In A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe, Giuliana Chamedes presents the heretofore understudied history of Catholic international diplomacy in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Training her attention especially on the periods around the two world wars, Chamedes shows how the Vatican sought to shape the political and social life of Europe by signing concordats—“bilateral treat[ies] that would bind the Church and nation-state together under international law” (3)—with various European nations. These concordats lent legitimacy to both the status of the Vatican as the spiritual and political center of Europe and to the burgeoning nation states that came into being following the first world war and were eager for international recognition. The Vatican’s goal through the signing of these concordats was indeed to “remake Christian Europe” into something that mirrored a medieval past where the Vatican stood at the center of Europe. For these concordats often stipulated that the state would implement laws that reflected Catholic contemporary Catholic doctrine (concerning marriage and divorce, for example) and maintain Catholic educational systems.
During this time period, the Vatican perceived that communism was the primary threat to implementing this goal. During World War I, while the Vatican also expressed anxiety around the rise of political and economic liberalism, as well as socialism, communism was its primary concern. As Chamedes also demonstrates, quite often this anti-communism was imbued with older forms of antisemitism that had been given new life in the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” during this time period. In its bid to combat the rise of communism, Chamedes shows, the Vatican played an active role in shaping the nation-state, defining the boundaries between public and private religion, and demarcating the meanings of the religious and secular.
As the book demonstrates in careful detail, the Vatican’s obsession with communism was in fact what led it to sometimes aid, and at other times remain silent on, the rise of fascism in the lead up to World War II. Indeed, while there were internal debates surrounding how the Vatican should respond to Mussolini and Hitler’s rise, more often than not in its public facing documents the Vatican ignored the atrocities being committed by these leaders, and instead returned to communism as the primary evil that the Church should focus on eliminating. The Vatican’s complicity in the rise of these brutal regimes, and the Holocaust, remains a ghost that haunts the Church to this day.
As Chamedes notes, even if the center of institutional power of the Church did not address the rise of fascism, lay Catholics and theologians did at times speak out, condemning fascism and seeking points of dialogue with communists and socialists. There was indeed during these times “A War for the Soul of Catholicism” as the title of chapter 7 of the book reflects. It is the tension between how one might have wanted the Church to act, and how it did in fact act, that drives two of the responses to this symposium.
Scott Appleby, drawing on Atalia Omer’s concept of the critical caretaker, reflects on how the theologian or scholar of Catholicism might confront and indeed offer alternatives to the authoritarian vision of Catholicism that animated the views of the Vatican during the early- and mid-twentieth century. In his essay, Toussaint Kafahire, himself a priest and theologian, also grapples with these questions and confronts the fact that the Vatican’s political maneuvering led it to make alliances with fascist governments that betrayed what he sees as the true mission of the Church.
Approaching Chamedes’s book as a fellow historian, Paul Hanebrink reflects on the dynamic relationship between political and religious rhetoric. More specifically he contends that it is important to not only attend to the way political rhetoric is often influenced by religious convictions, but also the reverse, that is, how political convictions influence the way one understands religion. He also suggests that even though the official days of concordat diplomacy are now past, the idea of “remaking Christian Europe” survives to this day in figures like Viktor Orbán, the current Prime Minister of Hungary. Cara Burnidge likewise approaches the book as an historian, contending that Chamedes’s book can be of aid to religious studies scholars seeking to understand how religious institutions have changed in the modern world in light of novel political and social situations. Bringing her own research on Woodrow Wilson into conversation with Chamedes, she also suggests that different notions of “Christianizing” were contending with one another at this time.
Finally, in her response, Chamedes reflects on the notion of the critical caretaker, as well as Burnidge’s concern with competing notions of Christianity and Hanebrink’s attention to the dynamic ways that political and religious language have influenced one another.
In his first blog post for the Contending Modernities project, Scott Appleby wrote, “Neither Catholics, Muslims, or Seculars have been passive recipients of the developments and processes associated with modernity. Rather, each has shaped, resisted, accommodated and adapted to the growing explanatory powers of science; the encompassing reach of the modern nation-state; the differentiation between religion and state, public and private realms; the dynamics of global markets and mass media communication; and other constituent elements of ‘the modern world.’” By uncovering key dynamics of how powerful representatives of the Catholic tradition “shaped, resisted, and accommodated” the modern nation state, and indeed continues to do so, Chamedes’s work, and this symposium, continue the work of unpacking the forces of secularism, religion, and modernity.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Handover of the Saar territory, March 1, 1935. Catholic clergy and Nazi officials, including Joseph Goebbels (far right) and Wilhelm Frick (second from right) perform salute. Photo Credit: Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
The muffled applause you hear emanating from U.N. headquarters, and from the diminishing number of world capitals whose leaders still believe, is offered in quiet celebration of the centennial of the creation of the League of Nations, in 1920. Ah, what a time it was for the internationalists of every stripe! A year earlier, in 1919, Lenin had founded the Comintern in Moscow; not to be outdone, his rivals for leadership of “world labor” established their own Labor and Socialist International four years later. Around the same time, fledgling non-communist democratic parties across Europe began finding one another, and decided to jump aboard the “crossing borders” bandwagon; in 1925, they grouped together under the non-pithy banner of The International Secretariat of Democratic Parties Inspired by Christianity.
Most of these contenders, save the Communist International, turned out to be pretenders. Bereft of a hardy universalist ideology to sustain their ambition and blunt fissiparous infighting, they sputtered after a season or so in the sun. Only one nations-based transnational organization, an experienced one at that, had the vision, the ideology, and the cadres of devout to give Moscow a run for its money as a would-be world hegemon—the Roman Catholic Church. When it took shape at the height of the First World War, Catholic Internationalism, writes Giuliana Chamedes, was “a set of practices (crossing borders, forging connections), a way of seeing the world, and a vision for the future. Its claims dovetailed well with the Church’s longtime espousal of universalism . . .[and] its purpose was to use new and technologically advanced means to centralize power and glue members to Rome, even as it provided an infrastructure for increased sociability within national bounds” (6).
In A Twentieth-Century Crusade, her new history of Vatican diplomacy and statecraft from 1914 to 1960, Chamedes details how all the Pope’s men sent about to reclaim Europe from the clutches of aggressively secular-liberal forces, first through a series of concordats (bilateral treaties recognized by international law) with sympathetic Catholic nation-states and early “marriages of convenience” with right wing ethnonationalists emerging in Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, and Spain; and, then, in the 1930s, through a transnational (eventually global) campaign to counter “atheistic Communism” —Catholic schoolchildren never knew it as mere “Communism”—via alliances with (anti-liberal, antisemitic) fascist regimes, support for anti-communist lay activist networks, and the suppression of anti-fascist Catholic leaders.
The strategy, Chamedes notes, was remarkably effective. While not quite endorsing the claims of Catholic partisans at the time that Rome had become “’the seat of the mightiest Internationale the world has ever seen,’” she concludes that the Vatican “did not lose the battle with modernity,” but rather militated effectively against the separation of private and public spheres in much of Europe and “successfully de-privatized religion” during the interwar years (6–7).
In A Twentieth-Century Crusade, her new history of Vatican diplomacy and statecraft from 1914 to 1960, Chamedes details how all the Pope’s men sent about to reclaim Europe from the clutches of aggressively secular-liberal forces, first through a series of concordats (bilateral treaties recognized by international law) with sympathetic Catholic nation-states and early “marriages of convenience” with right wing ethnonationalists.
Grounded in extensive archival sources, Chamedes’s history is particularly strong in demonstrating how the concordats and related socio-political negotiations, settlements, and strenuously cultivated relationships between Church and state officials were designed to weave a thick web of collusion across key dimensions of cultural, civic, and “private” life. The goal was to ensure not only ecclesiastical privilege in the partner states, but also enforcement of the Church’s teachings on marriage, divorce, education, religious observance, and the status of religious “outsiders” (i.e., Jews and Protestants) in return for the legitimacy afforded the regimes by the Church’s endorsement.
Fascist atrocities during the Spanish Civil War and World War II did not move the Church to recalibrate the basic strategy informing Catholic Internationalism; so intent was the Vatican on “protecting the Church” that even the horrors of the Holocaust, not lost on Pope Pius XII, failed to scandalize Catholic diplomats and other officials into reconsidering the rights of religious minorities and championing religious freedom.
Not all Catholics overlooked the tragic dimensions of the Vatican’s focus on ecclesiastical prerogatives, of course; as historian James Chappel has shown and Chamedes acknowledges, as early as the 1930s a generation of lay Catholic intellectuals, along with a number of pioneering priests and theologians working independently of the Vatican, took up pressing questions of labor, economics, and politics “from below,” thereby retrieving and updating an earlier Catholic approach to the social order and laying the groundwork for what Catholics of the period following the Second Vatican Council (1962-’65) would refer to as the Church’s “social justice” mission.
. . . So intent was the Vatican on “protecting the Church” that even the horrors of the Holocaust, not lost on Pope Pius XII, failed to scandalize Catholic diplomats and other officials into reconsidering the rights of religious minorities and championing religious freedom.
And, in one of the ironies that fascinates students of Catholicism—not least, because they are not quite ironies but, rather, the reconciliation of seeming paradoxes embedded in the Church’s spiritual DNA—Pius XII himself promulgated two encyclicals in 1943 which eventually served to undermine, or at least contest, the notion of the Church as a worldly hegemon rather than a (merely) spiritual kingdom. The encyclicals were Mystici Corporis Christi, which promoted the Biblical image of the Church as a mystical communion—not merely, or even primarily, as a hierarchical institution; and, Divino Afflante Spiritu, which authorized new translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, and cautiously opened the way for “critical,” historically informed biblical studies.
Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, prior to his election to Pope, at a procession celebrating the 900 years of the city of Bamberg, July 1924. Photo Credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv.
Owing in part to these emerging alternatives, and to the postwar rise of Christian Democratic parties across Western Europe, which established a measure of independence from Rome, the Catholic Internationale eventually lost steam and collapsed.
All of this raises trenchant questions for Catholics trying to make sense of—account for—the Church’s scandalous dalliance with fascism and antisemitism. How could “the Bride of Christ,” the “perfect, unblemished eternal society,” “the kingdom of God on Earth”—labels for the Church familiar to Catholic parochial school students during the period in question, and beyond—fail so egregiously to uphold the standards of basic human decency, not to mention fundamental principles and tenets of Christian ethics?
Catholic intellectuals seeking to address this puzzle might take a page from the writings of Atalia Omer, whose struggles with the mounting ethnoreligious nationalism and socio-political exclusivism of Zionism led her to call for the constructive reimagining of Jewish identity and the reframing of the Jewish ethical compass. Are Catholic scholars of religion, in particular, called to the role of “critical caretaker” of their own contested, internally plural, ethically ambiguous, and yet spiritually profound tradition? Their religious, cultural, and historical acumen seem poised to serve the goals of analysis, understanding, and “explanation,” yes, but also recovery and renewal.
How could “the Bride of Christ”. . . fail so egregiously to uphold the standards of basic human decency, not to mention fundamental principles and tenets of Christian ethics?
A big and complicated project, to be sure. But let us begin to sketch its outlines, modestly, by extrapolating beyond Chamedes’s crisp analysis, with its necessary focus on high-level diplomacy, national politics, Vatican intrigue, and the mobilization and social organization of Catholic anticommunist youth movements and related organizations. While Chamedes in her attention to these topics does not overlook the piece of the puzzle which millions of twentieth century Catholics would grasp intuitively as its centerpiece, she does not quite capture its explanatory significance. I refer to the priority of belief—in this case, the widespread, bred-in-the-bone belief in the supernatural as the controlling and ordering reality, a matter of faith held reflexively and, well, infallibly, by Roman Catholics of the era. Absent a feel for the metaphysical import of the Catholics v. Commies drama—this was a face-off of the highest consequence: Good v. Evil, God v. Satan—one cannot fully understand the extremes to which the Church was willing to go in order to prevail.
Absent a feel for the metaphysical import of the Catholics v. Commies drama—this was a face-off of the highest consequence: Good v. Evil, God v. Satan—one cannot fully understand the extremes to which the Church was willing to go in order to prevail.
Here is the hard core of the tradition with which the critical caretaker of “the Catholic thing” (in Rosemary Haughton’s memorable phrase) must grapple: we Catholics really believed in spirits and angels, virgin births and a crucified god, Heaven and Hell—and in the utter inconsequence of merely mundane politics and earthly travails when measured against the fate of the immortal soul. What is more, and perhaps more difficult for “merely” secular scholars (those not infected with the crazy-making virus of hard-core religious belief) to accept: even the popes and scheming prelates and professional diplomats and worldly bureaucrats were, first and foremost, true believers. This does not mean that their machinations were not also about power. But the calculus of power, this argument goes, was different than, say, Lenin’s or Stalin’s. And it was this overweening religious imaginary which sniffed out, correctly, that the ultimate threat was not mere mundane fascism, with its nominally theistic sympathies, but rather atheistic communism—“the earthly face of Satan himself,” as Chamedes rightly puts it (5).
The Catholic scholar who is critical caretaker would also employ her historical literacy to recognize and underscore the fact that the Vatican had been preparing for this cosmic struggle long before the Comintern threw down the internationalist, world-hegemon gauntlet. Decades before Chamedes begins her story, the Bishop of Rome had elected to sacralize and enforce the affinity between revealed Truth (encoded in creed, ritual, and dogma—the objects of “belief” for Catholics), on the one hand, and the institutional Church, in its rigidly hierarchical and ultramontane authority structure, on the other. As Ann Taves documents in her history of Roman Catholic devotional practices in mid-nineteenth century America, The Household of Faith, an earlier Pius (Pope Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878) had employed “modern technologies,” especially mass-produced printed devotional manuals, laced with prayers for the Supreme Pontiff alongside invocations of the saints, as part of his campaign to set the Church decisively against the forces of liberalism and secularism. Distributed across the Catholic world within and beyond Europe, the pamphlets helped to conflate, in the popular Catholic imagination, the prerogatives of the pope and the heart of the faith itself.
The Catholic scholar who is critical caretaker would also employ her historical literacy to recognize and underscore the fact that the Vatican had been preparing for this cosmic struggle long before the Comintern threw down the internationalist, world-hegemon gauntlet.
The next Pius who came along (Pope Pius X, 1903–1914 as pope) made abundantly clear that new respect in modern secular culture afforded to the individual subject and personal experience was an error no less pernicious than the wooly-headed notion that non-Catholics had a right to vote in a properly ordered democracy. On September 8, 1907 the Vatican published the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis: On the Doctrines of the Modernists, one in a series of official documents and rulings promulgated during his pontificate as part of a sustained crusade against “modernism,” which Pascendi called “the synthesis of all heresies” (para. 39). Subsequently, priests were required to swear an oath against modernism, and vigilance committees were established in dioceses around the world to root it out. At stake was no less than church-state union, the radical transcendence of the Divine, and the authority of the Church.
According to the pope, God’s absolute sovereignty over human affairs was being compromised by certain modern Biblical exegetes and critical historians whose writings downplayed, or even denied outright, external or “extrinsic” revelation from God, in favor of human “experience” as the source of sacred truth. Holy Scripture and Church dogma have emerged over time as the result of evolving human awareness under shifting circumstances. The sources of revelation, in short, were reduced to fallible historical artifacts subject to “development.” Were the modernists to prevail, Pascendi warned, the authority of the magisterium or (and, by extension, the infallibility of the pope) would be threatened; so, too, would the “properly ordered” political society.
These earlier chapters in the history of Catholicism’s turn to technologically enhanced, modern forms of authoritarianism provide a key to interpreting the alliance with fascism. The parallels between the wielding of power by authoritarian fascist leaders and by the nineteenth and early twentieth-century popes, who rejected what they saw as the “absolute madness” of religious freedom and religious pluralism, have not gone unnoticed by historians of many and no religious backgrounds.
Perhaps it falls to critical caretakers of the Catholic tradition, then, to recover and recuperate Catholic narratives, histories, and self-understandings which, while grounded in enduring marks of the tradition such as the priority of belief, resisted narrow and absolutist interpretations of how such affirmations might be understood and practiced.
Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1985) is the Marilyn Keough Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Appleby, a professor of history at Notre Dame, is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1978 and received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Chicago. From 2000-2014, he served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Appleby co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.
Protest against solitary confinement and in favor of the Halt Bill which would place restrictions on the use of solitary confinement in prisons in New York state. June 23, 2016. Photo Credit: Flickr User Felton Davis.
Background
As an American citizen and a historian of Islamic legal traditions, I have been thinking a great deal about the nexus between punishment and mercy in both contemporary Anglo-American criminal jurisprudence (as part of a secularized liberal democracy) and classical Islamic criminal jurisprudence. Partly on the basis of this reflection, I want to discuss the extent to which the opinions of pre-modern Muslim legal authorities on the issue of the just relationship between punishment and mercy can contribute to discussions on criminal justice reform in the United States. To be clear, the moral justification of punishing human beings is a neuralgic topic, one that requires deeply reflective and serious attention. It is necessary regardless of whether one accounts for capital, corporeal, or non-corporeal (e.g., prison) forms of punishment. Moreover, criminal justice issues are not only a U.S. problem. Legal systems in various Muslim-majority countries have not fared more justly (see for example, Tahir Wasti’s The Application of Islamic Criminal Law in Pakistan). But returning to the U.S. case, the question I have been asking myself is: What happens when criminal laws and their associated punishments appear to violate the very standards of justice a legal system is theoretically designed to uphold? The Eighth Amendment here in the U.S. explicitly prohibits the use of “cruel and unusual punishment.” But as an example, a felony conviction in the U.S. criminal justice system often comes with what I refer to as overreaching harms—consequences that are overly severe and go above and beyond the punishment itself (e.g., imprisonment).
The excessive nature of punishment in U.S. criminal laws is important for several reasons, one being that they have been instrumentalized to perpetuate a brutal race-based social and economic caste system designed to oppress African Americans and other people of color (Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of our Discontent). As Michelle Alexander notes in The New Jim Crow, the socio-economic control is nothing more than a reconfigured extension of Jim Crow laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The clearest expression of this racist structure can be found in the mass incarceration of people of color. “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities [as the United States]” (Alexander, 8). Since the murder of George Floyd, more Americans than ever before have begun to acutely examine the legacy of the U.S. criminal justice system. By taking this deeper look, we have the space to not only see the ways in which overreaching harms have been baked into U.S. jurisprudence (read: modern and secular jurisprudence) to perpetuate injustices such as racial segregation, we also have the opportunity to explore possible ways in which faith-based legal traditions—that are frequently neglected—could actually have something to teach us.
Islamic Criminal Law: A Case Study
I begin with reference to the primary source of law according to Islamic jurisprudence: the Qur’ān. A verse commands flogging as punishment for unlawful sexual intercourse (zinā): “As for the woman and man who commit unlawful sexual intercourse, flog each of them 100 times and do not take into account any mercy…” (Q. 24:2). Several Muslim exegetes believed that the second provision, which appears to stipulate that no mercy can be extended to the offenders, categorically prohibits any alteration. For example, al-Ḍaḥḥāk (d. 724 CE) interprets “do not take into account any mercy” to mean that the fixed punishment of flogging cannot be vacated.[1]Another exegete, Muqātil (d. 767 CE), writes that the clause is a reference to the entire category of the fixed punishments and that they cannot be suspended.[2] For these two commentators (among others), Q. 24:2 seemingly indicates that the punishment cannot be dropped under any circumstances.
By contrast, various Muslim jurists were prepared to reconsider the punishment in certain situations based on what appear to be normative standards of morality and justice. Their positions were based on deliberations about the unintended consequences that could emerge from attempting an unqualified implementation of the flogging directive. One hypothetical case analyzed drew upon circumstances in which flogging could lead to the offender’s death, such as when they suffered from a potential physical comorbidity. Muḥammad al-Shaybānī (d. 805 CE) opined that in such cases the offender should be imprisoned until they physically recuperate.[3] Ibn ‘Alī b. al-Haddād (d. 1397 CE) wrote that when a sick person is flogged, they may well be enduring more harm than they are obligated to receive[4]—the implication of his opinion (and of al-Shaybānī’s) being that the person cannot be punished in the manner prescribed by the Qur’ān. In sum, these legal authorities were willing to take into account an overreaching harm. Although flogging is a divinely prescribed sanction, they found reasons for its mitigation.
Some Muslim jurists used a report about the Prophet Muḥammad according to which he ordered modifications to the form and number of lashes. Reportedly, a physically weak man was convicted of illicit sexual intercourse. The Prophet, in accordance with Q. 24:2, ordered that the man be flogged 100 times. Those who knew the offender protested the instruction based on information the Prophet did not yet possess. They told the Prophet that were the offender to be flogged 100 lashes, the latter would likely die because his emaciated body could not withstand the punishment. Upon hearing this, the Prophet amended the Qur’ānic directive by stating that the offender be struck once with a raceme of a palm tree in which there were 100 fruit-stalks and then released. To account for overreaching harm(s), the Prophet’s modification of the 100-flog mandate appeals to the spirit of a law rather than to its letter. The jurist al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 820 CE) used the report to take the position that the form and number of lashes must be modified when an offender is too physically weak to withstand flogging and the punishment’s implementation could lead to death (i.e., excessive harm unintended by the prescribed punishment).[5] In short, if there is any possibility of punitive overreach, the punishment must be changed.
Excessive Harm in the U.S. Criminal Justice System
The criminal justice system in the U.S. purports to dispense punishment equally to all members of society. However, behind this veneer of “blind” objectivity coupled with a theoretical prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment,” lies a seemingly intentional disregard of any overreaching harm that results from the delivery of a punishment. For example, there is no shortage of studies documenting the severe psychological effects of solitary confinement. These effects include a heightened degree of anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, and obsessive thoughts (Metzner and Fellner, “Solitary Confinement”). Confinement in isolation produces cognitive impairment and affective disturbances in perpetuity (Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects”). Yet despite the overwhelming evidence about both the short-term and the long-term consequences of confinement in isolation, most states continue to use it. Solitary confinement is a form of extra-judicial punishment. It causes psychological and physical damage entirely unaccounted for in the prisoner’s adjudicated sentence and in excess of the prescribed baseline punishment of group confinement.
For the criminal legal system to claim it is just, it has no choice but to be governed by principles of fairness that must attend to the real possibility of excessive harm.
Collateral consequences resulting from criminal convictions also illustrate, as a general matter, the ways in which punishments borne in the U.S. criminal justice system result in overreaching harms and, indeed, are debilitating. On October 14th, 2020, the Sentencing Project issued a publication according to which approximately 5.2 million former incarcerates would not be allowed to vote in the 2020 national election. Felony disenfranchisement, the inability to secure employment because of conviction, the ineligibility to receive student loans and accrued government benefits, among other things, represent symptoms of what can legitimately be viewed as an institutionalized penal infrastructure designed to facilitate harm that goes beyond the parameters of an offender’s adjudicated sentence.
An Exchange of Ideas?
What ideas from Muslim jurists might we draw upon when discussing possible ways to reform the U.S. criminal justice system in light of its normalized overreach of harms ensuing from punishments? Muslim legal authorities were, when faced merely with the potential for a punishment’s overreach, fully prepared to alter or vacate the sanction they understood to be divinely commanded. They were willing to do this despite the fact that the plain sense of the verse evidently mandates the punishment regardless of circumstances. The principle that appears to undergird the opinions of these jurists is that no criminal law can be construed as anything close to justice if it contravenes normative standards of fair treatment. The implication is that such a violation would compromise the moral standing of the entire legal system itself. It calls into question the legitimacy of its raison d’être: the just regulation of human behavior. For the criminal legal system to claim it is just, it has no choice but to be governed by principles of fairness that must attend to the real possibility of excessive harm.
The current U.S. criminal justice system punishes unreasonably. To borrow from Erin Kelly (The Limits of Blame, p. 168), it should be morally unacceptable for us to allow a system to hold a person responsible for their actions when the system’s actors themselves are deserving of blame for doing unjust things. One approach towards a more just system would be to implement a core principle that when there is clear evidence of overreaching harms resulting from a particular punishment, then it must be altered or abandoned. While the genesis of U.S. jurisprudence and Islamic jurisprudence have varied beginnings and are not grounded in the same ethical or theological commitments or socio-historical contexts (e.g., Muslim jurists were not operating within a system that enslaved Black people through laws and policies), there are possible ways in which a meaningful exchange of ideas can take place that allows us to learn something from a tradition that is not our own.
Syed Atif Rizwan, PhD is Assistant Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies and Director of the Catholic-Muslim Studies Program at Catholic Theological Union. His research interests include history of Islamic law; hadith studies; medieval and post-modern theories of punishment; and interreligious dialogue and studies.
Protester holds signs featuring images of Aung San Suu Kyi and Min Aung Hlaing during February 14, 2021 protest in Myanmar. Via Wikimedia Commons. Photo Credit: MgHla (aka) Htin Linn Aye.
For more than half a century, Myanmar’s military generals have based their political legitimacy on the claim that they were protectors of the realm, caretakers of Buddhism, and defenders of the people’s sovereignty in the evolution toward self-governance. In Burmese Buddhism, power is thought to be activated through moral acts and prior karmic inheritance that transforms the self and reality. Political authority is thus a sign of personal karmic election. Pre-colonial ideas of classical Buddhist kingship have endured throughout post-Independence political arrangements, as every ruler has sought to demonstrate their standing as a spiritually potent (hpoun) sovereign. From this principle emerges the notion of karmic kingship, a concept that can help us interpret current events in Myanmar.
An Unstable Diarchy
Myanmar’s fragile ten-year experiment with democracy appeared to draw to a shocking close in the pre-dawn hours of February 1, 2021. Following an electoral repudiation of the military’s (Tatmadaw’s) proxy Union Solidarity Development Party in the November 2020 elections, commander-in-chief, Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, on the back of the claim of a “stolen election,” invoked Article 417 of the Constitution and imposed martial law. Although Article 417 states that only the President can declare a state of emergency, the military appropriated this right for itself in the name of protecting the people’s sovereignty. Min Aung Hlaing contends that Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party have been insufficiently committed to democracy. If necessary, he announced, the Constitution itself could be revoked.
Myanmar’s democratic Constitution was drafted by the military government in 2008 subsequent to the Saffron Revolution, in which the military violently suppressed monks’ protests. These events were followed soon after by the devastating Cyclone Nargis.
Cyclone Nargis resulted in more than 140,000 deaths. The event was made by interpreters to conform to folk beliefs that natural disasters are a consequence of the actions of evil kings who disrupt the moral order and law (Dhamma). Sovereign and state are held to be in alignment; karmic effects of a king’s actions are visited upon the people. The storm was interpreted as a cosmic repudiation of General Than Shwe in particular, who had earned the nickname “Monk-killer Than Shwe.” Rumor had it that at any moment he might be swallowed up by the ground and dragged down to the hell realms.
The General did not take these prophesies lightly. On the advice of his personal astrologer,[1] a constitutional referendum was rammed through with a hasty election before the “waxing of the next moon”—even while the dead remained unburied and hundreds of thousands more were displaced and starving. Rumor and gossip, which had become the media for vox populi during half a century of repression, averred that the karmic stores sustaining Than Shwe’s power had “dried up,” and with it his legitimacy to rule. Than Shwe countered these claims with merit-making activities, pagoda construction, and offertories to the Sangha (monks). He had these efforts reported upon ceaselessly in the national news media. Rumors also circulated that the General was resorting to black magic rites and “reversal of karma” rituals (yadaya) in the attempt to rejuvenate and sustain his power stores.
It is in the context of these events that the 2008 Constitution needs to be understood, i.e., as a desperate attempt by the military to stabilize its power at the very moment they had lost their mandate as legitimate representatives of the moral karmic order. The claim, in 2008 as today, that they alone can grant or revoke democratic civilian power-sharing is as much a statement about the de facto truth of ongoing military might as an assertion of the karmic legitimacy of its leaders.
The Constitution, which was to enshrine the people’s sovereignty, therefore unsurprisingly contained the caveat of mandatory power-sharing with the military. It gave the appearance of a transition away from military rule, while in reality it was a re-entrenchment of power by alternate means. In result, after 2008, rulership of the country could be described as an unstable diarchy: not one government, but two, each with its own portfolios, registers of authority, and claims to legitimacy.
Competing Sources of Legitimacy
Ostensibly, shared civilian-military rule after 2008 meant a stepwise lessening of authoritarian rule. Western observers tended to regard the post-2008 period as an almost inexorable transition to democracy. The country was now “open for business,” as President Obama declared; the long-frustrated hopes of a subjugated people would be realized at last. In practice, politics proceeded as usual in conformity with Burmese Buddhist principles concerning the sources of power and conditions for political legitimacy. Through these means, and by periodic threat of force, the military managed to maintain its grip on the leash of fledgling democracy. Today as well, the country’s political future remains subject to the politics of legitimacy defined by the attempt of those vying for power to demonstrate karmic election to worldly authority.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s political worldview has, because of this unobvious context, often been misinterpreted by outside observers. By now it should be more evident that she has been negotiating between two divergent models for political legitimacy and sovereignty. On the one hand are western principles of human rights and democracy, on the other is karmic kingship.
During her house arrest between 1989 and 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was extolled as a symbol for human rights and democracy and as a witness to their ongoing violation under authoritarian rule. For the Burmese Buddhist majority, the desire for freedom from military rule has not always been identical to the desire for democracy, however, as western journalists have assumed. Generations had grown up isolated from the world under authoritarian rule; their imaginations of freedom drew more proximally from Buddhist sources than from western ones. Exposed as a student at Oxford to western democratic ideals, as a politician Aung San Suu Kyi sought to translate and align these to domestic Burmese Buddhist political culture. Attempting to thread that needle while remaining subject to the military’s de facto minority rule required skills of statecraft that apparently exceeded her capabilities.
Upon ascent to political power, Aung San Suu Kyi undertook a pragmatic approach to instituting a shared framework of the rule of law and establishing its procedures in Myanmar’s Constitution. Her aim to change the Tatmadaw-scripted Constitution, and indeed to “send the military back to the barracks,” put her in direct competition with the Tatmadaw’s design to retain power. Her efforts to solidify her personal power and that of her NLD Party proceeded on the one hand through the ballot box. On the other, she had to vie in the accustomed Burmese Buddhist pattern of elite rivalry among political contenders for the right to rule through demonstrations of their karmic accord with moral Buddhist order.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s effort to carve out more space for civilian representation in government with the eventual goal of reforming the 2008 Constitution and subordinating the military required broad public support from the majority Burmese Buddhist public whose devotion was not primarily to democratic ideals but to the universalistic ethic of Dhamma, the moral law. This split goal or orientation resulted in the compromise the world witnessed as Aung San Suu Kyi’s tacit endorsement of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state. Apparently, Aung San Suu Kyi compromised democratic principles of human rights in the belief that only once the Bamar majority became free of military power could ethnic minority freedoms be addressed.
Protestor holds up three-finger salute during a protest against the military coup in Myanmar. The three-finger salute originates in book and film series The Hunger Games as a signal of rebellion against tyrannical rule. It was also widely used during protests in Thailand in 2014 and has been a popular symbol throughout Southeast Asia. Via Wikimedia Commons. Photo Credit: VOA Burmese.
The power struggle between the Tatmadaw (military) and NLD (civilian) governments evolved into an elite struggle with its own political dynamics that locked them in an arrangement of preserving the existential status of the other in order to preserve themselves. This is because it was the military that ultimately afforded civilian governance the space to operate, while the civilian government gave democratic and political legitimacy to the military in the international sphere. This would explain why Aung San Suu Kyi has been willing to speak in support of the military, even going so far as to shield them at the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide.
On the populist side, Aung San Suu Kyi abjured human rights in favor of espousing illiberal popular beliefs about the priority of protecting the religion against imagined enemies such as the Muslims and Rohingya—a classic obligation of a Burmese Buddhist king. (Although, it should be noted, that this particular nationalist and xenophobic version of Buddhist “caretaking” was not a necessary condition of Buddhist statecraft. Rather, it was a strain promoted and enflamed by the military who sought to present themselves as Buddhist defenders and to divide support for Aung San Suu Kyi either by exposing her as insufficiently Buddhist in her desire to promote Democracy or to expose her to the International community as insufficiently democratic in her desire to promote Buddhist nationalism.) To this extent, Aung San Suu Kyi participated in the logic and practice of karmic kingship. In order to maintain her political power, she prioritized protection of the Buddhist realm in order to sustain support of the majority she required to rule by democratic criteria of the sovereignty of the people.
The rivalry with military leader Min Aung Hlaing was also personal. Voters in the 2020 elections sought to shift the balance of power decisively toward civilian rule, and for a time Aung San Suu Kyi looked poised to succeed at shifting the balance of power to the favor of her ruling party. Min Aung Hlaing, who in July faces mandatory retirement from his position as head of the military, reportedly approached Aung San Suu Kyi requesting that she offer him the presidency in the new Parliament (a role decided upon by Parliamentarians and not by popular vote). She reportedly rejected his request, effectively blocking him from achieving any path to political power either within the military or the government. The move humiliated the General. Moreover, with his name specifically targeted in the ICJ Report as responsible for crimes against humanity, the status of his family’s vast (ill gotten) businesses was likewise threatened. He was politically, personally, and financially cornered. The only path forward was to revoke democracy and presume the path of a world conquering king.
Where Does Karmic Kingship Come from?
Pre-colonial political culture saw the rise and fall of kings as directly related to the store of their hpon, a karmic source of spiritual potency accumulated through meritorious deeds supporting the religion and the monkhood, sangha. The sovereign was mimetically equated with the Buddhist state such that Myanmar’s 800-year history of kingship was simultaneously a history of the preservation and expansion of the Buddha’s teachings and sacred realm, the sasana.[2]
Monk posing with a former Myanmar king and a wizard statue.
Following the rupture of Buddhist kingship under British colonialism, Burma’s (later Myanmar’s) governments all sought political legitimacy in Buddhist monarchical terms, continuing the moral order and causative criteria that had governed Burmese Buddhist ideas of power and authority for centuries prior. In modern times, too, the association of royal symbols with modern statecraft is not just a pairing in the metaphorical sense. Each of Myanmar’s post-Independence military rulers have laid claim to being reincarnations of previous Myanmar kings or bodhisattva kings prophesized to come; in other words, they have acted as pretenders to the throne.
The first post-Independence prime minister U Nu’s vision of a Buddhist welfare society, for instance, drew on ideas of bodhisattva kings whose future Buddhahood certified their worthiness to rule. Drawing on cultural myths and symbolism of the Ashokan Buddhist kingship model in which the state was expanded through conquest, pacification, and Buddhist conversion, U Nu’s military successors drew on a kingship model as well; the state saw its role in terms of unifying and protecting those seen as belonging to the greater Burmese Buddhist order. Dissemination of Buddhism is a virtuous, legitimate undertaking for a king, and the unification (and subordination) of peoples to a national idea of Burmese Buddhist identity was iterated in this model.
Conclusion
Myanmar has a long way to go before it can complete the unfinished business of nation-state building that will entail integrating the various ethnic minorities in a federal democracy, defining who is a citizen, establishing the conditions of authority, and affirming the rule of law. At stake in the current confrontation are the rules of the political game itself, about what kind of political system Myanmar is to have. What we are seeing is not just a contest between authoritarianism and democracy, which it also is, but a contest between two distinct ideas of sovereignty, one based on the will of the people and the other based on the idea of karmic kingship.
Ingrid Jordt is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program for Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her past and current research has concerned processes of political legitimation, lay/monastic relations in Buddhist Myanmar and Buddhist meditation movements in Mainland Southeast Asia. Her principal field site is Burma/Myanmar, where she has been working since 1988, but she has conducted research concerning the export of Burmese Vipassana meditation in Thailand, Malaysia and Laos. She is the author of Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power (Ohio University Press, 2007).
In addition to her academic research, Ingrid has been engaged in humanitarian projects and has served in an advisory role to US government agencies. In 2007-2008, she formed Burma Rescue, an effort coordinated with civil society groups in Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta region to bring resources to victims of Cyclone Nargis when the military government was blocking aid from entering the country.
In private conversations the Indian Fiqh Academy of India voiced deep worries that madrasa students were not being prepared to confidently navigate the modern world. In response, Primary Investigator Dr. Ebrahim Moosa, himself a madrasa graduate, developed the Madrasa Discourses project to equip young Islamic studies scholars with the theological and scientific literacies to engage contemporary challenges. After four years of intensive Islamic studies programming with a select group of young theology experts from India and Pakistan, the Madrasa Discourses project took its innovative curriculum global. On February 24th, 2021, the online version of the project was shared with the world. Theologians and religious studies experts from around the globe joined the web launch, including Dr. Kyai Ulil Abshar Abdalla, civil society actor and scholar from Indonesia; Dr. Masooda Bano, Professor at the University of Oxford and expert in Muslim youth perceptions of tradition and modernity; Dr. Usman Bugaje, public intellectual and religious education expert from Nigeria; and Dr. Haroon Sidat, Research Associate at Cardiff University with a focus on Darul Ulooms in the West and madrasa graduate himself.
The online curriculum at madrasadiscourses.nd.edu is free and open to all scholars and students and guides participants through four cumulative semesters on history and the theological tradition, modern science and its relationship to theology, and finally contemporary challenges to the Islamic tradition. Envisioned as a free-standing curriculum or as supplemental materials for existing courses, Madrasa Discourses Web complements and deepens the traditional madrasa education and prepares students to face present-day concerns. Core questions include:
If tradition is our guide, do changes in our reconstruction of history today change our relationship to tradition?
Does equality require equal human rights?
What kind of Islamic theology is possible in a natural universe defined by quantum mechanics and evolution?
Tradition and Modernity:
There is a fear, Dr. Bano noted at web launch, that the Islamic scholarly debate is at risk of losing to the secular modern world. Traditionally-trained scholars are often not able to respond to the needs of modern times, and as such their knowledge and the history they carry can be sidelined. Yet, as Kyai Ulil Abshar Abdalla stated, Islamic theology cannot be conducted without taking into account modern discoveries. It is in service to this balance, to the search for a wholly Islamic path rooted in the past but adaptive to the present, that the Madrasa Discourses program and web curriculum were conceived.
Dr. Bugaje, who joined from Nigeria, explained that it is necessary to reform traditional education to incorporate technology and science. Indeed, he noted, these studies were previously part of the Islamic education, but had been abandoned for some time. Many madrasa students are already paving the way, as Dr. Sidat relayed in his comments on students who pursue a traditional Dars-i Nizami syllabus alongside secular education in the UK. Dr. Sidat highlighted how budding scholars seek out and build upon the “creative potential” of cherished histories and texts, undermining the supposed religious/secular divide in their successful integration of faith learning and secular schooling.
Contending Epistemologies:
To achieve and weave through this “creative potential,” however, requires recognition of fundamentally different worldviews embedded in traditional and modern practices. “How do we navigate different approaches to knowledge?” Dr. Ebrahim Moosa mused. “Knowledge is about perception, the place of revelation and intuitions.” Dr. Bugaje noted that the epistemological divides between traditional religious and modern modes of knowing, with different sources and logics, posed perhaps the deepest challenge to bridging the gap between traditional and Western education.
This is precisely the opening theme of Madrasa Discourses Web: How do we know what we know? The program builds upon core classical Islamic texts to answer these and other questions, turning in this case to classical theologian Abū Manṣūr Māturīdī (d. 944 C.E.) and his treatise Kitāb al-Tawḥīd to explore the relationship between revelation and reason. Māturīdī proposes a method to evaluate competing truth claims and to pursue sources independent of revelation. In fact, as Dr. Ahmed Dallal details in his presentation, Islam, Science, and History: Beginnings, early Islamic jurists used mathematical astronomy to re-orient mosques to the qibla, overriding earlier religious authority.
The same epistemological questions arise again in the section on science, eschewing ahistorical descriptions of contemporary models in favor of an exploration of scientific ways of knowing and how they have changed over time. Only in getting to the heart of the contemporary scientific method and the metaphysical assumptions that underpin it can we step back from scientific triumphalism. From there we may critically assess the distinct or overlapping assumptions that historical and contemporary science makes, vis-à-vis Islamic theology, about the human person, creation, and the divine. It is only in recognizing these distinct logics, to echo Dr. Bugaje, that Islamic studies scholars can knowledgeably engage with modern scientific thought.
Next Steps:
Many questions remained at the end of the launch event. Notably, how can this material be shared with madrasa-educated audiences around the world? The curricular materials are currently in their original languages of Arabic and English; many more students could be reached with translated or endogenous materials in, for example, Bahasa Indonesia, Hausa, and Urdu. And while, as Kyai Ulil emphasized, young people have great energy and interest in ensuring Islam remains vibrant and dynamic, the road to ensuring madrasa-educated scholars have the preparation they need for the contemporary world has only just begun. We thank the John Templeton Foundation for their generous funding in supporting the project thus far!
Dania is Program Manager at the Contending Modernities research initiative, where she oversees operations and contributes to program development. Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies. She is active in efforts to establish restorative justice pathways in her local community, and volunteers to advance grant making for community-led social cohesion programs globally. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Map of Moses’ and the Jews’ journey into exile recorded in Exodus. From John Speed’s The Genealogies Recorded in the Sacred Scriptures (1628). Via Wikimedia Commons.
For years, Marc Ellis has been arguing for the importance of a Jewish theology of liberation. His efforts fall for the most part on deaf ears, except, for example, Atalia Omer’s Days of Aweand Santiago Slabodsky’s Decolonial Judaism. Those interlocutors fall, for the most part, within a paradigm of Jews who are, as Judith Butler would say, “intelligible,” to those who dominate Jewish identity today—namely, Ashkenazi Jews, especially those living in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Intelligibility in this context refers to forms of appearance, given the rules of legitimate performance, behavior, or embodiment, that makes sense to those perceiving them.
Despite the historical influence of Latin American Liberation Theology, Sephardic Jews, historically the most prominent in the Americas, seem to lack a voice and visibility. To make matters worse, the various rifts across the views of Jews worldwide—or at least Ashkenazi Jews—range not only from the ultra-orthodox to secular, but also from far right to radical left. This is despite earlier tendencies among critics from the right and the left to associate such Jews primarily with liberalism. What, however, if we were to consider other Jewish voices, Jews among Jews who are genuinely “others”?
Afro-Jews and White Jews Reflecting on Pesach
Consider Afro-Jews. What do such Jews reflect on at Seders during the evenings of Pesach (Passover)? The Seder is a ritual meal involving reflection on Shemoth (Names), popularly known through Christianity as the Exodus story of the Israelites’ liberation from enslavement in Kmt (the ancient indigenous people’s name for the country that eventually became, through Greek conquest, Egypt). It is among the binding narratives of Jews, when even secular Jews often take time for such reflection. During this time of the year, regardless of ideological perspectives, Jews today in and outside of the State of Israel simultaneously reflect on the value of liberation. That is, however, also where many Jews divide. It is much easier to reflect on liberation from enslavement in a story reputed to have taken place in Northeast Africa approximately 3,400 years ago, and one in which Moses—the greatest hero and prophet of the Jewish people—and his biological siblings rose to the occasion in actions reverberating over the ages.
Most white Jews (and many white Christians) overlook the story’s philosophical and political significance, however, in favor of the redemptive elements it offers. Moreover, the closing line at the conclusion of all Seders for Jews outside of Israel—“Next year, in Jerusalem . . .”—poses a challenge for Afro-Jews, Arab Jews, and Jews located among Dalits in South Asia. It makes them think of the plight of non-white Jews living in Israel. For some white Jews, the declaration poses challenges of ambivalence and for others it requires summoning the strongest resources of self-evasion or bad faith because they may support struggles for liberation for oppressed peoples in every country except Israel.
Why do I say this?
First, reflection on enslavement doesn’t require a huge leap for Afro-Jews. Though much of Jewish history has been whitewashed as Euromodernity offered European Jews possibilities of assimilation in the former colonies through promises of racial transformation, the fact of the matter is that the ancient, technically pre-Jewish people of the Exodus narrative (“Hebrews,” “Israelites,” and “Jews” are not identical), were clearly East African and West Asian. This is the case even accounting for, in today’s parlance, “racial mixture.” That combination makes these people unequivocally, in today’s understanding, people of color. Today’s hegemonic white Jewish populations connect with such ancient peoples, then, in the way Germanic peoples imagine themselves the descendants of ancient Mediterranean peoples from whom they claim to inherit a classical past. Some may be their biological descendants, but not all and probably not most.
White Jewish connection with ancient Israelites is mostly symbolic, and when they attempt to make it otherwise, they do so by eliding history and basic facts. This is made easier by simply rewriting the past as white. This whitening emerges from a failure to learn not only the ancient history of East Africa and West Asia, but also crucial moments in Jewish history, such as the events of the first few hundred years after the fall of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and the unfortunate prohibitions against exogamy enacted in the 4th century CE by the Roman Emperor Constantine. The Judeans who became citizens of the Ancient Roman Empire were a proselytizing people, initially ranging from 150,000 (some critics say 4 million), whose efforts produced about 8,000,000 Jews among the Romans in little more than a century.
Such a large influx of people across the Roman Empire pushed to the wayside the earlier Afro-Asiatic peoples and inaugurated a story of hegemony among members who during different periods were at the center of whichever empire displaced others. A line stretching from Rome to Mecca to Andalusia to Spain to Portugal to the Netherlands to Britain to the United States in “the west” reveals one of shifting representations of who “authentically” exemplifies Jewish people. Different lines pushed into Asia, and others through Africa and South America. In all, closeness to enslavement shifted here and there, but for the Afro-Jew from the fifteenth century onward, it is more near than far. In the words of the famed reggae artist Bob Marley, who was also of Jewish ancestry, “Every time I hear the crack of a whip / My blood runs cold” (1973).
If “the slave” is symbolic and to be liberated, then the relationship of the white Jew to the story of liberation is remote. Bear in mind that white Jews aren’t the only Jews for whom identification with enslavement is remote. The history of Arab racism and enslavement of non-Muslim African peoples raises questions for Mizrahi or Arab Jews as well. I’m not focusing on that group here because, frankly, they are not hegemonic.
If “the slave” is symbolic and to be liberated, then the relationship of the white Jew to the story of liberation is remote.
Identification with whiteness leaves no recourse from being identified with the enslaver and master. White Jewish evocation of Exodus thus reeks of hypocrisy so long as such a Jew insists on being white. A different basis of connection must supervene, and for such Jews, nothing affords such a connection more than antisemitism and the historical significance of Shoah (the Holocaust). Thus, “long ago” tends to be the Exodus where liberation is less significant, while “near” becomes hatred of Jews, Jewphobia, the importance of twentieth-century atrocity, and the achievement of the State of Israel. Looking at non-Jewish blacks reflecting on slavery, such Jews quickly speak of antisemitism. When confronting Afro-Jews, however, white Jews prioritizing antisemitism face several problems. Where such Jews relate to Afro-Jews as among Jews, there shouldn’t be an issue, that is except for Afro-Jews bringing along both the realities of recent enslavement and antisemitism. That the overwhelming population of Jews massacred in Shoah were Ashkenazi creates a peculiar Jewish problem. White Jews may question Afro-Jews’ identification of shared loss, but for many white Jews who did not lose family members in that effort at genocide, the question is: Why do they have a more legitimate connection to those victims of antisemitism than their counterparts of color?
Black Dream, White Dread
The situation of such ambivalence and dispute has added difficulty. The “nearness” or “closeness” of injustice and oppression for Afro-Jews is not only about enslavement, racism, and antisemitism. It is also about colonialism.
Why does colonialism pose a problem? A clue rests in the distancing of antisemitism from racism. Jews were, after all, not historically white. It was the need to create distance from the colonized populations in the Euromodern world that raised the demand for growing populations of whites in the colonies. The result was that many groups who were not white in Europe were offered a ticket to become white in its outposts. Difficulty emerged from Christianity being the dominant religion of European colonies because of the transformation of Christendom into a European identity. New identities were born through the protection of religious freedoms, where a group’s religion could be separated from its “race,” a term that emerged from Andalusia in the Middle Ages through a transformation of the word “raza,” which, ironically, referred to Jews and Moors. If Jewishness could be made exclusively religious, then the bearer of the religion could be racially otherwise. Thus, those light-skinned enough to be accepted as white received membership into whiteness by appealing to their religious identity as separate. This was not a good development for Jews who could not “pass” as white, however, and its impact on Jewish history is palatable as a once majority population of color quickly disappeared in proverbial plain sight.
“Travesia del Judio’ street sign in Spain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
There are many negative consequences of Jewish whiteness. The first is that it led to a rewriting of Jewish history to match the expectations of Euromodernity. I define “modernity” here as the value of belonging to the future. As such, it legitimates a people’s present and rewrites their past. Thus, if the future of Jewishness is whiteness, then authentic Jews of the present become white, which makes the Jewish story a retroactively affected one of whiteness as a condition of appearance. This was catastrophic for other Jews, because since they supposedly did not legitimately belong to the future, their present was delegitimated and their past erased. This led to an additional false thesis—namely, that non-white Jews must have somehow come to Judaism. Since whiteness afforded Euromodern Judaism’s legitimacy, this meant that those other people could only enter Euromodernity and then become Jews by other means. The standard position is Christianity. If Africans enter Euromodernity through colonization and enslavement, the presumption is that happens through their having first become Christian. Thus, to stand as an Afro-Jew is, by many white Jews, presumed erroneously to do so as a prior Christian. The Afro-Jew thus faces delegitimation of her or his Jewish history since even when embodying a line of Jewish ancestry older than many white Jews, they are presumed to be “converts” in the presence of a population whose presumed original authenticity is not premised on conversion. Actual Jewish history disputes that.
“Antisemitism” is thus, for many white Jews, an attractive formulation of hatred of Jews since it disassociates Jews from the dreaded designation of being a race, because, as nearly anyone who has experienced racism would admit—like “gender” with regard to “feminine”—“race” is a term that for the most part signifies being of color. As this discussion is short, I won’t get into the details of why “antisemitism” is a concept saturated with bad faith. I will just state this: Most people who hate Jews are not thinking about religion. They see Jews, even if white, as never white enough. They ascribe, in what existentialists call the spirit of seriousness—the materialization of values—that Jewishness is in the flesh and soul of Jews. There is thus the error of avowedly white Jews rallying for religious freedom in the face of a foe that sees them as a racial threat. They want to defend “us Jews” in the practice of our religion while imagining “us whites” in their daily social lives.
If we concede antisemitism as a form of racism, the story is different. As mixed-race people could be hated for both sides of their mixture (think of an Afro-Asian receiving anti-black racism and anti-Asian racism, or Arabs who could be hated as an ethnicity or “race” despite their morphological diversity), the Afro-Jew may ask if both are at work if she or he focuses on racial oppression.
These reflections become complicated when we reflect on the passage into whiteness of many Euro-Jews. The story is, after all, a colonial one, and that precious whiteness is indebted to colonialism, enslavement, and racism. Thus, Euro-Jewish investment in whiteness ensnares them in a defense of colonialism, enslavement, and racism. As liberation discourses are patently anti-colonial, anti-enslavement, and anti-racist, this places Jewish whiteness in a logical collision with liberation and struggles for freedom.
The Afro-Jew thus faces delegitimation of her or his Jewish history since even when embodying a line of Jewish ancestry older than many white Jews, they are presumed to be ‘converts’ in the presence of a population whose presumed original authenticity is not premised on conversion. Actual Jewish history disputes that.
This reactionary position is not, of course, the only historical Jewish story. On the one hand, Jews were so associated with the formation of liberalism that even Karl Marx, a grandson of a Rabbi, saw it fitting to address European Jewish values as ideologically linked to Euromodern liberal capitalism in “On the Jewish Question.” In recent times, the lure of whiteness produced politically neoconservative Jews who moved to the right of liberalism in a desperate embrace of whiteness to the point of, unfortunately, allying in recent times with White supremacist Christians and even, as we see in the United States, politicians supported by neo-Nazi and other fascist groups.
Rejecting Idols, Embracing Ethical Life
To the left of all this are many secular Jews, and among Jews who practice Judaism, the complicated matter of religion offers a unique convergence of their Jewish political identity among those in and out of the white umbrella. I cannot here, because of limited space, spell out the many kinds of Jews who live their faith, ethnic, and racial identities outside of whiteness. As I do that elsewhere, I would here simply like to state this: Many Jews of color who are also Jews of faith do not live their lives worried about what white Jews think of them. They are simply people of faith practicing the varieties of Judaism they know. There is, however, a common question posed to all Jews that come to the fore on the question of liberation, and that is its relation, specifically, to Jewish ethics.
To illustrate my point, consider the famed early Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists. They are often misunderstood today because of how they are studied by Christian theorists who presume the grammar of a secularized Christian framework. The idea of a critical philosophy, originally formulated by Immanuel Kant as transcendental idealism, was a formal, secularized Protestantism. The transcendental movement through Arthur Schopenhauer and G. W. F. Hegel kept the Protestant eschatological elements. In Marx, however, the problem of idolatry was posed as a problem of ideological critique and a rejection of fetishism. Sigmund Freud took these concerns to the inner reaches of consciousness and even the unconscious elements of mind. Adding Edmund Husserl’s effort to explore the critical conditions of consciousness without ontological reductionism, we have three Jewish thinkers (although the first was from a family who converted to Christianity and the third did so on his own) posing what to some seemed the irreconcilable objectives of the material world, unconscious forces, and the social world in which reality becomes meaningfully conscious. Yet the early group of Frankfurt School thinkers—for example, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, all Jewish and committed secularists—took on the task of not only bringing these thinkers together (especially Marx and Freud), but also to do so without collapsing into idolatry, that is, making their intellectual heroes, societal norms, and economic systems into gods. (I regard the post-WWII Frankfurt School, whose main exemplar is Jürgen Habermas, to be a reclamation of secularized Protestant Christian thought.) Adorno expressed this Jewish anti-idolatry position well in the concept of negative dialectics and negative theology.
This rejection of idolatry is also the basis of a uniquely Jewish position on theodicy. Christian theology poses a deity who must be cleansed of contradictions. Judaism, alternatively, poses a deity who must not be named, constrained, reduced—in short, offered as an image. This is a crucial element for Jewish ethics, since it in effect explains “election” (in Hebrew, bhira) and the significance of striving for kashrut (kosher living) according to Halakhah (“the way,” or Jewish law). Many Christians are surprised, even shocked, when they learn that Jews do not need to embrace G-d as an ontological being or entity. An activist philosopher and social worker friend of mine once put it this way: “I don’t go to shul [synagogue] because I believe in G-d.”
This mysterious explanation makes sense for Jews who understand that election or to be chosen does not mean to be better than others. It means to face the fear and trembling of radical ethical responsibility. I add “radical” because the responsibility is for more than specific commandments (mitzvoth). Its radicality rests on taking responsibility for responsibility. In Judaism, this means responsibility for the image of G-d on earth, which, as the argument goes, is not an “image” proper, since that would be idolatrous. It is a responsibility, and it is so often in the form of a terrible, burdensome calling. Through the act of carrying the Torah (direction, instruction, teachings) when becoming a Bat Mitzvah or Bar Mitzvah (daughter or son of the commandments), the honored is also taking on the weight or burden in one reading of ethical life. The seeming conundrum of non-ontological Jewishness is resolved thus. There are Jews who regard G-d as a just being. No Jew, however, should accept the idea of G-d solely as a being. Justice, broadly conceived (because the Hebrew word Tzedek includes but is not reduced exclusively to justice), is the crucial element. Thus, since neither the religious nor the secular Jew would reject the importance of taking responsibility for the ethical face of the universe, my friend’s remark on believing in G-d makes sense. She refuses to be idolatrous, and she insists on the importance of ethical life marked also by righteous action. That friend’s remark was to offer a critique of synagogues that have subordinated Jewish ethical responsibility for responsibility through subordinating it to the fetish of such things as a Jewish state.
Fetishizing antisemitism at the expense of fighting against oppression endangers Jewish ethical life. This leads to a form of idolatrous relationship to Jewish people read through Judaism and, as a consequence, places Jews in an antagonistic relationship to liberation struggles against colonization, enslavement, and racism. Where Jewish people become the enemy of liberation, Judaism, from this point of view, is lost.
Though I have posed these reflections in terms of white Jews versus Afro-Jews and other Jews of color, there is the reality of ideological critique where beneath white Jews is the paradoxical darkness offering ethical life. There are designated white Jews who make decisions to shed the unethical garbs of white investments in anti-liberation. This reflection from an Ashkenazi mother on her son from her union with an Afro-Sephardic-Mizrahi father concludes these reflections:
… there is a general lesson that more fully entering a black world through marriage and parenting has taught me: one must live as if values and virtues and excelling and being a person of integrity matter, for that is what it is to live a human life.
An Arabic version of this piece is available here.
I am a non-white Mizrahi Jewish academic who has been studying Israel/Palestine and the history of Jews in the Middle East for two decades. My family hails from Ottoman Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, and the Greek islands of Zakynthos and Corfu. All too many of us were murdered by Nazi Génocidaires (and rest assured that we will not forget or forgive). Precisely because of this scholarly and biographic background I was embarrassed to read the letter sent by England’s Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, to all university vice chancellors. Utilizing an authoritarian tone devoid of understatement, Williamson demanded that all universities in England adopt formally what is called “the working definition of antisemitism” drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
Photo from the Synagogue in Kerkyra/Corfu. Fingers pointing out to families associated with Behar’s maternal lineage, Mother’s maiden name included.
Born in 1976, Williamson has been a Tory politician for 25 years. He and his party have not been noteworthy for their passionate activism against racism, antisemitism included. Nor did Williamson find it problematic to serve under Boris Johnson, author of Seventy-Two Virgins (HarperCollins, 2004), a novel that disappointingly recycled antisemitic tropes and stereotypical portrayals of Jews and other British minority ethnic groups.
The letter Williamson authored is littered with antisemitic tropes. A non-Jew himself, Williamson first chooses to single out Jews from non-Jews and, in so doing, officially mark Jews as “other.” Embracing the “divide and conquer” colonial approach, he proceeds to divorce antisemitic racism from similar manifestations of racism with which he is less concerned, including Islamophobia, Afrophobia/anti-Black racism, misogyny, anti-Roma/Gypsy racism, homophobia, and xenophobia vis-à-vis Asians and Arabs.
Most disturbingly, Williamson’s letter upgrades the quintessential stereotype of money and Jews to a new level by linking Jews to monetary penalties and potential state sanctions on universities if their managements exercise what is otherwise a simple academic and democratic right to adopt a view and definition of antisemitism that differ from his. The irony of setting Christmas as the deadline for his pseudo-philosemitic mobilization has apparently escaped Williamson altogether.
The IHRA definition that Williamson labors to impose unilaterally defines antisemitism as “a perception that may be expressed as hatred.” This reading is vague, restrictive, minimalist, and—in the main—emotionalist. It bypasses manifestations of antisemitism that are equally, and possibly even more, important than “perception,” including oppression, discrimination, exclusion, prejudice, bigotry or other tangible actions. Moreover, a wall-to-wall agreement prevails among the rainbow of scholars of antisemitism that one singular definition of the abhorrent phenomenon does not exist. That is the case precisely as there is no one and only definition for racism, feminism, islamophobia, Judaism, Zionism, Islamism, English nationalism, communitarianism, and forms of bigotry.
There are at least four additional definitions of antisemitism that can guide the work of scholars or activists and that are analytically superior to that of the IHRA: the definition of the Canadian Independent Jewish Voices; that of the British Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust; and that of the British Jewish Voice for Labour. However, the most scholarly rigorous definition is “The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism” (JDA) that was made public today (disclosure: some serious reservations notwithstanding, I’m one of its 200 academic signatories). To be sure, Williamson’s top-down state decree of a single definition upon academia—let alone one deemed deficient by hundreds of scholars—runs the risk of echoing Soviet Stalinism and American McCarthyism.
And Then There Is Israel
As many as seven of the eleven illustrations that the IHRA definition marshals to exemplify antisemitism relate to post-1948 Israel (of which I happen to be a citizen). The Zionist/Arab matrix dominates the definition and as a result it often comes across as concerned more with the protection of Israel than the protection of Jews, let alone non-Israeli Jews. As early as 2016 the British Government’s own “Home Affairs Committee” found the IHRA’s definition wanting; cross-party committee members insisted on formally affixing two stipulations:
(1) “It is not anti-Semitic to criticise the Government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest anti-Semitic intent” and (2) “It is not anti-Semitic to hold the Israeli Government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, or to take a particular interest in the Israeli Government’s policies or actions, without additional evidence to suggest anti-Semitic intent” (italics added).
While it is unclear how precisely such “intent” is to be established or proven—let alone by what body or individual/s—it is clear that Williamson opted consciously to exclude these two surgical qualifications. That seems an additional testament to his instrumentalization of antisemitism for sectarian conservative ends. The Governing Bodies and Presidents/Vice Chancellors of at least 48 universities were unable to withstand the ongoing governmental pressure and effectively all endorsed the IHRA definition top-down without staff consultation. For example, my university’s management endorsed the definition with the Home Affairs Committee’s stipulations; Cambridge and Oxford did the same. While this too remains unsatisfactory, it is somewhat less misguided than adopting the IHRA definition as is.
The definition Williamson insists on imposing carelessly conflates “Jews” with “the state of Israel” and “Judaism” with “modern political Zionism.” The original conflation between these identities and phenomena was—and remains—an inherent organizing pillar of Zionist ideology. Self-proclaimed pro-Israel bodies and individuals exercise this conflation regularly in texts, actions, and advocacy. It comes as no surprise that this conflation has often been reproduced by Israel’s anti-Zionist critics, at times consciously and at other times as a consequence of inexcusable ignorance.
Recent example of irresponsible conflation between British Jews, Zionism, and Israel’s belligerent occupation.
The symbiosis between these opposing, yet mutually-empowering, Zionist/anti-Zionist tides yields the most toxic ground for unambiguous manifestations of antisemitism. This is in contrast to cases where straightforward criticisms of Israel—including by such organizations as Amnesty International, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute (established in 1993 by George Soros)—have been fancifully labelled as “antisemitic” to delegitimize pro-democratic activism on behalf of Palestinian human and political rights. Three facts that the IHRA definition fails to acknowledge should neither be forgotten nor blurred conceptually: that many Jews are not Zionist; that the majority of Zionists worldwide are not Jewish (including Christian fundamentalists); and that over 20% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish.
Beneficiary of a Double Standard
The IHRA definition which Williamson aims to institutionalize claims that it is antisemitic to apply “double standards to Israel by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” Viewed dispassionately through a scholarly lens, this formulation echoes what logicians term “the straw man fallacy.”
First, the overwhelming majority of Israel’s critics worldwide focus on its post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and the actions it is continuing to implement there to date. No democracy in the twenty first century holds a disenfranchised civilian population under such brutal occupation while deepening ceaselessly its colonization, implantation of armed civilian settlers, and illegal settlement construction, all based on religious affiliation and differentiation.
Branding as “antisemitic” criticism of Israeli actions pertaining to its occupation—on the ground that this applies a double standard—is Orwellian. The majority of Israel’s critics demand that Israel cease being the beneficiary of a double standard that has exempted it, for over 50 years now, from democratic requirements otherwise applied to, and expected of, all other democracies. The thrust driving this critique is that Israel will act, and be adjudged, in the same way as standard democracies. If that were to happen, this would remove Israeli exceptionalism, not create it.
Yet a transition of this sort remains absent. This partially explains why leading (Israeli) social scientists define Israel as a diminished form of ethnic democracy, that is, a state that does not meet the minimal requirements that would permit students of Comparative Politics to define it as a “liberal democracy.” For another (Israeli) school of scholars, the label “democracy” should be avoided altogether for the simple reason that the glove does not fit; they thus define Israel as an ethnocracy. For yet a third school of thought, Israel lamentably meets the definition of an apartheid state. Two months ago, the single most prestigious and scholarly of all Israel’s Human Rights Organizations, B’Tselem, published a report titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”
The above constitutes a standard scholarly debate that lacks any inherent link to antisemitism. It therefore should not be interfered with by career politicians for the purpose of policing speech, as already seems to happen. In fact, the principal author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, explained on many occasions that the definition “was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus” and that he himself “highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.” It is clear that Williamson did not bother to consult Stern or his writings upon issuing his letter.
Israel vs Civic-Liberal Democracies
The IHRA definition Williamson enforces provides assistance to no one when it resolves that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is a form of antisemitism. While such denial can surely assume an antisemitic form, in the majority of cases it assumes instead a straightforward democratic critique. For starters, scholars and non-scholars alike must have the democratic right to question Israel’s democratic credentials and self-defined national configuration, as well as those of any other state.
Israel rests legally upon the notion that all British Jews, for example—including those who have never set foot outside Britain—enjoy more individual and collective rights between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea than non-Jewish Palestinians who live in this territory, including those who have never set foot outside of it. That is the case not only vis-à-vis stateless Palestinians in the West Bank (annexed de facto but not de jure by Israel) but also with regards to Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise 21% of its population. Demands to correct this state of Israeli legal-political affairs are calls to democratize Israel; they are by no means a form of antisemitism.
Another problem with the IHRA’s uncritical adoption of Israel’s self-indulged “democratic nation” credentials can be illustrated by the fact that both Israeli Jews and non-Jews enjoy equal legal recourse to migrate to Britain and the US and acquire their citizenship. Yet the same democratic feature is nowhere to be found reciprocally in the case of Israel.
An Israeli Jew who marries a non-Israeli Jew from, say, Alaska, enjoys automatically a legal right to naturalize their spouse in Israel; conversely, a non-Jewish citizen of Israel who marries a non-Jew from Ramallah (or Alaska) does not enjoy the same equal right to bring their spouse and naturalize her or him. That also means that British or American non-Jews—including Palestinian American Christians, Muslims, seculars, and others—have no viable legal pathway to emigrate to Israel, nor to reunite with their indigenous families there, nor to become citizens in Israel. Yet British or American Jews automatically have this right whether they like it or not.
Israel is thus neither a democracy in the ways that Britain or other liberal democracies are, nor does it embody a national configuration that can, or should, remain above interrogation. Non-Jews in general, and Palestinians in particular, who seek to have rights in Israel equal to those bestowed upon Jews would first need to undergo a successful religious conversion to Judaism.
As is the case in other democracies, British immigration laws do not restrict apriori possible migration to Britain on the basis of religious affiliation alone. It is not too hard to imagine what the response of British democrats (Jews among them) would be if the right to migrate to Britain was reserved to non-Jews alone. Another example is that the combined state of legal, national, and political affairs in Israel easily enables non-Israeli Jews to purchase land in Israel even if they are not citizens. For Israeli citizens who are not Jewish this is effectively impossible to do. The Israeli notion of ascribing different rights to different religious groups—of both nationals and non-nationals—is absent in liberal democracies because it fatally corrodes the defining notions of civic democracy.
It therefore should come as no surprise that for its non-Jewish citizens, Israel is experienced as a Jewish and undemocratic state. Many Jews with democratic convictions subscribe to this view with ease. The attempt by many—chief among them Israeli Jewish and non-Jewish citizens for whom democracy is sacrosanct—to remove such discriminatory and unequal conditions and legislation, and, in doing so, to democratize Israel by bringing it nearer the model of a state that is for all its citizens (as Britain and the US are for example) does not constitute antisemitism.
The IHRA’s stipulation that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is a form of antisemitism is thus deceptive. It is on standard democratic grounds—not on antisemitic grounds—that many oppose the sweeping extra-territorial privilege of non-Israeli Jews to exercise a “national right to self-determination” inside Israel/Palestine that is bestowed upon them at the direct and inevitable expense of the individual and collective rights of non-Jews living in Israel/Palestine.
Let us lastly think of a European or non-European individual who denies “the right to self-determination” to the people of Catalonia, the Basque country, Scotland, Québec, Corsica (or others worldwide). Does this make them by definition racists vis-à-vis the Scots, Catalans, Québécois?
Woodblocks used for printing scriptures. Sera monastery, Tibet. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Decolonizing Buddhist Studies
Religious studies is finally beginning to come to terms with its colonialist past. Discussions related to decolonizing religious studies are becoming increasingly prominent, not only in forumslikethisblog, but also in places like the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the main academic gathering for scholars of religion in the US. We still have a long way to go, but the fact that these conversations are even happening is promising.
Within religious studies, however, scholars of Buddhism have remained largely absent from these discussions. Buddhist studies, on the whole, has not acknowledged, let alone addressed, issues of colonization, white supremacy, and the erasure of Asian people and cultures within the field. And with the news of a white man murdering Asian women on March 16, 2021, an attack that followed in the wake of increased anti-Asian violence related to misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, scholars of Buddhist studies need to acknowledge where we stand in all of this, beyond simply expressing our outrage at specific incidents of explicit hate.
Buddhist studies, on the whole, has not acknowledged, let alone addressed, issues of colonization, white supremacy, and the erasure of Asian people and cultures within the field.
Buddhist studies needs to confront the fact that our discipline, as it currently exists within the US academy, is overwhelmingly white and has benefitted from colonialist assumptions since its inception, yet it is built on the backs of Asian Buddhist communities. We have not yet, as a discipline, collectively and seriously considered the ways that we are complicit in this. To omit such a reckoning is to perpetuate its own kind of racial injustice.
Learning from Buddhist Practice Communities
In the practice of Buddhism in the US, there is a long history of white communities of convert Buddhists appropriating Buddhism by excluding Asians and ignoring the cultural aspects of Asian Buddhist traditions. Buddhist convert communities are beginning to wrestle with this history within their own sanghas by developing programs for BIPOC practitioners, as well as programs for white allies to confront systemic racism.
The presence of such efforts in Buddhist practice communities stands in stark contrast to the absence of that kind of work in the academic study of Buddhism. While Buddhist studies is not the same as Buddhist practice, these two enterprises are not wholly separate, either. There is considerable overlap between academic scholars and practitioners of Buddhism in the US, particularly in the sense that both communities have directly benefitted from the work of Asian Buddhist teachers and communities, often without acknowledging their contributions. With this in mind, it is especially troubling that Buddhist studies has been so slow to confront a history built on extractive methods and Orientalist assumptions.
These Issues Are Systemic
To be clear: I am not suggesting that individual scholars of Buddhism are actively engaging in erasing Asian people’s cultures. The vast majority of scholars of Buddhism in the US have a deep respect for the traditions and cultures that they study. The point, rather, is that Buddhist studies as a whole has failed to acknowledge systemic issues that need to be laid bare. Buddhist studies in the US is overwhelmingly white (and overwhelmingly male, although this is slowly changing), and has a certain level of privilege within the academy. This privilege is grounded in the whitewashing of scholarship related to Buddhism and the systemic erasure of Asian Buddhists within convert Buddhist communities. Historically, non-Asian academics who studied Buddhism relied on Asian Buddhist informants and translators to carry out their research, and these contributions have gone largely unacknowledged and uncredited. As a result, in the US, scholars with academic degrees are presumed to have a more authoritative understanding of Buddhist traditions than the Asian people and communities who have performed the “physical, emotional, and spiritual labor” of maintaining these traditions for the last 2500 years.
The point, rather, is that Buddhist studies as a whole has failed to acknowledge systemic issues that need to be laid bare. Buddhist studies in the US is overwhelmingly white (and overwhelmingly male, although this is slowly changing), and has a certain level of privilege within the academy.
These issues within Buddhist studies are also linked to popular conceptions of Asian religious traditions more broadly, which are similarly informed by a colonialist past. Buddhism found its way to the so-called “west” by way of colonization, which has resulted in assumptions that Buddhism is universally applicable and transportable, and can be stripped from its “cultural” or “folk” aspects. This is often demonstrated by the comments I hear from seatmates on planes who, when I tell them what I do for a living, inform me that Buddhism is “more a way of life than a religion.” This kind of assumption that Buddhism is a universal wisdom tradition ignores its cultural history, and is yet another instance of Asian erasure.
Next Steps
Where do we go from here? Honestly, I don’t know. As a white person with a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies, this is a difficult issue to acknowledge, and I’m genuinely uncomfortable writing about this. My entire career is a direct result of the Orientalist assumptions and colonialist attitudes that I mention here, and acknowledging these issues calls my own status and privilege into question.
What I do know is this: we cannot proceed without a frank conversation about the privileges and problems of whiteness within Buddhist studies. This is not an issue with easy answers, and it is not a problem that can simply be solved by including more diverse scholars on our AAR panels. (Although that is something that we should be doing, as well!) As Mallory Nye puts it: “Decolonization is not about ‘finding space’ at the table: it is about changing the room.” It is long past time for Buddhist studies to begin rearranging our own furniture. It is only through acknowledging and confronting the colonialist history of our field that we can begin to change it. We must recognize the impact that our actions and attitudes as scholars have on the communities that we choose to study.
Dr. Constance Kassor is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, where she teaches courses on Buddhist thought and Asian religious traditions. Her research primarily focuses on Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, and she is currently completing a book manuscript on the philosophy of the 15th-century Tibetan scholar Gorampa Sonam Senge. In addition to her academic work, she has written for Lion’s Roar and Tricycle, and has recently published Religious Lessons from Asia to the World, an audio course for The Great Courses and Audible.
It is my considered view that Pope Francis’s third encyclical letter, FratelliTutti (which means we are all brothers), undoubtedly marks a big step forward in promoting interreligious dialogue and peacebuilding, especially between Catholics and Muslims. Moreover, Fratelli Tutti resonates well with the teachings of Islam.
In this regard, it is instructive to note that Pope Francis acknowledges that the subtitle of FratelliTutti, “on fraternity and social friendship,” was inspired in part by his February 4, 2019 meeting in Abu Dhabi with Shaykh Dr. Ahmad al-Tayyeb, Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Islamic University. At this interfaith meeting in 2019, the two renowned religious leaders co-signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together. Furthermore, Pope Francis chose a Muslim, Judge Mohamed Mahmoud Abdel Salam, the secretary-general of “The Higher Committee on Human Fraternity,” as one of the speakers to formally launch FratelliTutti at the Vatican on October 4, 2020. This gesture was unprecedented and was a clear indication of Pope Francis’s intent in the encyclical of pursuing interfaith peacebuilding. In his remarks at the unveiling ceremony, Judge Abdel Salam welcomed Fratelli Tutti as an extension of the Document on Human Fraternity and said the following:
As a young Muslim scholar of Shari’a, Islam and its sciences, I find myself—with much love and enthusiasm—in agreement with the pope, and I share every word he has written in the encyclical.
Judge Abdel Salam’s comments were generous and reflective of the deep resonances of the substance and spirit of Fratelli Tutti with the broader teachings of Islam. In particular, Pope Francis provides us with profound definitions of peace and charity that resonate with Islam. For example, he offers the following broader and comprehensive interpretation of the meaning of charity which echoes fully with the purpose of Zakah, the third pillar of Islam:
It is an act of charity to assist someone suffering, but it is also an act of charity even if we do not know that person to work to transform and change the social situation that caused the suffering in the first place. (para. 186)
Furthermore, the egalitarian spirit of Fratelli Tutti is usefully encapsulated in a paradigmatic verse from the most primary source of Islamic guidance. The Qur’an proclaims the following:
O Humankind! We have created you of a male and a female, and fashioned you into nations and tribes, so that you may know each other (recognize each other); surely, the most honorable of you with God is the best in conduct. Lo! God is the All-Knower, Aware of all things. (Q. 49:13)
The above Qur’anic verse is emblematic of the Islamic tradition’s celebration of human diversity, its embrace of plurality, and its call to get to know each other through intimate knowledge and fraternal relations. One might consider it, as one commentator has suggested, as a Fratelli TuttiQur’anic verse.
While there is much in Fratelli Tutti which resonates with the traditional teachings of Islam, there are also some aspects of the encyclical which challenge mainstream and dominant understandings of Islam. Here I would like to identify only two such dissonances which may make for useful subjects of dialogical engagement between Catholics and Muslims in the future.
The first contestation is that Fratelli Tutti comes close to rejecting the traditional parameters of “Just War Theory” as morally indefensible given the destructive and indiscriminate nature of modern day weapons of mass destruction. Pope Francis proclaims that:
We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’ Never again war! (para. 258)
Fratelli Tutti’s skeptical stance on contemporary war ethics is already creating a renewed debate among just war theorists within the Catholic Church. Within Muslim circles, Fratelli Tutti’s challenge to craft a new fiqh al-jihad that takes into account the destructive and indiscriminate nature of contemporary weapons of warfare is even more controversial. There are only a handful of Muslim scholars who have proposed an Islamic theology of nonviolence, such as Maulana Wahiduddin Khan of India, Shaykh Jawdat Sa`id of Syria, and Chaiwat Satha-Anand from Thailand. [1]
Not surprisingly, the innovative viewpoints of these Muslim peace scholars have not been engaged with seriously by mainstream Islamic scholars. This is because of the hegemony of the classical Muslim jurisprudence of jihad which was forged by the early Muslim jurists in response to the imperial politics of the Abbasid caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. This led Professor Sohail H. Hashmi, a leading Muslim ethicist on Islamic war and peace, for example, to assert that an Islamic theology of nonviolence was an impossibility (194).
In light of Fratelli Tutti’s challenge to conventional “Just War Theory” and classical Islamic jurisprudence concerning jihad it might be useful to convene a robust and sustained interreligious dialogue on the ethics of war and peace that takes into account the effects of contemporary weapons of warfare.
A second area of contention with that of dominant interpretations of Islam is Fratelli Tutti’s invitation to religious leaders and institutions to speak truth to power. Here Pope Francis asserts,
Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the powerful. (para. 15)
Most commentators believe that this section of Fratelli Tutti refers to right-wing populist regimes. It is palpable, however, that the reference is much broader and includes all nation states. This is evident when Pope Francis rhetorically asks,
Nowadays, what do certain words like democracy, freedom, justice or unity really mean? They have been bent and shaped to serve as tools for domination, as meaningless tags that can be used to justify any action. (para. 14)
In many countries across the world the idea of religious leaders and institutions challenging the excesses of state power is anathema and frowned upon. This is the case in Western democracies such as France and the United States of America. In the Middle East, this is an even bigger problem. Here religious leaders and institutions have been rendered state apparatchiks whose primary role is to buttress and provide religious legitimacy to state power. In almost all Middle East countries the highest Islamic religious authorities are state appointed, including the Grand Shaykh of Al-Azhar Islamic University, and most Friday mosque sermons are state sanctioned. Moreover, religious leaders who criticize state policies are routinely incarcerated.
There is wide scale agreement among scholars and policy experts that one of the major factors impeding sustainable peace in the Middle East is the despotic and autocratic system of government with which most countries in the region are burdened. It is not difficult to imagine how Pope Francis’s Muslim interlocutors, like Shaykh Ahmad al-Tayyeb, and state-sponsored interreligious bodies, such as “The Higher Committee of Human Fraternity,” will respond to interreligious solidarity action campaigns against human rights violations by Middle East governments. (In 2019 shortly before his visit to the UAE, Human Rights Watch wrote a personal letter to Pope Francis outlining human rights abuses committed by the UAE and requested him to raise the issue during his papal visit.)
It is my considered view that the best strategy religious peacebuilders can adopt in advancing sustainable peace in the Middle East is to render their struggles for religious freedom and tolerance as an intersectional struggle for social justice that links religious freedom to the quest for comprehensive human rights and dignity for all. However, in order to ensure that such an intersectional social justice and interreligious peacebuilding program of action procures positive and sustainable peace in the Middle East, it is critical that it should be initiated, sponsored, and led by local actors and institutions.
Saint Francis with Sultan al-Kamil. 15th century. By Benozzo Gozzoli. Via Wikimedia Commons.
It is clear that state-sponsored interreligious dialogue programs will not advance a justpeace for the Middle East. Moreover, such top down escapades invariably involve established and high-profile religious leaders and institutions whose agendas of legitimating status quo power hegemonies often dovetail conveniently with that of state actors. Genuine interreligious peacebuilding programs demand independent religious leaders and institutions who truthfully represent the agony and suffering of their congregations and communities and courageously speak truth to power. Moreover, the agenda for such interreligious dialogue forums should not be restricted to the lack of religious freedom and full citizenship for Christian minorities in the Middle East. While this is an important and essential part of the struggle for peace in the Middle East, the struggle for a justpeace must also address other contentious social justice issues, especially that of the tyranny of despotic and monarchical oppressive systems of government, and the complicity of United States of America in providing uncritical support to these regimes and the unjust apartheid policies of the State of Israel.
Notwithstanding the two issues of contention I have raised above and other differences between Fratelli Tutti and traditional Muslim ethics of war, peace, and governance, the encyclical resonates deeply with the broader teachings of Islam. This includes the deeper meanings of charity, compassion, care for the environment, and of peace and fraternity amongst people of all faiths.
In conclusion, it is my view that through Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis has inaugurated a constructive platform for credible Muslim leaders to enter into a renewed dialogue with Catholics on the critical question of the roots of violence and the building of a justpeace in our contemporary world. Moreover, by locating such a conversation within the broader framework of Pope Francis’s theology of compassion for the poor—which offers a powerful social critique of our global culture of consumerism, covetousness, and opulence—interreligious dialogue will find even greater resonance among Muslims. It is my sincere hope that more Muslim scholars will take up the dialogical challenge presented in Fratelli Tutti in a comparable spirit of reverence and hospitality with which the twelfth century Muslim leader, Sultan al-Kamil, welcomed Saint Francis, from whom the current pope takes his name.
A. Rashied Omar earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an M.A. in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he is now a core faculty member. Omar’s research and teaching focus on the roots of religious violence and the potential of religion for constructive social engagement and interreligious peacebuilding. He is co-author with David Chidester et al. of Religion in Public Education: Options for a New South Africa (UCT Press, 1994), a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015), and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (Macmillan Reference USA, 2016). In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as Imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and an advisory board member for Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa.
Pope Francis delivering remarks during his visit to Mosul, Iraq on March 7, 2021. Photo Courtesy of Omar Mohammed, Mosul Eye.
“Fraternity is more durable than fratricide,” the pope remarked in his address to a group of Mosulis of different faiths in his recent visit to Iraq. The pope, who experienced conflict and violence in Argentina earlier in his life, can easily understand to where political and religious violence leads. Yet, the Archbishop of Mosul, Najeeb M. Michael, who was standing next to him during the visit to Mosul on March 7, 2021, relayed that “[Pope Francis] shed tears, while taking moments of silence.”
The Christian population of Iraq, as well as Iraq’s other ethnic and religious minorities, have been dreaming of these words being uttered by the pope on Iraqi soil since the fall of Mosul in June 2014. In honoring his promise to visit Iraq at the earliest opportunity despite the pandemic, Pope Francis has sought not only to respond to the calls for help from Iraqi minorities, including those that have suffered from genocide, but also to emphasize the importance of interfaith dialogue and to show that actions mean more than empty words, political promises, and shallow human rights invocations. In June 2014, the pope’s presence in Iraq would have been beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Despite the “never again” mantra that has circulated since the Holocaust, other genocides continue to further frustrate anyone’s faith in humanity, from Rwanda to Myanmar, and to the rule of the Islamic State on Iraqi soil in 2014, one of the disasters-that-were-waiting-to-happen following the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Pope Francis made the “never again” mantra concrete through his actions when he visited Iraq. In carefully unmasking, in all his activities, the very root of the destruction of the Iraqi social fabric that led to the destruction of Mosul, he aimed to provide not only hope to Iraqi civilian worshippers, but most importantly to minorities across the world.
In the series of meetings and gatherings, and in the symbolism of the places that he chose to call upon during his short three-day visit, Pope Francis laid out a diplomatic message that could become the most significant Holy See policy since Vatican II, a message of the concrete connection of the Catholic Church to other faiths at a time of religious divisions worldwide, a message emphasizing the importance of interfaith dialogue for achieving peace nationally and regionally.
In his meeting in Najaf with Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one simple picture of both religious leaders seated side-by-side provided visual counterevidence to not only the idea that the politicization of religion is inevitable, but also to the intransigency of the politicization of the ethnic and social divisions that have plagued Iraq since 2003. These divisions contributed to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq during the rule of Obama administration-backed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in the early 2010s. Under Al-Maliki’s rule, Sunnis were pitted against Shi’ites in a perceived government-sponsored brutality that echoed to many that of former President Saddam Hussein.
Iraqis in Mosul celebrating the visit of Pope Francis on March 7, 2021. Photo Courtesy of Omar Mohammed, Mosul Eye.
The Bush administration’s original sin of dividing Iraq along de facto religious lines through its infamous de-Baathification process led to civil war and the subsequent fall of Mosul in 2014. Years after this divisive colonial policy, the pope’s visit gestures to pathways to recover from this legacy. During the Najaf portion of his visit, the pope sought to place fraternity back into the limelight, and to encourage a move away from political Islam. In this groundbreaking meeting with Ayatollah al-Sistani, who is the second highest Shi’ite authority after Iranian leader Ali Khameini, and the most high profile advocate for the separation of religion from government, Iranian-style, Pope Francis might have performed a diplomatic miracle: that of beginning to help bridge the religious fault lines in Iraq by encouraging, for the first time, Ayatollah al-Sistani to appear in public, alongside the pope, in a show of support for interfaith dialogue and fraternity.
In the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Erbil, Pope Francis also met at length with Abdullah Kurdi, the father of the little Aylan, whose lifeless body was pictured on a Turkish beach in September 2015. Through this meeting, Pope Francis widened the scope of his diplomatic message to the rest of the world. His action subtly connected the dots between the invasion of a country, the division of its population, and the enduring alterations in the genetics of its social fabric, the result of which has often been more destruction.
In the same manner that depleted uranium weapons, Western-made and sold, durably altered the genetic fabric of civilian life, the partial annihilation of the second largest city in Iraq, Mosul, is a physical symbol of a far-reaching human tragedy. In Erbil, Pope Francis placed the onus of responsibility for the dreadful consequences of Western realpolitik on the shoulders of the many governments that sponsor international arms trade, only to close their borders to the collateral victims of conflict. He exposed the price that civilian populations pay for political decisions made elsewhere. Although seeking only to flee from economic hardships caused by war and destruction, many of these civilians have been condemned to suffer the dreadful fate of becoming “migrants,” the euphemistic term used to deny the collective responsibility of European nations for creating the very conditions that drive populations like those in Iraq out of their cherished homes.
His action subtly connected the dots between the invasion of a country, the division of its population, and the enduring alterations in the genetics of its social fabric, the result of which has often been more destruction.
The visit is not just a wake-up call to Iraq and the rest of the world, it is a demonstration of the faith, courage, and integrity of two religious leaders, and many more in their wake, whose coming together will restore not just our faith in humanity, but also our collective and individual responsibility to call on our leaders to start practicing another form of international relations, one more systemic, more humane, and more compassionate. Actions speak louder than words. Not all tears are crocodile tears. Never again is only possible if we all mean it.
Pope Francis included in his speeches in Mosul, Ur, Baghdad, and Erbil, many messages that called the government of Iraq to account. But on his way back to Rome he asked a question that the Iraqi government should take seriously: “Who sold the weapons to the destroyers and who is still selling them”? Answering this question requires a full review of the political and social structure of Iraq and its government’s position up until the post-ISIS period. Such a question is indeed one that should have been asked for a decade. Can anyone answer the pope?
In A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe, Giuliana Chamedes presents the heretofore understudied history of Catholic international diplomacy in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Training her attention especially on the periods around the two world wars, Chamedes shows how the Vatican sought to shape the political and social life of Europe by signing concordats—“bilateral treat[ies] that would bind the Church and nation-state together under international law” (3)—with various European nations. These concordats lent legitimacy to both the status of the Vatican as the spiritual and political center of Europe and to the burgeoning nation states that came into being following the first world war and were eager for international recognition. The Vatican’s goal through the signing of these concordats was indeed to “remake Christian Europe” into something that mirrored a medieval past where the Vatican stood at the center of Europe. For these concordats often stipulated that the state would implement laws that reflected Catholic contemporary Catholic doctrine (concerning marriage and divorce, for example) and maintain Catholic educational systems.
