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Global Currents article

Radical Free Speech


“Manif contre la ‘Loi sécurité globale’ à Paris le 28 novembre 2020.” (Protest against the Law of global security in Paris on the 28th of November, 2020.) Photo credit: Jeanne Menjoulet.

How does one write about the decapitation of Samuel Paty? How does one adopt a tone that is both complex and conciliatory, compassionate and engaged, committed and informed?  Do these two positions go together, and is it possible to develop a language that acknowledges the violence in all its horrific dimensions, and the context in which it took place? Can we address terrorism and what leads to it? Can we talk about violence and the preconditions for it? These were the questions I asked myself as I was caught in a storm of insulting reactions and attacks, including by politicians and fellow academics, due to a tweet that I wrote:

Horrific, despicable and sad. There are no words to condemn this hard enough. I hope this nightmare of our times will soon be over, and this will require a depolarization from all sides, including the French state.

Decapitations trigger a very particular sentiment of horror because they violate a deep sense of bodily integrity. The brutality of Samuel Paty’s decapitation by eighteen-year-old Abdoullakh Aznorov in plain daylight in October of 2020, and the physical proximity between the executioner and the victim, almost stand in a polar opposition with modern warfare, which is largely invisible and mediated by technology and distance. The visceral horror that accompanies this highly visible act explains, in part, why it is difficult to reflect on it. Yet, when I wrote my tweet, trying to express my disgust at what happened while also sharing my concerns about a further escalation of the ongoing tensions in France, I didn’t anticipate the wave of insults and hundreds of responses it would unleash. I was accused of “victim blaming,” my words were read as a justification of what happened, and I was told that I should be ashamed. I was also called an extremist, an ally of ISIS, and an enemy of the state.

Since the start of the War on Terror, the challenges and difficulties facing those who write about terrorism have been the subject of a number of reflections. It is thereby observed that terrorism has become an ideological battle ground, which is primarily apprehended in moral terms, thereby rendering analytical or intellectual reflections on such events difficult. Scholars have also extensively written on and documented the charges directed at those who have offered a contextual view on terrorism, as the latter are often accused of “excusing” or “condoning” such acts (Stampnitzky 2014; Asad 2007). Reflecting on this matter, political philosopher Judith Butler famously argued that this impossibility to reflect on terrorism figures as one of the central ingredients of contemporary warfare. The frames of war, as she explains, “work both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation” (2004: 4). An important consequence of this mechanism has been the consistent invisibilization of the violences perpetuated by Western states in the War on Terror, or their rationalization as a “lesser evil” (Weizman 2011; Delori and Bertrand 2015). Recently, a collective of French academics has denounced this silence and called for the need to come out of the denial around Western warfare, which is either rendered invisible or glorified.

 

Anti-Racism as the Ideological Accomplice of Terrorism

Yet in the weeks that have followed the attacks in France, the intensity surrounding this discussion seems to have reached a new level. This time, however, it has been expressed towards those who have raised the issue of Islamophobia in France. We have seen it in the accusations directed at The New York Times and other U.S. media by the French President Emmanuel Macron who contended that the US was legitimizing terrorist violence in its daily coverage. We also have also observed it in the censoring of pieces by journalists Mehreen Khan in the Financial Times or sociologist Fahrad Khosrokhavar in Politico (the pieces have been removed from the websites). Whereas none of the accused authors suggested that the French state was directly to blame for the attacks, they did situate these attacks against a background of ongoing public debates on Islam in France. In the months preceding the different attacks, the public debate in France had soared again in preparation for a new law against separatism. Announced by Macron in September 2020 during the 150th celebration of the Third Republic, it aimed to express a firm commitment to restore national cohesion around the values of the Republic which were seen to be under threat by anti-republican movements. These were explicitly mentioned and identified as Islamist movements. They were accused of promoting values that stand in conflict with republican values (e.g. gender segregation, religious orthodoxy). The French state’s response to the assassination of Samuel Paty has also been to immediately pursue and dissolve Muslim human rights and humanitarian organizations, like the CCIF and BarakaCity.

Attempts by journalists or sociologists to paint a broader picture around the events in France by also highlighting the longstanding intensified climate around Islam have been heavily critiqued as a form of “victim blaming”—and so was my tweet. In some cases, however, charges went even further. Such was recently the case for well-known journalist Rokaya Diallo. In the Arte show 28 Minutes which was broadcast on October 21, 2020 she was accused by writer Pascal Bruckner of having provided the ideological weapons for the attackers of Charlie Hebdo in 2015. The conversation went as follows (own translation):

PB: Your status as a woman, Muslim and Black makes you privileged, and allows you to say things, if I had said those things… More particularly, what you said about Charlie Hebdo and which led, amongst others, to the death of 12 other Charlies…

RD: What I said has led to the death of other people?

PB: Yes. You did a petition in 2011…

RD: It was not a petition, but a text. And none of the texts I wrote has led to the death of anyone… It is appalling that you say that…

PB: It is not appalling. You have, with others, lead to the hate of Charlie Hebdo and weaponed the arms of the killers. Voila.

As the discussion went on, Pascal Bruckner defended his position, inviting her to take responsibility for her claims. In another radio show, after this program, he reiterated his claims, arguing that “words kill.” This was not the first time Bruckner accused journalists or anti-racist activists of enabling terrorism. On previous occasions, the Parti des Indigènes de la République and Diallo had been described as ideological accomplices (complices idéologiques) of the attackers of Charlie Hebdo. Bruckner justified his position by referring to a text, signed by Diallo and others, that was published in 2011. The text was written in response to a firebomb explosion in the empty offices of Charlie Hébdo, and the ensuring discourse that followed. The authors of the text questioned the large amount of attention given to this incident in comparison to other similar acts of violence that had taken place against mosques or Muslim cemeteries around the same period, but which remained unmentioned in the national press or the public debate. They equally critiqued how free-speech was increasingly instrumentalized as a way to promote Islamophobia (in Charlie Hébdo but also French society at large), and called for the need to raise awareness around other forms of free speech that they considered to be threatened, such as the free speech of veiled women, undocumented workers, and homeless people.

While Bruckner’s view that those who critiqued the newspaper Charlie Hébdo in 2011 were to blame for the attacks of 2015 might appear extreme, he does not stand alone. The recent weeks and months have witnessed an increasing mobilization, both on the part of the French state but also by other intellectuals, around the supposedly inciting effects of anti-racism. This mobilization is also seen in academic spaces. In the framework of a piece of legislation aimed at revisiting the funding of higher education (LPR—loi de programmation pour la recherche), parliamentarians attempted to add an amendment that conditions academic freedom on “respect for the values of the republic” (respect des valeurs de la République). And more recently, one hundred French academics seconded the claims of the French Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer, who stated that “Islamo-gauchism”[1] (Islamic-leftism) was devastating French universities and fostering an “intellectual radicality”—which, for him, includes decolonial thought and intersectionality—that had “conditioned” Samuel Paty’s killer.

 

“Free Speech” as a Root Cause of Radicalization

One way to understand these developments is to see them as a turn to the right by the French administration, which is also exacerbated by the electoral presence of the far-right. Several analysts have suggested that the French government’s position needs to be understood in light of a growing competition with the far-right party ahead of the presidential election that is in two years. This development is, furthermore, also strengthened by an increasingly rigid view of laïcité (French secularism), which takes the expression of religious practices like the headscarf as a signpost of political Islam. While the most recent push was given by influential networks like the Printemps Republicain,[2]this development also stands in continuity with what the French sociologist Vincent Geisser already analyzed in 2004 as “Islamismophobia”: a form of Islamophobia that operates through the distinction between allegedly “ordinary” Muslims and “political” Islam, the latter being understood as an “aberration” of Islam. Wearing a headscarf or praying at the workplace are, in these cases, not seen as expressions of religious piety, but primarily read as a manifestation of political Islam. This generalized designation of Islamism as a new public enemy is, furthermore, supported by a legion of secular or “moderate” Muslims. Yet, there is another element that I want to highlight, which not only attends to how the French model of laïcité has evolved more rigidly around the Muslim question in the last three decades, but also how this development has become increasingly entangled with a growing concern with processes of radicalization and national security in recent years. I want to suggest that the current backlash against “free speech”—which accuses academics, anti-racist activists, and journalists of “intellectual complicity” with terrorism—is one of the logical continuities of an increasingly dominant view that links terrorism with a process of radicalization and social fragmentation, which is seen to be provoked by cultural and religious diversity and a lack of assimilation to secular values.

Police at protest for people without papers on April 5, 2008, Paris. Photo Credit: Philippe Leroyer.

When the language of radicalization was introduced in Europe, it was the result of a desire by the security services to find adequate language to capture the growing tensions they linked with the multicultural composition of their societies. In a recent study on this question, I, Martijn de Koning, and Francesco Ragazzi offered a close analysis of how this notion draws on a security-based preoccupation with cultural diversity and integration. We analyzed how the language of radicalization was introduced by the security services in the Netherlands in 2001, and later adopted by other countries such as the UK through the PREVENT model, as a way to capture the relationship between the “problem of integration”—which was increasingly diagnosed as a domestic preoccupation—and (international) terrorism.  Political violence was, thereby, no longer read as being only the result of militant movements in particular conflictive contexts, but also as an outcome of social fragmentation due to the perceived clashing of cultural values.[3] As a result, there emerged a growing consensus around the need to monitor and police the process of integration of minority ethnic-cultural communities (and Muslims in particular). Several scholars have, however, critically challenged this turn, referring to how it draws on an idealistic view of society. As suggested by Willem Schinkel and Marguerite van den Berg (2009), such an account tends to reproduce social cohesion as a norm, and sees the presence of conflict and dissensus—reproduced here through the presence of conflicting cultural norms—as a national threat. The murder of Theo Van Gogh in 2004 by Mohamed Bouyeri was, however, viewed as a confirmation of this thesis, and announced, in the case of the Low Countries, a more intensified engagement with cultural and religious diversity through these security lenses.

More than a decade later, the idea that a process of radicalization precedes terrorism has become a well-integrated adagium for most European countries since the departure of European Muslims to Syria and the attacks of 2015. This take has, thereby, also enabled a renewed set of inquiries into the “root causes” of radicalization. Through this lens, Islamic organizations and movements (understood at times as Salafism and at others as part of the Muslim Brotherhood) have consistently been viewed as enablers of this process. “Radical Islamists” are accused of promoting a Manichean view, thus fragmenting society, and a sense of victimhood and resentment (through the obsessive focus on Islamophobia). Rather than considering these movements as complex sociological developments that equally interact with the lived conditions of Muslims in Europe, Muslim organizations are increasingly treated as enablers of a polarizing view on the social world.[4]

The events of recent weeks in France show, however, a further expansion of this development. Now anti-racist views, including academic ones, are also being charged with instigating hate and polarization,[5] and with potentially radicalizing people. Such was the argument of Pascal Bruckner. And this argument was also echoed by the French Minister of Education. Academic studies on racism and Islamophobia are not simply read as descriptive statements about a material or social context. They are, rather, diagnosed as producing particular visions on the social world. Like in the case of “radical Islam,” they are apprehended as idealistic and performative justifications, thus inducing certain moods and motivations and enabling a sense of victimhood and resentment. There have been several efforts to resist these recent attacks on academics and activists in France and beyond on those grounds. Yet, in order to expand the political potential of these resistances, it will be important to not only read this evolution simply as an assault on “free speech,” but also as part and parcel of a broader development that tends to turn social contestation (whether religious/Islamic or secular) into “radical speech.”

________

[1] Islamo-gauchism could be translated as Islamic-leftism, but refers primarily to an intellectual attitude that is accused of allying with and enabling radical Islam. These critiques are often directed at scholars who work on Islam, race, and gender. Some analysts have noted a continuity between the antisemitic trope of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and that of Islamo-gauchism. See for instance this essay by Corinne Torrekens.

[2] The movement englobes people who self-identify as “left” and “center-right” and seeks to promote a view on laicité that opposes what it considers as identity-based forms of nativism. The movement has been quite influential in attacking individuals and groups considered as Islamists or qualified as “indigénist” (i.e. belonging to the Parti des Indigènes de la République). https://www.printempsrepublicain.fr/#acturs

[3] This idea was also present in France, notably through the figure of Khaled Kelkal, a second-generation Algerian Frenchman who took part in the 1995 terror bombings. Yet his actions were largely read as a result of political Islam, and public discourses and authorities primarily focused on the mobilizing potential of these militarized Islamist groups. France maintained a sustained focus on political Islam for a long period, and only adopted a broader preventive policy around radicalization much later, in 2014.

[4] The idea that Islamic organizations promote segregationist views in the French Republic is not new, but was already present in the early nineties in the writings of Gilles Kepel.

[5] The shift from “radicalization” to “polarization” has also been central to the development of this discourse. It marks as an attempt to be more inclusive of other ideologies (such as the far-right, far-left, or ecological movements), and to no longer simply target Muslim communities (see Fadil & de Koning 2019: 70-71).

 

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Abdellali Hajjat and Martijn de Koning for their comments on a previous version of this essay and Dania Maria Straughan, Joshua Lupo, and Atalia Omer for their editorial work.

 

 

 

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Nadia Fadil
Nadia Fadil is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cutlural Anthropology at KU Leuven. She works on religion, race and secularism with a particular focus on Islam in Europe. Her most recent publications include Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions. European configurations (2019) and Radicalization in Belgium and the Netherlands. Critical perspectives on Violence and Security (2019).
Global Currents article

France: A Sacred Union against Terrorism or against Muslims?


Place de la République à Paris, October 19, 2019. A manifestation in support of Fatima, a mother who had been insulted and humiliated in front of her son by a National Front elected official. The demonstration also spoke out against Islamophobia in France more broadly. Caption courtesy of Yessa Belkhodja, modified by CM. Image credit: Anne Paq /Activestills.org.

Translated by Isis Sadek.

France, similarly to the United States of America, is in the midst of an “organic crisis,” to use Antonio Gramsci’s term (210–18). With this, he names a crisis so sweeping that it threatens the stability of capitalism and its institutions. Indeed, as ultra-liberalism was imposed upon all peoples, the multi-dimensional crisis that it spawns has destructive consequences: an ecological and health crisis that wreaks devastation both economically and socially, as well as protest and anger rising from the four corners of the globe, including the most advanced capitalist countries whose working classes were protected up until recently (with the emergence of movements for economic and social justice such as the Occupy movement, los Indignados, les Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vests…). To this, we must add another factor: that the established Western powers are competing with the new capitalist powers even as they are in fatal decline. This is precisely what heightens their aggressiveness and the danger they pose in international conflicts.

In France, this organic crisis is combined with a crisis of meaning so intense that it lays bare all the contradictions of the French myth. Whereas those who are not white have always known that the triptych “liberté, égalité, fraternité” is merely cosmetic, the white working classes are gradually becoming aware of the abyss that separates myth from reality, particularly since the state violently repressed the protests of the social movement and the Yellow Vests. The shock is such that some cartoonists jested: “Usually, it’s Black people or Arabs who get hit!”

In this, we touch upon an important contradiction that Macronism must solve: How to hold on to power while methodically undertaking a questioning of the long-standing compromise between Capital and Labor, which benefits the former, in a climate that exacerbates a social anger that first and foremost targets the government’s liberal politics and the state’s institutions?

Macron’s biggest fear is the erosion of the racial pact. The more the pressure applied by liberal forces undoes the social pact, the more those in power count on the solidity of this pact to enable them to continue to tie the destiny of the white working-class world to the bourgeois state. And when the racial pact weakens (as is evident in the convergence of the republic’s indigènes,[1] the social movement, and the Yellow Vests in their opposition of the police, as well as in the Left’s more accurate understanding of the Islamophobic phenomenon and of structural racism), power panics and has only one option: to reinforce the racial pact. This is one of the key functions of the notion of laïcité (secularism), a malleable signifier whose contents vary depending on the ideological necessities of the colonial counter-revolution. In fact, the aim is to substitute the principle of “justice”—the principal demand of all social movements—with that of laïcité, which is far from innocent. Laïcité is one of the governing classes’ greatest ideological deceptions and is aimed at redrawing objective solidarities between the beneficiaries of white supremacy and the state’s main interests to undermine a social and political bloc that opposes its power.

Place de la République à Paris, October 19, 2019.A manifestation in support of Fatima, a mother who had been insulted and humiliated in front of her son by a National Front elected official. The demonstration also spoke out against Islamophobia in France more broadly. Caption courtesy of Yessa Belkhodja, modified by CM. Image credit: Anne Paq / Activestills.org.

In this context, the nationwide homage to Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded by a young radicalized Muslim, takes on the air of a national High Mass intended to unify the French people around the Jupiter-like figure of Macron. There is accordingly nothing innocent about this quasi-religious tribute to the murdered teacher. The secular national (sacred?) unity orchestrated around this crime (reminiscent of the unity forged in the aftermath of the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo) amounts to a reining in of critical public contestation of the official interpretation of the crime. The official narrative attributes terrorist attacks to those labeled “Islamist fanatics” who supposedly dislike the French way of life and democracy, and seek to impose Sharia law—and is combined with a hunt for Muslims that materializes in the dissolution of the charitable organization BarakaCity, in the threats to dissolve the CCIF (an organization that supports the struggle against Islamophobia), in minutes of silence observed in all schools and in the singling out of children who refuse to observe them (to this day, 400 children have been singled out and 150 complaints have been filed against children accusing them of justifying terrorism), in the muzzling of anti-racist and anti-imperialist organizations. Although comparisons have their limitations, historians of World War II remind us that, prior to the deportation of Jews and French collaborators by the Vichy regime, the first targets of state-perpetrated repression were Jewish humanitarian organizations and the anti-racist movement that was denouncing anti-Semitism and mobilizing against it. This parallel is as eloquent as it is frightening.

The main aim of the establishment becomes clear: to foreclose the emergence of other interpretations of the tragic murder. To use all means possible to prevent the meeting of the two angers (white anger and the anger of racialized populations) and the possibility of their convergence. These must be separated and partitioned. These two components of working classes must be pitted against one another, because, if united, they would pose a threat to the governing classes. Cynical as this may seem, the terrorist threat functions as a tool to adjust opinion along the national-republican line so that the racist consensus is restored and class solidarity is undermined. The threat of terrorism guarantees that that the white political forces of the Left, guided by their (immediate) racial interests, will fall back on their historical and structural chauvinism. Calls for national unity, to which the political forces of the radical Left hardly resist, play precisely this role. The stigmatizing accusation of “Islamo-Leftists” (uttered today in ways reminiscent of “Judeo-Bolshevik” in the past)—that the media use to accuse the Left engaged in the struggle against Islamophobia—aims to pressure this Left to renounce this project of unifying the two angers by charging it with a phantasmagorical complicity with terrorism. This accusation seeks to pressure the Left into once and for all abandoning its solidarity with Muslims and the (racialized) populations of the banlieues, or suburbs.

The main aim of the establishment becomes clear: to foreclose the emergence of other interpretations of the tragic murder. To use all means possible to prevent the meeting of the two angers (white anger and the anger of racialized populations) and the possibility of their convergence.

This is the analysis that should serve as a lens to understand the bill on separatism. At a time when material reality is undeniable, the wealthy classes, those who possess, are separatist in their refusal to share. They live in their ghettos for the wealthy as the French government prepares to vote on a law to criminalize the “separatism” imputed to Muslims—a social group that is exploited and discriminated against, one which the Republic’s racism has separated, and continues to separate, from white society. This is the hypocrisy of French “universalism.” This is the Lumières’ obscurantism.

 

[1] Indigènes refers here to the populations from the former French colonies that immigrated to France. They are part of the country’s working class and are typically targets of racism and thus are often referred to as racialized subjects of the republic.

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Houria Bouteldja
Houria Bouteldja is a founding member of Parti des Indigènes de la République, a decolonial political party based in France. She has written numerous articles on decolonial feminism, racism, autonomy, and political alliances, as well as articles on Zionism and state philosemitism. She is the author, with Sadri Khiari, of Nous sommes les Indigènes de la République (Amsterdam Edition) and Whites, Jews and Us: Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love (Semiotext(e)). She recently resigned from the party, but she is still a decolonial activist. 
Global Currents article

From Danish Cartoons to French Separatism: Mobilizing Culture Wars


“A Walk in Paris.” Photo Credit: Flickr user Carl Cambpell, 2016.

 

Some things change, and some things stay the same. The current furor around France’s relationship with its Muslim citizens in recent weeks seems new, but contemporary European history would teach us otherwise. The question is: Did we ever learn those lessons?

In 2005, the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published an article with cartoons the newspaper claimed depicted the person of the Prophet Muhammad. In the article, the culture editor of the newspaper wrote:

Modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech . . . we are on our way to a slippery slope where no-one can tell how the self-censorship will end. (emphasis mine)

The assertion was clear: contemporary democracy, freedom of speech, secular society—even modernity itself— is “rejected” by “some” Muslims. The “some” here refer to those who object to the cartoons. The culture editor, in making this claim, tied together modernity, secularism, and democracy into the broader ideological frame of Western civilization.

It’s important to reflect on this statement in the aftermath of the October 2020 killings carried out in France by radical Islamist extremists, as well as Macron’s previous claims of a “crisis in Islam.” In the wake of these killings, many of the same issues have been raised.

The French elite, French President Emmanuel Macron included, cited “separatism” as the cause of these events. Macron explained what he meant by “separatism’ in an interview on November 1, 2020 in the following way (emphasis mine):

When I talked about separatism, what does it mean, and why does it correspond to what I was describing to you earlier? Because there are groups, which I call these violent extremists who act in the name of Islam and by hijacking religion. Who teach [and] explain within the framework of associations, using all the freedoms and rights that the Republic offers, that our country offers: they teach that we must not respect France, that we must not respect our law; that we must somehow get out of our laws; they teach that women are not equal to men; they teach that little girls should not have the same rights as little boys. Not our values! I’m telling you very clearly: not our values! We believe in the Enlightenment, and that women have the same rights as men. It is vital. And so, I will never, never, never accept an association, even if it would be in the name of a religion, that would promote these [claims], in any case, one that would say a little girl is not the equivalent of a little boy; that she will not have the same education, that she will not be given the same opportunities; because these are not our values. People who think like that, let them do it elsewhere, but not on French soil. So, I say, these groups that are on our soil, that want to establish their claims, in order to separate a part of society, we must fight against them. Very clearly, because they decide to separate.

In the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings, I was appointed as deputy convenor of the UK government’s working group on tackling extremism. Years before, I was targeted by the radical group “al-Muhajiroon” for condemning al-Qa’eda’s attacks in East Africa, and then targeted by similar extremists, particularly in the Arab Spring era. I note this only to point out that I take such issues quite seriously. But the French authorities’ response to the attacks in France is not simply about violent extremism. Rather, it’s inextricably bound up with a larger culture war, one which inevitably will be instrumentalized for partisan political purposes.

Take the point made by the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten when he describes the rejection by some Muslims of modernity, secularism, democracy, and freedom of speech. The direct implication here is that those who opposed the publication of these cartoons were somehow against all of these things. In framing the discussion as such, he essentialized what it means to be a Dane in contemporary Europe and delegitimized anyone who does not fit that definition. Those among “Danish society” who do not agree with this understanding of Danish identity are simply afraid of the consequences—i.e., they are cowards who are unwilling to stand up to the dangers that Western civilization faces. And those who defend a more pluralistic account of Danish identity are wrong-headed.

Of course, that’s not the situation in reality. Many non-Muslims in Denmark rejected the publication of the cartoons. And the cartoons were not a litmus test of very much. The same culture editor wrote to the illustrators’ union in 2005, asking them to draw the cartoons. Out of all the members, only 15 responded—the rest didn’t bother. Of the 15, 3 declined. One called the project vague and only one said he was afraid to participate. Different Danish academics subsequently noted that the project “lacked validity” and “fell short of sound journalistic basis.” But the culture war argument sticks.

[T]he French authorities’ response to the attacks in France is not simply about violent extremism. Rather, it’s inextricably bound up with a larger culture war, one which inevitably will be instrumentalized for partisan political purposes.

And the argument itself is not a new one. The idea that European civilization is being threatened from “within” by a rabid Muslim horde, aided by weak indigenous Europeans, is a long-running one. It was established by the “EurArabia” myth of the late 90s and early 2000s. While it was once a tremendously marginal idea, it has more recently become mainstream in public discourse.

Indeed, simply dividing supporters and opponents of the cartoons into either the “free speech” camp or the “Muslim camp” is problematic in and of itself. European society most definitively does not have absolute free speech and, as Europeans, we are not ashamed of that. We do have protected speech, but we also have unprotected speech. We do not, for example, universally protect Holocaust denial, because of what the Holocaust signifies for many European identities. We do not universally protect insults to national symbols (French law included). We have laws about libel and defamation all around the continent.

“F-Haine nothing has changed, except the facade.” Photo Credit: Flickr user doubichlou14, at a 2017 protest against the far-right in Paris.

The question was never about free speech per se; it was about what we, as Europeans, considered to be sacred in the public sphere, and how we, as Europeans, continually redraw the lines of inclusion and exclusion in our political, social, and cultural spaces. Muslim Europeans and Muslim non-Europeans generally have an attachment to the Prophet that would treat insults against him to be far more reprehensible than insults to themselves. Is that so difficult to understand, even if ultimately, European legislators do not choose to claim a negative depiction of him as unprotected?

In Macron’s statement that ‘Islam is in a crisis,’ we see a similar issue at play. Macron’s November 1, 2020 interview makes it clear: he’s not simply going after violent extremists in France due to the killings. If he was, he might get a great deal of sympathy around the world, including from Muslim-majority countries. It is, after all, Muslims who have fought such extremism the most, and also died from it the most.

Rather, Macron’s target is far wider than that: he’s after conservative Muslims, even ultra-conservative Muslims, who do not quite fit the mould of the European Enlightenment, at least as he chooses to deploy an impression of that for political purposes. That’s not counter-terrorism, or even counter-extremism. That’s a culture war, carried out on the back of a terrorist atrocity.

But none of that should be particularly surprising. The French public sphere has long had an issue with Muslim visibility. The face veil (niqāb), the headscarf (ḥijāb), and many other exhibitions of commitment to conservative or traditional Muslim values have been subject to discriminatory regulation. Indeed, the minister of interior indicated intentions of drafting a law against “separatism,” including the forbidding of individuals from refusing to be treated by doctors of the opposite sex, with penalties of 75,000 Euros and 5 years imprisonment. In the draft released in mid November, such penalties are not mentioned, but the stated intention alone is concerning

For all the talk about the separation of religion and state in France, this particular political trend aims directly at opposing a different kind of religiosity, even if it is engaged in utterly voluntarily, due to the coercive power of the state. After all, what is the constant campaign against the headscarf, which clearly does not affect anyone but the wearer, by French officials, except a promotion against a certain religiosity?

That is many things—but it is not secularism.

Or is it? That’s the question one may want to ask in the aftermath of all of this.

 

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H. A. Hellyer
Dr H.A. Hellyer researches the interchange between politics, international studies and religion, in the West and the Arab world. A senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, he publishes on different forms of extremism, and religion in modernity. Dr Hellyer is currently on the steering committee for the EU-funded project on “Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion,” which brings together European, North African, and Asian perspectives with a consortium of 12 universities & think-tanks. Previously a Brookings Institution Fellow, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and Research Associate at Harvard University, Dr Hellyer’s analysis has been published in various international outlets including CNN, the BBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Mada Masr, and the Guardian. Among his books include Muslims of Europe: the ‘Other’ Europeans and A Revolution Undone: Egypt’s Road Beyond Revolt
Theorizing Modernities article

Beyond Analogy


Grid formed by criss-crossing suspender cables on a bridge. Photo Credit: Flickr User Dennis Church.

Diaspora is distance plus practice, entangled in mediated scenes, messy, lived.

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We’re on the far side of Yom Kippur. My mother sends me and my brother a photo of the Zoom service hosted by her synagogue up in Portland. The image is a bit blurred, a bit pixelated. The rabbi, speaker-view large, appears in mid-strum on his guitar, with a 1×6 column of participants stretching mid-song on the right-hand side of the screen. The sonic resonance can’t quite break through the photo, but it’s the noise in the signal that brings me closer to her and this fleeting moment, its low-fi intimacy, its traces of an imperfect digital translation like the smudge of ink on a handwritten letter.

Later, on our weekly family call—a standing date which began about a year ago and has only become more regularized during the pandemic—she tells me about the song. It’s an updated version of the liturgical poem Unetaneh Tokef, which was allegedly composed during the Byzantine period. The original poem is a litany for judgment. Stark poles define the parameters for the futures of the living, including “who shall have rest and who shall wander, who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued . . . who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low.” For those who perish prematurely, Unetaneh Tokef shows death coming in many dramatic forms: swords and beasts, famines and earthquakes, strangulations and stonings. I remember being chilled as a child by its square-eyed view on mortality, the coarse language of spectacular forms of premature death stripped bare of metaphor.

The update to the poem, caught in that visual, sonic, digital blur, is everything. Fire. Searing. Written by the Black Jewish educator and organizer Imani Romney-Rosa Chapman, Unetaneh Tokef for Black Lives was posted to the Lilith Blog in June 2020. Also stripped of metaphor, this update cuts into the starkly mundane ways in which Black people have been killed in recent years. It is a haunting autopsy of four centuries of white supremacy. The mournful repetition, “who shall die while,” addresses a litany of present participles—“jogging, relaxing, holding, decorating, enjoying, sleeping, playing, shopping, reading, running.” The continuous present, fatally interrupted. Chapman’s song includes thirty names, personalizing premature death through the proper nouns of their being and their loss. Names are prefaced with hashtags. In doing so, they become inscribed not only as the traces of individuals to be contained within white supremacy’s Book of Judgement, but also as indexes for a network—an expansive and expanding set of material traces that cuts across time, space, and medium—that reaches out to connect, and in those desires for connection, signals communities composed of mournful and righteous rage. Distance plus practice.

The song is sung in the first-person plural. Black lives are a clarion “we” that unifies a people across more than four centuries, now numbering, as the song tells us, 47.8 million—an approximation of those who identify as Black in the United States, and in an uncanny coincidence, the number of times #BlackLivesMatter appeared on Twitter in the two weeks following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Unetaneh Tokef for Black Lives closes by addressing a “you,” the “white world” named in the song’s opening lines. You are both something far less precise, and far more challenging. The song figures Yom Kippur as a crucial moment not only for personal reflection on, but for collective reckoning with, the fatal consequences of white supremacy. Quoting from Mishnah Yomah, the song nears its close:

The Day of Atonement brings no forgiveness

Till he has become reconciled with the fellowman he wronged.

From the distance of scripture’s third-person singular, Chapman moves immediately to address directly a second-person plural, which is also the intimacy of a second person singular:

When will you atone? How will you atone?

For you, like us, will be judged.

You, like us, will return to dust.

The “white world” was made through conquest and slavery, a worldmaking that created whiteness as a self-authorizing and auto-legitimating regime. Reckoning with that world, the changeful complexity of what it has wrought, along with the worlds that live alongside, beneath, and beyond its ken, strikes me as part of what Unetaneh Tokef for Black Lives calls on us to consider.

*  *  *

What, then, are the tensions between the you that is plural—a world composed in the calculus of white supremacy—and a you that is singular—an individual and the identity possessed therein?

Part of those tensions, it seems to me, can be grasped through a critical reckoning with the nation-state as such, a political structure that is only naturalized as the commonsensical way to organize political communities in the twentieth-century refashioning of a white world emergent from the ashes of European empires. Is the nation-state, that pharmakon of political modernity, the only means by which to advance a project of minoritarian self-determination? Does it allow us the necessary space to script the value of difference otherwise? Those noisy diasporic traditions of study—Jewish, Black, and Palestinian alike—suggest caution in a hastily affirmative response. As critical race scholars have long argued, whiteness is, among other things, a legal and political construction. It is mutable and shifting, and is materialized through a relation to property and profit, freedom and mobility. It is lived in the affective and somatic tenor of national belonging. Whiteness is a signifier of freedom and territorial acquisition for a national project whose historical predicates were the theft of land and labor rationalized and legitimated through the heuristics of race. Responses to the post-World War II interruption of white supremacy have sought to incorporate into the body politic non-white difference—both legally and culturally—through institutionalized practices of recognition and representation. The frictions of multicultural difference and recognition, slipping into and out of national belonging, and rubbing against the coarse violence of lives hierarchically valued, continues to generate much of the heat in our racial politics.

Is the nation-state, that pharmakon of political modernity, the only means by which to advance a project of minoritarian self-determination? Does it allow us the necessary space to script the value of difference otherwise? Those noisy diasporic traditions of study—Jewish, Black, and Palestinian alike—suggest caution in a hastily affirmative response.

In the churn of our pandemic times, identity keeps calling. Identity’s promise of a “good night’s rest,” in Stuart Hall’s pithy phrase, provides reassurance when living through what Gramsci once termed “morbid symptoms” that arise between the no longer and the not yet (43). And yet, might holding fast to identity, defensively, reactively, also be a morbid symptom in its own right? Whether and how one’s own identity might animate solidarity has likewise resurfaced as a question in recent months. What these questions remind us of is that solidarity is no synonym for identity, equivalence, or similitude. Solidarity is a practice, an action, whose condition of possibility is the messy materiality of social difference, not its flattening. The vitality of solidarity is that it presumes difference. It requires difference, it is vitalized by difference. To predicate solidarity either on embracing identity or rejecting it is to foreshorten the capacity to think across difference. We refuse such resources for thought, which are, indeed, the conditions of possibility for thought, at our peril.

Entangled filaments of Mycelium. Photo Credit: Flickr User Kirill Ignatyev.

How, then, to enable difference to surface in our language and our ways of being?

Analogy continually proves to be one entry point. Analogy mediates. Analogy emphasizes resonance and similitude, without collapsing into identity. It provides a figure in the traditional rhetorical sense, to make sense differently. But the grammar of analogy is a rhetorically thin structure for meaning-making. To arrive at a moment analytically when one can compellingly state a social phenomenon is like another often requires holding at bay the confounding variables—the noise in the signal—of lives lived deeply and in relation to their own histories. Analogy is no more than an analytical tool with which to think. But it is also no less than that, for figures are powerful, and heuristics have truth effects.

For me, several questions arise when faced with the grammar of analogy: What are the historical conditions that have given rise to these particular ways of seeing relationally? How did they come to be infused with meaning? What do they make legible, visible, sensible? And then, what are the constellation of truth effects, the ripples across common sense, that such formulations incite? Questions like these are meant to contextualize analogy’s rhetorical force, even as they pry open space for critique.

Solidarity is a practice, an action, whose condition of possibility is the messy materiality of social difference, not its flattening. The vitality of solidarity is that it presumes difference. It requires difference, it is vitalized by difference.

As I have argued elsewhere, one ought to cast a critical lens on the romance/tragedy narrative of the Black-Jewish civil rights coalition. This coalition wielded analogies as part of its rhetorical arsenal. All too often those who employ this narrative retrospectively impose pat liberal nationalist frames onto a complex history that is wrought with contradictions and critical commitments that exceed this narrative’s terms of reference. Visions of national inclusion, monumental public action, and charismatic leadership are easy highlights in this tale, which are thought by some to then become quickly degraded by Black internationalist solidarity politics, robust critiques of capitalism and imperialism, and the question of Palestine. At the same time, one must consider carefully how Black-Palestinian solidarities have been forged and practiced, how they’ve been suffused with content that has changed over time, that likewise draw on analogical grammars that belie the noise of lives lived across difference.

Beyond analogy lies entanglement. Returning to the reckoning that Unetaneh Tokef for Black Lives prompts, nation-state sovereignty’s plural you reflects the racializing systems of value that give it meaning, and, crucially the entangled forms of sociality that trouble their terms of reference. Certainly solidarity as a practice of relation across difference is one such form. So too are more mundane entanglements. Jewish and Black are hardly mutually exclusive categories, in the United States or anywhere else. Debates persist about racial classification on the U.S. census among Arab, Iranian, and North African American communities who are counted as white. And the historical entanglement of Black and Palestinian freedom struggles, and Jewish involvement in these struggles, have offered political imaginaries beyond the exclusionary visions of Zionism and the cruel calculus of white supremacy. To flatten these histories into particular identitarian narratives unfolding in parallel cannot but seek to regulate who belongs where, forgetting again the noisy insights of our diasporic traditions. These entanglements have resonances, translations and touchpoints, iconographies and ideologies, that have brought these streams of thought and practice into a lived relation, reminding us that distinct communities with differentiated histories draw inspiration from one another, breathing together, apart, in relation across difference.

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Keith Feldman
Keith P. Feldman is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Center for Middle East Studies. An interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar, Feldman’s work examines the interface between race, knowledge, and imperial cultures, with a focus on the U.S., the so-called “Middle East,” and North Africa. Feldman is the author of A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (2015). He is also the co-editor of #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (2019); co-editor of a special issue of Social Text on “Race/Religion/War;” and the editor of a forum for Comparative Literature on “Blackness and Relationality.”
Decoloniality article

Decolonizing Comparative Theology


Insulae Americanae in Oceano Septentrionali, cum Terris adiacentibus / Guilielmus Blaeu. – Escala [ca. 1:9.783.000]. 70 Milliaria Germanica [= 5,3 cm]. – [Amstelaedami : Sumptibus Ioannis Blaeu, 1662. Photo Credit: Flickr User Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Introduction

Several years ago, I attended a talk featuring John Cobb and Robert Neville. Cobb has been an innovator within process studies, environmentalism, and religious pluralism. Neville’s work has impacted comparative religion, particularly studies of Confucianism. Their theological dialogue was framed as a discussion about the nature of God and the future of theology. During the Q&A, I asked about their approaches to studying non-Christian religions. Would they take seriously critiques of Western philosophy and Christian hegemony from postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and/or cultural studies? One speaker immediately objected, saying: No religious other wants to acknowledge they are victims of colonialism and imperialism. He went on: Religion is merely the human engagement with ultimate reality. Studying human beings experiencing oppression, genocide, and destitution apparently does not count as doing “real religious pluralism.”

What then counts as real scholarship in comparative theology? I argue that decoloniality unmasks hybridities, cosmopolitanisms, and inclusive pluralisms that support neocolonial, Eurocentric, and white supremacist operations that appropriate and plunder racialized bodies and religions. From its inception, religious studies and comparative theology were intimately connected to one another and to these operations. As such, they share similar theoretical and methodological problems that stem from them. I propose archipelagic thinking as a method for decolonizing comparative theology.

Religionswissenschaft and Orientalism

Despite the proliferation of religious studies scholars adopting critical, postcolonial approaches, our understanding of religions persistently replicates Euro-American hegemony. Two streams in religious studies have formed: world religions studied through philology, history, philosophy, and sociology; and primordial/primitive traditions studied by cultural anthropology, ethnography, and mythology. The two-streams approach allows asymmetrical distinctions to persist in valuations of metropolitan civilization, former Oriental empires, and colonies. These valuations, based on geographical, philological, and racial difference, formed a racialized hierarchy of nations that placed Euro-Americans at the top and “savage” tribal communities at the bottom. David Chidester has noted that historic world religions were positively studied as repositories of wisdom, while those religions deemed as savage were considered prehistoric artifacts requiring functionalist explanations. For example, compare treatments of Chinese religions to the religious cultures of Polynesia, particularly anthropological studies of cargo cults.

Furthermore, the contemporary world religions approaches, in commitment to objective descriptions and ever-expanding taxonomical hierarchies, assumes that religion as a human phenomenon can be separated from political economy, culture, and society. This reifies bifurcations of the sacred and secular, the private and public, and the material and ideal. The sacred and profane—popularized by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, and Peter Berger—persist in social-scientific methodology. A new paradigm is needed to correct these failures.

Current approaches to studying religion that do not take critical theory, comparative ethnic studies, and decoloniality studies seriously are complicit in the racialization of non-white bodies. Such racialization is the result of the instrumentalization of cultural/ethnic differences and the evaluation of religious cultures according to Euro-American norms. Euro-American epistemological and religious standards center texts as the main founts of wisdom and separate such studies from those that are pursued to better understand the cultural and spiritual proclivities of non-Western groups designated as premodern or primitive.

Comparative Religious Studies and Comparative Theology

Many 19th century religious studies scholars were theologians. Timothy Fitzgerald has argued that liberal ecumenical Christian theological presuppositions shaped many founding religious studies scholars like Rudolph Otto, Gerardus Van der Leeuw, and Ernst Troeltsch. Furthermore, Tomoko Masuzawa has argued that the world religions typology was present in both 19th century comparative theology and Religionswissenschaft. The latter was the academic study of religions that deployed critical and empirical methodologies that distanced it from both theological and philosophical appraisals of religions.

Comparative religion/history of religions in the United States adopted many of the methodological commitments of Religionswissenchaft, with a special emphasis on hermeneutics (both historicist and phenomenological). Marianne Moyart appeals to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as a methodological basis, while Paul Hedges notes Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach justifies Francis X. Clooney’s comparative theology. Betül Avci along with Reinhold Bernhardt argues that comparative theology lies between the phenomenology of religion and confessional theology. Whilst Religionswissenschaft excluded theology and philosophy from the scientific study of religion, religious studies in the U.S. took a hermeneutical turn to admit more interaction between religious studies, philosophy, and theology. Thus, while Gadamer and Ricoeur are not part of Religionswissenschaft, their philosophical hermeneutics have been preceded by phenomenologists of religion like Van der Leeuw and Otto, and theologians who have adopted Eliade’s hermeneutical strategy like Paul Knitter and Hans Kung.

Clooney, himself trained in Indology, is dependent on the history of religions methodology for his own comparative theological reflection. S. Mark Heim remarks that comparative theologians study a second religious tradition through religious studies and confessional programs. Keith Ward extends Max Weber’s antipositivism and limits the scope of his comparative theology to scriptural religions. He appeals to rationality and scientific knowledge when negatively evaluating “primitive” religions in comparison to scriptural religions. His account of revelation privileges Christianity and other scriptural traditions while arguing for the inadequacy of “primitive” traditions. Thus, for many comparative theologians, comparative religious studies research and methods have significantly shaped and informed their comparative theological projects.

Deconstructing Eurocentric Comparative Theology

Despite assertions that comparative theology begins with mutual respect and takes the religious other seriously, its three major approaches inherit the problems with comparative religion mentioned in the previous section. The first, pioneered by John Cobb and David Griffin, utilizes process philosophy as a metaphysical grounding to relate disparate religious traditions. It examines Christianity’s compatibility with Asian religious traditions, vaguely aiming for mutual transformation. The second approach, put forward by Francis X. Clooney, advocates deep intertextual reading across traditions. It privileges the text as the locus of study and avoids constructive claims. The third approach, exemplified by Robert C. Neville, follows John Hick and Max Muller’s perennialist hypothesis, examining the compatibility and correspondence of “ultimates” in different traditions, as well as the pragmatic implications of bridging Eastern and Western philosophical discourses.

By deeming racialized practitioners as inauthentic, comparative theologians reduce their studies of religious others to a hermeneutical and philological exercise guided by Eurocentric historicism.

These approaches assume Western philosophical or Christian systematic categories to be universal. Imposing categorical/typological rigidity onto traditions reduces them to essences and functions. Masuzawa has demonstrated that rigid typologies discursively maintain European imperial hegemony. Comparisons driven by alleged normative categories such as the “most ultimate” domesticate and appropriate neocolonial bodies, epistemologies, and wisdom for the Euro-American scholar’s utility. Furthermore, assuming that the identity of the other is transparent to the scholar facilitates their subjectivation. Comparative theology does not speak to the material conditions of present-day communities, sometimes only tracking the theologian’s own transformation. Indeed, some cross-textual studies are critical of historical practitioners and religious communities that deviate from texts. By deeming racialized practitioners as inauthentic, comparative theologians reduce their studies of religious others to a hermeneutical and philological exercise guided by Eurocentric historicism. Oral traditions and “little traditions” are glossed over. Christianity remains centered as the primary interlocutor in comparative theology. 

Decoloniality Beyond Idealism

Adapting Marx’s words, religious studies scholars often seek merely to interpret the world through philological and hermeneutic exercises. The point, however, is to change it. Walter Mignolo writes, “[D]ecoloniality has changed the terrain from aiming at forming sovereign nation-states (decolonization) out of the ruins of the colonies to aiming at decolonial horizons of liberation (decoloniality) beyond state designs, and corporate and financial desires” (125). While decolonization resulted in independent nation-states, Achille Mbembe has argued that the postcolony is a neocolony in a globalized, neoliberal present. Religiocultural, racialized others are subjectivized, commodified, and socialized as auto-exploiting achievement-subjects.

Critiquing overly positive notions of relationality, archipelagic thinking overcomes neo-orientalist romanticization and taxidermical preservations of the indigenous or primordial.

Who does the work of decoloniality? What is decolonization? Etic/emic approaches are often implicitly assigned: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) scholars are assumed to be doing emic work, providing yet again “raw data” for etic scholars perpetuating whiteness to objectively analyze, evaluate, and theorize upon. BIPOC scholars are accused of subjectivity, producing scholarship bound to their racialized bodies. Religious “others,” like racialized bodies, are ontologized and essentialized in subjectivization. Epistemic decolonization is only the beginning of decoloniality. To proceed, decolonial scholars must overcome the rigid emic/etic binary. They must resist totalizing/reductive typologies and overcome atavistic thinking by seeing fragments and partial objects as sites of resisting subjection and ontologization. One must, as Fred Moten echoes Edouard Glissant, “consent not to be a single being” (xv).

Archipelagic Thinking

Archipelagic thinking offers a methodology to decolonize comparative theology. Derived from Glissant’s writings on the archipelago, créolité, and antillanité, archipelagic thinking resists the atavistic thinking found in Euro-American theoretical production and social consciousness. The archipelagic—modeled on the fragmentary, constellated, and rhizomatic Caribbean—critiques totalizing ontology, epistemology, Manichean logic, and forms of identity grounded in ethnocentrism, nation-states, or rigid religiocultural typologies. Dictee exemplifies archipelagic thinking in literature through the entanglement of a polyvalent assemblage of voices with a multiplicity of readers with polysemous immersions into the various textual mise-en-scène.

Dianne M. Stewart, M. Fadeke Castor, and Monica A. Coleman exemplify this approach in comparative religion/theology. Coleman theorizes African American religious pluralism as challenging canonical white scholarship on religious pluralism that focuses solely on imperial world religions through a Christian interlocutor and focuses on texts at the expense of the lived experience and embodied spirituality of non-white religious practitioners. Coleman argues African American religiosity is a pluralistic assemblage drawing from the fragments of multiple traditions. Her scholarship examines the theological, cultural, political, and the historical dimensions of religiosity while rejecting ontologized identities. According to Susan Gillman, archipelagic thinking problematizes imperialism and resists conventional, predictable comparisons. The endless archipelagic facilitates inexhaustible relation, resisting an ontology of comparison and hierarchical evaluations. Relations between objects are asymmetrical, affected by hierarchical valuations. Critiquing overly positive notions of relationality, archipelagic thinking overcomes neo-orientalist romanticization and taxidermical preservations of the indigenous or primordial.

Decolonial comparative theology examines hybrid formations engaged in material struggle against neoliberalism and neocolonialism in religious studies and in the broader spiritual marketplace.

A new theoretical toolkit for constructing decolonial comparative theologies overcomes mimicry of the colonizer’s intellectual discourse and toolkit. Rather than celebrating ambivalent colonial relations, it critically reappraises hybridities. Claude Levi-Strauss defines hybrid bricolage as the ideological residue of mythical thought or the “fossilized evidence of history” (13) rather than the material conditions and lived realities of decolonial assemblages. Mimicry in some [neo]colonial hybridities is not emancipation for the colonized, but, as Nigel Gibson puts it, “at most that of the enfranchised slave” (281).

Decolonial comparative theology examines hybrid formations engaged in material struggle against neoliberalism and neocolonialism in religious studies and in the broader spiritual marketplace. Commodified religiocultural resources alienate racialized subjects from counterhegemonic memories and practices, imposing cultural amnesia on racialized bodies: absolute rupture and severance from spiritual embodiments of the ancestors. Neocolonial subjects are passive consumers unable to reconcile the rupture between depoliticized meditation or yoga sessions and their own political commitments.

Archipelagic thinking bypasses the Euro-American interlocutor claiming to “take seriously the religious other” by reducing the other to a textual abstraction whose materiality is domesticated and appropriated for Euro-American and imperial ends. Opting out of the Manichean logic of metropole/colony comparisons, archipelagic thinking immerses itself in the decolonial discourse of [neo]colonized intersubjectivities that are actively deconstructing the ideological superstructure of white supremacy, neoliberal cosmopolitanism, and capitalism. It engages in decolonization of the material conditions of destitution, exploitation, and poverty that accompany the neocolonial capture of racialized bodies. Decoloniality appeals to Glissant’s opacite as a liberative praxis from repressive ontologies and auto-exploitation. Without liberation from imperial regimes of knowledge in all authoritarian and nationalist polities, decolonization cannot be achieved. Lastly, archipelagic thinking breaks from imperial Western and East Asian humanisms and moves towards posthumanist assemblages liberated from the desire to be repressed by [neo]colonial authority. Decolonizing comparative theology via archipelagic thinking thus engages in a material struggle to liberate racialized bodies from interpellation, commodification, and domestication and improve the material condition of posthuman assemblages.

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Girim Jung
Girim Jung is Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion and Contextual Theologies and Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Iliff School of Theology. He specializes in Comparative Religion and Comparative Philosophy with a particular focus on East Asian Buddhism, Black Atlantic traditions, and Decolonial Thought.
Theorizing Modernities article

Response to Gendered Morality Symposium


Osman Hamdi Bey, “Girl Citing Qur’an” (1880). Via Wikimedia Commons.

I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Kecia Ali, Kathryn Kueny, Bob Tappan, Saadia Yacoob, and Travis Zadeh for engaging so deeply with the arguments I make in Gendered Morality and offering their reflections in this forum.

When I was writing Gendered Morality, I was very tempted to say in the conclusion that it is impossible to redeem an ethical system which necessitates the exploitation of women and non-elites and in which the good life is only available to elite men. Such a system should be thrown out completely. Then I remembered how and why these texts have endured. It is not simply because they are classical texts of Islam, written by venerated scholars; it is also because their contents—their insights and advice—have continued to resonate and hold truth for new readers, especially in their observations of a society that was shaped by the ideas in the texts themselves. People want to be cosmically connected; they want to know what part they can play in creating an ethically ordered world; they want to know how to behave in order to live their best lives. Many people believe that the world is, or ought to be, structured hierarchically, the way that these texts say it is. Unfortunately, what these texts offer up is hierarchy and an ethical path that is available only to elite men, or at its widest scope, to those with the privilege to utilize others. Also, quite separately, I do not want to throw out the akhlaq texts because I think they do help us think about what it means to live a good life. I just think that we may be better off taking their questions as important ones to be answered, without adopting their answers.

We might, then, start with the crucial question of how to read ethics of the past in the present. Travis Zadeh reminds us that today’s ubiquitous concept of liberty (thanks to imperialism and colonialism) makes it hard for us to understand the past—how power worked, how society was ordered—and that concepts of hierarchy, while troubling to our present sensibilities, make it easier to understand the ethical order of past societies. I agree about the presentism that makes historical akhlaq texts unsettling, but I would add that not all contemporary sensibilities are repulsed by hierarchies in the texts. Many people on individual and institutional levels continue to believe that exploitative social hierarchy is natural law, or God’s law.

I do believe, as Kecia Ali states, that democratization of ethics is possible, and that self-cultivation remains necessary for broad social justice. Because as Saadia Yacoob points out, self-cultivation is reliant upon social relations, the question that Kathryn Kueny raises is crucial—whether ethical systems based on hierarchy can ever be fully replaced. However, I do think that regardless of their historical significance, asking whether the recovery of pre-modern akhlaq texts is possible—and how such recovery should be attempted—is not where we should focus our energies. Rather, I think that identifying the problematics that critical feminist analyses of them brings up can help to create a more inclusive and just ethics. As my interlocutors in this forum have identified, the major problem is how to think about interdependence in ethics without the exploitative aspects of hierarchy. I think it is possible to address (but not solve!) this problem by breaking it down further into specific issues that the akhlaq texts raise.

Problems I have articulated are: (1) reliance on rationality and its possession in defining the human being, thus excluding women and non-elites because of their lack of access to higher learning; (2) defining moral responsibility using patriarchal concepts of khilafa; (3) expanding access to the moral enterprise has often led to piecemeal inclusion because our paradigms of inclusivity still rely on the exploitation of those not included; (4) the goals of akhlaq, or ethics, necessitate exploitation because of the interconnectedness of human relations that are folded into discipline and practice of akhlaq and how refinement is achieved. I discuss these interrelated topics, sometimes using different language, in the conclusion of Gendered Morality, but here I am going to add a little more texture to that discussion, specifically in response to the generous participation of my colleagues in this forum.

How can we create an ethics which is not incremental or piecemeal in opening the circle of inclusion? As Ali alluded to, one example of this is the case for the United States Constitution. In some accounts, it reflects incremental inclusion; it first granted emancipation to the enslaved, then granted full citizenship to women, then outlawed discrimination against Black people, and later was interpreted to protect other minorities and LGBTQ folks from discrimination. This kind of incremental inclusion into planes of rationality, equality, and justice, as Kueny points out (echoing Audre Lorde and Helen Longino), “only promotes competition among the marginalized for what bits and scraps of the good life or happiness might be cast aside by those with all the power.” Just because the circle of inclusion may be bigger, it is not less exclusionary, and maintains oppressive hierarchies. Bob Tappan’s remarks on redeeming women though the marginalization of animals, similarly, but more broadly, eschews the incremental approach because it is an extension of patriarchy that elevates one kind of subjectivity over and against others.

Historically, the gendered criteria for inclusion has been rationality. Even though the ethicists argued that higher cognitive function is the hallmark of humanity, they didn’t believe all humans possessed it. And even if we walk away from rationality as a criterion for defining the human being, doing so requires some care and philosophical reflection on humans’ relationship to non-human animals since rationality is classically thought to mark the difference between human and non-human animals.

Relatedly, the concept of khilafa in ethics discourses requires several layers of analysis in order to break down its paternalism. On the first layer, khilafa is historically understood as the male mantle of leadership that feigns care for all—paternalism at its finest. On the positive side, built into this definition is the concept of care, which for many is a call to human beings to enact Divine law and justice. As Kueny mentions, khilafa as care has tremendous potential to transform paternalism into empathetic responsibility. But I would caution, as Marcia Homiak reminds us, that care ethics, with its focus on empathy and feeling, is often set up dichotomously against rationality—care defines feminine ethics and rationality while virtue remains within the realm of masculine ethics. Such a construction concedes that women are unable to participate in the taming of the rational faculty that is the hallmark of nafs training in the Ibn Sinan tradition of akhlaq—as if women are irrational empaths. As it stands in that tradition, khilafa is a false care that is bound up with male authority, one that is justified through male rationality and male perfection, and excludes others. Ironically, khilafa requires the care of the elite men who are playing khilifa, which, as Yacoob points out, is dependent upon women’s labor that is done to nurture and sustain the family—including the men—to the detriment of their own refinement.

Patriarchy is an environmentally destructive enterprise just as it is exploitative of non-elite human beings.

Tappan brings up the question of reading khilafa as understood in the akhlaq world and contemporary exegesis alongside Sarra Tlili’s argument that early Qur’anic exegetes did not view khilafa in the same paternalistic light that later scholars did. In this way Tlili recovers khilafa by predating definitions of the term to a time before it came to mean that certain men know best. Tappan questions what happens to the edifice of akhlaq then? Akhlaq certainly comes crashing down because the genre assumes khilafa is a feature of male existential concern (universalized and normalized as human concern). Women and non-human animals serve the same purpose for elite men in that they both act as rational foils and as moral instruments that men utilize. Both are described as less capable and born at a lower station in life (despite descriptions of equality of God’s atoms and matter).

Because religious and philosophical justifications (paternalistic khilafa and male rationality) have been used in a similar way to subdue women as well as non-human animals, and indeed the entire natural environment, for elite men’s purposes, we can see —echoing Carol Adams’s arguments in Sexual Politics of Meat and that of eco-feminism in general—that patriarchy is an environmentally destructive enterprise just as it is exploitative of non-elite human beings.

Perhaps the goal should not be to elevate animals to the level of human beings as much as possible, but to demote human beings to the level of animals.

However, I worry about the emphasis placed on animals’ cognitive abilities and on recognizing religion in animals—as much as that data is incredible—to serve as evidence that human beings need to be kinder to them (we should, anyway). Indeed, non-human animal rationality and religiosity are important to study so that we can flesh out our relationship to them in the cosmic scheme. But as we have learned from disability studies, the mere presence of rationality is not specifically what defines humanity or affords someone ethical deserts or dignity. Disabled human beings who may possess lower cognitive capacity are still considered human. Non-human animals, regardless of their place in the hierarchy of cognitive ability or religiosity, still deserve not to be abused, mistreated, or exploited. Perhaps the goal should not be to elevate animals to the level of human beings as much as possible, but to demote human beings to the level of animals. I read Sarra Tlili’s work as evidence that in the Qur’anic tradition, humans are not so special in the scheme of following God’s natural law because non-human animals also obey God’s commands; thus, the very basis of khilafa in the tradition—that as the best of creation, humans have the responsibility to discipline or order the world—is moot even if it is a post-Qur’anic understanding of khilafa.

However, to “demote” humans is a difficult proposition in light of the great emphasis placed on rationality as the defining feature of human beings in Islamic philosophical and ethical discourse. The tradition is self-congratulatory, naming humans as al ashraf al makhluqat (the noblest of creation) because of their ability to reason. The superlative construction of the term, ashraf (noblest), as opposed to sharif (noble) implies a hierarchy of nobility and a hierarchy of reason. As I argued in Gendered Morality, far from thinking of it as a universal (if an able-bodied) feature of humanity, rationality is used to describe only elite men and dehumanize all others. This leads me to ask how we can dismantle rationality, because of its exclusivist application, as the standard that makes someone sharif (noble).

We need new practices for reading these texts—to ask the questions they ask, but to critique the ways they go about answering them in order to arrive at our own answers. As Zadeh puts it, in the akhlaq tradition, the goal is to tame the body and social relations to serve “the cosmic force of the divine soul as it emanates throughout all existence.” The usefulness of akhlaq’s epistemology for building an inclusive ethics, however, lies in the details. These include: challenging the various criteria used for exclusion in akhlaq such as rationality, understanding interconnectedness outside of exploitative care and paternalistic khilafa, and breaking up incremental approaches to justice and inclusion. In addition to serving as major contributions of Islamic ethics to moral discourses, these concerns are at once practical and philosophical and they require critical feminist reflection.

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Zahra Ayubi
Zahra Ayubi is a scholar of women and gender in premodern and modern Islamic ethics. She specializes in feminist philosophy of Islam and has published on gendered concepts of ethics, justice, and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women’s experiences. Her first book, Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia, 2019) rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani. She interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition.

Her next book project, Women as Humans: Authority and Gendered Ontology in Islamic Medical Ethics, is being supported by a three-year grant from the Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholars Program. The project is a textual and ethnographic study of gender and gendered experiences in Muslim biomedical ethics. In addition to a focus on practical ethics, in this project she examines what are Muslim ontological, metaphysical, and existential conceptions of women.
 
Theorizing Modernities article

Hierarchy, Interdependence, and Islamic Ethics


This illustration depicts the ruler Tumanba Khan, an ancestor of Genghis Khan, with his wife and nine sons, interwoven with the texts of Chingiznama, which records this account. Photo Credit: The Met Museum.

One of the most common concerns expressed in Muslim social media spaces, almost exclusively by mothers (see here, here, and here), is the question of finding the time to dedicate themselves to ethical refinement. If the path to ethical and spiritual refinement is defined by an individual’s ability to engage in ritual worship and the acquisition of religious knowledge, how can women—who are overwhelmingly responsible for household and care labor—ever aspire to walk such a path? This gendered division of household labor is by no means exclusive to Muslims. Research has shown consistently that while men in American households are increasingly spending more time on housework and care work, women are still doing far more than them. Women throughout the world are negatively impacted by this unequal division of household labor.

A similar concern is reflected in a query posted by the Imam Ghazali Institute, an educational institution that describes itself as committed to the “preservation and protection” of the Islamic intellectual tradition. Lamenting their inability to focus on individual ethical refinement as their time is largely taken up with parental duties and responsibilities, the questioner turns to religious scholars for a solution: “All my time is spent raising my children and I feel I am missing out on worship and seeking knowledge. What advice can you give me?” The respondent, a prominent Sunni religious scholar, assures the questioner that parenting and caring for children is an important act of worship. While the respondent is sensitive to the concerns of the questioner (though perhaps lacking in constructive advice), he fails to address the reasons why women (particularly mothers) experience such exclusion. What about Muslim ethical discourse and the path offered for virtuous living fails to account for the diverse lives of humans? What are the unquestioned assumptions about the “human” that are presupposed by this discourse that creates such alienation?

Zahra Ayubi’s recent book, Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, takes on these critical questions, offering us an incisive and critical feminist reading of classical Islamic ethical discourse. Through a close reading of three ethics treatises by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali’s Kimiya-i Sa’adat (The Alchemy of Happiness), Nasr-ad Din Tusi’s Akhlaq-i Nasiri (Nasirean Ethics), and Jalal ad-Din Davani’s Lawami‘ al-Ishraq fi Makarim al-Akhlaq (Lusters of Illumination on the Nobel Ethics), Ayubi provides a detailed account of the construction of masculinity, femininity, and gendered ethics. Her work compellingly argues that the imagined audience of classical Islamic ethics was the normative male elite, a subject who was Muslim, male, free, and (above all) rational. These ethicists construct this normative ethical subject through the othering of women and non-elite males. In chapters on the ethics governing marriage, the household, and homosocial relations between men (especially across social classes), Ayubi demonstrates the hierarchical social order that was both presupposed and authorized by these ethicists.

My own work on Islamic law also analyzes how legal subjecthood is constructed along multiple intersecting hierarchies. From gender to enslavement, age, social status, and religion, individuals acquire their status as rights-bearing subjects based on the intersection of these different social identities. Full legal agency is only inhabited by the normative legal subject who is an adult, free, Muslim male. This hierarchy does not entail, of course, that non-elite individuals cannot make claims upon each other or even upon the normative male subject. It does, however, designate non-elite subjects to a subordinate legal status. This is because their marginalization in relation to the normative male subject is seen as essential to maintaining a harmonious social order. In classical ethical discourse we can see a parallel construction of ethical subjecthood. It seems that while women and non-elite men also have access to ethical refinement, this can only happen through the acceptance of their subjugated status and the humiliation that this entails.

Among the powerful contributions of Ayubi’s analysis is her unpacking of the contradictions inherent in classical ethical discourse. In the chapter on gendered metaphysics, for example, we see that the ethicists held that all humans have a nafs (soul), which is androgynous. This understanding of the nafs, and its possession by all people, is an indication of an egalitarian impulse in the ethical tradition. All people are created equal by virtue of the possession of this nafs. The classical ethicists, however, did not imagine all humans as equal.  Their reliance on rational capacity in ethical refinement not only gendered the nafs male but also authorized an intellectual hierarchy in which only elite men possessed full rational capacity. For Ayubi, the internal contradiction in these texts—between this egalitarian understanding of human creation, and the social and spiritual hierarchy discussed above—opens up the possibility of re-imagining an egalitarian ethical discourse. The last chapter of the book, a prolegomenon to a feminist philosophy of Islam, calls on scholars of gender and Islam to consider the importance of a feminist philosophical theorization of Islam. Such a Muslim feminist philosophy, Ayubi argues, could offer an ethical discourse that is rooted in an egalitarian metaphysics. Whereas classical discourse curtails ethical excellence to a normative male elite, achieved through the instrumentalization of non-elite subjects, an egalitarian metaphysics would allow for all humans to realize their ethical potential, an essential aspect of the human experience. This profound chapter urges us to consider the many philosophical problems raised by classical ethical discourse as we move towards developing an egalitarian virtue ethic. In taking the first steps in this direction, Ayubi offers us a way to move beyond critique and to begin thinking with, and through, classical Islamic ethical discourse.

One thing in particular that captured my attention in Ayubi’s book is the ethicists’ focus on human relations and their centrality to ethical refinement. In the chapters on marriage, the domestic household, and the homosocial relationships between men, I was struck by the interdependence between the normative ethical subject and his situatedness in social and kinship networks. The human subject imagined in this discourse is not a bounded and self-sufficient self whose ethical refinement is detached or unaffected by those around him. Social relationships are in fact key to shaping the ethical subject. We could in fact argue that it is only through these relationships that the ethical subject is able to achieve ethical excellence. The problem, however, is that this interdependence was understood through a hierarchical worldview. As Ayubi argues, women and non-elite men were instrumentalized for the social and spiritual benefit of elite men; elite men are ethical subjects, whereas women and non-elite men are made into objects. In an ethical worldview where justice was understood as proportional, this hierarchical and instrumentalist relationship was not seen as unjust, but rather as necessary, since the ethical flourishing of an elite group was tied to the “good” of society as a whole.

Despite the hierarchical nature of this interdependence, the understanding of humans as interconnected in the striving towards ethical excellence carries tremendous potential as a foundational story for the narratives that Muslim feminists construct about human flourishing. In an interview discussing her book, The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler talks about the importance of recognizing our social and ecological interdependence as we engage in the project of building a better world. Like many other theorists who have critiqued the destructiveness of liberal notions of individualism, Butler asserts that acknowledging interdependence will allow us to begin thinking and living in a way that decenters our own self-interest over that of others. It is only through the recognition that we are not separate but instead deeply interconnected that we can move towards the flourishing of all. The challenge that stands before a Muslim feminist ethical discourse is how to center this interdependence and embed it in an ethical vision of radical equality rather than hierarchy. Scholars like amina wadud, Sa’diyya Shaikh, Aysha Hidayatullah, Jerusha Rhodes and others have already begun this difficult work. Ayubi’s contribution carries this conversation forward by bringing our attention to the gendered nature of metaphysics and the need to reflect on the fundamental question of how to understand the purpose of human existence.

Let me end by returning to the Imam Ghazali Institute post that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. Ayubi’s analysis of classical Islamic ethical discourse allows us to understand the sense of alienation felt by many Muslim women who attempt to walk the path prescribed in these texts. While religious scholars and preachers today obscure the power dynamics of this discourse by presenting the ethical excellence described in these texts as gender neutral and accessible to all, these women’s lived experiences put into relief the hierarchical and exploitative nature of classical ethical discourse. The path to ethical refinement in this discourse depended on women, enslaved people, and non-elite males carrying the everyday responsibilities of mundane life, leaving the elite male free to pursue ethical refinement and excellence. Classical Islamic ethical discourse did not imagine the marginalized as its audience, but instead depended on the exploitation of such groups for the spiritual benefit of the privileged.

Through her brilliant and very accessible analysis of this discourse, Ayubi not only challenges any attempt to elide the patriarchal nature of this discourse, but also offers us the possibility of thinking with this discourse to develop a Muslim feminist ethic that centers the flourishing of all humans.

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Saadia Yacoob
Saadia Yacoob is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College.  She holds a PhD in Islamic studies from Duke University and an MA from the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University.  She has also studied and conducted research in Egypt and Jordan. Her research focuses on gender, childhood, slavery, and legal personhood in Islamic law. More broadly, her research interests include Islamic legal history, Muslim feminist studies, history of sexuality, and slavery studies.  She has a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law on the contribution made by gender scholars to the study of Islamic law and is currently working on a book titled Reading Gender in Early Islamic Law.
Decoloniality article

Heretical Histories of Liberation: Black Liberation Theology, Historical Materialism, and the Making of Black Freedom


Monument to 1795 Slave Revolt, Landhuis Kenepa, Curaçao. Photo Credit: Flickr User CP Hoffman.

The Limits of Black Theology

Black theology has often been made equivalent to black liberation theology. It is perhaps this overdetermination by a sense of liberation that is characterized by a Christian redemptionist account of freedom that can create both a sense of disjointedness between black theology and black studies, and a critical point of engagement. In a recent essay, I noted how Cedric Robinson identifies a homology between a Christian redemptionist paradigm and the political paradigm of the West. While the modern political order aims to repress its mythical foundations, equating the mythic with the primitive as a way of obfuscating its origins, Robinson shows how the combination of the mythic and the scientific provides the foundation for Western assumptions of order. What is so crucial about Robinson’s recognition for developing a decolonial account of black liberation theology is that it makes explicit how the theological paradigm of redemption coincides with the political illegitimacy of black people in the West.

It is an open question as to what can be done with black liberation theology, but taking Robinson’s work seriously requires a close engagement with the question of redemption in black theology. While black liberation theology maintains a steady influence, particularly in providing a critical announcement of God’s siding with black people against white oppression, it also remains the site of critique for its masculinism, its overdetermination by Christianity, and its seeming support of redemptive suffering. Developing theological approaches in conversation with black studies requires a refusal of orthodox Christian theological assumptions of confession at the outset, which, too often, can impose a narrative order on an existential and epistemological situation that is precisely a rupture within Christian order. At the same time, such inquiry must also demand a refusal of secularism’s orthodoxies and the cordoning of the theological to the private sphere. What I consider here are the possibilities of understanding black theology in terms of a black tradition of historical materialism set out by scholars like Cedric Robinson and Sylvia Wynter. Such an approach requires an embrace of the heretical and the heterodox as a means of liberating the black theological imagination from Christian order.

Historical Materialism and the Black Radical Tradition

A recent essay by Matthew Harris and Tyler Davis on James Cone and the Third World is a helpful example of the usefulness of a historical materialist framework for an engagement with black theology. Refusing to cast James Cone in terms that cohere with Christian orthodoxy or subject him to a pragmatic critique of black nationalism which is beholden to the American democratic project, the two provide a view of Cone’s relationship to Third World theologians and critiques that enable a resituation of his work. Here, coming to terms with the limits of black liberation theology doesn’t require it’s supersession so much as its rereading in otherwise terms. It also encourages dehiscence–the immanent splitting or rupturing of its thought and spreading of contents in unforeseen and disordered ways.

Similarly, refusing to excise the theological from black radical thought would go a long way toward resolving the anxiety around religion, spirituality, and the mythic in historical materialist circles. For instance, there is sometimes a Marxist-Leninist critique of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism that posits a “cultural-metaphysical Black Radical tradition” as inadequate to contending with racial capitalism as opposed to “antiracist socialism.” Because Robinson never shies away from mystical elements of the black radical tradition, critiques of him sometimes rest on the desire to expel these elements from his analysis. But it is precisely his understanding of these mystical and mythic elements of the tradition, not as signs of a primitivism, but as key elements of the historical material mode of refusal and resistance to racial capitalism that makes it so insightful. Rather than seeing black religiosity and black theological production as at odds with historical materialism, we, following Robinson, might see them as ways into the historical struggle over the matters of authority and order. As Avery Gordon’s preface to Robinson’s Anthropology of Marxism notes:

The socialist tradition that Robinson uncovers and which finds its exemplar in medieval heretical radicalism was indeed more than an opposition to capitalist exploitation. It issued a morally authoritative analysis of the corrosive abuse of power, the indignities of unrelieved poverty, and the sacrificial value of private property ownership. It had a ‘consciousness of female liberation,’ of popular democracy, and of the inhumanity of slavery and ‘imperialist excess.’ (xxii-xxiii)

Here, Robinson’s historical materialism leads him to the heretical histories that are repressed in the Christian and secular production of knowledge and governance. Taking seriously the material of these histories, a key element of Robinson’s analysis is grounded on the heretical political theological material that provides the foundations for socialist struggle. Thus, Robinson’s attention to this material provides both a recognition of the mixed paradigm of the mythic and the scientific that undergirds Western claims of order, while it also sheds light on the theological as part of the historical material of heretical resistance to hierarchical and racializing authority. For instance, he notes “the religious or pious women” who lived “on the margins between dualistic heresies and the mendicant orders.” “Sometimes as nuns . . . , sometimes as lay mystics . . . , and sometimes as heretics . . . , they appropriated the vita apostolica with a vengeance: experiencing and declaring a special relationship with Christ through Eucharist-inspired visions; preaching the gospel; living lives of poverty; and organizing communes” (47). As Gordon notes, Robinson’s attention to these heretical claims illuminates how social and historical claims regarding divinity and authority make the matter of revelation central to socialist traditions.

Refusing to excise the theological from black radical thought would go a long way toward resolving the anxiety around religion, spirituality, and the mythic in historical materialist circles.

At the same time, refusing orthodoxies requires taking seriously heretical approaches to reading Cone and Robinson. What would it mean to take seriously those readings of Robinson and Cone that do not simply bolster a claim to the black radical tradition as already worked out in advance? Such readings can undercut the making of the black radical tradition, positioning it as supernaturally always already the fulfillment of a promise rather than the work of the people. In some sense, resisting such comforting readings would embrace the demand of these authors to be attentive to the immanent irruptions that produce heretical knowledge and challenge the sedimentation of authority. Reading Robinson and Cone as writing against a white Western imposition of order, then, is important for how one displaces the prioritization of claims of origins or legitimation through a Christian model of redemption, which can naturalize a divine’s sanction of the oppressed. But such a view makes it appear as though God has always sided with the oppressed in history or makes the black radical tradition an ontological totality whose preservation requires a pure reproduction of itself. Such assumptions are inadequate to the reality of black existence and epistemology.

The Historical Material of Black Liberation Theology

While there are limits to the Christian model of redemption that provides the model for Cone’s work, to simply reduce his theology to an anti-black production of Christian order is to miss the extent to which he models black knowledge production, regardless of the field one is in. We are able to read Cone both in terms that take seriously his theology and his critique of redemption history as the production of an anti-black salvation history. If all Western fields of knowledge have served to constitute an antiblack world, there is no other site from which to produce a counter-insurgent form of knowledge. Instead, the heretical appropriation of materials is necessary.

Pier Francesco Mola, The Angel Appearing to Hagar in the Desert (recto). Wikimedia Commons.

But this heretical appropriation is not solely a matter of making claims, but a matter of employing a method and procedure by which existence and knowledge are produced and reproduced. We can turn to writers like Delores Williams and William R. Jones as those who work immanently within the black theological tradition to provide readings of the Christian theological tradition that refuse the assumption of God’s goodness or the preferential option for the poor and the oppressed. Obviously, this claim has been taken as fundamental to the announcement of liberation and to question it is sometimes seen as heretical to black liberation theology. But perhaps we can understand the announcement of liberation as an announcement of the freedom to suspend those assumptions of divine order and to understand divinity in terms that are more adequate to the diversity of black religious experience. Indeed, both Jones and Williams have such staying critiques precisely because they subject black liberation to the demand of the historical material of black existence, epistemology, and culture without seeing this demand as extrinsic to the production of theological terms. That is, they take seriously the theological production of knowledge as structured by this historical material, even as their creative and heretical appropriations of black knowledge production go forth as a theological act against the order of the anti-black world.

If all Western fields of knowledge have served to constitute an antiblack world, there is no other site from which to produce a counter-insurgent form of knowledge. Instead, the heretical appropriation of materials is necessary.

Williams, for instance recovers a Hagaritic tradition as one that has been evaded because of the dominance of the liberationist tradition of reading. This critique requires a displacement of a Christian model of redemption as the terms of liberation because of its inadequacy for attending to black suffering. While Jones turns to a black humanism and Williams posits a womanist revision of redemption in light of Jesus’s life and ministry rather than the cross, both provide ways of thinking with Cone in terms that take the historical material of blackness and theology as demanding a displacement of Christian order. Embracing the heretical proclamation of black liberation from Christian order even as it takes up Christian theological materials might draw attention to the creative re-imagination and re-use of the theological in black culture as critical, existential, and materialist practices of transformation throughout black history.

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Amaryah Armstrong
Amaryah Shaye Armstrong is an Assistant Professor of Race in American Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. Her research takes up black studies, social and cultural theory, and political theology to examine issues of black reproduction. She is also a co-host of Assembly, a podcast on the political theology network.
Theorizing Modernities article

Can the Akhlaq Tradition Be Redeemed When It Comes to Animals?


Short Beaked Common Dolphins, Scotland. Photo Credit: Richard, 2020.

I wish I had a copy of Gendered Morality when I was writing my dissertation on assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in Iran. A number of points made by Ayubi mapped over directly with my work on ARTs: the influence of akhlaq ideals (a mode of Islamic ethics that aims to inculcate virtues in individuals, families, and societies) and gender roles throughout Persianate culture, concern to protect children from social discrimination based on their parentage, and the notion that mothers do not contribute to the conception and gestation of the child (other than serving as a sort of “pot” for the male seed to grow in, an idea which I found in the fatwas of several Shi`i scholars). Ayubi’s approach would have helped me center gender in my analysis, and would have spared me the insightful (and shameful) critique by Dr. Margaret Mohrmann during my dissertation defense when she simply asked, “Where are the women?” This was a prime example of Ayubi’s claim that current work on Islamic ethics has tended to neglect the importance of gender (even when scholars think they have incorporated it!).

In this post, however, I would like to discuss another area where the book raises important questions for me: the status of non-human animals in Islam. At several points in the book, Ayubi engages directly with the status of animals in the akhlaq texts, where she creates space for rich future discussions among scholars of Islamic ethics. Just as Ayubi asks how the akhlaq tradition might be redeemed for the modern world, I found myself asking how the akhlaq tradition might be redeemed for animal consciousness, especially in light of modern understandings and scientific explorations of language, emotion, ethics, and even religiosity in animals.

One fruitful area of investigation could be a continued look at the notion of khilafah (vicegerency). While Ayubi does touch on Saara Tlili’s critique of khilafah, further engagement with Tlili and her sources on khilafah would pose a deeper, more profound question that would challenge the entire akhlaq project: What if the understanding that humans are God’s vicegerents, in charge of installing and maintaining justice on earth, does not hold up to the scrutiny of early Islamic exegesis or in light of modern reevaluation of that exegesis? What does it mean for the entire edifice of akhlaq if this presumption of human vicegerency is not borne out upon further investigation? Perhaps this is hinted at, when, in her conclusion Ayubi recasts akhlaq as a method allowing all humans to seek ethical refinement and growth, rather than only a few (elite men). But even this idea presumes a sense of special human election and responsibility, which may not hold up in light of the early exegetes’ understandings of khilafah as suggested by Tlili. Ayubi’s investigation into the idea and the historical context of khilafah in the akhlaq tradition (278) can be read alongside Tlili’s investigation of the term among classical Qur’anic exegetes to help us see how changing contexts and understandings may have shaped Muslim ethical understandings of the meaning of khilafah.

Ayubi’s book also can be read profitably with works of feminist and animal ethics, like Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat. In much the same way that bringing in contemporary philosophical discussions on gender, race, and class into dialogue with the akhlaq tradition, as Ayubi does, bringing in contemporary philosophical reflection on speciesism, drawing on Adams, can bear much fruit. Ayubi does touch on the ethicists’ views of animals at numerous points. In the elite, patriarchal views of the akhlaq thinkers, animals serve a similar purpose to that of women. Just as women serve as a foil to men, so do animals to humans (though, really to elite men). As Adams and others show, animals are envisioned in speciesism much the same way women are in patriarchy. Men (humans) are refined and intellectual, women (and animals) are gross, embodied, and lack reason. Without questioning the ethicists’ time-bound ideas of animals, we run the risk of further marginalizing and othering non-human animals by redeeming women into the hierarchy of creation, just as women were demoted within it by the patriarchal views of the ethicists. This might further entrench religious and philosophical justifications for the subservience of animals and their use as objects in much the same way religions and philosophical systems have justified such use and abuse based on race or gender. As we have come to see (or are coming to see), these beliefs about racial or gender inferiority have not borne scrutiny, and it may well come to pass that the same will apply to views about animals.

There does seem to be space to rehabilitate the akhlaq tradition for animals in ways similar to Ayubi’s rehabilitation of the tradition for women. Ayubi identifies points of tension between the akhlaq hierarchy (elite men at the top, other men below them, and all women below the lowest men) and the more inclusive notions of justice, possessing a soul, or having reason found in the Qur’an and even in the akhlaq texts themselves. These tensions allow her to argue for an akhlaq open to all human beings, including non-elite men and women. In a similar way we can see that the Islamic philosophers’ general presumptions about the bestial, instinctive, and irrational animal are in tension with Qur’anic statements about animals (see Tlili) and their own recognition in their akhlaq texts that animals have nafses, some animals have “tools” (making them thus “higher” than other animals), and some animals can be trained to a superior level through discipline and education. With these openings, we might put the akhlaq thinkers into dialogue with modern ethologists, animal behavioralists, and others thinking about animals and religion in much the same way that Ayubi puts the akhlaq thinkers into dialogue with feminist philosophers.

What can akhlaq tell us about how to live as decent and ethical (human) beings in a world in which we now have ample evidence of animal rationality and complex language capacities, from the “lowly” prairie dog, to the great ape who can learn sign language and communicate intelligibly with human beings, and even a dog who uses a speech-language pathology device to communicate in “sentences” of up to five words? Where we can measure compassionate and empathetic choices made by rats and mice, or deception, lying, and general intentional naughtiness by dogs, cats, and great apes? What are the implications of our increased knowledge of dolphin brains? The silent areas of the mammalian brain—which we know are responsible for thinking, imagination, and ethics in humans—is 40% larger in bottlenose dolphins than in humans, something that led John Lilly to speculate about the potential for intelligence and ethics in cetaceans that may equal (or exceed) that of human beings (80–83).

Olive Baboon, Germany. Photo Credit: Zweer de Bruin, 2017.

And if animal intelligence upsets the hierarchy of the akhlaq ethicists and their presumptions of rational exclusivity, what about notions of religiosity? Beyond the information we have learned from studying the brains of primates and their behavior, where we can see the structural capacities for and have observed in the field their altruism and even warfare, Jane Goodall and others have noted behaviors in primates that would likely be recognized as “religious” if observed in human beings. Most famous are the “waterfall dances” where chimpanzees display a sense of “wonder and awe” that Goodall sees as akin to at least a basic form of worship. Likewise, primatologist Barbara Smuts observed olive baboons engage in what she described as a Buddhist communal meditation, or sangha (300–301). The recent work of Donovan Schaefer would be especially useful to bring into the analysis of the akhlaq thinkers. Schaefer’s use of affect, or emotion, feeling, embodiment, and materiality to explore religion, including the possibility of animal religion, argues that religion is something pre-linguistic and pre-rational, which emerged early in the history of bodies (217). If this is the case, then religion is something open to many beings, beyond the human.

Much as Ayubi demonstrates how the ethicists’ culturally conditioned presumptions and stereotypes shaped their view of women, despite scriptural and other counterfactual sources, we might see how the ethicists did much the same when it came to animals. Tlili’s work and others shows a deep and rich presentation of animals as worshipers of God, capable of complex language, and able to make ethical (or unethical) choices. Our current understanding of these capabilities stands in stark contrast to the very instrumental view of animals held in the akhlaq tradition, views which likewise instrumentalized women and non-elite men. Just as Ayubi suggested with regard to gender that “utilizing others for one’s own ends, whatever the purported intent, diminishes both the utilizer and the utilized,” (275) I suggest her work can be extended to our thinking about non-human animals and Islamic ethics.

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Robert Tappan
Robert M. Tappan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. His areas of interest include Islamic ethics, theology, and law, with a particular emphasis on exploring Shi`i scholarship on Islamic biomedical ethics. He has published several book chapters and encyclopedia articles on Islamic views of ethics, assisted reproductive technology, biomedical ethics, and health care. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Imperfect States


A master teaches students in a school courtyard. Folio from an illuminated manuscript copied in Lahore for the Mughal emperor Akbar (d. 1605), Akhlaq-i Nasiri (The Nasirean Ethics) by Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274). AKM288.8. Photo Credit: Aga Khan Museum. CC BY-NC 2.5 CA.

“If everyone were equal, it would end in their demise.” So claims Nasir al-Din Tusi, the famed Iranian philosopher from the thirteenth century. Tusi found this maximum to be particularly insightful and wove it into his influential manual of ethics. This idea, that social stratification is a necessary condition for human flourishing, stretches back to the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. The belief in hierarchy as a bedrock for political order is an abiding feature of classical moral philosophy. A perfect state of society can only be obtained through a progressive series of hierarchal orders, the philosophers explain. Not only is the superiority of a male elite unquestioned it is celebrated and feted. As a man rules his home, so does a ruler govern society. Thus proceeds the syllogistic logic of the body politic in classical virtue ethics.

Needless to say, much of this thinking would appear to be anathema to liberal sensibilities, steeped in values of egalitarianism and equality—for all their contradictions and unrealized aspirations. Yet ideals of hierarchy and mastery have also proved to be rather useful in the uneven legacies of liberalism, of freeing others through conquest. The specter of liberty brought by the empires and markets of colonialism has made the prospect of fathoming the difference of the past a rather vexing endeavor.

Historically, Muslims, like both Jews and Christians, drew copiously from the well of Greek learning as a font of science and wisdom. One of the many bequests of classical moral philosophy is the assertion that social hierarchy is the natural state of God’s creation. In the development of Islamic thought, philosophers and intellectuals frequently turned to the unequal conditions and capacities among humans as confirmation of a grand chain of being that connected the quotidian minutia on earth to the sublime heavenly orbs above. In this, Muslim authorities shared in a universal field of science and philosophy that sought to account in taxonomical form for the entire order of existence, emanating from God through the tiniest particles of being.

Over time, such cosmic orders proved quite useful when justifying the status of those in power. For classical virtue ethics, the metaphysics of hierarchy served to advance male dominance and patriarchal rule as a natural basis for domestic order and political life. Zahra Ayubi traces the genealogies of these ideological formulations in a lucid and thought-provoking study focused on canonical Persian works from the tradition of classical Islamic moral philosophy. Along the way, Ayubi develops a feminist reading and critique of the gendered dynamics that govern the conditions for human happiness and the language of reform.

Ayubi leads us through an influential corpus of ethical writings on akhlaq, the natural traits or characteristics of individuals, by the likes of Ghazali, Tusi, and Davani. These widely read works on moral philosophy offered practical advice for improving the self and society through the corporal and intellectual disciplines of moral refinement. As an indication of the deep connections with classical philosophy, the category of akhlaq is itself a calque of the Greek plural ethe and with it the field of ethika, which historically was also implicated in the project of promoting and affirming male privilege. In her own readings of these ethical manuals, Ayubi consciously follows the footsteps of earlier feminist philosophers, such as Luce Irigaray and Martha Nussbaum, who have asked what, if anything, can be recovered from the ancient writings of a male elite who sought to anchor their own authority in the transcendent power of cosmic order.

Taming the Body

For the diverse moral economies of liberalism, a good deal in this ethical universe may stand out as elitist, racist, and sexist. This extends beyond merely the unquestioned centrality of the male subject to the entire body politics of perfection towards which these works progress in teleological fashion. Perfection is the name of the game. In the framework of Aristotelian ethics, the idea of telos, as both end and completion, carries a special importance. It is directly related to the central concept of entelecheia, the work of bringing into full actuality the ideal self through a process of self-fulfillment. It is a concept generally rendered in Arabic and Persian as takmil, perfection, completion, and actualization.

As a discourse of perfection, these writings privilege above all a male subject whose body is marked for purification. The marginalization of women from this discipline of self-actualization is not an accident, but rather a structural feature designed to promote men as vessels of power and as models of divine rule. Despite all this, classical Islamic moral philosophy also cultivated and valued social justice. Yet as a system of thought that approached equality not as a desirable virtue but as a dangerous imbalance, the ideal of what constituted justice in these works does not easily accord with today’s language of universal human rights and civil liberties.

As with Plato’s yoking together of soma and polis, the metaphor of the body politic is a central feature of these writings on hierarchical order. It is a conceit with incredible traction. “The excellent city is like a perfect, healthy body whose limbs all work in concert,” explains the early Muslim philosopher Farabi. Like Plato, Farabi viewed the perfect state as governed by an enlightened ruler who could lead and guide all classes of society, from the ignorant masses to the educated elite. In the ideals of classical Islamic moral philosophy the apex of social order is identified with men—generally in the form of an imam, caliph, or a group of wise authorities—who, through the discipline of the soul and the power of the intellect, have obtained extraordinary states of knowledge and wisdom that far surpass what ordinary people can achieve. Justice, in such a framework, is maintained not through insuring equality of rights or the protection of liberties, but by balancing the diverse and unequal factions of society in complete harmony, where individuals know their place and act according to and within their own capacities.

The constellation of Cassiopeia, known in Arabic as dhat al-kursi, the “Woman with the Throne.” Folio from the Kitab suwar al-kawakib (The Book of the Fixed Stars) by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (d. 986). Bodleian Library, MS. Marsh 144, p. 100. Photo Credit: Bodleian Library. CC BY-NC 4.0.

Importantly, the metaphysical structure undergirding this system of thought is designed to describe in scientific and rational terms the physical powers of prophecy as located in the nafs, or soul, the psyche of Greek philosophy, which in turn serves as the cognitive basis for human reason. The epistemic foundations of classical Islamic moral philosophy rest on the cosmic force of the divine soul as it emanates throughout all existence. These teachings form the keystone in the metaphysics of Ibn Sina, whose work indelibly shapes the tradition of virtue ethics that Ayubi explores. Here the hierarchical gradation of intellectual capacity, as determined by the mental faculties of the soul, is used to explain the natural foundations of prophecy, miracles, and magic. In such a schema, the Prophet, as the total, complete, and perfect human, represents the pinnacle of human potential, the ideal lawgiver, and the consummate model for dignity and happiness.

This corpus of writing promises individual and social improvement and refinement. As Tusi notes in the opening to his widely read manual of ethics, while theoretical philosophy culminates in the abstract analysis of the soul as a force in nature, practical philosophy teaches how to harness and actualize the psychic power of the intellect. Starting with tahzib al-akhlaq, the individual refinement of character or virtues, the path of perfection then turns to the organization of domestic economy and finally ends in the study of good governance. This ultimate field focuses on siyasa, not in the sense of politics, which is what the word generally conveys in modern Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, but with the meaning of discipline and punishment, as in the classical Persian expression siyasat kardan, to discipline or punish and thereby to rule. The coercive power governing the home and the state is meant to keep subordinates in place.

As Ayubi demonstrates time and again, the gendered values that animate this system of applied philosophy advance the authority of an ideal male subject as the head of the family and as the leader of society. These works speak in a language of mastery. It is a mastery born of discipline and control through the refinement of comportment, thought, and language. Ethics and etiquette intermingle in the staging of adab, a general term for educated decorum and refined speech. Mastery of language as a normative condition for maturity and manliness is a frequent trope in these appeals to moral refinement.

In Polite Society

The universal claims animating this philosophy of the good life lent themselves to countless audiences. As a testament to their popularity, many of the works that Ayubi considers were deployed in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal administrative education. In South Asia, this meant importantly readerships of Muslims and Hindus alike—Kayasthas and Khatris in particular. These diverse readers highlight, above all, the appeal of akhlaq literature to a natural order that transcended sectarian divides, pointing to a kind of a universal, if not secular, sphere of learning and knowledge before the advent of colonialism.

In the course of early Islamic reform movements, practical moral philosophy played a rather outsized role. As a means of reviving the body politic in the face of European colonialism, the classicism of tahzib al-akhlaq, the refinement of morals, could appeal to an internal discourse on education and self-improvement. As Ayubi notes, the phrase famously served as the title for the reformist Urdu gazette founded in 1870 by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. The English header for Sir Sayyid’s journal, The Mohammedan Social Reformer, announces exactly what tahzib is meant to convey: a process of refinement, purification, and polishing, through a discipline of correcting and improving the morals of society. The term carries a sense of honor and good manners. So too did tahzib come to serve in Urdu as a direct translation of the rather novel English word “civilization,” in the moral sense of cultured, and in direct opposition to the barbaric and semi-barbaric (wahshi-o-nisf wahshi). In this regard, Muslim reformists closely followed colonial discourses on the improvement of society by drawing on an autochthonous language of rectification and refinement, with the control of women’s bodies occupying a central concern.

 

Header for Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s journal, The Mohammedan Social Reformer. Public Domain.

With appeals to universal order and refined etiquette, it should come as no surprise that Orientalists also turned to collections on akhlaq, often for the purposes of Persian language instruction. The continued centrality of virtue ethics for edification can be traced back to early colonial contacts. For example, Sir William Jones lavishes praise on Kamal al-Din Kashifi’s Persian collection of morality tales in his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), a work prepared for the instruction of officers and other servants in the employ of the East India Company. In 1821, a bilingual English and Persian selection from Kashifi’s popular compendium was published so as to be “attentively studied during the passage to India.” British orientalists translating akhlaq materials as employees of the Company—often with the aid of their moonshee or “intelligent native”—were quick to recognize a common basis of ethical knowledge rooted in Greek philosophy, which in turn offered commonalities not only in moral and epistemic terms, but also in the rareified field of science itself. Given their administrative use, this body of ethical literature also came to serve a curricular basis for civil and military service in the East India Company and then, after the Government of India Act of 1858, as part of the Indian Civil Service of British India. The pedagogical use of these materials for language instruction is rather suggestive, as the focus on self-discipline also coincides with the Orientalist enterprise of mastering and standardizing the language of others.

In addition to aspirations of mastery, European writings from the period on moral philosophy and political economy, by the likes of John Stuart Mill, also found common cause in the metaphor of a “political” or “social body.” While a body can decay, so too can it be purified, disciplined, and improved. As a concept, the body politic, however, has notable limitations. Foremost, it has often served to naturalize group identities, while obfuscating the circulation of power, such that social hierarchies are readily justified and imbued with cosmic and ethical significance of a transcendental magnitude. This kind of reasoning generally papers over the very ideological work at the heart of group formation. All imagined communities necessitate an ideological, if contradictory, heterogeneous, and conceptually impossible, means of identification, of who we are, where we have been, and where we are going, in the associative bonds that draw us together and pull us apart. The facticity of group identities, in this regard, is a product of ideation, not of crude determinism.

Politics of Imperfection

While colonial agents were often mouthpieces for various forms of liberalism, they were also keenly invested in cultivating hierarchies of race, class, and gender, which they used to divide up the world between the civilized and the savage. The logic of the civilizing mission justifying global European hegemony generally predicated the inherently unequal status of humans. In such equations, Islam long stood as a foil to the forward march of history, a withered and decayed hand of oppression shackled by superstition and ignorance. For the rights based ideology of secular liberalism, as Joseph Massad contends, Islam has frequently betokened the irrational, illiberal, tyrannical other, inimical to the forces of freedom and self-fulfillment.

In the waves of reform and post-colonial resistance, with the rise of liberation theology and the development of Islamic feminism, there have followed countless efforts at locating and recuperating egalitarian values in the foundational sources of Islamic authority. Yet Ayubi observes, referencing the work of Ayesha Chaudhry on domestic violence and the Qur’an, the interpretive procedures for identifying messages of gender equality in these materials are anything but straightforward. Indeed, like all forms of reading the past, such hermeneutical maneuvers are by necessity anachronistic, that is, they are shaped by the vocabularies, desires, and values of the present, as well as by the potential of what can actually be thought or said. While today one may point to numerous sources for egalitarian thought in the wide course of Islamic history, such gestures are inevitably made and conditioned in the shadow of liberalism. As an ideological formulation, liberalism’s promise of freedom presents itself as the perfect and only conceivable basis for human flourishing.

Yet, perfection is no easy state. Everything is in flux, constantly changing and reforming. The discipline of the self is never complete, just as group formation is a continual work in progress. Perfection is an ideological position, not a state of being. A politics of imperfection, as Leela Gandhi calls for in her transnational history of democracy, proceeds from the messiness of material conditions and the heterogeneous identities and values that guide us all, following the empathic possibilities of thinking otherwise. In contrast, the disciplines of perfection have always spoken in the name of mastery, be it over language, with the fine line of a diacritical mark, or over bodies, in the master who stands in for and silences another.

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Travis Zadeh
Travis Zadeh is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, New Haven. He is the author of Mapping Frontiers across Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation and the ‘Abbasid Empire (Bloomsbury, 2011) and The Vernacular Qur’an: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis (Oxford, 2012). Recently, Dr. Zadeh has also finished a forthcoming monograph on wonder and astonishment in Islamic philosophy, science, and literature.