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The IHRA’s Careless Conflations on Antisemitism (and A Few Alternatives)


An Arabic version of this piece is available here.

I am a non-white Mizrahi Jewish academic who has been studying Israel/Palestine and the history of Jews in the Middle East for two decades. My family hails from Ottoman Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, and the Greek islands of Zakynthos and Corfu. All too many of us were murdered by Nazi Génocidaires (and rest assured that we will not forget or forgive). Precisely because of this scholarly and biographic background I was embarrassed to read the letter sent by England’s Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, to all university vice chancellors. Utilizing an authoritarian tone devoid of understatement, Williamson demanded that all universities in England adopt formally what is called “the working definition of antisemitism” drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Photo from the Synagogue in Kerkyra/Corfu. Fingers pointing out to families associated with Behar’s maternal lineage, Mother’s maiden name included.

Born in 1976, Williamson has been a Tory politician for 25 years. He and his party have not been noteworthy for their passionate activism against racism, antisemitism included. Nor did Williamson find it problematic to serve under Boris Johnson, author of Seventy-Two Virgins (HarperCollins, 2004), a novel that disappointingly recycled antisemitic tropes and stereotypical portrayals of Jews and other British minority ethnic groups.

The letter Williamson authored is littered with antisemitic tropes. A non-Jew himself, Williamson first chooses to single out Jews from non-Jews and, in so doing, officially mark Jews as “other.” Embracing the “divide and conquer” colonial approach, he proceeds to divorce antisemitic racism from similar manifestations of racism with which he is less concerned, including Islamophobia, Afrophobia/anti-Black racism, misogyny, anti-Roma/Gypsy racism, homophobia, and xenophobia vis-à-vis Asians and Arabs.

Most disturbingly, Williamson’s letter upgrades the quintessential stereotype of money and Jews to a new level by linking Jews to monetary penalties and potential state sanctions on universities if their managements exercise what is otherwise a simple academic and democratic right to adopt a view and definition of antisemitism that differ from his. The irony of setting Christmas as the deadline for his pseudo-philosemitic mobilization has apparently escaped Williamson altogether.

The IHRA definition that Williamson labors to impose unilaterally defines antisemitism as “a perception that may be expressed as hatred.” This reading is vague, restrictive, minimalist, and—in the main—emotionalist. It bypasses manifestations of antisemitism that are equally, and possibly even more, important than “perception,” including oppression, discrimination, exclusion, prejudice, bigotry or other tangible actions. Moreover, a wall-to-wall agreement prevails among the rainbow of scholars of antisemitism that one singular definition of the abhorrent phenomenon does not exist. That is the case precisely as there is no one and only definition for racism, feminism, islamophobia, Judaism, Zionism, Islamism, English nationalism, communitarianism, and forms of bigotry.

There are at least four additional definitions of antisemitism that can guide the work of scholars or activists and that are analytically superior to that of the IHRA: the definition of the Canadian Independent Jewish Voices; that of the British Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust; and that of the British Jewish Voice for Labour. However, the most scholarly rigorous definition is “The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism” (JDA) that was made public today (disclosure: some serious reservations notwithstanding, I’m one of its 200 academic signatories). To be sure, Williamson’s top-down state decree of a single definition upon academia—let alone one deemed deficient by hundreds of scholars—runs the risk of echoing Soviet Stalinism and American McCarthyism.

And Then There Is Israel

As many as seven of the eleven illustrations that the IHRA definition marshals to exemplify antisemitism relate to post-1948 Israel (of which I happen to be a citizen). The Zionist/Arab matrix dominates the definition and as a result it often comes across as concerned more with the protection of Israel than the protection of Jews, let alone non-Israeli Jews. As early as 2016 the British Government’s own “Home Affairs Committee” found the IHRA’s definition wanting; cross-party committee members insisted on formally affixing two stipulations:

(1) “It is not anti-Semitic to criticise the Government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest anti-Semitic intent” and (2) “It is not anti-Semitic to hold the Israeli Government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, or to take a particular interest in the Israeli Government’s policies or actions, without additional evidence to suggest anti-Semitic intent” (italics added).

While it is unclear how precisely such “intent” is to be established or proven—let alone by what body or individual/s—it is clear that Williamson opted consciously to exclude these two surgical qualifications. That seems an additional testament to his instrumentalization of antisemitism for sectarian conservative ends. The Governing Bodies and Presidents/Vice Chancellors of at least 48 universities were unable to withstand the ongoing governmental pressure and effectively all endorsed the IHRA definition top-down without staff consultation. For example, my university’s management endorsed the definition with the Home Affairs Committee’s stipulations; Cambridge and Oxford did the same. While this too remains unsatisfactory, it is somewhat less misguided than adopting the IHRA definition as is.

The definition Williamson insists on imposing carelessly conflates “Jews” with “the state of Israel” and “Judaism” with “modern political Zionism.” The original conflation between these identities and phenomena was—and remains—an inherent organizing pillar of Zionist ideology. Self-proclaimed pro-Israel bodies and individuals exercise this conflation regularly in texts, actions, and advocacy. It comes as no surprise that this conflation has often been reproduced by Israel’s anti-Zionist critics, at times consciously and at other times as a consequence of inexcusable ignorance.

Recent example of irresponsible conflation between British Jews, Zionism, and Israel’s belligerent occupation.

The symbiosis between these opposing, yet mutually-empowering, Zionist/anti-Zionist tides yields the most toxic ground for unambiguous manifestations of antisemitism. This is in contrast to cases where straightforward criticisms of Israel—including by such organizations as Amnesty International, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute (established in 1993 by George Soros)—have been fancifully labelled as “antisemitic” to delegitimize pro-democratic activism on behalf of Palestinian human and political rights. Three facts that the IHRA definition fails to acknowledge should neither be forgotten nor blurred conceptually: that many Jews are not Zionist; that the majority of Zionists worldwide are not Jewish (including Christian fundamentalists); and that over 20% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish.

Beneficiary of a Double Standard

The IHRA definition which Williamson aims to institutionalize claims that it is antisemitic to apply “double standards to Israel by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” Viewed dispassionately through a scholarly lens, this formulation echoes what logicians term “the straw man fallacy.”

First, the overwhelming majority of Israel’s critics worldwide focus on its post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and the actions it is continuing to implement there to date. No democracy in the twenty first century holds a disenfranchised civilian population under such brutal occupation while deepening ceaselessly its colonization, implantation of armed civilian settlers, and illegal settlement construction, all based on religious affiliation and differentiation.

Branding as “antisemitic” criticism of Israeli actions pertaining to its occupation—on the ground that this applies a double standard—is Orwellian. The majority of Israel’s critics demand that Israel cease being the beneficiary of a double standard that has exempted it, for over 50 years now, from democratic requirements otherwise applied to, and expected of, all other democracies. The thrust driving this critique is that Israel will act, and be adjudged, in the same way as standard democracies. If that were to happen, this would remove Israeli exceptionalism, not create it.

Yet a transition of this sort remains absent. This partially explains why leading (Israeli) social scientists define Israel as a diminished form of ethnic democracy, that is, a state that does not meet the minimal requirements that would permit students of Comparative Politics to define it as a “liberal democracy.” For another (Israeli) school of scholars, the label “democracy” should be avoided altogether for the simple reason that the glove does not fit; they thus define Israel as an ethnocracy. For yet a third school of thought, Israel lamentably meets the definition of an apartheid state. Two months ago, the single most prestigious and scholarly of all Israel’s Human Rights Organizations, B’Tselem, published a report titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”

The above constitutes a standard scholarly debate that lacks any inherent link to antisemitism. It therefore should not be interfered with by career politicians for the purpose of policing speech, as already seems to happen. In fact, the principal author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, explained on many occasions that the definition “was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus” and that he himself “highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.” It is clear that Williamson did not bother to consult Stern or his writings upon issuing his letter. 

Israel vs Civic-Liberal Democracies

The IHRA definition Williamson enforces provides assistance to no one when it resolves that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is a form of antisemitism. While such denial can surely assume an antisemitic form, in the majority of cases it assumes instead a straightforward democratic critique. For starters, scholars and non-scholars alike must have the democratic right to question Israel’s democratic credentials and self-defined national configuration, as well as those of any other state.

Israel rests legally upon the notion that all British Jews, for example—including those who have never set foot outside Britain—enjoy more individual and collective rights between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea than non-Jewish Palestinians who live in this territory, including those who have never set foot outside of it. That is the case not only vis-à-vis stateless Palestinians in the West Bank (annexed de facto but not de jure by Israel) but also with regards to Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise 21% of its population. Demands to correct this state of Israeli legal-political affairs are calls to democratize Israel; they are by no means a form of antisemitism.

Another problem with the IHRA’s uncritical adoption of Israel’s self-indulged “democratic nation” credentials can be illustrated by the fact that both Israeli Jews and non-Jews enjoy equal legal recourse to migrate to Britain and the US and acquire their citizenship. Yet the same democratic feature is nowhere to be found reciprocally in the case of Israel.

An Israeli Jew who marries a non-Israeli Jew from, say, Alaska, enjoys automatically a legal right to naturalize their spouse in Israel; conversely, a non-Jewish citizen of Israel who marries a non-Jew from Ramallah (or Alaska) does not enjoy the same equal right to bring their spouse and naturalize her or him. That also means that British or American non-Jews—including Palestinian American Christians, Muslims, seculars, and others—have no viable legal pathway to emigrate to Israel, nor to reunite with their indigenous families there, nor to become citizens in Israel. Yet British or American Jews automatically have this right whether they like it or not.

Israel is thus neither a democracy in the ways that Britain or other liberal democracies are, nor does it embody a national configuration that can, or should, remain above interrogation. Non-Jews in general, and Palestinians in particular, who seek to have rights in Israel equal to those bestowed upon Jews would first need to undergo a successful religious conversion to Judaism.

As is the case in other democracies, British immigration laws do not restrict apriori possible migration to Britain on the basis of religious affiliation alone. It is not too hard to imagine what the response of British democrats (Jews among them) would be if the right to migrate to Britain was reserved to non-Jews alone. Another example is that the combined state of legal, national, and political affairs in Israel easily enables non-Israeli Jews to purchase land in Israel even if they are not citizens. For Israeli citizens who are not Jewish this is effectively impossible to do. The Israeli notion of ascribing different rights to different religious groups—of both nationals and non-nationals—is absent in liberal democracies because it fatally corrodes the defining notions of civic democracy.

It therefore should come as no surprise that for its non-Jewish citizens, Israel is experienced as a Jewish and undemocratic state. Many Jews with democratic convictions subscribe to this view with ease. The attempt by many—chief among them Israeli Jewish and non-Jewish citizens for whom democracy is sacrosanct—to remove such discriminatory and unequal conditions and legislation, and, in doing so, to democratize Israel by bringing it nearer the model of a state that is for all its citizens (as Britain and the US are for example) does not constitute antisemitism.

The IHRA’s stipulation that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is a form of antisemitism is thus deceptive. It is on standard democratic grounds—not on antisemitic grounds—that many oppose the sweeping extra-territorial privilege of non-Israeli Jews to exercise a “national right to self-determination” inside Israel/Palestine that is bestowed upon them at the direct and inevitable expense of the individual and collective rights of non-Jews living in Israel/Palestine.

Let us lastly think of a European or non-European individual who denies “the right to self-determination” to the people of Catalonia, the Basque country, Scotland, Québec, Corsica (or others worldwide). Does this make them by definition racists vis-à-vis the Scots, Catalans, Québécois?

1 Comment on The IHRA’s Careless Conflations on Antisemitism (and A Few Alternatives) Array
Moshe Behar
Moshe Behar holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from Columbia University and is Associate Professor and Programme Director, Arabic & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Manchester, UK. His work includes the anthology Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics and Culture, 1893-1958 (Brandeis University Press) and can be further explored here. 
Global Currents article

Buddhist Studies Has a Whiteness Problem


Woodblocks used for printing scriptures. Sera monastery, Tibet. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Decolonizing Buddhist Studies

Religious studies is finally beginning to come to terms with its colonialist past. Discussions related to decolonizing religious studies are becoming increasingly prominent, not only in forums like this blog, but also in places like the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the main academic gathering for scholars of religion in the US. We still have a long way to go, but the fact that these conversations are even happening is promising.

Within religious studies, however, scholars of Buddhism have remained largely absent from these discussions. Buddhist studies, on the whole, has not acknowledged, let alone addressed, issues of colonization, white supremacy, and the erasure of Asian people and cultures within the field. And with the news of a white man murdering Asian women on March 16, 2021, an attack that followed in the wake of increased anti-Asian violence related to misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, scholars of Buddhist studies need to acknowledge where we stand in all of this, beyond simply expressing our outrage at specific incidents of explicit hate.

Buddhist studies, on the whole, has not acknowledged, let alone addressed, issues of colonization, white supremacy, and the erasure of Asian people and cultures within the field.

Buddhist studies needs to confront the fact that our discipline, as it currently exists within the US academy, is overwhelmingly white and has benefitted from colonialist assumptions since its inception, yet it is built on the backs of Asian Buddhist communities. We have not yet, as a discipline, collectively and seriously considered the ways that we are complicit in this. To omit such a reckoning is to perpetuate its own kind of racial injustice.

Learning from Buddhist Practice Communities

In the practice of Buddhism in the US, there is a long history of white communities of convert Buddhists appropriating Buddhism by excluding Asians and ignoring the cultural aspects of Asian Buddhist traditions. Buddhist convert communities are beginning to wrestle with this history within their own sanghas by developing programs for BIPOC practitioners, as well as programs for white allies to confront systemic racism.

The presence of such efforts in Buddhist practice communities stands in stark contrast to the absence of that kind of work in the academic study of Buddhism. While Buddhist studies is not the same as Buddhist practice, these two enterprises are not wholly separate, either. There is considerable overlap between academic scholars and practitioners of Buddhism in the US, particularly in the sense that both communities have directly benefitted from the work of Asian Buddhist teachers and communities, often without acknowledging their contributions. With this in mind, it is especially troubling that Buddhist studies has been so slow to confront a history built on extractive methods and Orientalist assumptions.

These Issues Are Systemic

To be clear: I am not suggesting that individual scholars of Buddhism are actively engaging in erasing Asian people’s cultures. The vast majority of scholars of Buddhism in the US have a deep respect for the traditions and cultures that they study. The point, rather, is that Buddhist studies as a whole has failed to acknowledge systemic issues that need to be laid bare. Buddhist studies in the US is overwhelmingly white (and overwhelmingly male, although this is slowly changing), and has a certain level of privilege within the academy. This privilege is grounded in the whitewashing of scholarship related to Buddhism and the systemic erasure of Asian Buddhists within convert Buddhist communities. Historically, non-Asian academics who studied Buddhism relied on Asian Buddhist informants and translators to carry out their research, and these contributions have gone largely unacknowledged and uncredited. As a result, in the US, scholars with academic degrees are presumed to have a more authoritative understanding of Buddhist traditions than the Asian people and communities who have performed the “physical, emotional, and spiritual labor” of maintaining these traditions for the last 2500 years.

The point, rather, is that Buddhist studies as a whole has failed to acknowledge systemic issues that need to be laid bare. Buddhist studies in the US is overwhelmingly white (and overwhelmingly male, although this is slowly changing), and has a certain level of privilege within the academy.

These issues within Buddhist studies are also linked to popular conceptions of Asian religious traditions more broadly, which are similarly informed by a colonialist past. Buddhism found its way to the so-called “west” by way of colonization, which has resulted in assumptions that Buddhism is universally applicable and transportable, and can be stripped from its “cultural” or “folk” aspects. This is often demonstrated by the comments I hear from seatmates on planes who, when I tell them what I do for a living, inform me that Buddhism is “more a way of life than a religion.” This kind of assumption that Buddhism is a universal wisdom tradition ignores its cultural history, and is yet another instance of Asian erasure.

Next Steps

Where do we go from here? Honestly, I don’t know. As a white person with a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies, this is a difficult issue to acknowledge, and I’m genuinely uncomfortable writing about this. My entire career is a direct result of the Orientalist assumptions and colonialist attitudes that I mention here, and acknowledging these issues calls my own status and privilege into question.

What I do know is this: we cannot proceed without a frank conversation about the privileges and problems of whiteness within Buddhist studies. This is not an issue with easy answers, and it is not a problem that can simply be solved by including more diverse scholars on our AAR panels. (Although that is something that we should be doing, as well!) As Mallory Nye puts it: “Decolonization is not about ‘finding space’ at the table: it is about changing the room.” It is long past time for Buddhist studies to begin rearranging our own furniture. It is only through acknowledging and confronting the colonialist history of our field that we can begin to change it. We must recognize the impact that our actions and attitudes as scholars have on the communities that we choose to study.

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Constance Kassor
Dr. Constance Kassor is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, where she teaches courses on Buddhist thought and Asian religious traditions. Her research primarily focuses on Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, and she is currently completing a book manuscript on the philosophy of the 15th-century Tibetan scholar Gorampa Sonam Senge. In addition to her academic work, she has written for Lion’s Roar and Tricycle, and has recently published Religious Lessons from Asia to the World, an audio course for The Great Courses and Audible.
Global Currents article

The Peace Dimensions of Fratelli Tutti: A Muslim Perspective


Pope Francis shakes hands with Ahmad al-Tayyeb following their signing the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together. Used with permission. Photo ©Vatican Media.

It is my considered view that Pope Francis’s third encyclical letter, Fratelli Tutti (which means we are all brothers), undoubtedly marks a big step forward in promoting interreligious dialogue and peacebuilding, especially between Catholics and Muslims. Moreover, Fratelli Tutti resonates well with the teachings of Islam.

In this regard, it is instructive to note that Pope Francis acknowledges that the subtitle of Fratelli Tutti, “on fraternity and social friendship,” was inspired in part by his February 4, 2019 meeting in Abu Dhabi with Shaykh Dr. Ahmad al-Tayyeb, Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Islamic University. At this interfaith meeting in 2019, the two renowned religious leaders co-signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together. Furthermore, Pope Francis chose a Muslim, Judge Mohamed Mahmoud Abdel Salam, the secretary-general of “The Higher Committee on Human Fraternity,” as one of the speakers to formally launch Fratelli Tutti at the Vatican on October 4, 2020. This gesture was unprecedented and was a clear indication of Pope Francis’s intent in the encyclical of pursuing interfaith peacebuilding. In his remarks at the unveiling ceremony, Judge Abdel Salam welcomed Fratelli Tutti as an extension of the Document on Human Fraternity and said the following:

As a young Muslim scholar of Shari’a, Islam and its sciences, I find myself—with much love and enthusiasm—in agreement with the pope, and I share every word he has written in the encyclical.

Judge Abdel Salam’s comments were generous and reflective of the deep resonances of the substance and spirit of Fratelli Tutti with the broader teachings of Islam. In particular, Pope Francis provides us with profound definitions of peace and charity that resonate with Islam. For example, he offers the following broader and comprehensive interpretation of the meaning of charity which echoes fully with the purpose of Zakah, the third pillar of Islam:

It is an act of charity to assist someone suffering, but it is also an act of charity even if we do not know that person to work to transform and change the social situation that caused the suffering in the first place. (para. 186)

Furthermore, the egalitarian spirit of Fratelli Tutti is usefully encapsulated in a paradigmatic verse from the most primary source of Islamic guidance. The Qur’an proclaims the following:

O Humankind! We have created you of a male and a female, and fashioned you into nations and tribes, so that you may know each other (recognize each other); surely, the most honorable of you with God is the best in conduct. Lo! God is the All-Knower, Aware of all things. (Q. 49:13) 

The above Qur’anic verse is emblematic of the Islamic tradition’s celebration of human diversity, its embrace of plurality, and its call to get to know each other through intimate knowledge and fraternal relations. One might consider it, as one commentator has suggested, as a Fratelli Tutti Qur’anic verse.

While there is much in Fratelli Tutti which resonates with the traditional teachings of Islam, there are also some aspects of the encyclical which challenge mainstream and dominant understandings of Islam. Here I would like to identify only two such dissonances which may make for useful subjects of dialogical engagement between Catholics and Muslims in the future.

The first contestation is that Fratelli Tutti comes close to rejecting the traditional parameters of “Just War Theory” as morally indefensible given the destructive and indiscriminate nature of modern day weapons of mass destruction. Pope Francis proclaims that:

We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’ Never again war! (para. 258) 

Fratelli Tutti’s skeptical stance on contemporary war ethics is already creating a renewed debate among just war theorists within the Catholic Church. Within Muslim circles, Fratelli Tutti’s challenge to craft a new fiqh al-jihad that takes into account the destructive and indiscriminate nature of contemporary weapons of warfare is even more controversial. There are only a handful of Muslim scholars who have proposed an Islamic theology of nonviolence, such as Maulana Wahiduddin Khan of India, Shaykh Jawdat Sa`id of Syria, and Chaiwat Satha-Anand from Thailand. [1]

Not surprisingly, the innovative viewpoints of these Muslim peace scholars have not been engaged with seriously by mainstream Islamic scholars. This is because of the hegemony of the classical Muslim jurisprudence of jihad which was forged by the early Muslim jurists in response to the imperial politics of the Abbasid caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. This led Professor Sohail H. Hashmi, a leading Muslim ethicist on Islamic war and peace, for example, to assert that an Islamic theology of nonviolence was an impossibility (194).

In light of Fratelli Tutti’s challenge to conventional “Just War Theory” and classical Islamic jurisprudence concerning jihad it might be useful to convene a robust and sustained interreligious dialogue on the ethics of war and peace that takes into account the effects of contemporary weapons of warfare.

A second area of contention with that of dominant interpretations of Islam is Fratelli Tutti’s invitation to religious leaders and institutions to speak truth to power. Here Pope Francis asserts,

Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the powerful. (para. 15)

Most commentators believe that this section of Fratelli Tutti refers to right-wing populist regimes. It is palpable, however, that the reference is much broader and includes all nation states. This is evident when Pope Francis rhetorically asks,

Nowadays, what do certain words like democracy, freedom, justice or unity really mean? They have been bent and shaped to serve as tools for domination, as meaningless tags that can be used to justify any action. (para. 14)

In many countries across the world the idea of religious leaders and institutions challenging the excesses of state power is anathema and frowned upon. This is the case in Western democracies such as France and the United States of America. In the Middle East, this is an even bigger problem. Here religious leaders and institutions have been rendered state apparatchiks whose primary role is to buttress and provide religious legitimacy to state power. In almost all Middle East countries the highest Islamic religious authorities are state appointed, including the Grand Shaykh of Al-Azhar Islamic University, and most Friday mosque sermons are state sanctioned. Moreover, religious leaders who criticize state policies are routinely incarcerated.

There is wide scale agreement among scholars and policy experts that one of the major factors impeding sustainable peace in the Middle East is the despotic and autocratic system of government with which most countries in the region are burdened. It is not difficult to imagine how Pope Francis’s Muslim interlocutors, like Shaykh Ahmad al-Tayyeb, and state-sponsored interreligious bodies, such as “The Higher Committee of Human Fraternity,” will respond to interreligious solidarity action campaigns against human rights violations by Middle East governments. (In 2019 shortly before his visit to the UAE, Human Rights Watch wrote a personal letter to Pope Francis outlining human rights abuses committed by the UAE and requested him to raise the issue during his papal visit.)

It is my considered view that the best strategy religious peacebuilders can adopt in advancing sustainable peace in the Middle East is to render their struggles for religious freedom and tolerance as an intersectional struggle for social justice that links religious freedom to the quest for comprehensive human rights and dignity for all. However, in order to ensure that such an intersectional social justice and interreligious peacebuilding program of action procures positive and sustainable peace in the Middle East, it is critical that it should be initiated, sponsored, and led by local actors and institutions.

Saint Francis with Sultan al-Kamil. 15th century. By Benozzo Gozzoli. Via Wikimedia Commons.

It is clear that state-sponsored interreligious dialogue programs will not advance a justpeace for the Middle East. Moreover, such top down escapades invariably involve established and high-profile religious leaders and institutions whose agendas of legitimating status quo power hegemonies often dovetail conveniently with that of state actors. Genuine interreligious peacebuilding programs demand independent religious leaders and institutions who truthfully represent the agony and suffering of their congregations and communities and courageously speak truth to power. Moreover, the agenda for such interreligious dialogue forums should not be restricted to the lack of religious freedom and full citizenship for Christian minorities in the Middle East. While this is an important and essential part of the struggle for peace in the Middle East, the struggle for a justpeace must also address other contentious social justice issues, especially that of the tyranny of despotic and monarchical oppressive systems of government, and the complicity of United States of America in providing uncritical support to these regimes and the unjust apartheid policies of the State of Israel.

Notwithstanding the two issues of contention I have raised above and other differences between Fratelli Tutti and traditional Muslim ethics of war, peace, and governance, the encyclical resonates deeply with the broader teachings of Islam. This includes the deeper meanings of charity, compassion, care for the environment, and of peace and fraternity amongst people of all faiths.

In conclusion, it is my view that through Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis has inaugurated a constructive platform for credible Muslim leaders to enter into a renewed dialogue with Catholics on the critical question of the roots of violence and the building of a justpeace in our contemporary world. Moreover, by locating such a conversation within the broader framework of Pope Francis’s theology of compassion for the poor—which offers a powerful social critique of our global culture of consumerism, covetousness, and opulence—interreligious dialogue will find even greater resonance among Muslims. It is my sincere hope that more Muslim scholars will take up the dialogical challenge presented in Fratelli Tutti in a comparable spirit of reverence and hospitality with which the twelfth century Muslim leader, Sultan al-Kamil, welcomed Saint Francis, from whom the current pope takes his name.

[1] For further reading on Islam and Nonviolence, see Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam: Theory and Practice.

3 Comments on The Peace Dimensions of Fratelli Tutti: A Muslim Perspective Array
A. Rashied Omar
A. Rashied Omar earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an M.A. in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he is now a core faculty member. Omar’s research and teaching focus on the roots of religious violence and the potential of religion for constructive social engagement and interreligious peacebuilding. He is co-author with David Chidester et al. of Religion in Public Education: Options for a New South Africa (UCT Press, 1994), a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015), and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (Macmillan Reference USA, 2016). In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as Imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and an advisory board member for Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa.
Global Currents article

Fraternity is More Durable than Fratricide : Pope Francis Visits Iraq

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Pope Francis delivering remarks during his visit to Mosul, Iraq on March 7, 2021. Photo Courtesy of Omar Mohammed, Mosul Eye.

“Fraternity is more durable than fratricide,” the pope remarked in his address to a group of Mosulis of different faiths in his recent visit to Iraq. The pope, who experienced conflict and violence in Argentina earlier in his life, can easily understand to where political and religious violence leads. Yet, the Archbishop of Mosul, Najeeb M. Michael, who was standing next to him during the visit to Mosul on March 7, 2021, relayed that “[Pope Francis] shed tears, while taking moments of silence.”

The Christian population of Iraq, as well as Iraq’s other ethnic and religious minorities, have been dreaming of these words being uttered by the pope on Iraqi soil since the fall of Mosul in June 2014. In honoring his promise to visit Iraq at the earliest opportunity despite the pandemic, Pope Francis has sought not only to respond to the calls for help from Iraqi minorities, including those that have suffered from genocide, but also to emphasize the importance of interfaith dialogue and to show that actions mean more than empty words, political promises, and shallow human rights invocations. In June 2014, the pope’s presence in Iraq would have been beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Despite the “never again” mantra that has circulated since the Holocaust, other genocides continue to further frustrate anyone’s faith in humanity, from Rwanda to Myanmar, and to the rule of the Islamic State on Iraqi soil in 2014, one of the disasters-that-were-waiting-to-happen following the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Pope Francis made the “never again” mantra concrete through his actions when he visited Iraq. In carefully unmasking, in all his activities, the very root of the destruction of the Iraqi social fabric that led to the destruction of Mosul, he aimed to provide not only hope to Iraqi civilian worshippers, but most importantly to minorities across the world.

In the series of meetings and gatherings, and in the symbolism of the places that he chose to call upon during his short three-day visit, Pope Francis laid out a diplomatic message that could become the most significant Holy See policy since Vatican II, a message of the concrete connection of the Catholic Church to other faiths at a time of religious divisions worldwide, a message emphasizing the importance of interfaith dialogue for achieving peace nationally and regionally.

In his meeting in Najaf with Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one simple picture of both religious leaders seated side-by-side provided visual counterevidence to not only the idea that the politicization of religion is inevitable, but also to the intransigency of the politicization of the ethnic and social divisions that have plagued Iraq since 2003. These divisions contributed to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq during the rule of Obama administration-backed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in the early 2010s. Under Al-Maliki’s rule, Sunnis were pitted against Shi’ites in a perceived government-sponsored brutality that echoed to many that of former President Saddam Hussein.

Iraqis in Mosul celebrating the visit of Pope Francis on March 7, 2021. Photo Courtesy of Omar Mohammed, Mosul Eye.

The Bush administration’s original sin of dividing Iraq along de facto religious lines through its infamous de-Baathification process led to civil war and the subsequent fall of Mosul in 2014. Years after this divisive colonial policy, the pope’s visit gestures to pathways to recover from this legacy. During the Najaf portion of his visit, the pope sought to place fraternity back into the limelight, and to encourage a move away from political Islam. In this groundbreaking meeting with Ayatollah al-Sistani, who is the second highest Shi’ite authority after Iranian leader Ali Khameini, and the most high profile advocate for the separation of religion from government, Iranian-style, Pope Francis might have performed a diplomatic miracle: that of beginning to help bridge the religious fault lines in Iraq by encouraging, for the first time, Ayatollah al-Sistani to appear in public, alongside the pope, in a show of support for interfaith dialogue and fraternity.

In the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Erbil, Pope Francis also met at length with Abdullah Kurdi, the father of the little Aylan, whose lifeless body was pictured on a Turkish beach in September 2015. Through this meeting, Pope Francis widened the scope of his diplomatic message to the rest of the world. His action subtly connected the dots between the invasion of a country, the division of its population, and the enduring alterations in the genetics of its social fabric, the result of which has often been more destruction.

In the same manner that depleted uranium weapons, Western-made and sold, durably altered the genetic fabric of civilian life, the partial annihilation of the second largest city in Iraq, Mosul, is a physical symbol of a far-reaching human tragedy. In Erbil, Pope Francis placed the onus of responsibility for the dreadful consequences of Western realpolitik on the shoulders of the many governments that sponsor international arms trade, only to close their borders to the collateral victims of conflict. He exposed the price that civilian populations pay for political decisions made elsewhere. Although seeking only to flee from economic hardships caused by war and destruction, many of these civilians have been condemned to suffer the dreadful fate of becoming “migrants,” the euphemistic term used to deny the collective responsibility of European nations for creating the very conditions that drive populations like those in Iraq out of their cherished homes.

His action subtly connected the dots between the invasion of a country, the division of its population, and the enduring alterations in the genetics of its social fabric, the result of which has often been more destruction.

The visit is not just a wake-up call to Iraq and the rest of the world, it is a demonstration of the faith, courage, and integrity of two religious leaders, and many more in their wake, whose coming together will restore not just our faith in humanity, but also our collective and individual responsibility to call on our leaders to start practicing another form of international relations, one more systemic, more humane, and more compassionate. Actions speak louder than words. Not all tears are crocodile tears. Never again is only possible if we all mean it.

Pope Francis included in his speeches in Mosul, Ur, Baghdad, and Erbil, many messages that called the government of Iraq to account. But on his way back to Rome he asked a question that the Iraqi government should take seriously: “Who sold the weapons to the destroyers and who is still selling them”? Answering this question requires a full review of the political and social structure of Iraq and its government’s position up until the post-ISIS period. Such a question is indeed one that should have been asked for a decade. Can anyone answer the pope?

1 Comment on Fraternity is More Durable than Fratricide : Pope Francis Visits Iraq Array
Omar Mohammed
Omar Mohammed is a native Mosuli historian and the founder of Mosul Eye. He is currently teaching Middle East History at Sciences Po University. 
Victoria Fontan
Victoria Fontan is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Vice President of Academic affairs at the American University of Afghanistan. She is the author of Voices from Post-Saddam Iraq (Praeger) and Decolonizing Peace (Dignity Press).
Theorizing Modernities article

Sovereignty and its Afterlives in Muslim South Asia: A Response


SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (2020)

I want to begin by profusely thanking Josh Lupo and his team at the Contending Modernities program for their time and efforts in organizing this forum, Ebrahim Moosa for penning an incredibly thoughtful and productive introduction, and all discussants—Jonathan Brown, Faisal Devji, Zunaira Komal, Waris Mazhari, Ammar Nasir, and Sohaira Siddiqui—for their extensive intellectual generosity in engaging my book with such depth, brilliance, and insight. Their commentaries are not only a great gift and source of honor; they have also helped me think anew about the book in generative ways. Among the central aspirations of Defending Muḥammad in Modernity is to forge conversations between scholars in Islamic studies, South Asian history, religious studies, and anthropology in addition to generating interest (including critical and normative evaluations) among Muslim traditionalist scholars or the ‘ulamā’, especially in South Asia. Therefore, it is particularly heartening to see that collectively, contributors to this forum encompass all these intellectual profiles. Before I address the excellent points and critiques raised by the contributors, let me very briefly situate and contextualize the book in Western academic studies on Islam and South Asia, and add a word on how that context connects with its main argument. The beginnings of this project lie in my years as a graduate student at Duke University from 2005 to 2012. I entered graduate school during a moment when the field of religious studies was feverishly grappling with the recently published and hugely influential critiques and genealogies of secular power offered by Talal Asad and his students and interlocutors (it still is though perhaps with a more settled view of competing takes and readings). In addition, Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s pioneering work on Deoband, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change, that for the first time brought into view South Asian ‘ulamā’ discourses and debates from a perspective that combined intellectual history and religious studies, had also recently emerged. Fifteen years later, in Defending Muḥammad in Modernity I have sought to further and bring into more deliberate dialogue these two streams of scholarship in a manner that might disrupt secular claims about religious traditions. I do this through close readings of a particular tradition of intra-Muslim contest that highlight alternate logics of life unavailable for secular moderation and disciplinary canonization. More specifically, through a close reading of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic, most often approached with a lens saturated with liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, inclusive/exclusive, reformist/non-reformist etc., I try to present an alternate conceptual framing that instead sees this polemic as a reflection of what I call “competing political theologies.” With the loss of Muslim political sovereignty in nineteenth-century South Asia, the pioneers of the Barelvī and Deobandī orientations and their predecessors articulated and avidly fought for two rival visions of the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the practice of everyday life. This in a nutshell is the argument of the book.

Logics of Sovereignty

The contributors to this forum have engaged varied aspects of this argument, while extending its scope and application in variously dazzling ways. Paucity of allotted space will not allow me to address all the points raised by each commentator; I will choose one or two from each and try clubbing them together when appropriate. In her theoretically electric reading of the book, Zunaira Komal asks the difficult question of how the notion of divine sovereignty in modern Muslim reformist discourses might “be understood alongside the sovereignty of the colonial state as well as the declining sovereignty of nineteenth-century Muslims in the subcontinent? Is the understanding of power within Islam similar or different than what the colonial encounter brought?” During the course of researching and writing this book, I wrestled with this question rather avidly. I cannot propose a resolution to this problem except to point out that traditionalist Muslim conceptions of divine sovereignty, its encounter with prophetic authority, and the implications of that encounter for the practice of everyday life cannot be collapsed or reduced to colonial power and conditions. This, of course, is not a gesture, as I stress repeatedly in the book, to retrieve “native agency” from the rubbles of colonial power. And yet, the competing logics of moral argument—centered on the status of divine sovereignty in a world enveloped by the crisis of political sovereignty—that animated the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic entailed a vision of the political that exceeded and provincialized the modern colonial and postcolonial privileging of the state as the centerpiece of politics. In this regard, I appreciate as well as concur with Komal’s astute suggestion that intra-‘ulamā’ debates on matters like the Prophet’s knowledge of the unknown (‘ilm al-ghayb) showcase a vision of the political that while contending with “the temporality of the world” remain “aspirationally open to the temporality of the Elsewhere.” Thus, though indebted to the technological and institutional conditions of colonial power, modern ‘ulamā’ discourses and debates on divine sovereignty point to horizons of politics that also disrupt the alleged universality of that power. This in turn marks their decolonial potential, as Sohaira Siddiqui has wonderfully elaborated in her remarks on this forum.

Paradoxes of Sovereignty

But as much as I am invested in detailing the distinctive logics of sovereignty at work in ‘ulamā’ discourses, capturing the vexing tensions and paradoxes of sovereignty haunting their discursive programs is also central to my concerns, as Faisal Devji has probingly observed in his signature quizzical style. He has also summed up the central paradox of sovereignty, as reflected in competing modern Muslim reformist discourses, rather pointedly: “On the one hand, a sovereignty unavailable to colonized peoples might have been displaced onto God as a kind of compensation. On the other hand, its expulsion from the world of mortals may indicate a deep suspicion of sovereignty and the modern state it represents. Having been stripped of its own political tradition, in other words, new forms of Islamic thought were magnetized by the idea of sovereignty in a way not so very different from anti-colonial nationalism.” Yes, indeed! Extending Devji’s helpful extension and elaboration of my argument here, I should add that it is precisely this tense interplay between the urgency to retrieve divine sovereignty in a world beset by moral corruption and to deny mortal humans responsible for that corruption any hint of popular sovereignty that renders ‘ulamā’ actors discussed in my book at once thoroughly modern and yet defiantly anti-modernist. In other words, even when critiquing spiritual hierarchies (such as in the Prophet’s capacity for intercession or access to knowledge of the unknown), their worldview remains wedded to a strictly hierarchical spiritual economy whereby the ability of the masses to access the vatic capital of God’s sovereign power and the Prophet’s normative guidance hinges on the mediating authority of the ‘ulamā’. At stake in defending Muḥammad in modernity—whether as an exceptional beloved of God endowed with extraordinary powers (the Barelvī view) or as an agent whose perfection depended on the perfection of his humanity (the Deobandī position)—is precisely the regulation of the encounter between divine sovereignty and prophetic charisma in a manner that ultimately amplifies the sovereign authority of the scholarly class. Devji’s intriguing suggestion that “controversies about the Prophet’s status rehearse a political as much as theological paradox, since the very effort to expel sovereignty from human society while preserving it elsewhere sets the stage for its spectacular return” provides a helpful frame with which one might begin to address a question that both Sohaira Siddiqui and Ammar Nasir raise in different ways: What is one to make of the postcolonial afterlives of these intra-Muslim polemics over prophetic memory and honor that trace their beginnings to the colonial moment? As Siddiqui asks: “[H]ow has the conceptual-ideological problem-space of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic changed [in more recent times]?” Nasir asks a similar question while also advancing the suggestion that perhaps the stability and order provided by the juggernaut of the nineteenth-century colonial state is precisely the reason that many such intra-Muslim and inter-sectarian polemics did not descend to the sort of rabid violence that has often accompanied them in postcolonial contexts like Pakistan.

Postcolonial Ruptures

Let me offer three brief propositions addressing this line of inquiry: (1) The metastasis of violence associated with intra-Muslim doctrinal contestations in settings like Pakistan has perhaps less to do with the weakness of the state (as compared to say the colonial state) than the further intensification of the crisis of sovereignty in popular consciousness and everyday life. The instability of sovereign agency over the contingencies of life is increasingly compensated by the fantastical figure of a Prophet at once incorruptible and yet always vulnerable to injury. The pathological patrolling of prophetic love not only borrows liberally (pun intended) from a distinctly Christian political theology of blasphemy, as Devji in his comments points out; it also signals a rather fascinating interplay of masculine certainty and endemic fragility mapped onto the body of the Prophet. (2) While it is easy to get caught up in the proliferation of intra-Muslim divisions in the postcolonial context, we have also seen the emergence of some curious alliances between otherwise arch rivals. So, for instance, the recent movement and protests over blasphemy in Pakistan have often brought together Barelvī, Deobandī, and Ahl-i Ḥadīth actors in a common program of defying the state and non-state modernist elite. The lines of activity between ‘ulamā’ and more popular preachers and activists have also been often blurred, as seen most dramatically in the rise of the popular outfit Tehrik-i Labayk Ya Rasul Allah (TLYR) that has frequently sucked in ‘ulamā’ actors in their drive to protect prophetic honor even as it cuts into the latter’s’ religious authority in the marketplace of moral persuasion. (3) The space for intra-Muslim disagreement on sensitive theological questions has certainly shrunk; a century and couple decades later, it is almost unthinkable that questions like, “Can God produce another Muhammad?” or “What’s the difference between Muhammad’s and Satan’s knowledge?,” could be discussed and debated as transparently and with the sort of intellectual depth and nuance as they were by nineteenth-century Barelvī and Deobandī pioneers and their predecessors. Indeed, as I elaborate in the book’s postscript, if nothing else, the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic showcases the potential for intellectual fecundity associated with a fierce yet layered and complex polemical encounter. This is not to suggest some sort of a rise and fall model of history that valorizes the ‘ulamā’ of colonial India as occupants of a “golden era” of intellectual valor and sophistication supplanted by the mediocrity of the present. What I am gesturing at rather is an observable constriction in the parameters of doctrinal debate, especially on questions concerning the Prophet.

The Middle Eastern Shadow

Jonathan Brown wonderfully highlights a theme that, while discussed at numerous points in the book, certainly merits much further inquiry and exposition: the relationship between intra- ‘ulamā’ rivalries in modern South Asia and the Muslim intellectual landscape and debates of the Ottoman Middle East. As I detail in the book, the Hanafi assault on Wahhabi thought in Arabia not only colored the polemical ink of South Asian scholars like Aḥmad Razā Khān (d. 1921). Moreover, seeking the endorsement of prominent Arab scholars was also seen as a coveted pursuit by Barelvī and Deobandī pioneers alike (see esp. chapter 9). Brown has also highlighted an instructive irony: “[Aḥmad Razā] Khān’s writings seem to have had little impact on scholarship in the Arab world, certainly not in comparison to Deobandīs like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī [d.1933]. Ironically, if asked about the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen or the mawlid, scholars like [Zāhid] al-Kawtharī [d.1952] and [‘Abdallāh] al-Ghumārī [d.1993] would no doubt take the Barelvī side. But they could read and appreciate the books of Deobandī scholars in blissful removal from the controversies in South Asia.” This observation is pertinent not only to the interaction of Arab and South Asian traditionalism, but in a sense also to the popular reception of these rival groups within South Asia as well. On the one hand, the dominant mode of everyday ritual practice among South Asian Muslims most certainly aligns much greater with the Barelvī worldview. For instance, the Prophet’s birthday celebration today is not only deeply entrenched in the ritual life of the community; establishing it as a heretical innovation seems a task much more socially and doctrinally daunting than it was a century ago. However, despite the ritual entrenchment of the Barelvī orientation, the Deoband school continues to dominate the intellectual and popular terrain of religious knowledge in terms of institutional structures and depth, publishing capacity and output, and outreach to global scholarly audiences, as Brown’s analysis also confirms.

The Work Continues

Brown’s point also connects nicely with a useful and valid critique raised by Waris Mazhari that for all my claims to complicate Deobandī thought, I at times perhaps generalize its intellectual project without having considered prominent Deobandī ‘ulamā’ voices that run contrary to those generalizations. More specifically, Mazhari astutely argues that while I present the early nineteenth-century reformer Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831) and the Deoband school as part of a common reformist program and genealogy, Deobandī heavyweights like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī were in fact deeply critical of what they saw as Ismāʿīl’s acerbic discursive style. Mazhari’s critique not only provides me the opportunity to offer the clarification that my juxtaposition of Ismāʿīl and some of the Deoband pioneers was specific to some among the latter—most notably Rashīd Aḥmad Gangohī (d. 1906), Ashraf ‘Alī Thānvī (d. 1943), and Khalīl Aḥmad Sāharanpūrī (d. 1927)—and to specific theological and normative problems. More importantly, it also serves as a useful reminder of the dizzying variety and the unpredictable scholarly trajectories that populate Deobandī and indeed Barelvī discursive universes. On that note, I hope Defending Muḥammad in Modernity and other kindred works that have appeared in the last couple years will inspire and attract more than a few graduate students to dive into the often-perplexing yet hugely rewarding waters of South Asian ‘ulamā’ traditions of knowledge and debate. Our work, indeed, has just begun.

 

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SherAli Tareen
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, and author of Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) that was awarded the 2020 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize. His work centers on Muslim intellectual thought in modern South Asia with a focus on intra-Muslim debates and polemics on crucial questions of law, ethics, and theology. Tareen is also interested in the intersection of secularism and Muslim intellectual thought, Muslim political thought, and Muslim revolutionary politics in the inter-war period. His various articles have appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion, Muslim World, Political Theology, Islamic Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ReOrient, among many others.
Global Currents article

Uyghur Oppression from a Decolonial Perspective


Demonstration in support of human rights for Uyghurs in front of White House, September 25, 2015. Photo Credit: Elvert Barnes. Via Wikimedia Commons.

For Uyghur people to thrive, the principles of pluralism and human dignity need to be promoted in China. This requires that Uyghurs be made visible and allowed to speak in their own voice. It is necessary, therefore, to create a transformative imaginary that promotes dialogical and dialectical processes of real social transformation. Such an imaginary would involve supporting Uyghur subjects in their struggle against forced assimilation and retrieving them from a subordinate position to those in power. In support of this imaginary, academic and intellectual spaces that confront the Uyghur issue need to be created. This requires creating new forms of social understanding from non-Eurocentric perspectives as well as new strategies for creating knowledge that go beyond the colonial and North-centric legacies of the current social sciences. It also requires delving into pluralistic forms of constructive social thinking that are emergent in different places in the “South,” including the Uyghur region. To inhabit the South is not to merely side with those coming from a particular geographical region. It is to metaphorically place oneself on the side of those who suffer from the harms caused by nation- and global-scaled capitalism and colonialism, and against those who would minimize the claims or lives of those who suffer and/or suggest they “get over” it.

Since post-colonial times have not (yet) come for the Uyghurs, a decolonial approach to the Uyghur issue must start by assuming the colonial nature of the relations between the Chinese nation-state and both the Uyghurs and their homeland. This requires recognizing Chinese colonialism’s proper characteristics and avoiding the universalization of European colonialism as practiced in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as “the only possible colonialism.” The domination of the Uyghurs by the Chinese state is a form of “colonialism” if by colonialism we mean an ancient practice of conquest, usurpation, and subalternization. Such a definition requires that we don’t fall into the “salt water fallacy.” If we analyze the last two and a half centuries up until the present of what today is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, we will see that it is a colonial history. Many Uyghur scholars have pointed this out—though not openly until very recent times. A colonial—Chinese, in this case—extractive logic leads to the confiscation of the potentialities of land and bodies, and reduces the colonized to “subaltern” categories: (1) residents of extremely poor enclaves; (2) undocumented migrants / illegal exiles; (3) enslaved workers; (4) racialized populations; (5) objects of gender discrimination.

The Uyghurs’ territories and resources are appropriated by the dominant class, and impoverished by extensive farming and labor-intensive industries. The urbanization and subsequent gentrification of the Uyghur landscape, jointly with asymmetric resource management and racist segregation, turn huge percentages of Uyghurs into residents of extremely poor enclaves, and exclude them from the formal labor market. This often leads them to emigrate towards other regions/countries looking for better opportunities. However, the state restrictions on their ability to obtain passports and documents force a conspicuous number of Uyghurs to illegally abandon their region, turning them into undocumented migrants/illegal exiles. Although exile can easily be considered a condition that denies dignity and an identity to people, in this case it is practically the only form of survival for excluded people. The totalitarian nationalism of the People’s Republic of China provokes, among other consequences, their urgency to rebuild as people and individuals living in exile. It also requires them to deal with feelings of rejection and isolation once they settle in a foreign land.

The Uyghur Situation Today

Since mid-2017 the Uyghur situation has received more visibility on the international scene. This occurred when intellectuals and activists from both the Uyghur diaspora and within Chinese borders reported that the Chinese Communist Party had opened alleged vocational reeducation camps. Those correctional facilities act as sites where Uyghurs and peoples of other nationalities can be transferred to Chinese and foreign factories as enslaved workers.

The official façade that has enhanced the success of those centers is the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) embrace of the narratives and strategies of the post-9/11 Global War on Terror. It paints this effort as a struggle to contain terrorism within its territory while allegedly modernizing the region and increasing harmony among the 56 nationalities of China. In doing so, the Chinese government legitimizes its own particular state-controlled anti-Muslim forms of racialization, hiding geopolitical and economic interests behind the well-accepted banner of the Global War on Terror. This strategy targets racialized populations and establishes religious and cultural repression over them. However, survivors and their families have started to make their stories public, either openly or anonymously. Among those are the testimonies of women forced to have abortions in the camps. While the official Chinese propaganda celebrates (in a now-deleted tweet from the Chinese embassy to the US) “that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated […], making them no longer baby-making machines,” these strategies in actuality show the gender discrimination that the government promotes and its long-term strategy to commit a genocide against the Uyghur people. Also aiding in more recent international recognition was the subsequent forced disappearance of an increasing number of Uyghurs—and Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other minority nationalities.

Decolonial Studies and the Uyghurs

The suffering of the Uyghur peoples has been carried out as a colonial project—with all the epistemic, metaphysical, and cultural assumptions that such a project entails—which has real world implications such as physical violence and cultural oppression. The support of these real-world catastrophes by the ruling ideologies of colonial powers is telling. It reveals the constructed nature of the ontological—hence, not (only) geographic—South as a dominated subaltern subject. For it is seen by colonial powers—including the Chinese state in this instance—as a problematic segment that must be controlled.

Over the last several decades decolonial studies have become more ubiquitous across multiple disciplines. They have opened new perspectives and new geographies to the social sciences research landscape. Although decolonial discourse originates from dialogues between intellectuals based in Latin America and the Caribbean, it has established links with projects born in other places, for any political proposal founded on the basis of epistemological universalism, as the Chinese statist universal project remains, is an imperial/colonial global design and is to be criticized as such. In the Uyghur case, this clearly appears both in the statist appropriation of Uyghur history that hides Uyghur history within a broader national narrative, and the assimilative “bilingual education” policy that has been imposed on the region. The modular history of the Uyghurs, which is made of routes interweaving shrines and religious places with myths and national history, is dismantled under the weight of official narratives. As this case demonstrates, decolonial studies ought not to rely on one kind decolonial thinking, but rather should facilitate local- and community-based dialogues across similar and different experiences, and it should do so in geographical and/or epistemic places outside of Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, my decolonial proposal is to give voice to a series of actors/subjects that until now have been relegated to the non-scientific field of “memories/folklore.”

In recent years, most of the opposition to the Beijing regime’s oppression of the Uyghurs has come from within the US, both from governmental offices and associations of Uyghurs in the diaspora. This is due to the Chinese Communist Party’s extreme control over all Uyghur activity within the Xinjiang region. The geographic locus of opposition has caused adverse reactions from critical sectors of the global intellectual left, especially diaspora Chinese media collectives. Those criticisms, though rooted in prudent worries, frivolously and programmatically tie intellectuals and activists struggling in favor of Uyghur dignity with neoliberal ideologies hostile to the socialist bastion China represents. To overcome these adverse reactions, then, involves dissociating from this Cold War-generated dualistic and simplistic vision of neoliberalism vs. communism, the US vs. China, and Western democracy vs. Asian autocracy. Our role as intellectuals and activists is to highlight social injustices and offer viable alternatives to their perverse mechanisms.

A scene of the Chinese Campaign against Rebels in the East turkestan, 1828. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Although the Global North/West has a long history in producing and consuming Asia and China symbolically—what has been called Cold War Orientalism—dealing with an empowered and subjecting actor like today’s PRC subverts as it simultaneously recreates Cold War dichotomies and structures. However, China’s very role in the world struggle against imperialism and capitalism—enhanced since the Cold War period with the Bandung Conference—should nowadays be critically scrutinized.

As various authors already pointed out in interviews and op-eds, and as so far shown in this post, the Chinese nation-state has established subalternizing relations with the Uyghur people. I, along with others, see the identity and cultural repression and ethnic genocide as a consequence of official state violence, imposed by the powerful for clear hegemonic—and, hence, economic—reasons. The ethnic repression and genocide are caused by an expanding and evolving Chinese capitalist society. The struggles that have arisen in response to the changes within global capitalism, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and the modifications of the geopolitics of domination that have come with these changes (which have so far been controlled by the US) have led to the establishment of asymmetrical relations—and hence, violent ones. This is the direct consequence of a colonial epistemology which establishes hierarchical ontologies and attempts to invisibilize the subaltern. This creates, then, a North/South domination that reproduces a colonial pattern. This pattern repeats narratives about global “enemies” that have been employed throughout history. It labels groups of peoples as potentially dangerous for global security and welfare, and thus as worthy of being persecuted, oppressed, and made illegal. We can see this pattern in the yellow peril, passing through the kamikaze threat, the cholo gangs, and most recently the Kung-flu. These racial stereotypes have targeted the Chinese, Muslim, Latinx communities and now, the Uyghurs—that is, colonized/subaltern subjects—and legitimized violent and repressive policies against them.

To approach Uyghur studies from a “museistic” perspective—a sort of “theme park” showing purely historiographical, theological, anthropological facets—would mean, in my opinion, to perpetuate an “official,” “partial,” and hence, propagandistic, vision of Uyghur reality, as the official Chinese sources about Xinjiang’s history attempt to do. An approach that can properly address the situation that the Uyghurs face can hardly be inscribed in the sealed compartments of traditional academia. Traditional forms of academia are, after all, complicit in hegemony. In other words, the commitment to “hybrid” and “mestiza” research, which may dignify “other” forms of knowledge seems the only viable way to break with the epistemological tradition of a “North-colonial-nation-state-centric” world system. This form of research can reframe the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of the Uyghurs’ struggle for human dignity.

From a decolonial perspective, it is necessary to (1) recognize the state’s propaganda when analyzing the official history of the territory; (2) identify the socio-environmental and ecological hegemonic strategies taken towards the autochthonous populations; and (3) listen to the subaltern and dignify the “Small Voices of History.”

What has become “conventional” decolonial theory is not sufficient. The challenge I propose here, then, is to promote an Uyghur emancipatory thinking, in which different knowledges may coexist, and in which histories may be counterhegemonically reappropriated. This requires that we acknowledge our permission to narrate without taking away the voices of our subjects. By doing so, we can show how to attain the transformative imaginary mentioned at the beginning of this post: transcending this subject-object duality while traversing the route “from dualities to ecologies.” And that certainly is a difference that matters.

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Chiara Olivieri
Chiara Olivieri graduated with degrees in Sinology Studies (2014) and Islam Studies (2015) at the University of Granada (Spain). She completed a Masters degree in East Asian Studies (2015) and a Specialization Course in Epistemologies of the South (2017). She holds a PhD in Migration Studies with the University of Granada. She is now a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the Project “Islamophobia in the East of the European Union” at the University of Toronto, and Invited Professor at the University of Granada (UGR) in the MA in East Asian Studies. She is also a member of the Research Group STAND UGR-HUM952. Her current research project's aim is to investigate the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on the human appropriation of materials and energy in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang (PRC), and how Islam (which includes laws, customs, and demonstrations) is the element that the PRC instrumentally employs in legitimating its violent and restrictive policies against Uyghur people in order to maintain its power over the territory and its natural resources.
Theorizing Modernities article

Decolonial Islamic Studies and Defending Muḥammad in Modernity


British Colonial Estate in India during the Raj. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In his ground-breaking book, Defending Muḥammad in Modernity, SherAli Tareen masterfully takes the reader through one of the most complex polemics in South Asian Islam between the Deobandīs and the Barelvīs. Tareen notes that while this polemical terrain may not be overlooked within secondary scholarship, it is indeed undertheorized and underappreciated. Instead of engaging deeply with the scholarly arguments articulated by both the Deobandīs and the Barelvīs, the polemic is reduced to a competition between puritan disenchantment (Deobandīs) and mystical enchantment (Barelvīs), one which supports a series of conceptually flawed dichotomies between legal/mystical, reformist/nonreformist, and most problematically, traditional/modern. For Tareen, these flawed classifications of rich intellectual traditions are underpinned by neocolonial attempts to frame Islam in terms of good religion, which is “amenable and useful to neoliberal interests,” and bad religion, which requires “surveillance and discipline” (17). Tareen seeks to challenge these dichotomies, and the logics which undergird them, through a close textual and theological analysis of the debates that stood at the heart of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemics. His analysis reveals that the two groups present competing rationalities of tradition that have at their core opposing conceptions of the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the normative practice of the believing Muslim community. But what are the grounds from which these scholars articulated these competing rationalities of tradition and how might scholars of religion benefit from a more nuanced understanding of these debates?

Tareen notes that the British colonial intrusion ushered in a crisis of sovereignty that forced Deobandī and Barelvī scholars to articulate new political visions that responded to the realities that Muslims faced. But not only did the colonial terrain serve as the catalyst for new political visions, it also fundamentally reshaped the nature of these intellectual debates. Tareen notes that from the pre-colonial to colonial period there were four important shifts: (1) an increased focus on everyday religious practice, (2) a rise in oral and written polemics, (3) a notion of a defined public that was the focus for reform, and (4) a more aggressive reform temperament. Thus, while the majority of Tareen’s substantive chapters explore theological debates on Prophetic intercession, heretical innovation, divine sovereignty, and normative religious practice, the author recognizes that the nature of these debates are informed by a colonial context. Herein lies one of the most important methodological insights that Tareen’s work presents for scholars of religion, especially those interested in the decolonization of the study of religion.

With remarkable subtlety, Tareen impresses upon the reader the distinction between the ability of colonial modernity to affect the nature of intellectual debates and the ability of colonial modernity to affect the content of those debates. To clarify, while colonial modernity served as the catalyst for scholars to answer certain questions about everyday religious practice and political sovereignty, the mode of answering these questions, and the content of the answers were articulated from within the intellectual traditions of the religious communities and these scholars did not adopt a secular or colonial rationality. This difference is crucial to note as insights of decolonial studies are beginning to be taken seriously by scholars of religion. The most foundational insight that decolonial scholars have provided to scholars of religion is that the modern study of religion was, and continues to be, informed by the European colonial/imperial enterprise. This has meant that non-Western religious traditions have been subject to the categories and classifications of Western religious experiences. This is precisely what Tareen himself indicates when he challenges the problematic dichotomies of legal/mystical, reformist/nonreformist, and traditional/modern. A decolonial approach to religious studies, which has recently been discussed on the Contending Modernities website, seeks to: (1) reject Western conceptions of religion, (2) reveal the persistent epistemological legacies present within the study of non-Western religions, and (3) incorporate more intentionally colonial/post-colonial voices. Inspired by the work of Edward Said and Talal Asad, a decolonial approach to the study of religion seeks to simultaneously provincialize the West and carefully bring to the fore the neglected intellectual contributions of the colonized.

This decolonial turn in the study of religion, and more specifically, Islamic Studies, is a welcome one that will likely usher in new frameworks and methods that will stimulate the field for years to come. However, as previously neglected voices and frameworks are incorporated into Islamic Studies, scholars of religion will have to play close attention to the ways in which colonial modernity impacted these intellectual frameworks both in terms of their nature and in terms of their content. In the case of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic, Tareen reveals to the reader the possibility of colonial modernity fundamentally shaping the nature of debates, while the content of these debates remains squarely theological and reflective of intra-Muslim intellectual engagement. Tareen also provides scholars of religion with a blueprint on how to write works that are deeply engaged in the theology and hermeneutics of these debates without losing sight of their socio-political context. But, the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic that Tareen delves into is just one element of a complex and rich colonial intellectual environment. And as other scholars of South Asian Islam will readily note, there were intellectual frameworks articulated by Muslims living under colonial rule that were shaped both in terms of the nature of their framework, and the content of it, by colonial modernity. How do scholars of religion study the thought of these individuals without falling into another dichotomous trap between colonial collaborator versus anti-colonial resistor?

In case of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic, Tareen reveals to the reader the possibility of colonial modernity fundamentally shaping the nature of debates, while the content of these debates remains squarely theological and reflective of intra-Muslim intellectual engagement.

A question, left unresolved for the readers, is the contemporary nature and content of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic. As one of Tareen’s intellectual progenitor’s, David Scott, argues, scholarly attention in the postcolonial period should not merely focus on new answers that are articulated, but also the new questions that are being asked. What Scott aims to critique is how postcolonialism continues to “bear the distinctive traces of anticolonialism’s conceptual preoccupation” (6). He argues that different temporal periods reveal different “conceptual-ideological problem-spaces” that generate a new set of questions and demands (7). For him, the postcolonial conceptual-ideological problem-space must be different from the anticolonial one. Returning then to Tareen’s arguments, he acknowledges that colonial modernity and the crisis of sovereignty within the Muslim community contributed to the nature of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic but did not fundamentally alter its content. But the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic was not one that simply existed during colonial modernity. In the past decades, it has migrated from the colonial period, through anticolonial movements, and has settled as part of everyday religious discourse in postcolonial times. Through this migration, how has the conceptual-ideological problem space of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic changed? In what ways has its nature and content been affected by the new terrains it has been forced to inhabit? And what does this reveal about another oft-invoked dichotomy, that of rupture versus continuity?

Scholars who carefully engage with Tareen’s book will quickly realize that beyond providing accessible insight into a rich and complicated theological debate that continues to wage on, the book contributes in important methodological ways to religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian Islam, and the newly burgeoning turn to decolonialize religious studies. In the final chapter of Tareen’s book, “Listening to the Internal ‘Other,’” he ends on the biographical note that throughout the book he has attempted to “listen eagerly and sympathetically to what one might call an internal ‘other.’” He emphasizes that the process of listening attentively is not for the express purpose of agreement, but to “learn from it sympathetically and with humility” (387). It seems that the heart of a decolonial turn in Religious Studies and Islamic Studies, as Tareen poetically notes, necessitates grounding in an intellectual humility that is not simply willing to listen attentively to the “internal other” but moves a step further to listen to the historically “external other” as well.

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Sohaira Siddiqui
Sohaira Siddiqui is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. She is the author of Law and Politics Under the 'Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Locating the Shari'a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice (Brill, 2019). She has also published numerous articles in Islamic Law and Society, Journal of Islamic Studies, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Middle East Law and Governance. Her work focuses on the relationship between law, theology and political thought in classical Islam; Islamic law during British colonization; Islamic law in contemporary Muslim societies; and secularism and modernity in relation to Muslims in the West. She has held fellowships at Cambridge University, Tubingen University, and Harvard Law School.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Formation of Religious Identities in Modern Islam: Recounting a Story from Nineteenth-Century South Asia


Shrine to Salim Chisti, a Sufi Mystic. Photo Credit: Flickr User Soham Banerjee.

The Historical Context of the Debate

Intra-Muslim polemical debates have remained a persistent feature of Islamic intellectual life since the inception of Islam. In early Islam, these debates pivoted mostly around theological questions concerning the concept of God, such as the interrelation of God’s knowledge with human agency, the anthropomorphic expressions found in the Qur’an for the person of God, and the boundaries that demarcate belief from unbelief.

A significant shift took place in nineteenth-century South Asia when the person of the Prophet became the center of theological debates. A new set of contentions came to center-stage, opening up new avenues of theological wrangling. These new modalities of contestation are exemplified by questions like: Does or does not the Prophet have access to knowledge of the unknown (‘ilm al-ghayb)? Was his physical essence similar to or different from ordinary humans? Is his physical presence subject to human spatio-temporal constraints? Does he have the capacity of being simultaneously present at several places? Is he or is he not privileged with divine powers of intervention in the fate of human beings? Is it possible for God to create another being possessing the same stature as that of the Prophet? These trajectories and questions of contention in Muslim theology curiously mirror early Christian theological debates about Jesus’s divinity, with the caveat that they intensified in Islam at a much later period.

To be sure, even in the premodern period, the temptation to assign divine aura to the person of the Prophet found expressions in the extravagant imagination of the laity. However, these popular temptations rarely found their way to the scholarly theological domain explicitly; they instead had to be channeled through esoteric ontologies conceived mainly by mystic thinkers. These ontologies imagined the world as populated by a hierarchy of sub-divine entities that culminated in the person of the Prophet. These entities were believed to possess specially bestowed divine powers. This belief inspired a popular culture in which visiting the shrines of famous Sufi saints and invoking their intervention in human affairs became a common practice among the masses. But these Sufi practices did not pass unquestioned, and were subjected to a long and intense counter tradition of criticism and reform, often executed by Sufi scholars themselves. For instance, prominent Muslim reformers from the early Mughal era voiced their censure of what they considered deviations in the beliefs and practices of the common people.

From the sixteenth century onwards, these reformist tendencies received additional impetus from newly opened Indo-Hijaz scholarly connections. As Aziz Ahmad points out, these connections redirected intra-cultural intellectual affinities from Iran to Hijaz, and were facilitated by the maritime colonial presence in the Arabian ocean (which became the main route that South Asian pilgrims would use to reach Makkah). Scholars like Sheikh Abdul Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlavī (d.1642), Sheikh Aḥmad Sirhindī (d.1624) and Shāh Walīyullāh (d.1762) vehemently criticized several creeds and practices, though never severing their attachment with the dominant Sufi tradition. Shāh Walīyullāh, for example, likened those who visited the shrines and prostrated before the graves asking for the favors of the saints with the polytheists of Arabia. He even ventured to assert that if one wanted to catch a glimpse of the (polytheistic) belief system that the Qur’an had so vigorously criticized, one should look no further than popular Sufism prevalent in Muslim India in his time. So clearly, the critique of widespread Sufi practices is not an invention of the colonial period but a feature found copiously in the religious imaginary of precolonial early modern Muslim scholars, in South Asia and indeed elsewhere.

But the loss of Muslim political power at the hands of British colonialism engendered a crisis of identity and set the stage for unprecedented normative battles, in terms of content and intensity. The ensuing chaos presented a prime opportunity for British colonizers to play a decisive role in reshaping the political and cultural landscape of South Asia. This process was accompanied by an intensification of already existing tensions and fissures within South Asian Islam. By the end of the eighteenth century, the printing press had created a new public space in which religious preaching could be directed to larger numbers of common people. Intricate theological debates could now be contested in the public sphere and a fertile ground was irrigated for the formulation of new political theologies that corresponded with new normative projects and imaginaries.

In this context, what transpired in the early nineteenth century in Northwestern India was but a next stage of an ongoing reform movement. Critical shifts in the political and social order enabled an enthusiastic reformer like Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d.1831) to launch and execute a public movement that challenged the doctrinal legitimacy of long running beliefs and practices in the public sphere while also laboring to purge from South Asian Islam the stain of accrued heresies and deviations. Shāh Isma‘il’s movement was the catalyst that unleashed the struggle for defining religious identities anew in South Asian Islam. The move he made was astute and, in terms of its effects, devastating for the popular Sufi narrative. He took as his point of departure the vigorous reassertion of divine sovereignty in a way that negated the Prophetic persona and authority as held in the religious imagination of the masses. As the Prophet stood at the apogee of the hierarchical order on which the entire ontology of Islamic mysticism hinged, divesting him of a unique cosmological status in the divine providential schema would cause the entire edifice of that ontology to crumble. With this purpose in mind, Ismāʿīl consciously chose to punctuate divine sovereignty and emphasize the Prophet’s completely subordinate status in the cosmological scheme in provocative, and at times even crass idioms that were bound to invite charges of blasphemy. In fact, some controversial phrases of his well-known tract, Taqwīyat al-Īmān (Strengthening of the Faith) (analyzed by Tareen in part 1 of his book) have been acknowledged even by prominent Deobandi scholars as inappropriate and ill-suited. For example, Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933) has been quoted by Sayyid Aḥmad Raz̤ā Bijnaurī as saying:

“I am not much pleased with Taqwīyat al-Īmān. Perhaps it was written in view of the needs of a specific moment. In fact, a committee of five persons . . . were given the task of reviewing the words and phrases of Taqwīyat al-Īmān and was even authorized to make changes. The committee became divided. . . . One group held that the wording chosen was inappropriate. The other was of the opinion that it [the doctrine of tawhīd] must be stated in a very explicit and unequivocal language and that without using pungent expressions, the intended message would not be communicated clearly. . . . I am not pleased with these phrases because they have engendered a lot of controversy. . . . I have also been informed that Mawlānā Qāsim Nānautvī held the same opinion, even though he had a profound affection for Shāh Ismāʿīl.” (Aḥmad Raz̤ā Bijnaurī, Malfuzat Muhaddith Kashmiri, 177–78)

In any case, Shāh Ismāʿīl’s over-charged enthusiasm for doctrinal reform, premised on deflating any supernatural associations with the Prophet, ironically and inadvertently provided the occasion for a hitherto latent Muḥammadology to find an articulate expression in the style of an explicit creed. The ineffable notion of Haqīqat-i Muhammadiyya or Muhammadan Reality that had so far been considered to be accessible only to those possessing higher cognitive and gnostic abilities was now made to undergo a far-reaching process of profanation. A normative expectation central to the Sufi tradition, that privileged mystical knowledge is not revealed to the simple-minded common people, was thus left in tatters with the ruthless attack of Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl and his likes.

Tareen’s Intervention

It is this story of transformation that SherAli Tareen’s recent book, Defending Muhammad in Modernity recounts and explores primarily for a Western audience. His objectives in writing this book are manifold. He wants to correct the misreading of the Barelvī-Deobandī divide in terms of law versus spirituality, or the mystical versus the legal traditions. As he rightly argues, both of these groups of towering modern South Asian Muslim scholars, the Barelvīs and the Deobandīs, steadfastly adhere to the Sufi spiritual tradition and propounding Sufi modes of piety constitutes an integral part of their reform programs. Tareen also brings to light important features of the reform agenda that the Barelvī ‘ulamā’ (traditionally educated Muslim scholars) sought to introduce in the popular Sufi culture while preserving the hierarchical ontology without which institutional Sufism would have no attraction for the laity. In this, the Deobandīs took a middle ground between them and the Wahhābīs or Salafīs who rejected Sufism as totally alien to Islam.

Courtyard of Jamia Naeemia, a Barelvī madrasa in Lahore, Pakistan. Photo by Josh Lupo.

Another primary objective of Tareen’s endeavor is to expose the inadequacy of analytical categories derived from dominant secular liberal frameworks in the study of intra-Muslim debates and divisions. Because of its self-imposed blinkers, Tareen argues, liberal secular approaches to religion and Islam fail to see what lies at the heart of such intra-Muslim debates. In the present case, for example, what is often regarded as the manifestation of a perennial legal/Sufi tension in Islam is, in fact, a face-off between two opposing political theologies that adhere to, and take inspiration from, the same canonical sources and traditions of Islamic law and Sufi spirituality. Tareen’s critique of and disappointment with dominant secular liberal paradigms in the study of religion, especially Islam, is a recurrent theme throughout the book. This critique finds its sharpest expression in Tareen’s skewering of historian of South Asian Islam, Ayesha Jalal, who in her book on Jihad in South Asia Partisans of Allah conceptualized Sayyid Ahmad (d.1831) and Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s jihad against the Sikh regime in Punjab and tribal chiefs of the Muslim Northwestern Frontier Province as an instance of privileging “religion as demarcator of difference” over “religion as faith.” Jalal valorizes the latter as it belongs to what she terms the realm of private inner experience, but finds the former distasteful as in her view it is preoccupied with the external world of public ritual performance and the exercise of violence for the establishment and maintenance of political power. Tareen quarrels with this binary division between the purity of privatized spiritual religion and the impurity of publicly performed material religion stained by violence and politics as the product of what he calls a “liberal secular theology.” This is just one example of several instances throughout the book where contemporary scholars of South Asia and Islam are keenly taken to task for their explicit or implicit attachments to secular conceptual and political frameworks.

But one common secular liberal assumption that Tareen challenges in the “Postscript” that particularly caught my attention was this: that religious polemics by nature are seen as perpetually susceptible to descent into violence and thus as a perennial threat to the peace and order of society. For Tareen, the fact that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was fought out with much intensity and eagerness in the nineteenth century without turning into a physically violent conflict mitigates against this secular assumption. In this context, he finds the decision by the Government of the Punjab in Pakistan a few years ago to ban the polemicist literature comprising dozens of texts written by Deobandī, Barelvī, Shīʿa, and Salafī scholars a shallow act that represents the modern state’s propensity to control and manage the boundaries of religion and religious discourse in society for its own designs and power.

While Tareen’s main contention carries weight, a question that still warrants further probing is this: How are we to then understand the relationship between the often violent contestations over South Asian Muslim identity today that pit against each other actors and groups of varied stripes and the colonial context of these contestations that Tareen examines in his book? A mere glance at the religious and ideological landscape of contemporary South Asia reveals the preponderance of a political consciousness grounded in perceiving a particular “other” as an existential threat whose elimination or marginalization would guarantee the survival and prosperity of one’s own identity. Political theologies based on the identification of certain groups or narratives as the enemy was arguably pioneered in the South Asian context by the sixteenth-century scholar, Sheikh Aḥmad al-Fārūqī al-Sirhindī who, against the backdrop of rising Shīʿa political power, declared that Shīʿītes ought to be considered as outside the fold of Islam. In the British era, the same sledgehammer of identity formation was laid down by Barelvī scholars against adherents of all competing Muslim groups, particularly the Deobandīs. The emergence of naturalists, Aḥmadīs, and Munkirīn-i ḥadīth (those who deny or severely restrict the legislative authority of the Prophet) provided additional targets for all the extant religious groups to protect and assert their identity through the “othering” of internal and external “others.”

To play the devil’s advocate, what if one wagered that these clashes of identity did not turn physically violent in the nineteenth century, as Tareen claims in the Postscript to his book, because of the general stability and order made possible by the presence of the colonial state and its power? For otherwise, what explains the descent into rabid intra-Muslim violence in the postcolonial period, especially in settings like Pakistan. Are the violent denunciations of minority groups and subsequent attacks on the Shīʿas, Aḥmadīs, and Christians the product of unhinged power games aimed at the acquisition of political power in a contested normative battlefield? South Asian Islam, one might argue, still has to come to terms with the new political and cultural realities of the postcolonial context and to find a way in which different religious identities can coexist without undermining the underlying fabric of society, for that is what provides the state the opportunity to monopolize religious discourse in the public sphere.

Defending Muḥammad in Modernity provides a long awaited and much needed call to action for scholars and historians of South Asian Islam in particular and modern Islam more broadly to turn their gaze to such critical inquiries. To what extent will Tareen’s scholarship succeed in reorienting the discourse on South Asian ‘ulamā’ in the Western academy I am not in a position to tell or prognosticate. What I can say with confidence though is that his work can play a crucial role in providing indigenous South Asian scholarship in India and Pakistan a new theoretical lens through which to approach and understand its own history and tradition in a more sophisticated and nuanced manner.

Acknowledgment: The author wishes to thank SherAli Tareen, Ebrahim Moosa, and Josh Lupo for their feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this piece.

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

Decolonizing the Study of South Asian Islam: Reflections on Defending Muḥammad in Modernity


Dare Jadid Darul Uloom Deoband. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Translated by SherAli Tareen

See the original Urdu text here.

The Context of the Argument

The modern colonial era, marked by political and moral uncertainty, generated several new conundrums for South Asian Muslims, all centered on the following two critical questions: Who are we? What is our identity? These were questions of religious and cultural identity that became especially pressing with the fall of the Mughal empire and the ascendance of British colonialism. These new conditions reignited the debate over Muslim/non-Muslim relations and the boundaries of religious identity and difference, a debate that had remained on the back burner since the reign of the Mughal emperor Jalāl al-Dīn Akbar (d.1605). In addition, intra-Muslim contestations, which had simmered even in the precolonial period, congealed and metastasized in the colonial era. Some of these intra-Muslim contestations pivoted on the question of how one ought to align the normative imaginary and application of Muslim politics with the new conditions and requirements of the modern period. This is the intellectual and political context of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic that is explored in SherAli Tareen’s book Defending Muḥammad in Modernity through the conceptual lens of the interaction between sovereignty, theology, morality, and ritual practice. More specifically, this book examines the encounters and relations between these rival groups of Muslim scholars and the ensuing formations of religious and moral identities among South Asian Muslims.

Throughout Muslim history, debates and contestations on religious identity have erupted in especially acute terms during moments of political decline and turmoil. A similar situation was seen in colonial South Asia. As prominent historian Francis Robinson has argued, there were two major factors that compelled South Asian Muslim scholars to debate the boundaries of their religious identity: (1) the activities and agility of Christian missionaries, and (2) the rise of Hindu revivalist movements. These developments, coupled with the antagonism of the British towards South Asian Muslims, gave rise to rival Muslim reform movements in the 19th century, the pioneers of the two most prominent of which, the Deobandīs and the Barelvīs, form the focus of Tareen’s study.

The centerpiece of this book, on which all its other discussions converge, focuses on the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and ritual practice as seen in the thought of prominent Muslim reformist scholars in 19th century South Asia. Their efforts to carve and refashion the religious identities of South Asian Muslims represented articulations of what Tareen calls “competing political theologies.” In other words, discourses on prophetic authority, morality, social order, normative laws, and ritual practice ultimately coalesced around the theme of political theology (See Part 1 of the book). According to Tareen, these seemingly theological discussions and debates were in fact interwoven with political currents and aspirations. Throughout the book, he interrogates the mutual imbrication and entanglement of theology and politics.

Painting representing Jalāl al-Dīn Akbar around 1557 CE. Source: Vincent A. Smith: Akbar the Great Mogul, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917). Via Wikiemdia Commons.

On this count, it is useful to note that for much of South Asian Muslim history, politics has dominated religion. What I mean by this is that theological interpretation often followed from political conditions. For instance, the stipulation of Quraysh lineage [prophetic lineage] as a precondition for the mantle of the caliphate, or for that matter the concept of united nationalism. These are two among many other examples whereby political conditions and exigencies informed the formulation of religious and theological ideas in the South Asian context. Despite pressure of the ‘ulamā’, successive Muslim political rulers in South Asia such as ‘Alāuddīn Khiljī (d. 1316) and Jalāl al-Dīn Akbar (d. 1605) resisted the dominance of religious concerns over political calculations and expediency. Aurangzeb ‘Ālamgīr (d. 1707) did depart from this tendency, which was one of the reasons for the decline of the Mughal empire. Yet, despite the inherently dominating nature of politics, religion and politics operated largely in cooperative harmony for most of Muslim history, with no obvious dichotomy or contradiction. The only exception to such concordance was seen either in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century [that saw the fall of Baghdad] or during the Western colonial invasions of the 17thand 18th centuries. Both these moments of political uncertainty generated for Muslim intellectual thought new vexing questions of faith, law, morality, tradition, and culture. Similarly, in the early 19th century context of colonial Muslim South Asia, the major question that came to occupy the center stage was this: With the erasure of Muslim political sovereignty, how is one to preserve and practically manifest [through ritual practice] divine sovereignty? Further, how should one approach the relationship between God, the Prophet, and the community during these new conditions of colonial modernity? And how can one protect Muslim culture and its markers of distinction in the era of colonialism?

Tareen’s book examines the epistemological and theological debates engendered by these questions, while offering new perspectives on, and theorizations of, those debates, establishing in turn their relevance and significance for the contemporary period. Tareen’s project is important because it offers a critical corrective to the general perception in South Asia that views the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic as an arcane fruitless intra-Muslim squabble belonging to a period of Muslim political and moral decline. Tareen is absolutely correct in claiming that this debate was not a superficial ideological dispute but rather the reflection of two competing rationalities [of tradition and reform] that have henceforth not received adequate attention in scholarship. He argues that the political transformation of colonial modernity in the 19th century inaugurated unprecedented transformations in Muslim intellectual thought that in turn have deeply imprinted the texture of Muslim religious identities in South Asia until today. The two key terms coined by Tareen in this regard, “competing political theologies” and “competing rationalities of tradition and reform,” are of crucial significance. These categories provide the conceptual bedrock for grasping the significance of the intra-Muslim debates that anchor the book. I find the framing Tareen suggests and advances at once novel and creative in the study of modern South Asian Islam. They pave the way for the formulation of new intellectual horizons and directions.

Tareen’s Contribution to the Field

The first two sections of the book traverse the early and late 19th centuries. In the first section titled “Competing Political Theologies,” Tareen engages a fierce polemic between the prominent scholars Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831) and Fazl-ī Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d.1861) that again highlights the enmeshment of theology and politics in debates on the status of divine sovereignty in modernity. These debates concerned problems like prophetic intercession, prophetic love, and God’s capacity to lie or produce another Muḥammad. On the other hand, the second section, “Competing Normativities,” addresses contestations on matters of ritual practice and theology, such as the Prophet’s birthday celebration and his knowledge of the unknown, as they took on a group-centered orientation in the late 19th century, and pitted the pioneers of the Deoband and Barelvī schools against one another. Collectively, these two sections enable the reader to appreciate the ideological foundations that not only divided these two groups of scholars, but also the normative underpinnings that brought them together. The third section “Intra-Deobandī Tensions” focuses on Ḥājī Imdādullah Muhājir Makkī’s (d. 1899) epistle Resolution to the Seven Controversies (Faysala-yi Haft Mas’ala) (335–75). Tareen shows that the contents of this epistle, through which Imdādullah sought to resolve the polemic between the Deobandī and non-Deobandī ‘ulamā’, who were followed by Aḥmad Razā Khān and his followers and were recognized later as Barelvī (until this time, the ‘ulamā’ who were opposed to the pioneers of the Deobandī school were not recognized as Barelvī) generated subtle but important divisions among the pioneers of Deoband themselves (to whom Imdādullah was their revered Sufi master). In a sense, Imdādullah demonstrated that the [epistemic] borders of the Deoband school touched the Barelvī school and vice versa, thus undermining the assumption of inherently oppositional identities. Both these movements, despite all their bitter disagreements, were steadfast followers of the same unquestionable legal tradition. And both believed in a common discursive foundation for how the relationship between individual experience and spirituality must unfold. Tareen’s book explicates this point very convincingly by critiquing the common tendency to approach the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic through the prism of the law-Sufism binary that is in turn a product of the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary, especially as seen in the popular works of think tanks and political institutions in the West.

Tareen questions this popular tendency by demonstrating that both these outfits were in fact standard bearers of religious reform. Where they differed was on what reform meant to them: for the Deobandīs, widespread ritual practices that were a product of the indigenous Indic milieu did not belong to the normative Islamic tradition, where, on the other hand, the Barelvīs approached Islamic normativity through a much broader canvass that allowed the continuity of such ritual practices concurrent with the work of religious reform. Moreover, while the Deobandīs advocated transformative reform eager to block any form of corruption from entering and thus polluting everyday life, the Barelvīs preferred selective reform over wholesale transformation. They specifically focused on the corruptions that had accrued on entrenched ritual practices rather than outlawing those practices altogether. Also, in the Barelvī worldview, the temporal reference of normativity was not restricted to any specific time period in history; each successive generation contributed to the formation and maintenance of communal norms in accordance with local habits and practices. But despite these subtle disagreements, the central objectives and societal role of these two schools mirror in a manner that frustrates any binary framings of their relationship or conflict.

Madani chattar, dedicated to Ḥusayn Aḥmad Madanī. Monument designed by Ar. Jishnu Kumar Das. Sylhet, Bangladesh. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Therefore, and this is a fascinating point, the third major Muslim reformist group in modern South Asia, the non-conformist Ahl-i Hadīth, considers the Barelvīs and Deobandīs as essentially the same. On the other hand, the Barelvīs consider the Deobandīs and Ahl-i Hadīth as extremist Wahhabis. Thus, Deoband serves as a bridge and conduit between the other two groups. On Deoband, Tareen makes an arresting point: namely that the Deoband movement at its core is marked by an amalgamation of diverse and often competing viewpoints, a feature that its opponents often cast as a sign of contradiction. In fact, it is this very quality of the Deoband school that has allowed it to adapt and respond to varied and shifting political conditions, even embracing at times the ideas of united nationalism and secularism. This Deobandī characteristic of intellectual flexibility and expansiveness is derived from and heir to the thought and legacy of the 18th century polymath Shāh Walīyullāh (d. 1762). Here I disagree with Tareen, who presents Deoband pioneers as the intellectual successors of Walīyullāh’s grandson Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, ignoring in the process major Deoband scholars like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933) and Ḥusayn Aḥmad Madanī (d. 1957) who were in fact quite critical of Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl. More accurately, the advancement of  Ismāʿīl’s reform agenda hinged on reenergizing divine sovereignty constituted only one aspect of a much broader and multivalent Deobandī discursive terrain also populated by scholars with very different points of doctrinal emphasis, like prophetic love, etc.

Critiquing “Political Theology”

In sum, Defending Muhammad in Modernity has opened several new avenues of inquiry and presented fresh perspectives on the rationality of Muslim political theologies in South Asia. This is perhaps the first book to have shown and established the theoretical and political relevance and importance to the contemporary world of Muslim intellectual debates and discourses that are too often understood as inscrutable relics of a bygone past. But for all its merits, there are some shortcomings of this book that must also be highlighted. First, Tareen seems to present the intra-‘ulamā’ dispute over the theological questions of God’s capacity to lie or that God can produce a second instantiation of the Prophet Muḥammad as products of the modern South Asian context whereas these debates boast a much longer premodern genealogy, as seen for instance in the debates between the Ash‘arites and the Mu‘tazilis that do not receive much attention in this book. Moreover, the pivotal contribution of Deoband’s founder Qāsim Nānautvī (d.1877) to this twin debate, as found in his text Taḥzīr al-Nās, has also been ignored. Second, one of the leading assumptions of this book is that the Barelvī-Deobandī disagreement over the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and every day ritual practices was a product of and a reaction to the new conditions of colonialism. Tareen’s theoretical apparatus impinges on excavating the latent political imaginaries and logics that inform seemingly theological debates, what he calls political theology. But in so doing, he perhaps does not adequately engage the entanglement of religion and politics within Muslim thought and normativity. For instance, in classical Muslim thought, leading prayers (imāmat-i sughra) is considered a prelude to political leadership (imāmat-i kubra). Religion and politics are intimately conjoined. Now, I am critical of this view. Moreover, in the modern period, this classical worldview has also been forcefully challenged by Muslim scholars, one of whom is the Egyptian reformer ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq (d. 1966). But despite the transformations inaugurated by colonialism, the theoretical and ideological attraction of this conjoined view of religion and politics remained intact. The point I am getting at is this: why must we employ Western frameworks and categories of analysis like political theology to examine indigenous theological discourses and debates? For instance, yes, from the standpoint of the theory of political theology, Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s critique of ritual practices as a way to restore divine sovereignty could be read as a response to the loss of Muslim political sovereignty in modern South Asia. Or Fazl-ī Ḥaqq Khayrābādī considering the possibility of another Prophet Muḥammad unfathomable could be interpreted as a defense of the Prophet’s political authority. But this theoretical framework will not find much acceptance among the traditionalist Muslim intellectual circles of South Asia for it will be seen as imposing political meanings and aspirations onto explicitly theological debates. In other words, the conclusions that Tareen draws from his reading of these intra-Muslim debates are a product of the theoretical framework that he deploys to study them. But what if these debates were considered on their own terms apart from analytical frameworks wedded to Western academia? Perhaps such an exercise might generate competing and contrasting conclusions.

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Waris Mazhari
Dr. Waris Mazhari PhD (Jamia Millia Islamia, 2013) is presently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Hamdard in New Delhi. For the past twenty years, he has been with the Darul Uloom Deoband Old Boys Organization as an editor of its Urdu monthly journal Tarjuman-e-Darul Uloom. Dr. Mazhari served as Research Associate for Virtual Dialogues, an initiative at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, from August 2011 to July 2013. The monthly magazine Communalism Combat dedicated a special issue to his writings on peace, non-violence, and interfaith dialogue, under the theme Rediscovering the Tolerant Tradition in Islam in May 2010. Dr. Mazhari is a prolific writer with countless articles and multiple books under his name. Among these is Hindustani Madaris ka Talimi Nezam Aur Us me Islah ki Zarurat: Ek Jaeza (The Educational System in Indian Madrasas and the Need for Reforms: An Analytical Study), a work that discusses the need for reform in the madrasa curriculum, published in Urdu in 2014. His chief interests are in the areas of interfaith dialogue, peace and social harmony, the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam, and reform in Indian madrasas. Many of his articles have been translated into other languages.
Global Currents article

Whose People? The Oppression of Uyghurs and the Idea of the Muslim World


A Uyghur Rights Protest in San Francisco in April 2008. Photo by Jack Fitzsimmons.

On August 31st, 2020 a chartered flight flew from Israel to the United Arab Emirates for the first time, carrying a team of Israeli and American diplomats, including President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. In response to this move towards the normalization of relations with Israel, Iran’s top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that the Emiratis had committed “treachery against the Muslim world.” In a series of tweets, the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decried Khameini’s reading of the event and added, “And if you’re looking for those betraying Islam @Khamenei_ir, China is seeking to destroy the Uyghurs. Looking forward to your public callout for the CCP’s horrific treatment of those Muslims.”

This rhetorical move, familiar from the Cold War-era, is generally referred to as “Whataboutism.” When called to account for a condemned policy, a state’s spokesperson brings up abuses associated with the accusing state and its allies. Whataboutism is not new or surprising, but what I find of interest here is which states are considered accountable for another state’s crimes. Muslim-majority states have been expected to condemn the oppression of Uyghurs, with the largest attention paid to those believed to have the greatest political power. These public callouts demonstrate how normative ideas about “the Muslim World” and monolithic ideas about Islam in politics continue to prevail at multiple discursive levels despite vast evidence of the heterogeneity of the politics of Muslim-majority countries.

Since the events in Xinjiang became common knowledge, various state spokespersons and international representatives have been asked to comment, to condemn, and to act. First, of course, were the largest and most powerful entities in the world, the United States and the European Union. James Millward has written an excellent column about the U.S. response in The Guardian, discussing how loud “anti-Chinese posturing” has precluded a multifaceted, targeted, diplomatic search for solutions. Similarly, Human Rights Watch has described the public EU responses as continuing to just “tick the box marked ‘raised concerns’.”

At the same time, the revelations about the oppression of Uyghurs immediately spawned articles in the Western press, looking for, decrying, and explaining (or “Westplaining”?) responses from “the Muslim world.” Contrasting the muted commentary on the events in Xinjiang from specific Muslim-majority countries and from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to the same entities’ strident statements about the plight of Palestinians and the Rohingya Muslims, such articles gave legitimate political and economic reasons for each country’s response, while simultaneously doubling down on mistaken assumptions about Islam as a unifying, political force.

Muslim-majority countries, often simply referred to as “Muslim countries,” have been expected to respond to the oppression of Muslims across state boundaries in a way that is not expected from Christian-majority countries. (The latter are also rarely referred to as “Christian countries.”) The large Muslim-majority states of the world, especially Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey, were called to task loudly in the international arena for not responding to the events forcefully enough. Out of these three, Turkey was the only one to eventually speak out. These different responses tell us a great deal about the imbrications of human rights, politics, and the constructed nature of state identities. They also help us gauge the state of democracy in each country and aid us in deconstructing the idea of a unified Muslim world.

In his book The Idea of the Muslim World, Cemil Aydın argues that while “the Muslim world”—a political entity unified by religious identity—does not exist in any real sense, the political mobilization of the idea has proven powerful in specific instances.

Historically, various countries have been identified as the putative center of the so-called Muslim world. For example, President Obama gave his famous address to “the Muslim world” in Cairo, Egypt, home to the historical Al-Azhar University. Recently, however, multiple articles (here, here, and here) have pointed to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as being locked in a struggle for the symbolic and cultural leadership of this imagined community.

Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan pictured with President Xi Jinping of China at a Belt and Road international forum. Photo from the Russian Presidential Press and Information Office. Via Wikimedia Commons

While backing China’s Xinjiang policy, Saudi U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi has also claimed, “Nobody can be more concerned about the status of Muslims anywhere in the world than Saudi Arabia.” Iranian representatives have been similarly quiet on the subject, despite the country’s own claims to moral leadership over Muslims everywhere. Because of business and trade ties, along with the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement, the Iranian economy has become even more dependent on China and Russia. It is also safe to say that the Iranian regime broadly shares China’s stance regarding “rights talk.” Like China, it sees international human rights pressure as unwelcome meddling in its internal affairs and as a violation of its national sovereignty. These factors largely explain Iran’s muted response. The Turkish case, on the other hand, has perhaps been the most interesting. Turkey, too, is dependent on Chinese funds and Chinese disavowal in rights-based interventionist rhetoric. In 2018, when the Turkish economy was suffering from U.S.-imposed sanctions, China gave the country a $3.6 billion loan. Similarly, China has been quiet on civil rights abuses associated with Turkey’s crackdown on dissidents after the failed coup attempt of 2016.

Turkey, however, also has very close cultural and linguistic ties with the Uyghurs. Ankara’s official stance is that the Uyghur people are the Turks’ close kin. Every primary school child learns to recognize the Uyghurs as relatives who contributed greatly to Turkish/Turkic history and culture. Our languages are mutually intelligible and the modern Turkish word for “civilized” (uygar) is said to come from “uyghur,” as the Uyghurs were the first Turkic political entity to switch to non-nomadic life. In addition, the world’s largest community of Uyghur exiles (about 12 million strong) resides in Istanbul and is quite active in their efforts to support the Uyghur cause in China. Thus, it was no surprise that the events in Xinjiang drew the attention of both devout and non-devout Turks early on.

However, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose words—we are told—carry some weight with Muslims across the world, had not spoken about the oppression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China until early 2019 when local politics forced his hand.

The reports of the death of renowned Uyghur poet Abdurehim Heyit in detention appear to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Although Heyit was later proven to be alive, on February 9, 2020 the Turkish government issued a stern statement denouncing China for “violating the fundamental human rights of Uyghur Turks and other Muslim communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” This made Turkey a significant exception among Muslim-majority countries and showed the role religious and ethnic ties can play in complicating realpolitik.

However, even in this case, politics played a much larger role than popularly acknowledged—specifically local politics. Given the sympathies of the population, rival parties had begun exploiting the Erdogan government’s silence, organizing massive protests, and attempting to launch parliamentary investigations into China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. However authoritarian, Erdogan and his party AKP are dependent on votes and could only prioritize foreign policy and trade ties over electoral politics for so long.

It behooves us to examine which states are being called to condemn the actions of which states, why they are being called to do so, and by whom they are being called. Instead of assuming a normative Muslim unity embodied in the idea of “the Muslim world,” it is helpful to see the mobilizations and the limits of this concept. In fact, despite its strongly worded public statement, there have been many reports of the Turkish government collaborating with China in arresting, detaining, and deporting Uyghur activists. In specific danger, it seems, are activists who advocate for the independence of what they are calling “East Turkestan” and any exile with even the most tenuous connection to Syria.

Muslim disunity is the true reality of our world. What is unusual is when acts of condemnation occur in spite of the political and economic pressures that push in the opposite direction. Even in the case of Turkey, a country that has built its identity on Uyghur history and culture, politics drove recognition even more than vice versa.

In response to the deportation of a family member, one Uyghur exile said, “It’s so difficult for me to accept that Turkey did this . . . Turkey, the land that is like our home, where the people are like our own.” Ultimately, however, the failure to condemn international human rights abuse despite cultural, linguistic, and religious ties with its victims is not unusual. As Aydın’s book and the Syrian conflict confirm, Muslim disunity is the true reality of our world. What is unusual is when acts of condemnation occur in spite of the political and economic pressures that push in the opposite direction. Even in the case of Turkey, a country that has built its identity on Uyghur history and culture, politics drove recognition even more than vice versa.

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Perin Gürel
Perin E. Gürel is associate professor of American Studies and concurrent assistant professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017), explores how Turkish debates over “westernization” have intersected with U.S.-Turkish relations in the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Turkish Literature, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a second book project on the impact of U.S. political discourses on Turkey-Iran relations from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Gürel is also faculty fellow for the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame.