reflect the socio-political dynamics of their countries.
There has been no linear or singular trend in how people have responded to the pandemic. This should not be surprising. Any group of people—whether grouped by religion, social strata, or political affiliation—will have a different response.
One conspiracy theory in circulation among the Muslim minority in India is that the vaccine creates some sort of magnetic force within the body. The conspiracy theory has evolved to include the belief that the United States government may eventually use this magnetism to pull Muslims out of the country and onto Mars. This conspiracy theory reveals much about this identity group’s deeper feelings of mistrust towards the Indian and American governments, which are perhaps further rooted in the feeling of being a minority religious group in their country. Coupled with the irresponsible responses of some political leaders and a lack of trust in the governmental institutions, some people are reluctant to take vaccines from government centers and government medical institutes. They doubt whether the proper vaccine is being injected into them and are concerned that they are being fooled in some way. Another contributing factor among these identity groups is that religious scholars that are held in high esteem are sometimes skeptical of modern tools (such as medical technologies) and methods of modern medicine. When these scholars believe in such misconceptions, they are likely to misguide many others as well.
In the United States, some Catholic Christians are likewise hesitant to receive the vaccine and some flat-out refuse to receive it. They refuse, however, on different grounds than Muslims in India. Some Catholic Christians are concerned that one of the vaccines was made using fetal stem cells. Under normal circumstances, the Church condemns such a practice. A core belief of the Catholic Church is respect for the dignity of all human life, from conception until natural death. Because obtaining embryonic or fetal stem cells typically requires destruction of the embryo or fetus, this practice, therefore, comes into conflict with Catholic doctrine. The global pandemic, and the controversy surrounding the use of stem cells, led Pope Francis to issue a church order to assure members of the faith that in these devastating and unprecedented circumstances receiving the vaccine was recommended, though not obligatory.The Coronavirus has forced Church members all the way up to the highest levels of leadership to make difficult decisions on the tenets of their faith and notions of morality.
In Pakistan, responses to the COVID-19 vaccine have been varied. Although people are often reluctant to receive the vaccine, they again have different reasons than some Muslims in India and some Catholic Christians in the US. The people who have less exposure to authentic information have the oddest reasons for opposing vaccination—for example, that the vaccine may be a population control mechanism, or that it may cause a life-threatening disease. Others influenced by social media believe in different conspiracy theories, including an international conspiracy that the vaccine is intended to surveil and control different populations. Moreover, even some educated and literate people, who typically do not believe in conspiracies, are hesitant to receive the vaccine because they are unsure of its quality. One example is the reluctance of frontline health care providers to get vaccinated. Their reason for not wanting to be vaccinated is that they do not trust the health care system and/or are worried about becoming lab rats. It should be noted that Pakistani Catholic Christians do not raise the stem-cell issue as US Catholic Christians do, keeping in mind that Christians in Pakistan make up only 1.27% of the population while Christians in the United States make up 72% of the population.Rather, their concerns are the same as those mentioned above, and thus are more correlated with the socio-economic class they belong to rather than their religious affiliation. The threatened identity, be it religious or socio-economic, is the source of the conspiracy in which one believes. In each of these identity groups’ narratives, people believe conspiracies because they lack trust in social and political institutions. They believe theories because believing reality feels more dangerous or detrimental to them.
The sources of conspiracies are not religious beliefs but rather are the reservations and vulnerabilities a community already has towards the government, society, or another distrusted entity. Any part of the community that does not receive clear and trusted information will be most inclined to conspiracies. It is the fear of the unknown and uncertain or the feeling of being under threat that is the source of conspiratorial thinking.
Reckoning Identity with the Pandemic
This post has been focused on the relationship between identity, religion, society, and conspiratorial thinking. To conclude, we turn briefly to the deeper questions the pandemic has raised about religious belief and practice.
Due to masses being canceled, a table was set up with blessed palms, yellow ribbons, and prayer cards on Palm Sunday at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Springfield, Tennessee. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
During the pandemic, many individuals and groups were forced to confront foundational issues and questions that they would never have considered. Individuals and religious institutions were forced to make difficult decisions and adapt to a new way of living, praying, and engaging in fellowship with one another. On a logistical level, the pandemic has barred religious people from attending services in person, but, on the other hand, it made virtual services possible. On a more spiritual level, the pandemic has pushed some to become more hostile to religion, while it has pushed others to become more religious. Believers no longer have physical access to their places of worship and may thus feel isolated or abandoned by their religious community or God Himself. They may ask: Why has God allowed such suffering to occur? This may lead them to start questioning their religion or reconsider their faith. For this reason, global religiousness and religiosity may decline. On the other hand, the pandemic led some people to reconsider or revive the religious spirit. The sickness and loneliness that the pandemic has wrought has pushed some believers closer to religious practices and rituals. Some consider it to be a phenomenon depicting the human power to thrive and survive in response to a global dilemma. It has nothing to do with spiritual or divine causes.
The challenges to religious belief as well as the rampant proliferation of conspiratorial thinking indicate that the pandemic has had a significant impact on society. Addressing these impacts will require individuals, communities, and governmental institutions to reevaluate their understandings of the world and their priorities within it. Reckoning with one’s faith is a necessary step for these identity groups in moving forward in this new pandemic world. Likewise, establishing or reestablishing trust in communities and governments appears to be another essential step on the path forward. It seems vital that people be included and involved in decision making and policy in an unbiased manner that addresses community concerns. Additionally, the almost uncontrollable dissemination of unverified information and misinformation demonstrates the dire need for reliable and authentic information.
The world has changed, and people’s identities must change with it.
Mary Kate is a Kellogg International Scholar at the University of Notre Dame studying Political Science and Global Affairs with a minor in Musical Theatre. She spent the summer of 2021 participating virtually in the Madrasa Discourses program. Mary Kate hopes to pursue a career in international relations and public service.
Zulqernain Haider is a PhD scholar at International Islamic University Malaysia, Department of Fiqh and Usul fiqh. He also completed his MA in sociology and anthropology IIUM. He joined Madarsa Discourse in 2019.
Sidra Zulfaqar is a Sharia and Law graduate who completed a Masters (LLM) in the same subject from international Islamic University, Islamabad. She is currently serving as a visiting lecturer at International Islamic University. She joined Madrasa Discourses in 2019.
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In the course of my recent research in Iran, I read informative studies of mysticism in Iran and found Ata Anzali’s history of 
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