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Theorizing Modernities article

Language and Feeling in Ritual Practice


Folio with Verses in Nasta’liq Script. The verses on this folio are written in diagonal lines of nasta‘liq script. Noted for its refined and lyrical quality, nasta‘liq is ideally suited for love poetry replete with mystical allusions and Sufi metaphors. Date: A.H. 1017/ A.D. 1608–9. Via Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Just what is “modern religion” exactly? Conventional wisdom, biased toward Protestant Christianity, would claim that it is the kind that fits best to modern society, which is defined and purportedly organized as secular. Since Iran is a society that officially opposes secularism, one might assume that religion there is not modern. In a secular society, one that institutionally separates religion and politics, church and state, religion is meant to be a private matter only. The ideal practice of “modern” religion is thus conceived of as interior, a matter of personal conviction and private experience, not of obligation and public display. In the history of Christianity, the latter was the critique Protestants levelled at Catholic legalism and ritual. In light of that critique, they sought to establish a new church with fewer mediators between the individual and God. By 1800, in an era of rising secularism, the Protestant thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher arrived at a further understanding of modern religion, defending the value of faith in its experiential rather than moral dimension, religion as a feeling rather than a rule. True religion, then, was the one sincerely felt, not merely performed as a duty. And this is where Niloofar Haeri’s Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran delivers fascinating insights for those of us who know more about the history and practice of Protestant Christianity in Europe than of Islam in the Middle East. It turns our assumptions about what modern religion might be on their heads and reminds us of similarities between the two traditions.

It is an interesting feature of Protestantism that its core understandings around the proper relationship between person and God emerged from and was articulated strongly in mystical practices: Martin Luther started his career as a member of a contemplative community; Pietist movements of the seventeenth century and the revivalism of the nineteenth century all drew on mystical language and strove for a personal and immediate experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Today’s charismatic Christians follow in these footsteps, and in so doing, appear in the eyes of many secular observers to be decidedly un-modern. In the contexts that I have studied—German and US American Christians since 1800 —religious practices which strive to feel God’s presence in the body become increasingly viewed as “too” religious, associated with politically reactionary views and fundamentalist understandings of religious texts. It is hardly remembered now how modern it once was to practice an experiential religion and have a personal relationship to God, a stance which provided the basis for a privatized religion that could fit into a secular society.

Reading Niloofar Haeri’s book, I was struck by the different constellations and history of experiential and legalistic modes of religious engagement she described, and how well suited it is to help readers question conventional wisdom—on religion in Iran specifically, and on the notion of modern religion more generally. Just like the Christianity I have studied (and Haeri notes interesting parallels between them throughout her book), Islam has struggled with the tensions between these two modes of religion. It also appears to be the educated middle classes which strive for an experiential mode of religious practice, shying away from a legalistic, externalized mode, in which even mindlessly going through the motions is considered enough to fulfill the religious obligation (in this case, demanded by the state). As Haeri notes in her conclusion, from the perspective of Muslim practitioners drawing on the deep tradition of ‘erfān, the laws of the anti-secular, Islamist regime in Tehran are in fact “institutionalized insincerity,” demanding obedience to rules regardless of one’s feeling. Throughout the book, she shows how the regime itself cannot completely reject Persian mystical traditions, though it remains ambivalent toward them. It appears to be a contradiction in the very fabric of Islamist rule in Iran and provides a far more nuanced understanding of how religion is practiced under such conditions. Are the women that Haeri portrays practicing a more “modern” Islam than that which the regime demands? Or is the regime itself “modern” because it produces this mode of practice? Not only do Haeri’s interlocutors feel that their parents and grandparents only practiced out of obligation (in a “pre-modern” mode) before the revolution, but the book as a whole argues convincingly for a broad societal problematization of religious practice after 1979 across the spectrum from secular to religious.

It is hardly remembered now how modern it once was to practice an experiential religion and have a personal relationship to God, a stance which provided the basis for a privatized religion that could fit into a secular society.

Haeri’s ethnography, with its excellent material and insightful analysis, opens a window onto this problematization, which revolves around the question of prayer. Why must Muslims pray at all (since regular namāz obviously does not automatically make everyone a better person)? What should motivate people to pray (love of God or fear of punishment; display of piety, or for oneself)? These are, as Haeri informs us, “the most frequently discussed questions on television, radio, Internet and among friends and strangers in Iran today” (72). Negotiating the space between religion and the secular, between the Islamist law of the land and personal conviction, revolves around these issues. This is no doubt because prayer, as a way to regularly communicate with God,  is a central practice of Islam, and arguably of religion generally. The tension between formalistic and experiential modes of this communication turns up not only at the societal level, but also at the personal level for the women interviewed here, since they can also have a prayer session that suffices formally but still not find it to be good enough. They strive for the feeling of hāl, which Haeri identifies as a sense of “co-presence with the divine”; this is what makes prayers truly valid and efficacious for them.

Particularly in this part of her analysis, Haeri sheds light on the emotional work of what appears to be mere recitation and rote prayer (in a foreign language, no less), again calling into question one of the basic assumptions about what makes religion modern. The mechanistic mutterings of the rosary in Catholicism (at one time also in a foreign language, Latin) was the very image of premodern religion for Protestants, who championed prayer “from the heart.” And yet, as I have found, their own great attachment to the Lord’s Prayer, the Psalms, and other texts belies this prejudice; they, too, have an understanding of how memorizing and reciting the words of another entails their internalization. Those words become, to a certain extent, one’s own, and reciting them was often described to me as a high point of the church service. Haeri’s study digs deeply into how speaking from the heart relies on the formal structures of language and ritual; they provide the necessary scaffolding for achieving a deeply personal experience. Recitation, therefore, does not make sincerity impossible. The words are not the issue for these practitioners so much as the question of how one prays. A good namāz also requires effort: “concentration (tamarkoz), sincerity (kholūs), and presence of the heart (hozūr-e qalb)” (159).

The importance of hāl as an indicator of a good namāz highlights how emotion mediates the experience of divine presence, and this study also offers insight into the connection between language and emotion. Two languages are at play here and each may offer its own emotional affordance. The mystical quality of the older, foreign language may conjure a sense of mystery and awe, while one’s own vernacular would seem to be closer to the heart and everyday life, which can make for more passionate, personal feelings. Haeri’s study suggests that the art of prayer among her interlocutors involves the creative interplay between such affordances. I have used the term “emotional practice,” building on William Reddy’s speech-act concept of “emotives” and Arlie Hochschild’s understanding of emotional work, to explain why emotions like hāl are a kind of skill, even if we do not experience them as being within our own power. Emotions are not so much “had” as “done,” and the fact that they cannot reliably be accomplished successfully speaks to the inherent instability of iterative practice and space for inserting one’s own creative agency. Judith Butler and other theoreticians of performativity emphasize that language precedes the subject and indeed, following Michel Foucault, serves to subjectify the individual, but it does not fully determine her subjectivity. This potential is excellently demonstrated in Haeri’s study and will hopefully encourage more investigations of this kind in other religious contexts, continuing to trouble our assumptions about modern religion as a matter of private experience.

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Monique Scheer
Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer is professor of historical and cultural anthropology at the University of Tübingen. In her teaching and research, Scheer brings perspectives from the history and anthropology of emotions together with issues around belief and conviction, religious and secular, and how they play out in social settings characterized by cultural and religious pluralism. Scheer's research monograph, Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (2020) combines historical and ethnographic methods in applying practice theory to the study of religion and emotions in the context of modern German Protestantism.
Theorizing Modernities article

Teaching Islamic Poetry Beyond Orientalism


Page of Calligraphy from the Kulliyat of Sa’di. Date: 18th century. Via Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

When I introduce students to Islam in my undergraduate courses, I always feel a little nervous. I am a scholar of Catholicism, I know no Arabic, and like everyone with a graduate degree in the humanities, I was trained in the pernicious histories of western appropriation of Islam well. At the same time, I have a deep sense of moral responsibility to teach at least some Islam in introductory theology courses. The vast majority of my undergraduate students come into the classroom with either a blank slate when it comes to Islam, or, more likely, with their heads full of disconnected snippets of Islamophobic images and narratives culled from growing up on a media diet in the post-9/11 United States. Add to that, Islam isn’t “other” or “out there”; there are always devout Muslim students in my theology classes too, usually first-generation students commuting from elsewhere in the Bronx, Queens, or Manhattan.

I begin teaching Islam always with trepidation, but I usually reclaim some confidence once I’ve introduced a line from Carl Ernst’s preface to Following Muhammad. He describes learning about Islam as a practice in which “the reader participates in the creative act of reimagining as human an immense group of people who have been demonized.” We talk a lot about the moral stakes of what Ernst calls “restoring a human face to Islam” (xxi). I’ve had a lot of success with documentaries like The Light in Her Eyes, anthropological work like Caroline Moxy Rouse’s Engaged Surrender, and this set of interviews with Muslim scholars who describe their work in personal terms. These are all deeply effective and humanizing materials.

But my nervousness inevitably picks up again, because the truth is, in my heart I love teaching most of all the mystical and poetic texts of religious traditions. There are few teaching memories I have that are more joyful than introducing students to the beauty of Rumi and Hafez from Omid Safi’s Radical Love, or discussing podcasts like this one, or even having incredible musicians like Dan Kurfirst and his band sing Rumi’s poetry accompanied to music. But of course, a unit on Islamic mysticism is besieged with dangers on every side: the risk of perpetuating orientalist fantasies about the pure Sufi kernel in an otherwise legalistic and dry religion. I try and tackle this head on, but I still struggle to connect Islamic poetry and mysticism to the larger pedagogical project of humanizing Islam. The students find the material beautiful and unexpected, but it’s hard to shake them of the idea that these poets merely illustrate a rarefied world of elite male writers, and that studying them is akin to peering into a museum. Some classroom discussions have veered disappointingly towards stereotypes that perhaps Islam “used to” be beautiful, playful, spiritual, but no longer. I sense these stereotypes always loom darkly at the edges of my teaching, and despite different pedagogical experiments tackling it, I never felt like I dealt with it satisfactorily. I always felt uneasy.

Then along comes Niloofar Haeri’s masterful new book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires. It is a beautiful, concise, and thought-provoking work, analyzing a community of women in post-revolutionary Iran whose religious lives are centered on the poetic and mystical materials of Islam, what she calls ‘erfān. The word ‘erfān has a wider connotative range than the words mystical, poetic, or spiritual have in English. The latter usually signal something that is done privately and interiorly. ‘Erfān, as Haeri describes it, is a communal practice through and through: these women grew up in Tehran memorizing and performing the poems of Hafez and Rumi at family parties, listening to poetry competitions on the radio, and keeping elaborate notebooks filled with transcribed mystical poems as teens. As adults, they host lunches and dinners where friends read poems and prayers for discussion and debate. It is these intensely relational settings in which Islamic interiority is cultivated.

The truth is, in my heart I love teaching most of all the mystical and poetic texts of religious traditions…But of course, a unit on Islamic mysticism is besieged with dangers on every side: the risk of perpetuating orientalist fantasies about the pure Sufi kernel in an otherwise legalistic and dry religion.

The book’s title comes from a famous dialogue in Rumi’s Masnavi, where Moses tells a shepherd what God has revealed to him: “Don’t search for manners and rules/Say what your longing heart desires.” The line embodies a central ‘erfān idea, that of the heart as the innermost and truest place out of which the pure love of God radiates (13). Readers already familiar with Rumi will recognize his characteristic vision of God, but Haeri’s work completely brings it to new life. Now, suddenly, we don’t read this only as evidence of the 13th century Persian Sufi genius, but we also see it as a theological vision that has been kept alive, circulated, debated and prayed with in the hearts and minds of people all over Iran today, particularly women.

One of the most interesting points Haeri makes concerns how this culture of ‘erfān emerged in Iran. Following the 1979 revolution and the end of the Pahlavi monarchy, Iranians experienced a succession of Islamicists consolidating power who aimed to Islamize society at every level. Many Iranians, of course, complied and promoted this vision, while others, such as secularists who remain allergic to anything religious, resisted. But for a huge swath of the culture, something subtle happened—a robust culture of laity began to take the Islamic materials into their own hands, and join in arguments about topics like what a true Islam looks like, the nature of God, and religious sincerity. Many of these people were drawn by the mystical and poetic materials and engaged them with urgency: the stakes, as Haeri puts it, were high in a way that was never true previously. Before 1979, most people mostly left Islam in the hands of the clerics and elites. Little was at stake because much of it never touched their lives. Now, on the other hand, nearly everyone has gotten into the game of religion.

But more than an overview of an understudied cultural phenomenon, the brilliance of  the book lies in Haeri’s analysis of the dynamic emotional, spiritual, and intellectual landscape of a group of people who are typically obscured in studies of Islam: educated, middle-class lay women. For example, in Chapter 1, “Where Do Ideas Come From?” Haeri argues that the prayers and mystical poems the women memorized made the religion real for them, but not just because of what the poems were “about” (the meanings of many mystical poems are not exactly clear). The memorization of poetry also served as an aesthetic and “pedagogic” practice that contributed to the cultivation of a literate, good, and moral person.  A person with a head and heart full of Hafez, Saadi, and even women poets whose names were new to me, like Parvin Etesami, would learn to cultivate ādāb, inner and outer refinement in ethics, character, and aesthetics. The practice of memorizing poems and sharing them publicly also enable the women to “acquire performance skills and quick wittedness, they hone their skills in memorization; they use it to express feelings and they learn to think about religion in imaginative and paradoxical ways” (45). Drawing on theorical material on sacred presence, Haeri also shows how the memorization of poems and prayers make present non-ordinary reality to the believer. One woman describes, for instance, how uttering a poem as an adult that she memorized as a child makes present a long-dead parent, while another woman describes performing her daily ritual prayers and imagines herself at Mecca, even standing before the Prophet (66-67).

Memorized poems also become the material out of which the women practice do’ā, or spontaneous prayer to God, the subject of chapter 3. In this chapter, the women’s voices are most central and most personal, with Haeri describing their intimate and serious dialogues with God. When it comes to spontaneous prayer, she writes, the women “make it up as they go along, using their imagination, their experiences, and whatever related sources they may have been exposed to, such as poetry, prayer books, the media, and discussions with others…God is neither conceptualized nor worshipped in just one way. The relationship with God is capacious and experiences vulnerabilities and ruptures” (123). What a vivid image to contrast to U.S. stereotypes of Muslims who “submit” to God uncritically and monolithically. These women are full of doubt and creativity.

In the end, I truly cannot think of a more compelling book that can do the work of (returning to Ernst’s phrase) “restoring a human face to Islam.” Scholars have long aimed to combat stereotypes of Islamic legalism and politization by introducing students to the mystical visions of Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi. But this book helps us do so much more than that—it enables us to keep this mystical language alive in our classroom while making sure we don’t ossify it as the orientalists did, and only see it as part of Islam’s past, the domain of rarefied male elites, and as disconnected to living Muslims today.

At the present of my writing this piece, we approach a new academic year in the midst of another COVID resurgence. It is quite honestly hard to face it with anything but dread. But when I imagine a day this coming year, maybe back in the classroom, reading some beautiful poems from a collection like Radical Love, then reading Say What Your Longing Heart Desires with my undergraduates, I start to feel something like the rushes of actual excitement, something much more powerful than nervousness or even dread. I am so grateful to Niloofar Haeri for this extraordinary book. I can’t wait to share it with my students.

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Brenna Moore
Brenna Moore is Professor of Theology at Fordham University. She works in the area of modern Christianity, with a focus on Catholic intellectual and cultural history in Europe. Dr. Moore’s teaching and research centers on mysticism and religious experience, gender, a movement in theology known as “ressourcement,” (“turn to the sources”) that paved the way for Vatican II, and the place of religious difference in modern Christian thought. She is most recently the author of Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This project explores a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Theorizing Modernities article

Textual Encounters: Meaning and Time in Islamic Studies


“Woman Applying Henna,” Late 16th century. This painting is a rare depiction of a young woman applying henna to her feet, a ritual associated with rite of passage celebrations, specifically marriage, in Iran and surrounding regions. Via the Metropolitan Museum of art. Public Domain.

In Say What Your Longing Heart Desires, Niloofar Haeri offers an anthropological account of textual encounters. While the book does not explicitly criticize major trends in Islamic studies, its approach to religious texts provocatively, if sometimes quietly, subverts familiar methodological distinctions. I want to ask how the book offers not a new interpretation of canonical texts, but a new way of conceptualizing textuality.

Let’s begin from the fact that Haeri is not primarily approaching Islamic texts as objects of exegetical interpretation or historical contextualization, as is common in the discipline of history. She also does not adopt an approach more commonly found in her own discipline of anthropology, which focuses on the sociopolitical use of texts — how, for instance, certain actors invoke scriptural passages to certify political authority or justify institutional inequalities. Haeri does not repudiate these approaches, and to a degree she draws on them in framing her analysis. However, her attention in this book mostly lies elsewhere, drawing our attention to a very different type of textual engagement. Across this remarkable ethnography of prayer and poetry, Haeri examines texts that her interlocutors recite, recurrently, over their lifespans. This shift in focus represents a methodological displacement, indeed a reorientation of the primary modes of textual analysis in Islamic studies. What is at stake in this displacement?

I want to highlight a difficult passage from the book that begins to suggest the significance of this move—difficult not because the analysis is unclear but because the passage concerns the very meaning of “meaning.” A number of Haeri’s interlocutors told her that in reciting al-Hamd (the sura recited in acts of daily prayer), they are communicating with God. They are using God’s words to express their own concerns, and because their own concerns are multiple and change with time this communication does not always have the same meaning each time they pray. Haeri notes the somewhat unusual nature of this claim, which strains the concepts of “meaning” and “communication”: “How can the most recited sura of the Qur’an ‘not always have the same meaning’?… What many of these women explained effectively meant that they use God’s chosen words to tell Him what they want to share: requests, gratitude, questions, anxieties, and remembrance of a person who is ill or has passed away, or wordless thoughts and feelings” (85).

In these acts of ritual prayer, the concept of meaning is not primarily about how these women interpret the words of the text. The women do, of course, reflect on the lexical semantics of certain passages in the Qur’an, and their understandings of certain verses evolve as they learn more about the texts in classes, discussions, and readings. But in the act of namāz, exegesis is not the primary concern of the enunciator. “I do not immediately begin to pray as soon as I stand on my sajjadeh,” Parvin states. “I pause and gather my thoughts. Then I try to concentrate on each word that I am saying and while doing that I am also telling God what I need, what I am afraid of, I ask for guidance” (84). Maryam also emphasizes the labor of enunciation itself: “Well, I am not choosing the words of the sura… but I try to concentrate on pronouncing them well, not hurrying through them, and I try to learn to tell God what I want to” (85). In both of these accounts of namāz, the moment of expressing one’s own anxieties and desires is preceded by an effort at concentrating and on trying to pronounce correctly. The meaning of scripture is at issue not as a problem of interpretation but of recitation.

Maryam indicates that she is learning to speak to God. The emphasis on learning suggests that she does not presume her own adequacy as a speaker. Her capacity to communicate with God can be improved over time, implying that the ritual act neither begins nor concludes with this one prayer. It is part of a longer process of repeated performance of the divine word and, across these many recitations, of learning how to present oneself to God.

If namāz is a mode of communicating with God, we need to rethink the very concept of communication that is at work here. The familiar, modernist concept of communication, which assumes that a speaker is verbalizing an intention and conveying a message to an addressee, is insufficient for understanding namāz. The words of the ritual are not simply an externalizing medium for expressing an internal intention or desire. The speaker, in this case, cannot presume the adequacy of her own presence before her addressee. The sincerity of her intent (kholūs) and the presence of her heart (hozūr-e qalb) are part of what the continued practice of namāz is meant to cultivate over time. As Haeri argues, “the reciter of namāz strives to create a space of co-presence by using God’s words to tell Him what the reciter wants. She comes to coexist with the divine in the very words that belong to Him” (87).

In retraining our scholarly attention on textual encounters defined by recurrent recitation, Haeri’s account signals an additional aspect of meaning-making that might otherwise fall from view. The women’s sense of meaning in prayer acquires depth in time, as their words and action comes to be mediated by a layering of voices. Returning to certain mystical verses of Hafez or Saadi or repeating certain Qur’anic passages across a lifespan, these women hear echoes of past encounters with the text—the voices of parents who taught them a passage in years past, or the intonations and accents of other relatives and friends who guided them in the studied act of properly reciting it. When someone communicates their own concerns and questions to God, using the words of God that they have repeatedly recited over time, they also carry the “accumulated presences” of others’ voices in their own (67). If the women cannot simply select and choose which voices from their biographical past to privilege and which to silence, then we cannot presume that they are sovereign with respect to the voices that arise in prayer. Already embedded in the act, a multitude of others’ voices shape the acoustic medium in which one is otherwise expressing one’s own concerns to God. How, then, does this communicating subject come to isolate her own concerns from the multitudes that populate the sounds she enunciates? This is a problem not for the analyst to resolve in theory but for participants to contend with as part of the process of subject formation. How do these women come to know their desire, if the very practice of prayer summons the presence of others?

I have suggested that Haeri’s monograph provides a double reframing—of meaning in terms of recitation and of prayer in terms of the presence of multiple voices. I want to consider now how these two aspects of Haeri’s depiction of textuality converge on a distinctive understanding of temporality. It is nothing new, of course, to say that a religious text is not static and that its uses and interpretations are subject to changes over time as the circumstances of uptake evolve. Haeri’s ethnographic materials go beyond the now-commonplace preoccupation with contextualizing the site and moment of textual engagement. The subject reciting God’s word in prayer is constituted by multiple processes unfolding in time, or as I will describe it here, processes shaped by the time of tradition and the time of biography.

A biography will never encompass the historical scope of the tradition, and in this respect the historical unfolding of tradition will never fully coincide with an individual’s lifespan. Tradition, however, is an inheritance across generations, and its transmission requires a specific materialization in the voices of kin and the guidance of instructors. The time of tradition manifests itself for the practitioner as a striving to become present before God in and through God’s words; at the same time, however, the practitioner, progressively learning to speak to God, must voice herself with the multiplicity of past figures and events, intonations and accents, that she recalls but cannot command in the present moment of recitation. From the perspective of an individual, the trajectory of tradition must be made to articulate with the trajectory of a life, along with the uncontrollable multivocality by which the latter is constituted.

One might ask at this point whether this methodological reorientation of the study of texts simply puts politics to the side? How might we bring an account of the politics of religion back into the analytical frame? Haeri’s ethnography does not directly broach the question, but nor, I would claim, does the work foreclose it. I read Haeri’s text as cautioning us not to assume that political encounters with religious texts have primacy with respect to practices of recitation in prayer. Politics, taking place in time, must render itself intelligible in contexts already shaped by the temporal unfolding of tradition and biography. A Qur’anic sura may be invoked for political purposes, but the invocation is often made public, and thereby political, by means of its recitation. For listeners familiar with the sura, this recitation evokes a spectrum of instances whose paradigmatic moment is one of communication with God. To the extent that a social actor pursues a political end by means of recitation, the individual can be questioned and criticized for whether they act with the sincerity and presence of the heart required for that form of speech. The criteria for that judgment derive from prayer, through the intersecting trajectories of tradition and biography that shape that practice. These multiple temporal trajectories may in the given conjuncture reinforce or disrupt one another. A key task for the future study of Islamic texts lies in accounting for how social action orients itself at these points of articulation between the times of tradition, biography, and politics.

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Kabir Tambar
Kabir Tambar is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. He is the author of The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Belonging and the Demands of History in Turkey. He is currently researching the critique of violence in late Ottoman and Turkish Republican contexts.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires


Religious experience has long been a central, and troubled, category in the study of religion. From Rudolf Otto to William James to more recent theorists like Stephen Bush and Ann Taves, a focus on the experiential aspects of religion has been seen as a necessary counterweight to theological trends that emphasize doctrine and textual analysis, and social scientific trends that treat the individual’s experience as a byproduct of wider social and political contexts.

The theoretical wager of Niloofar Haeri’s argument in Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Poetry, and Prayer in Iran—winner of the 2021 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies, sponsored by the American Academy of Religion (AAR)—is that these two modes of analysis need not be seen as diametrically opposed, and that indeed there is dynamism between how individuals practice and personally experience religion and the traditions and institutions that impose boundaries on those practices. Through fieldwork conducted with a group of middle-class Iranian women, Haeri shows how practices of prayer and poetry reading/recitation converge in ways that allow these women to explore a personal relationship with God. Against stereotypes of rote religious practice that one might find in western media—i.e. that Islam is about fulfilling religious obligation without concern for one’s sincerity in doing so—Haeri shows that for these Iranian women, prayer and poetry open one up to the experience of hāl, which can be translated as joy, passion, and awe before God. In describing how the interior lives of these women take shape against the backdrop of an Iranian society still deeply shaped by the 1979 Revolution, Haeri demonstrates that the boundaries between public selves and private selves are never as stark as they seem. Thus, those who only focus on the constraints that discourse, language, institutions, and structure place on subjective action miss how those limits are embodied by flesh and blood human beings. Because humans are embodied creatures they often take up constraints in ways unimaginable to those who designed them. To believe that it is either the individual or social context that is the main driver of change, in other words, is to introduce a false binaristic choice.

Haeri explodes this binary through her sustained attention to both the context in which these women live and their personal experiences. In chapter 1, she outlines the role of poetry in the childhood and adolescent years of her research subjets; in chapter 2, she details both the conventions and contexts surrounding practices of ritual prayer; in chapter 3, she describes the development of do’ā, or spontaneous forms of prayer, carefully laying out how this form of prayer has taken on a more specific meaning following the Revolution; and in chapter 4, she details the development of prayer books over the past decades. In each of these chapters, Haeri trains her attention on how the women in the group study, pray, and recite poetry against this wider social and political background. Prayer and poetry, on her account, allow these women to speak directly to God (even when they are repeating the words of others). It is a medium through which they give voice to the joys, anxieties, and fears they have about family, religion, and many other aspects of their lives.

The collection of essays in this symposium bring a variety of disciplinary expertise to bear on this monograph, and in doing so open up ways of engaging the book that are as dynamic as the text itself. Brenna Moore shows how Haeri’s book might be useful in the classroom for those wanting to counter orientalist stereotypes of Islamic mysticism, especially in its present-day focus on how practices of prayer and poetry recitation are being reappropriated by Muslim women. Kabir Tambar focuses on the challenge that Haeri’s book poses to familiar ways of approaching textual analysis in Islamic studies. Rather than reading the texts that these women draw on, as well as the claims these women themselves make as self-evident, Haeri pushes us to see texts, and the individuals that recite them and pray with them, as dynamic and ever-evolving. This, Tambar contends, forces us to reimagine subject formation beyond a static and sovereign individual. Ahoo Najafian is likewise compelled by the conceptual boundary breaking that Haeri’s text analyzes and theorizes. Najafian focuses on the the shifiting boundary between religion and literature, and suggests that Haeri’s engagement should lead us to further challenge the assumptions built into categories like those of religion or mysticism. Monique Scheer, meanwhile, compares the practices of the women that Haeri discusses in her own work on Protestant Christian religious experience. Haeri’s book, Scheer contends, upends many of our assumptions about what modern religion entails and reveals a closer proximity between the two traditions than have heretofore been imagined. Amy Hollywood mines similar territory, but does so through a recounting of a recent podcast conversation on the topic of Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre. Similar to Scheer, she finds that Haeri’s recounting of these Iranian women’s practices of prayer share more in common than one would expect with Protestant varieties of Christianity. Here, it is prose that provides the means by which to unlock these deeper theological points of connection. Ata Anzali suggests that currents of modernity run underneath the piety expressed by these women in their practices of prayer. These practices, Anzali contends, share more in common with pre-Revolution secularists rather than, as might be assumed, pre-modern religious actors. This is precisely because of their similar concerns with authenticity and self-expression. Finally, Setrag Manoukian begins his essay by offering an account of a conversation with a woman from Shiraz who, like the women in Haeri’s book, finds deep meaning in poetry. He then explores what he calls the “divergent convergence” between prayer and poetry in Iran concerning the role of language, the relationship between rules and desires, and what it means for prayers to be acts of communication.

The issues raised in the symposium go to the heart of the research concerns that animate Contending Modernities. By inviting us to confront our assumptions about what counts as modern religion, and where its origins lie, Haeri’s book again reminds us that accounts of modernity’s development are indeed contentious, and that there is no singular narrative that unites these different strains. Rather than seek unified accounts of modernity and secularization, perhaps we might take a cue from the women Haeri studies to think more capaciously about the sources and theories we draw on in our scholarly practice.

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

Religions of the Heart: Reflections on Reading Niloofar Haeri’s Say What your Longing Heart Desires


This text, which was written in several different hands, includes nasta’liq, ta’liq shikasta, muhaqqaq, and thuluth scripts. A poem written diagonally by the calligrapher Sultan Muhammad Nur uses religious imagery to describe the beauty of the beloved, and the large writing to the left of the poem is a calligraphic exercise in which the letter shin is repeated several times. Via The Met Museum. Public Domain.

In a recent discussion with Vanessa Zolton for her podcast Hot & Bothered: On Eyre, we talked about the second of two key deathbed scenes in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Jane, newly settled in paid employment as a governess, is called to the bedside of her aunt by marriage, the tormentor of her childhood, Sarah Reed. Aunt Reed views herself as unfairly saddled with the care of an unruly, ungrateful child, yet she had promised her dying husband that she would continue to raise Jane in her home. As readers familiar with the book or any of the many film adaptations know, Aunt Reed does not fulfill her vow. Jane Eyre opens with lacerating scenes of the cruelty to which Jane is subjected by her cousins and by her aunt, culminating in her expulsion from the house. Jane leaves swearing never to return; her rage against the injustice done to her by her cousins and aunt seems uncontainable and unassuageable. By the time she returns to that house almost ten years later, however, Jane has learned to control her anger and, she claims, to feel only love, pity, and sorrow for her dying aunt.

Extract from The Brontë Sisters by Patrick Branwell Brontë (died 1848). PD-US. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Yet the deathbed scene is peculiar within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English-language novels for its bleak coldness. Aunt Reed asks to see Jane because she feels the need to acknowledge two sins: first, her removal of Jane from her home against the wishes of and the promise made to her husband, and secondly, telling another uncle, who three years earlier on his return to England had written seeking Jane’s whereabouts, that she was dead. Jane easily grants her aunt forgiveness and stays in the house through her last illness and death. But there is no mutual love here, no tears, no visible repentance, despite the confession, for Aunt Reed still shudders if Jane tries to touch her, repulsed by this woman in whom she sees only the child she so hated. When explaining what I saw as significant about these scenes to Vanessa and her producer, Ariana Nedelman, I found myself talking in terms of a distinction very much alive to Charlotte Bronte when she wrote the novel, and so, of course, to her contemporaries: that between a religion of the law and a religion of the heart. The terms are deeply problematic in their anti-Jewish and supercessionist logic, yet as I said to Vanessa and Ariana, the theological debate being staged and enacted in Jane Eyre was less about Judaism, of which I imagine Bronte knew very little, than about what it means to be a Christian. For Aunt Reed, the mere statement of her repentance and the request for forgiveness will, she hopes, be enough to earn her salvation despite her sins. Jane both forgives her aunt and, through her own actions, stands as a subtle rebuke to her; in Jane we see a character who has come to understand that repentance requires love—all good works require love—to be truly Christian. As she learns from her teacher, Miss Temple (my thanks to Vanessa for the reminder about who teaches Jane this lesson), if one does not feel that love at first, through the repeated performance of acts of kindness, generosity, and forgiveness, anger and rancor will be abated and acceptance, even, with time and grace, the felt experience of loving kindness, will emerge.

Niloofar Haeri’s Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer & Poetry in Iran is about, among many other things, what it means to be Muslim for women in post-Revolution Iran. Although Haeri’s rich ethnography focuses specifically on prayer—how it is learned, performed, and understood by the women she calls “our group”—something like the distinction between a religion of the law and a religion of the heart so common in nineteenth-century Christianity runs throughout the book. A text from Rumi’s Masnavi-e Ma’navi, referred to by Iranians, Haeri tells us, as “the Qur’an in Persian tongue,” (12) articulates one form this distinction takes in Haeri’s book and in the lives of the woman with whom she talks, learns, and prays. In response to concerns about how prayer is conducted, God sends a revelation to Moses:

Hindus praise Me in the Hindi tongue
Sindhis praise Me in the Sindhi tongue
I am not made pure by their remembrance [prayers]
but pure, full of pearls, do they become

We have no regard for words or qāl
We look at their spirit and hāl (Cited by Haeri, 13)

As Haeri explains, the distinction here is between “language, or that which is expressed verbally” and a term, hāl, “that refers to one of the most central concepts in ‘erfān,” Sufism or Islamic mysticism. The term, Haeri elaborates, 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). Moses, although put into turmoil by this revelation, goes on to share it:

Don’t search for manners and rules
say what your longing heart desires. (Cited by Haeri, 13)

A religion of the heart rather than that of manners or rules: that, God reveals to Moses, and through Moses to the readers of Rumi’s poem, is the true Islam.

Haeri’s book shows how this principle is at work across three types of prayer common in Iran. The ritual obligatory prayers known as salāt in Arabic and namaz in Persian, prayers made up of the recitation of the Qur’an in Arabic, a language many who perform namāz do not know; do’ā, spontaneous non-obligatory prayers in Persian that can be said at any time and in any place; and prayers composed, collected, and passed down in prayer books, also predominantly in Arabic. Throughout all these different forms of prayer, among the Iranian women with whom Haeri speaks—whom she observes and with whom she learns and prays—the fundamental conception of Islam as pursuing what one’s “longing heart desires” can be found. Haeri suggests that it is the influence of Persian poetry, so central to Iranian culture, recited and memorized from childhood on, that gives this particular cast to prayer. For the medieval Persian poetry in which these women’s lives are immersed is itself saturated with ‘erfān. Love for God and for God’s creation runs through the verses recited and sung by Iranians of all ages, pushing gently, yet authoritatively, against more legalistic conceptions of what it might mean to be Muslim.

Although Haeri’s rich ethnography focuses specifically on prayer—how it is learned, performed, and understood by the women she calls “our group”—something like the distinction between a religion of the law and a religion of the heart so common in nineteenth-century Christianity runs throughout the book.

Something similarly complex occurs within English literary traditions, in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Evangelical Christian calls for the return to a religion of the heart, one I believe is grounded in early and medieval Christian monastic and mystical traditions, finds its expression in poetry and the novel. Jane Eyre is, among other things, a work of evangelical theology, one in which what it means to be Christian is articulated through story and through the poetry of Bronte’s language. English language literature has many sources and feeds from many different streams, but at least some of them are explicitly religious, tied to early claims that religious poetry is the highest form of poetry and that true poetry is always religious. This is all grounded in the role the recitation of the Psalms takes within the Christian tradition. From its earliest centuries, Christianity organized the life of prayer around the Psalms, calling on those who recite them to become one with the psalmist as he cries out in love, despair, fear, awe, desire, and shame before God (see Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and the Book”; Craig, Hollywood, Trujillo, Representations; and Furey, “Impersonating Devotion”). The Psalms were said to contain every affect and to recite the Psalms was to learn to direct these affects toward their true source—God. The extraordinary role feeling plays in the development of English literary criticism requires further exploration; within this critical tradition we can see that the novel is second only to poetry—at times stands alongside it—in its capacity to incite true religion. Many things in Haeri’s wonderful book call out for comparison with Christian traditions of prayer, reading, and devotion, but two things resonate most strongly with my own current research. First, how might we understand the recitation of the Qu’ran and other prayers within Islam and the recitation of the Psalms and related material in Christianity? My guess is that there are sharp differences as well as similarities here. Secondly, what role does poetry and literature plays in cultivating the heart in both Islam and Christianity? Do different understandings of revealed scripture across and within the two traditions make a difference to the role played by non-scriptural literature? (And of course, the cultivation of the heart is also a central theme in the Hebrew Bible.)

 

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Amy Hollywood
Amy Hollywood, Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School, is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), which received the Otto Grundler Prize for the best book in medieval studies from the International Congress of Medieval Studies; Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Acute Melancholia and Other Essays (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is also the co-editor, with Patricia Beckman, of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012) and, with Eleanor Craig, Niklaus Largier, and Kris Trujillo, of a special issue of Representations, "The Poetics of Prayer and Devotion to Literature" (2021). Devotion: Three Inquires on Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination, co-authored with Constance Furey and Sarah Hammerschlag, will appear in December 2021.
Field Notes article

Madrasa Discourses in Hindsight


Dr. Ammar Khan Nasir at a discussion session at the 2021 Pakistan Summer Intensive.

Madrasa Discourses has been one of the most instructive and most rewarding experiences that I have had in my intellectual journey. The project was conceived as a way to fill a gap that is often present in madrasa students’ education, namely the importance of history, science, and the humanities for understanding Islamic history and theology. Over the course of the five-year project, the faculty developed syllabi for filling this gap and have engaged with three cohorts of students in intensives, workshops, and online courses. At the end of the first iteration of the program, it can be said without doubt that Madrasa Discourses (MD) has helped madrasa graduates in a number of fundamental ways. In this brief post, I discuss three of these benefits.

First, as someone who myself is from a madrasa background, I can attest to the need for closer engagement with sciences and the challenges that modernity brings to Islamic philosophy and theology. Madrasa Discourses both deepened and broadened my understanding of the complexities associated with the modern scientific worldview and modernity from a religious perspective. Most madrasa graduates have only a very siloed Islamic framework for interpreting these matters. Madrasa Discourses seeks to broaden this interpretative framework by providing a nuanced understanding of the shifts that have taken place in the western intellectual frameworks for understanding both the natural and social world. One of the program’s initial main objectives was to advance scientific literacy among madrasa graduates, and this has remained a central focus up until the present. Instructors and guest lecturers employed a variety of lenses to critically understand the workings of modern science. Through these interactions Madrasa Discourses participants were able to better understand the different strands of inquiry about the interrelationship of science and religion. This led participants to develop a holistic view of the whole debate and opened them up to further engagement with history, culture, and politics.

Secondly, Madrasa Discourses reconnects traditionally trained ulama (religious scholars) with the broader Islamic intellectual heritage. In recent history, the madrasa system in South Asia shifted its focus from preserving and transmitting classical Islamic learning to forming sectarian identities, especially in Pakistan. This move was in response to the pressures and challenges posed by colonial modernity. Consequently, an environment of robust intellectual inquiry has been replaced by a madrasa culture of fashioning pristine and obedient minds that unfortunately preserves sectarian difference. Against this backdrop, our participants find it immensely instructive to engage with the rich treasure trove of Islamic intellectual tradition in a non-sectarian manner. Particularly instructive was our exploration through diachronically selected texts of how the Islamic tradition has wrestled with the question of the contradiction between reason and revelation and how this rich and diverse tradition is impacting the theological responses to challenges posed by the modern scientific worldview today.

Thirdly, Madrasa Discourses helps us rethink the stereotypical image of a monolithic west that is essentially working at cross purposes with the Muslim world. The participants realize that alongside the political and military policies of western governments and an overarching global agenda imposed by impersonal capitalist forces, there exists a very strong tradition of self-critique within western culture with which Muslim theologians and intellectuals can meaningfully engage. Challenging such stereotypes also reminds us of the need to develop alternative interpretations of the modern condition that recognize the multiplicity of human cultures and the diversity of human experiences. In this connection, Charles Taylor’s seminal work, A Secular Age was immensely helpful and the participants found his account of the rise of modernity much more convincing and insightful than the mainstream secularization theories.

And lastly, through Madrasa Discourses, we become acquainted with the rich and robust scholarship in the western academy that is seriously engaging very important questions related to the Islamic tradition and its place in the modern world. Having access to these debates and the contestations they provoke provides a context in which our participants can assess their own role and responsibility vis-à-vis contemporary challenges facing the Islamic discursive tradition.

Since its inception, Madrasa Discourses has faced the worst kind of criticism. This included a subversive media campaign that largely focused on political aspects unrelated to the substance of the project. One example is the critique that the project is hosted by a Catholic university and funded by an American donor foundation, an objection that betrays a lack of knowledge of how funding works in U.S. universities.  Over the course of time, however, this negative campaign has died out and the project has succeeded in drawing serious attention from within the madrasa community and intellectual circles at large.

In Pakistan, our participants have planned to continue this intellectual exercise in multiple ways following the formal end of the Notre Dame-based projection in July 2021. We regularly meet in a weekly study circle wherein classical and modern texts both from Islamic and western traditions are studied and discussed. A number of MD graduates have undertaken introducing these themes and topics to new people in their personal circles who are interested in such discussions. And we are collaborating with some reputed institutions that feel motivated to launch modified versions of MD from their platforms.

On a personal level, this project has provided me an invaluable opportunity to work with incredible scholars and friends like Dr. Waris Mazhari, Professor Mahan Mirza, Dr. Joshua Lupo, and Dr. SherAli Tareen under the leadership of no less a visionary than Professor Ebrahim Moosa, whose commitment, passion, and enthusiasm for the revival of Islamic intellectualism stands at the heart of this whole endeavor [Moosa is a Co-Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative]. This privilege of personal friendships is coupled with the chance to have interactions and scholarly conversations with a host of scholars from diverse fields of study who we invited to speak during Madrasa Discourses sessions and workshops. This network of connections and relationships is surely a very precious asset that will aid my personal intellectual advancement and will build transcultural networks of academic conversation and dialogue.

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Ammar Khan Nasir
Muhammad Ammar Khan currently teaches Arabic and Islamic Studies at GIFT University in Gujranwala, Pakistan and edits a monthly Islamic magazine, Al-Sharīʿah. Prior to teaching at GIFT University, he taught various subjects of the Dars-e Nizami course at Madrasa Nusrat al-Uloom from 1996 to 2006. His body of written work is largely in Urdu. His first work, Imām Abū Ḥanīfa wa-ʿamal biʾl-ḥadīth (Imam Abu Hanifa and Adherence of Hadith) appeared in print in 1996. In 2007, he academically reviewed the recommendations of the Council of Islamic Ideology, Government of Pakistan, regarding Islamic Punishments. His research on the issue was later compiled and published by Al-Mawrid, a Foundation for Islamic Research and Education in Lahore, titled Ḥudūd-o Taʿzīrāt: chand aham mabāḥith (Discussions on Islamic Penal Code). His other works include Masjid Aqṣā kī tārīkh awr haqq-i tawalliyāt (History of the Sacred Mosque in Jerusalem and the Question of its Guardianship) and Jihād – Aik Muṭālaʿa (A Critical Study of Theological Understandings of Jihad). The work on Masjid Aqsa is especially related to the subject of religion and conflict transformation as it tries to hammer out a workable solution to the thorniest religious conflicts of the present-day world. His research articles on a variety of religious issues appear regularly in the Monthly Ishrāq, Lahore, and Monthly Al-Sharīʿah, Gujranwala. 
Theorizing Modernities article

The Power of Kenyan, Christian, Queer Imagination


Contending Modernities is concerned with “exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.” Applying this to the subject of my book Kenyan, Christian, Queer, the innocent reader might assume that Christianity here is the religious force, and queerness a secular one, and that both forces are antagonistically opposed to each other in modern Kenya. After all, LGBT activism and queer politics have typically been understood, and often understand themselves, as secular projects, while contemporary Christianity in a country such as Kenya, like elsewhere in Africa, is frequently associated with a re-enchantment of the public sphere. I am grateful to the editors of Contending Modernities for facilitating this roundtable discussion which, in line with CM’s mission, demonstrates that such an oppositional and binary conceptualization of religious and secular forces is, at the very least, simplistic. Indeed, in relation to the subject matter of Kenyan, Christian, Queer, it appears that the religious and the secular are deeply entangled, with the boundaries between them being fluid, and their interactions complex and dynamic. How else can we conceptualize a context in which the semi-secular state presents Kenya as a Christian and heterosexual nation; a self-declared atheist gay writer engages in constructive black and queer religious thought; hip hop artists launch a Same Love music video with a Bible quotation and a theological statement about God; an LGBT church campaigns for the legal decriminalization of homosexuality; and queer subjects negotiate their sexuality and faith in multiple ways? I very much appreciate the contributors to this roundtable for their thoughtful engagement with my book and for initiating such a constructive conversation that helps to further unpack and understand the complex dynamics that I sought to unravel in Kenyan, Christian, Queer. In what follows, I will respond to some of the questions raised and criticisms made, in particular relating to the underlined need for greater attention to the political-economical and the institutional conditions and structures in which Christian and queer activism takes place in contemporary Kenya, and the reservations about cultural production as a viable and impactful strategy of transformation. Addressing these and other issues, I will make a case for creative imagination as a prophetic and politically significant practice.

Let’s begin with a recent event in Kenya. In August 2021, Ezekiel Mutua was reportedly forced to give up his position as Chief Executive Officer of the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB), an official government body regulating the film sector. The official notification that Mutua has been sent on “terminal leave … pending of the expiry of his contract on 25th October, 2021” does not give any reason for the premature dismissal. Yet rumor has it that the step was taken after KFCB had become subject to an investigation by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission because of irregular payments of allowances and salaries. Whatever the reason, many Kenyan social media users, as well as people working in the film and creative industry, welcomed Mutua’s inglorious ousting. During his six years in office, Mutua had established a reputation as a “moral policeman” and even a “deputy Jesus,” because of the way in which he used his position to fight against, and where possible ban, anything he considered immoral, going far beyond the official KFCB remit. In my book Kenyan, Christian, Queer, I mention Mutua in relation to the official banning by KFCB of the Same Love music video (discussed in chapter 2) and the film Stories of Our Lives (chapter 3). Mutua’s particular concern with issues of homosexuality became a national laughing stock when, in 2017, he called for the immediate isolation of two “gay lions” that had been spotted mating in the Maasai Mara national park.

Rather than offering a political economy analysis of queer arts of resistance in Kenya, I was interested in queer arts of resistance as creative and critical practices of social, political, and religious (re)imagination.

I was reminded of Mutua’s dismissal when thinking about Ebenezer Obadare’s suggestion that in my book, I could (or should) have paid more attention to the workings of the state in policing issues of sexuality and in regulating and restricting the conditions under which “queer arts of resistance” can become socio-politically impactful and viable. Perhaps more than any other governmental body, Mutua’s KFCB, at the time of my research, represented these workings of the state. Yet Mutua’s recent dismissal also illustrates that his self-declared role as a moral watchdog of the nation is not uncontested, and that state power can turn against him (possibly also because Mutua did not refrain from criticizing national leaders for “obscenity in public”). The state is far from monolithic. Even at the highest political level, there is a discrepancy between the very public anti-gay rhetoric of the Kenyan Deputy President, William Ruto, and the much-more low-profile stance of President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has publicly condemned the “witch hunts” against gay people while also stating that Kenya is “not yet ready” to decriminalize homosexuality. Of course, it is important to acknowledge these contradictions and ambivalences of the state, the government, and of political leaders, and to study them in-depth and in comparison to other countries on the continent and beyond. As some of the contributors (Obadare and Lado) to this roundtable suggest, the situation in Kenya appears to be quite different—that is, defined by a greater level of relative freedom—compared to countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast.

Yet the project of my book is a different one. Rather than offering a political economy analysis of queer arts of resistance in Kenya, I was interested in queer arts of resistance as creative and critical practices of social, political, and religious (re)imagination. Ludovic Lado rightly draws attention to the difficulties for such a queer reimagination of Christianity to find a space and affect change in major African church institutions. Without dismissing this concern—obviously the question of institutional, like political, change is an important one, and I salute progressive African clergy and theologians, such as Lado and Esther Mombo, for their important work in this regard—in my book I undertook an analysis of Christianity that is not primarily focused on the church as an institution but on public culture and creative arts. The arts, broadly defined, may have a greater ability to explore the potential of religion to contribute to a progressive, critical, and innovative vision for society, and thus to inspire social transformation. The arts can be conceptualized as the “interstitial spaces” that Sa’ed Atshan, following Homi Bhabha, associates with the potential for intervention that is critical to the decolonization of queer studies.

Although some critics might say that the selection of case studies in my book is “random,” the queer arts of resistance featured in each of these case studies constitute practices of resistance and reimagination that open up alternative possibilities—in this case, alternatives to institutionalized religious, as well as state-sponsored, homophobia. Even my ethnographic case study of a church—the Cosmopolitan Affirming Church in Nairobi—argues that this LGBT-affirming community presents a “space of possibility” with a prophetic significance, even if it does not bring about any (immediately visible) change in Kenya’s major Christian denominations or in the country’s political or legal structures. I am grateful to each of my interlocutors for acknowledging the validity, and indeed the importance, of this approach which recognizes cultural production as crucial for the development of counter-narratives to the hegemonic narratives of African and religious homophobia. I also appreciate why some interlocutors, especially those coming from a social scientific background, would have liked me to give a more critical assessment of the socio-economic and political viability of such emerging counter-narratives and of their long-term effects.

With reference to the Kenyan Christian queer counter-narratives that I document, Obadare asks: “What, really, are the chances of delegitimizing and upstaging Pentecostal demonology around homosexuality, never mind substituting it with an alternative notion of Christian love?” I understand where the question is coming from, and I have asked this question myself in the process of researching and writing my book. There is an abundance of studies of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Kenya and in Africa more broadly. Many of these foreground that Pentecostalism, in spite of its ambitions of radical moral regeneration and socio-political transformation, is an unstable religio-political project. Among other reasons, this is due to its internal fragmentation and pluralization and the resulting competition that follows. It is also because of the instability of religious authority in Pentecostalism. Obadare himself, in spite of the rather robust title of his book about Nigerian Pentecostalism and politics, Pentecostal Republic, acknowledges that Pentecostal Christianity’s “apparent political triumph is by no means irreversible.” In other words, we cannot assume that Pentecostalism in its current form will continue to be the dominant religious option on the African continent forever. Obviously, neither can we assume that the Christian landscape in countries such as Kenya and Nigeria will simply follow a trajectory of liberal progress, and that popular Christian movements which recently have come to profile themselves by a strong anti-LGBT stance, will be gradually taken over by progressive, queer-affirming ones. But I do suggest that religious, as well as social and political change, begins somewhere: with the emergence of prophetic, initially marginal, counter-narratives. Pentecostalism itself began like that, and its principle openness to new revelations from the Spirit present a potential for further transgressions and transformations. As Achille Mbembe has pointed out with reference to the history of slavery and the civil rights movement, “Struggle as a praxis of liberation has always drawn part of its imaginary resources from Christianity” (174). Underlining my earlier point, he adds to this that the Christianity in question is not foremost that of the institutional Church, but is instead “a space of truth” and “a be-coming, a futurity” (175).

The arts, broadly defined, may have a greater ability to explore the potential of religion to contribute to a progressive, critical, and innovative vision for society, and thus to inspire social transformation.

If the account presented in my book reflects a sense of optimism which some readers may find “jarring,” it is because the participants in my fieldwork, and the creative texts in my cultural analysis, themselves reflected a strong optimism. For instance, recent steps to decriminalize homosexuality in countries such as Mozambique and Botswana reinforced their belief that such a change might be possible in Kenya, too, without them necessarily being naïve about the struggle it would take. The queer arts of resistance centered in Kenyan, Christian, Queer present, in the words of Jose Esteban Munoz, a “forward-dawning futurity” (29) and therefore are inspired by—and simultaneously engender—hope. As these arts of resistance are not only queer, but also Christian, this hope, for my research participants, is fundamentally related to faith, that is, faith in God who, in the words of Mercy Oduyoye that serve as epigraph of my book, enables people with a spirituality of persistence to “make a way where there is no way.”

I am grateful to Sa’ed Atshan for observing a very similar dynamics among queer Palestinian Christians, and to Mujahid Osman for observing the same in the context of the Inner Circle mosque in Cape Town, and conceptualizing it, along similar lines, with Sa’diyya Shaikh’s notion of “future-thinking.” My own choice not to downplay or critically evaluate, but instead render explicitly visible and share the optimism of my participants is informed by two methodological decisions. First, my commitment to strive for “researching with,” rather than “researching about,” participants and their life-worlds. Performing what Osman describes as a “political ethic of care” toward my interlocutors, was also a way, as Mombo acknowledges, of addressing my own positionality and thinking about the embodied relationality between me and my participants. Second, my commitment to a postsecular approach acknowledges religion, as Osman puts it, as a possible “source of meaning-making and liberation.” I fully agree with Atshan that such a nuanced, critical yet constructive and empathetic engagement with religion can further contribute to the decolonization of queer studies in the global South because religious knowledge, symbol, and narrative are so important to the world-making of queer subjects in Africa and other global South contexts.

Finally, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in his book Re-membering Africa, has pointed out that “creative imagination is one of the greatest remembering practices” (28) and thus has the potential to counter and overcome the effects of colonialism as a dis-membering practice through which African memory was supplanted by European knowledges. Such creative and imaginative re-membering can be applied to the memory of indigenous traditions of sexual diversity, which were supplanted by the introduction of Christianity in the colonial period and its related Victorian moral values and laws. Some African LGBT activists and thinkers—Binyavanga Wainaina, discussed in my book, is one of them—have therefore suggested to give up on Christianity altogether and instead reclaim indigenous spiritualties. Although understandable, this suggestion overlooks the long-standing presence of Christianity on the continent, which long-predates the history of European exploration and imperialism, and the ways in which Christianity has become deeply rooted in African societies and culture. In this context, it is important to acknowledge that some of the oldest narratives of same-sex intimacy in Africa relate to early Christian traditions, such as between Perpetua and Felicity, two second-century North African women martyrs, recognized by the Catholic Church as saints, and the seventeenth-century Ethiopian nun Walatta Petros, recognized as a saint by the Orthodox Church, and leader of a movement that drove out foreign missionaries. In other words, as much as the account of a creative imagination of Christianity and sexual diversity in Africa offered in my book has a strong present-day focus and is mostly concerned with contemporary Pentecostal Christian imaginaries, there is also potential for a remembering practice that engages with these queer African Christian memories of the past.

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Adriaan van Klinken
Adriaan van Klinken is Professor of Religion and African Studies at the University of Leeds. He serves as Director of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies and the Centre for Religion and Public Life. He also is Extraordinary Professor in the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands (2011). 

Adriaan’s research focuses on religion, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Africa. His books include Transforming Masculinities in African Christianity: Gender Controversies in Times of AIDS (2013) and Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism and Arts of Resistance in Africa (2019). He recently co-authored with Ezra Chitando,Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa (2021), and with Johanna Stiebert, Sebyala Brian and Fredrick Hudson, Sacred Queer Stories: Ugandan LGBTQ+ Refugee Lives and the Bible (2021).
Theorizing Modernities article

On Decolonizing Queer Studies


Raised fist with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.

The 2019 publication of Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan Christian Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa marks a critical moment for the fields of queer studies, African studies, religious studies, and postcolonial studies. Van Klinken’s book provides scholars with a model to theorize African political subjectivities where queerness and Christianity are mutually reinforcing rather than in opposition. He examines the contemporary Kenyan context, centering four case studies of the arts as activism, or “artivism.” One chapter focuses on the work of the queer Kenyan public figure Binyavanga Wainaina, another examines gay musician George Barasa’s “Same Love” music video, the next discusses the queer narratives of the Stories of Our Lives anthology project, and the final case study explores the queer Cosmopolitan Affirming Church in Nairobi. Van Klinken interweaves autoethnographic reflections with interludes between these chapters.  

In this essay, I draw upon Kenyan, Christian, Queer as a launching pad to think through decolonizing queer studies more broadly. Van Klinken is explicit in his commitment to decolonizing queer studies and he achieves this by problematizing western assumptions about queerness outside of the west. He utilizes Africa-based archives and methods and centers the voices of queer African thinkers and artists. He is also attuned to how  “overcoming homophobia is a matter of decolonization” (34). 

It is analytically useful to bring anthropologist George Paul Meiu’s 2017 book Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya, into conversation with van Klinken. Both scholars are invested in understanding African sexualities, have conducted fieldwork in contemporary Kenyan societies, recognize Kenya’s linkages to global domains, take historical colonialism and present postcolonial conditions into account, and contribute to queer studies.

Meiu ethnographically examines the phenomenon of young Samburu men from Northern Kenya who engage in sex tourism with older European women in coastal towns. These men perform Maasai moran warrior stereotypes in order to secure resources from these women, which in turn transforms their wealth and relationships with their communities in their home villages. Thus, while van Klinken’s analysis is focused on the middle class and more privileged Kenyans with access to urban and cosmopolitan networks, Meiu’s research is grounded in rural contexts and among poorer Kenyans. All of these Kenyans share a common heritage from British colonialism and postcolonial Kenyan elite governance. While the queer subjects in van Klinken’s book can forge solidarity with their queer counterparts in the west, the heterosexual subjects in Meiu’s text are mired in racialized/otherized/fetishized relationships with western tourists. Furthermore, Meiu explicates how ethnic categorizations undergirded colonial rule and postcolonial social engineering. This categorization does not factor in van Klinken’s analysis nearly as much. While van Klinken briefly acknowledges class in his analysis, economic factors are central for Meiu whose work is at the intersection of economy, ethnicity, and sexuality.  

Both authors delineate connections between colonialism and sexuality in Kenya. Van Klinken is cognizant of British colonial homophobia that significantly departed from indigenous Kenyan queer tolerant attitudes. Meiu traces British colonial perceptions of Samburu men as security threats whose bodies and desires need to be controlled. While van Klinken’s research subjects are queer, his text does not reveal much about the sexual aspects of homosexuality. On the other hand, Meiu dives into the sex acts underlying the heterosexual tourist-native relationships of his research subjects. While the former scholar conceptualizes queerness in terms of non-normative and same-sex gender and sexuality, the latter defines queerness in a broader sense that relates to temporality and momentary disruptions of age hierarchies and social roles.  

Both authors also outline connections between colonialism and religion. Van Klinken insists on postsecular scholarship that accounts for religion in analytically robust ways, while Meiu’s references to religion are brief. Meiu relates how Christian attitudes are related to particular notions of morality, developmentalism, and what should be the “proper” modern Kenyan subject. Van Klinken’s genealogy of Christianity in Kenya is extensive. He gives attention to the British-era penal code against “unnatural acts” and its adoption into law in 1963 by postcolonial elites, while also paying attention to how this has impacted Kenyan Christian sensibilities. Moreover, he is conscious of the role of Christian missionaries from the west in African colonization, and the continued realities of western Christian imperialism in Kenya and other parts of the African continent.  

A rally in London outside the Commonwealth Secretariat Headquarters to demand greater equality for LGBTQI people. Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY SA 2.0.

Van Klinken references postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s notion of interstice to theorize “interstitial or intervening space” and “interstitial intimacy” to challenge “binary divisions through which . . . spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed” (142). This epistemological approach of paying attention to the interstitial is critical to the decolonization of queer studies. Reading Van Klinken alongside Meiu queers our understanding of queerness to encompass broader norms related to patriarchy, in terms of both gender and stage of life. The work of these two scholars together queers understandings of Kenya beyond a rural versus cosmopolitan binary. We also come to see how Christianity can be both imperial and indigenous in Kenya, in addition to the interstices between the colonial and the postcolonial. Van Klinken’s conceptualization of the religious is expansive, broadening conceptions of the prophetic, liturgical, or even theological. Furthermore, while both scholars are European, they demonstrate the potential to decolonize queer studies in the Global South through rich analysis that is grounded in privileging the knowledge, imaginaries, and world-making of African subjects.  

We can also advance the decolonization of queer studies by increasing the space for South-South epistemologies and solidarities. I approach these questions as a Palestinian scholar of queerness in Palestine (having published the book Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique). Like Kenya, Palestine was colonized by the British, and it exists in the Middle East/North Africa region that must contend with the legacies of colonial homophobia as well. Moreover, LGBTQ Palestinian Christians queer the binary of Christianity as indigenous vs. imperialist in Palestine. Palestinian Christians suffer from Israeli military occupation and oppression that is largely sustained by western Christian Zionists, revealing the imperialist weaponization of Christianity by western actors committed to the subjugation of all Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim. Yet, Palestinian Christians are also cognizant of their experiences as indigenous Christians in Palestine, descendants of the land where Jesus was born, lived, and was crucified. For Palestinian Christians, Jesus was an anti-imperialist ancestor who challenged the Roman Empire. Thus, for queer Palestinian Christians, Christianity can simultaneously serve as a source of their spiritual violence as well as empowerment. When we are sensitive to nuanced and intimate analyses of queer subjects’ own understandings of their local moral worlds in the Global South, we contribute to the decolonization of queer studies.

During two recent book talks of my own, I experienced the power and potential of South-South queer intellectual and political exchange. One was at Swarthmore College, my home institution, where my brilliant colleague, Farid Azfar, who grew up in Pakistan, served as the discussant. We compared and contrasted the experiences of feminist activists in Pakistan and the queer social movement in Palestine. The other event was with Gautam Bhan, a queer scholar at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Bhan was a remarkable interlocutor who shared insights from his experience with the Indian queer community that resonated with what I have observed in Palestine over the years. With both events, it was refreshing not to have to turn to the White western gaze, and to be able to speak about non-normative gender and sexuality in the Global South without contending with Orientalist assumptions.  

Van Klinken and Meiu also share a commitment to post-Orientalist scholarship. Without homogenizing Kenya or the Global South, we can place Kenya alongside other former domains of the British Empire, including Palestine, India, and Pakistan, to elucidate the queer imaginaries that animate the colonial and postcolonial world. It is through such multiplicity of analytical vantage points that the intellectual project of decolonizing queer studies can reach its potential.   

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Sa'ed Atshan
Dr. Sa’ed Atshan is an Acting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University and Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Senior Research Scholar in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. Atshan earned a Joint PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies (2013) and an MA in Social Anthropology (2010) from Harvard University, a Masters in Public Policy (MPP) (2008) from the Harvard Kennedy School, and BA (2006) from Swarthmore. As an anthropologist and peace and conflict studies scholar, Atshan's research is focused on a) contemporary Palestinian society and politics, b) global LGBTQ social movements, and c) Quaker Studies and Christian minorities in the Middle East.
He is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020) and coauthor ofThe Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020). 
Theorizing Modernities article

Reading Religion and Queerness in Postcolonial Africa


Praying hands with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.

Adriaan van Klinken’s book, Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism and Arts of Resistance in Africa, is a wonderfully lucid and intellectually sharp monograph exploring the forms of activism deployed by LGBT Christians in Kenya and their modes of religious rereading, reconstructing, and reimagining. Van Klinken’s book is grounded in the multilayered analysis of postcolonial Kenyan (sexual) politics and its intimacy with religious, aesthetic, and discursive regimes. This scholarly orientation clearly presents itself when van Klinken draws on the lived realities, artistic interventions, and theological productions of his queer interlocutors—especially as he positions them as responding to the Global North’s claims of the “African homophobe,” as well as the assertions of some African political and religious leaders that the practice of homosexuality is “un-African,” and therefore a corrupting import from the West. 

Through a careful weaving of textual analysis and descriptions of thick ethnographic material, van Klinken challenges both hegemonic readings of “queerness” in Euro-American queer theory and postcolonial claims of homosexuality as un-African. In this regard, both responses to the presence of non-normative genders and sexualities are a continuation of colonial Orientalist and binary logic truncating the possibilities of human flourishing. However, this particular type of response is based on the idea of an absence; an absence of queerness on the African continent. In the case of the Euro-American academy, van Klinken challenges the supposed secularity of queerness. And in the case of postcolonial claims, van Klinken demonstrates how queerness has historically been part of the African cultural landscape and how queerness is manifested in the contemporary period. Van Klinken textures this intersectional location of the queer African by foregrounding the voices of real and embodied people. This engaged move not only makes claims to religious authority, but it also demonstrates how local groups in Kenya are collectively rearticulating what it means to be Christian in Africa. This move thus showcases how Christianity is taken up in various ways. 

I enjoyed how van Klinken nuances discourses of “African homophobia” by archiving and examining the ways in which queer Christians in Africa draw “on religious language and symbols” to make a claim to religious authority by creatively rereading the tradition (6). Moreover, van Klinken’s work also engages with the “canon” of queer theory. Drawing on the work of Melissa Wilcox, van Klinken challenges the supposed secularity (and therefore modernity) of queerness by centering his analysis on the embodied and subtle discourses of queer religious folks in Kenya. In so doing, van Klinken (and many others such as Andrew K.T. Yip and Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle) are challenging the “militantly secular” (and insular)  form that queer studies in the Global North takes (van Klinken, 14). For van Klinken, a decolonial intervention in queer studies requires an interrogation of the implicit assumptions undergirding queer studies in the Euro-American academy. This intervention, as van Klinken writes, would critically examine the “Western secular epistemological assumptions underlying much of queer studies” which often posits a static, antagonistic, and conservative view of religion (14). Following a postsecular trend, van Klinken advocates for an understanding of religion as a constructed category and therefore as part of a particular regime of power. In this light, the constructed category of religion can be viewed not only as a site of oppression for queer bodies, but also as a source of meaning-making and liberation. 

I found this intervention generative, particularly when parallels emerged between it and my work on queer Muslims in post-apartheid South Africa. In this light, by producing what Islamic Studies scholar Sa’diyya Shaikh calls a “multiple critique” in the context of Islamic feminism, van Klinken’s book address the intersectional challenges of reading queerness in postcolonial Africa. Shaikh’s multiple critique is constituted by three interrelated and interconnected elements: an external critique of Islamo-racism, an internal critique of Muslim patriarchy, and movement-building and future-thinking. 

Following a postsecular trend, van Klinken advocates for an understanding of religion as a constructed category and therefore as part of a particular regime of power. In this light, the constructed category of religion can be viewed not only as a site of oppression for queer bodies, but also as a source of meaning-making and liberation.

Thinking with van Klinken and Shaikh, at the intersection of Islam and queerness, we can see how, on the one hand, homosexuality (as an identity) was imported from the west and codified during the period of European colonization of the Islamicate world and has since then been constructed as “unIslamic.” This framing, in the minds of some (see Joseph Massad), reveals that the contemporary figure of the gay man and (to a lesser extent) the lesbian woman is constructed in the west and imported into the Arab and Muslim world via the financial (and ontological) strings of the development and peace complex. On the other hand, we can also better understand the emergence of  sexualized and gendered readings of Islamicate societies which construct Islam and the figure of the Muslim as the ultimate homophobe (see the work of Jasbir K. Puar, Fatima El-Tayeb, and Momin Rahman). 

Both of these traditions of critique are essential for the cultivation of a decolonial/queer ethic. However, the activism and agency of local actors should also be taken seriously. One such form of activism is the discursive work of activists and scholars who center the lived realties of precarious social classes at the center of their intellectual and political commitments. In this regard, following Shaikh’s multiple critique, a robust analysis of Islamically sanctioned forms of homophobia should be uncovered, challenged, and transformed. On a theological level, Kugle’s Homosexuality in Islam is the ideal starting point as it engages with the sacred sources of Islam (Qur’an and hadith) and its legal (fiqhi) ramifications. Additionally, the works of Afsaneh Najmabadi, Tom Boellstorff, and Wim Peumans convey the different and multivocal registers of sexual normativity and deviance in Islamicate communities. 

The final part of Shaikh’s multiple critique is religious and political transformation. This is the cultivation of alternative worlds which present the possibility of a different way of being. A striking embodied example of this is the cultivation of an alternative religious space of meaning-making and community-building. Van Klinken’s fourth chapter on gay churches was particularly attention-grabbing. This chapter struck me due to its resonance with my own work on The Inner Circle, a “gay mosque,” in Cape Town. As one congregant said on a documentary series: 

I came to this mosque to be able to pray in a space that is not gender segregated, to be able to stand in the front row, behind the imam, to sometimes be asked to lead the prayer, just to be in a space where women are in the front lines, are included as much as possible, are really actual participants, and not on the sidelines and forgotten about.

As this congregant accurately notes, the space that The Inner Circle creates should be recognized as a place where marginalized Muslims—from across the identity and ideological continuum—gather to “participate in religious meaning-making through the performance of supplicatory prayers and expressions of pious belonging and commitment.” This sacred space, created by The Inner Circle, reconstructs the Islamic tradition by creatively redeploying its narratives, rituals, and symbols. However, this deployment not only continues some aspects of the (discursive) tradition, it also alters and reimagines it in a way that creates a vision for an egalitarian future. This is also an interesting manifestation of Atalia Omer’s hermeneutics of critical caretaking. 

Perhaps closely related to this type of transformational work is a foundational commitment to an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to the study of religious queerness in postcolonial Africa. Through his creative use of ethnographic methods and textual analysis, van Klinken clearly conveys the contours of his capacious landscape. Through his deployment of ethnography along with queer theory’s critique of hegemonic forms of power, van Klinken shows that he is deeply cognizant of the power his body commands in postcolonial Kenya. Through his mixed methodological approach (textual analysis and ethnography) van Klinken provides a clear account of a fluid and dynamic approach to the ethnographic study of religion. His four ethnographic reflections (and interspliced interludes) expose the workings of power embedded in the process of knowledge production. 

By deploying a “queer approach to ethnography” van Klinken demonstrates how power is relationally constructed and dynamically mobile. Drawing on queer theory’s critical awareness of the fluid nature of power, van Klinken reflects on his engagements in the “field,” especially as an embodied researcher. He writes (reminiscent of Foucault) “power, in this approach, becomes multidirectional.” This showcases how both researcher and participant(s) are embedded in a network of power. This network illustrates power’s relational constitution, demonstrating how researchers and participants “are dependent on one another” (186). In this way, through enacting a political ethic of care toward his interlocutors, van Klinken demonstrates how reading queerness in Africa for nuance requires reading for intersectionality and an attentiveness to the ambivalent role of religion on the continent. This is an astute approach to research ethics, especially as we—students, researchers, scholars—grapple with the dynamic challenges of the field like conducting research with/about precarious or marginal(ized) classes.  

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Mujahid Osman
Mujahid Osman is a doctoral student in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. His work is at the intersection of Islam, queerness, coloniality, and liberation theology. Mujahid holds a Master of Global Affairs with an International Peace Studies concentration from the University of Notre Dame, a Bachelor of Social Science Honors degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) with a specialization in Religious Studies, and a B.A. in Political Studies and Religious Studies also from UCT. He has worked with social justice organizations in Cape Town for over four years on issues around political economy, liberation theology, and religious ethics.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Margins of “Queer Arts of Resistance” in Sub-Saharan Africa


Raised fist with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.

To honor the thick autobiographical breadth of Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBTQ Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa I would like in this contribution to share a bit of my own journey/struggle with question of the normality of homosexuality both at the personal and at the scholarly level. Coming from a Catholic background, I also suggest in my concluding remarks that the reference of van Klinken’s book to gay Pentecostalism should not occlude the fact that religions in Africa remain one of the main repertoires of homophobic arguments.

In January 2021, just a few days after the swearing in of Joe Biden as 46th president of the United States, I posted the following on my Facebook page, which has about five thousand followers: “I prefer a good homosexual leader to all the corrupt and inhumane heterosexual leaders who are destroying our countries here in Africa.” I was responding to a number of African critics of Joe Biden following the appointment of a number of LGBTQ Americans to his cabinet. For many of the critics, these appointments were unworthy of a president claiming to be Christian, let alone Catholic.  

My post attracted hundreds of comments, most of which were fierce critiques of my stance. The few who sided with me argued that competency and professionalism had nothing to do with sexual orientation. As for my critics, their arguments ranged from ethical considerations to mere insults. These criticisms came especially from those for whom my stance sounded like an apology for homosexuality, which many still perceive as a religious and ethical abomination. Coming from a priest and a scholar of religion, for them, it was a betrayal of moral and religious standards. 

One of my critics wrote: “your inclination for homosexuality is well established. I always wonder when you say your breviary, if you still celebrate masses, when you preach the word of God. You are more mundane than spiritual. It is not too late to swap your cassock for politics. You are a lost soul.” Another commentary read: “Finally a good Catholic priest coming out! Homosexuality is the golden rule among these fake religious people hiding behind a cassock.” Another one wrote: “You have to hang this devil, this demon or else burn him alive . . . you are lucky to have such a lax government that lets you do and say anything of this kind. I dream of seeing a real man at the head of the country that will mercilessly deal with these demons. I have always told people that the Catholic Church is the most demonic thing ever seen. I imagine what the children undergo in the hands of the same devil.” These homophobic utterances are far from being isolated in Cameroon, where I am from. The violence they exhibit is revealing and shows how little space there is in the public sphere for those who identify as LGBTQI+ to engage in what van Klinken calls “arts of resistance.” 

Cameroon is one of the many countries where being LGBTQI+ is illegal and same-sex relations are still criminalized. The most recent case where identifying as LGBTQI+ was criminalized was when two transgender women were sentenced on May 11, 2021 by a Cameroonian court to five years in prison and ordered to pay fines of $370 because of their sexual orientation. This example shows that it is still not safe to identify as LGBTQI+ in many African countries. It is in light of such challenges that van Klinken explores the  “dynamics relating to the creative ways in which gay men and other lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people in Kenya make themselves visible despite sociopolitical homophobia” (3). The book  “is particularly interested in the role of religious belief and practice in what I call Kenyan queer ‘arts of resistance’”(4). Based on the case studies discussed by the author, I reckon that although homosexuality is equally illegal in Kenya, LGBTQ people are safer in Kenya than in Cameroon. They can sing, write, worship and theologize against the exclusive normativity of heterosexuality without risking being arrested and jailed as they would be in Cameroon. In other words, the margins of Queer “art of resistance” vary from one country to another in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

My first intellectual engagement with the question of homosexuality dates back to 2011 when I published an article on popular homophobia in Cameroon. The essay showed how in public opinion representations of homosexuality that associated it with esoteric practices, including witchcraft, acted as defenses of traditional values and stood in contrast to the more liberal values of a corrupt postcolonial elite. Religion, especially the reference to sacred texts, was identified in this article as a major repertoire in homophobic arguments.  

Van Klinken’s major contribution to the debate is indeed his focus on the use of religiously inspired arguments to challenge homophobia.

More recently, within the Africa working group of the “Authority, Community and Identity” component of the Contending Modernities Project, I researched the politics of gender reforms in Côte d’Ivoire and it was again evident that religion is more often used to condemn and demonize homosexuality than to defend it. Therefore, van Klinken’s major contribution to the debate is indeed his focus on the use of religiously inspired arguments to challenge homophobia. The existence of a Pentecostal “gay church” discussed in chapter 4 was a discovery for me. I just do not think something like this is feasible yet in Cameroon, where I am from, or in Chad, where I live. 

Even doing research on homosexuality in some parts of Africa remains a major challenge. I have come to realize that some of my colleagues are very uncomfortable with the idea that research on homosexuality could be a worthy topic of scholarly investigation. For example, in Côte d’Ivoire, I encouraged a Master’s degree student to study how Ivorian LGBTQI+ organizations managed to secure visibility in spite of a largely homophobic legal environment. During the thesis defense, one of the examiners took issue with the student for choosing to work on LGBTQI+ organizations in the first place. For this examiner, to study LGBTQI+ organizations amounted to an apology for homosexuality, of which he disapproved. 

The second register of my personal journey with the LGBTQI+ community is that of human encounters. I wonder how many Africans on the continent have knowingly met and interacted with a gay person? Of course, in the context of Africa, these encounters are made difficult by the repressive legal infrastructure which limits the visibility and free expression of gay identity. For me, this has only happened in the west.   

Like most Africans, I grew up in a highly heterosexual and heteronormative social environment. Homosexuality was not an identity that was available for one to embody in my universe of socialization. It was during my years of university studies in the west, first in the United States and then in England, that I actually knowingly met LGBTQI+ people. Among my fellow priests, students, and lecturers, some openly identified as gay. We met in class, at church, on excursions, at sports events, etc. I had no choice but to interact with them regularly. With time, I learned to relate to them as brothers and sisters in humanity. Something shifted in my perception. I am not implying that these personal experiences did away with all my queries about homosexuality, especially given my position as a clergy man in a Catholic Church, which officially teaches that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” But my lived experiences now resist any dehumanizing approach.

Is there some space for the “queer arts of resistance” in the Catholic Church in Sub-Saharan Africa? Very little! A few theologians and scholars of religion, as van Klinken alludes to in his book, have cautiously attempted some intellectual openings. But the Church hierarchy strictly upholds heteronormativity. In one of the most recent cases on this topic, this time in Ghana, there were plans to establish the first LGBTQI+ community center. The Ghana Catholic Bishops Conference joined other groups to call on the government in a public statement to oppose it. While the center was opened in February 2021, it had to close three weeks later “due to homophobic pressure from politicians, antigay organizations and, you guessed it, church leaders.”  In a pastoral letter issued on July 29, 2021, the archbishop of Douala in Cameroon, Bishop Samuel Kleda, cites homosexuality among what he terms “pratiques sexuelles contre nature.”  These examples from the Catholic clergy suggest that there is a long way to go for the “queer arts of resistance” to find some space within major Church institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

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Ludovic Lado
Ludovic Lado, S.J., is the director of Centre d’Etude et de Formation pour le Développement (CEFOD) in N’Djamena, Chad. His publications include Catholic Pentecostalism and the Paradoxes of Africanization (Brill, 2009); Le Pluralisme Religieux en Afrique (PUCAC, 2015); and Towards an Anthropology of Catholicism in Africa (forthcoming).