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Decoloniality article

Provincializing Theodicy


Protest in Philadelphia on June 1st, 2020. Photo Credit: Rob Bulmahn. Flickr.

I saw something strange on June 1st, 2020. I saw the work of a generic theodicy take place on live television. I had come to the UK for a visit during my university’s spring break, only to find the majority of transatlantic flights cancelled and lockdowns imposed within the next few days. This meant that my stay had been extended indefinitely. So when the uprisings in protest against the continued police violence and murder of Black men and women began across cities in the United States, I could only watch my social media timelines anxiously as the police response in my home city of Philadelphia turned ever more violent. On June 1st I found a livestream of some mainstream local news covering one of the largest peaceful protest marches Philadelphia has ever seen. I was surprised to listen to the news anchors speak positively and compassionately about the protests. As the anchors were talking a large section of the protest did something other marches have tried to do in the past. They took I-676, a bit of the interstate that runs through Philadelphia’s Center City, stopping traffic and marching on the highway itself. The anchors seemed surprised but again remarked at how peaceful the protest had been and cut to a short story by a reporter on the ground about the peaceful events of the day so far. When they cut back to the live scene suddenly there was pandemonium as tear gas—a chemical that is banned in war by the Geneva Convention—enveloped I-676, wafting over the peaceful protesters and even the cars that had been caught in the protest march. Police in SWAT gear and with automatic rifles began to swarm the protesters. There is video of these police indiscriminately pepper spraying protesters who have their hands up and people rushing in panic to try get off the highway by climbing over concrete embankments and fences as police damage protester’s bikes and line up zip-tied protestors in stress positions on the hot and dirty highway. 

The anchors immediately began to look for a reason why this was happening. They could not figure out why the police would be so violent in the face of non-violent protesters. The obvious answer is that the police are a violent force and should be abolished. To accept that would be to call into question the entire world that police violence supports, to see in the incoherence of the violence against non-violent protests the same incoherence of struggle and suffering that undoes the world, that undoes our very sense of selves. In searching for a justification for this unjustifiable violence of the police, the anchors were engaged in theodicy. 

What is Theodicy?

Theodicy is both a concept and a discourse that comes to us today from the traditions of Christian theology and European philosophy. Traditionally the term refers to the justification of the existence of a benevolent God in the face of the problem of evil or suffering and broken into its Greek roots theos (God) and dike (justice) it literally means the justification of God. However, what we will see in this short essay, working with Sylvia Wynter’s treatment of theodicy as a technology, is a much more generic form of theodicy. In that generic form, theodicy is a matter of asserting coherence when confronted with the incoherence of struggle and suffering. This generic understanding of theodicy becomes apparent when we start to examine it as a particular technology connected to the project of European colonialism, with that project’s twinned history of settler-colonialism throughout the Americas and enslavement of Black Africans. Subjecting theodicy to this kind of examination is what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as “provincializing.” By provincializing theodicy, a central concept within philosophy of religion, we can begin to open up our thinking to the incoherence of suffering and struggle and begin to construct a thought worthy of what cannot be justified.

White Thought, Annotated and Exposed

One of the gifts that comes from engaging with decolonial theory is this provincialization of philosophy as white thought. Reactionary intellectuals often accuse decolonial theorists of being smugly satisfied in pronouncing some moral judgment over this or that particular philosopher. While we may find moral judgments like “Kant’s a racist!” or “Hegel’s a misogynist!” being thrown around a seminar table or turned into a meme to be scrolled past on social media, any such moral judgment is already superfluous for decolonial engagements with European philosophy. The risible and horrific statements of the pantheon of European philosophers regarding women, Africans, Jews, Muslims, and others outside a narrowly constructed identity of European whiteness are already well documented and in fact can be “revealed” simply by reading their most famous texts. There is no need for some hermetic method; it is shamelessly right there on the page. The task of reading the history of European philosophy from a decolonial perspective does not need to be one concerned with the place of the individual philosopher or theorists within history, but can concern itself directly with a kind of cartography of the world as constructed and reflected in that thought. This method says, here is the world as made by White Europeans, here are the paths you are told to follow, here are the divisions between this and that, the “civilized” and the colonized, “free” and slave. This is the world you have to navigate and such a map may be useful when it marks out the positions where philosophy is policed and where philosophers are the police. With such a map you may be able to avoid or evade them.

While we may find moral judgments like “Kant’s a racist!” or “Hegel’s a misogynist!” being thrown around a seminar table or turned into a meme to be scrolled past on social media, any such moral judgment is already superfluous for decolonial engagements with European philosophy.

Christina Sharpe builds a theoretical architecture of “Black life, annotated and redacted” for Black scholars engaged in Black studies for Black people. White scholars can place themselves under the demands of Black study without appropriating or profiting from this Black life by following the example of Sharpe’s method, but now directed at this newly provincialized white thought. Let us consider this cartographical method of study to be “white thought, annotated and exposed.” Annotating white thought in this way can be a strategy to be used against it, to evade it, to describe it ruthlessly and rigorously, and add to efforts to abolish it in its actualities and possibilities. Most assuredly this is not to critique it, which is how white thought continues as white thought, but it is rather to move away from it or to break it down into parts which might be useful when disempowered from the whole of the machinery. Daniel Colucciello Barber provides an example of this kind of annotated white thought that takes aim at the role of critique in continuing the world. When used in this way, annotations are a form of negation even as they are additions to the text. The annotations are made to mark out and better avoid philosophy’s checkpoints, the places where one is harassed and where demands for one’s papers are made. It is to mark the places where philosophy is part of an apparatus that decides one’s status, both as a political being and as a being. In other words, it shows how philosophy is part of the apparatus that determines what side of the border one is placed, whether that border be internal or external.

Sylvia Wynter on Theodicy

Theodicy should be subject to this annotation and requires such a cartography, for it manifests a general form of European thought—inclusive of the violent colonizing brothers, philosophy and theology—that plays a particular role within the construction of the colonial world. Sylvia Wynter has begun to trace such a category in her work. She has demonstrated that the appeal to theodical forms of thought is present throughout attempts to think about the history of racial-colonial capitalism. Wynter directs our attention here when she emphasizes the words of an apologist for colonialism, Gregory Cerio, who attempts to “deconstruct” the “black legend” of Spanish atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the so-called “New World.” Cerio provides a culturally relativistic defense of the Spanish saying that, by their standards, they acted with moderation and even “accepted” the indigenous into Spanish society. Wynter emphasizes the theodical nature of his claim by italicizing his assertion that the Spanish “sought to provide a philosophical and moral foundation for their actions in the New World” (6). 

Theodicy, as a general form of philosophical thought, is the theoretical justification of any system or relationship generative of meaning that places the violence and suffering necessary for that system’s operation within a narrative of redemption.

To provide a foundation is to provide a justification. This task of justification is not foreign to forms of philosophy taken to be central to the history of European thought. Hegel, for example, famously remarked in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History that his philosophy of history was a theodicy, an attempt to reconcile all the suffering and evils of the world with the accomplished aims of reason. He writes, “That world history is governed by an ultimate design, that it is a rational process—whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason—this is a proposition whose truth we must assume; its proof lies in the study of world history itself, which is the image and enactment of reason” (28). Stated with less theodical disavowal, all the “bad things” about the world, like the horrific violence and suffering of colonization and slavery, are justified by the goodness of the world’s ultimate reason.

The Unknown Maroon statue. Photo Credit: Flickr User: Steve Bennet, Haiti.

Wynter’s patient elaboration and re-elaboration of the racial-colonial and capitalist development of what it means to be human emerges necessarily in relation to these theodical philosophical and moral justifications, not simply as an intellectual problem but a social one. Denise Ferreira da Silva tells us that Wynter’s work is faithful to the early tenants of historical materialism. Wynter’s examination of the concept of race does not reduce it to some ideological excuse for colonialism, but the concept is itself made possible and emerges only on the basis of the social relation of “colonizer/colonized” (92). In other words, theodicy is called forth not by pure reason, but through our living as social beings and by a particular way of organizing that living together. With regard to the racial classification of people, theodicy is called forth by the need to justify why this person should suffer in absolute terms so that this person may live a good life. The incoherence of the forced living together of the colonizer and the colonized, and the even more extreme and incoherent violence of the relationship between slaver and enslaved, must be made sense of. Theodicy, as a general form of philosophical thought, is the theoretical justification of any system or relationship generative of meaning that places the violence and suffering necessary for that system’s operation within a narrative of redemption.

We can see this more clearly in Wynter where theodicy is especially related to the colonial episteme. In this colonial episteme, the creation of coherent sense or meaning is required to support the dominant genre of the human. The existence of any genre of the human, be it Christian, Man1, or Man2 (these being the three genres examined in Wynter’s work), must be justified in the face of suffering and evil that threatens the coherence and meaning of the human. For it is the genre of the human that, Wynter says, “aprioristically underlies all our present disciplines” (117). What it means to be human, the question of who “we” are, is produced through these genres of being “in whose,” Wynter says, “always auto-instituted and origin-narratively inscribed terms we can alone experience ourselves as human” (117). Theodicy arises out of the desire that we have the rules of order, the theoretical grammar, to experience ourselves, in so far as we are constituted relationally as social beings. 

Following Wynter, provincializing theodicy allows us to name theodicy as a concept or technology and not a problem. Here Wynter follows Lewis Gordon who identifies a secular form of theodicy in biological frameworks for understanding the human. He names this a “biodicy” that serves to justify the pain and suffering experienced within the here and now by appealing to a source of legitimacy. Wynter says that one can generalize from Gordon’s concept of a secular theodicy to all “supernaturally legitimated and guaranteed human societal orders” (137). This leads to a general statement of the form of theodicy: 

“Doing this by extending the traditional meaning of theodicy—that is, as an order that functions to justify the ways of God to mankind—to one in which all supernaturally guaranteed orders must function in a cognitively closed manner, in order to justify the order and its everyday function, to its subjects, as the realization of a true, because ostensibly supernaturally mandated, order” (135). 

The need for some form of theodicy arises from one genre of the human being taken as the absolute identity—meaning absolute self-sameness—of the human as such. Wynter demonstrates that as the genre shifts so must the underlying source of legitimacy. Theodicy does not disappear but is replaced by whatever is taken to be the supreme Being or supreme source of legitimacy. Theodicy then lies at the level of meaning itself.

After Theodicy

Earlier, I noted that Wynter treats theodicy as a technology and not a problem. This is distinctive and incisive because inside of the history of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology theodicy was understood as an intellectual problem relating to the external and objective reality of God. When philosophers of religion accept this story they are only able to see arguments for God’s benevolence in the face of the problem of evil and suffering. What they miss and Wynter sees is that the name of God hides a more generic problem of coherence and meaning that is implied in the function of God for those historical systems of thought and practice.  As Wynter has shown, the project of theodicy does not historically or abstractly require the theistic figure of God as given shape by certain theoretical interpretations and communal beliefs found within Christianity or any other particular monotheistic tradition. The form of this thinking persists even in seemingly secular times.

Perhaps the most egregious element of theodicy is the central practice of analogizing between times and peoples, between their sufferings and the specific role their relations plays in the creation of the world. Only by obscuring the particularity of suffering through what Frank B. Wilderson III identifies as the universalizing ruse of analogy does theodicy redeem the world. In the longer project this post is abstracted from, the centering of anti-Black violence of world-making and theodicy is examined in more detail. Any further discussion of the themes raised in this short post also requires a discussion of the importance of understanding the Black radical tradition as part of the decolonial tradition and one that calls for the abolition of the world. That world to be abolished is given ultimately as mythic past and the world as it could be or as possible is given as hoped for or awaited future. What the world is now is occluded through the analogizing of past and future. To think the world now, as it is, requires that we give attention to what François Laruelle calls the “worst necessary” instead of theodicy’s “best possible” (50). In “On Violence” Fanon argues that violence is the means by which knowledge of social reality is gained by the masses. Violence is then not primarily a means of politics so much as a means of mass or generic contemplation. To attend to violence, where such attention is now understood as “thinking about thinking,” is to attend to the world formed and forming of our grammars of coherence that exist to cover the violence that this world says is necessary for its existence. Returning to the scene that played out on Philadelphia’s I-676 on June 1st and the violence of the police on that day, the knowledge gained on that day by those protestors was a contemplation of the world as it is. Not the world as it is should or the world as it has been, but the way the world is now, propped up and sustained by police violence.  What remains after the diagnosis of theodicy as philosophical form is an analysis of violence as knowledge of the world. What might our philosophies and our theories look like if we began there?

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Anthony Paul Smith
Anthony Paul Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion & Theology at La Salle University in Philadelphia, USA. His research focuses in on the philosophy of religion and environmental humanities. He is also the translator of a number of books by the French philosopher François Laruelle and is currently completing a translation of philosopher Malcom Ferdinand’s A Decolonial Ecology: A Caribbean Perspective. Smith’s current research project is an investigation of theodicy as philosophical form and the possibility of a anti-theodical form of thinking. He often writes at the collective blog An und für sich and copies of his essays, recordings of talks, and other miscellany are available at his website.
Theorizing Modernities article

Ending Exile with the Prophetic Voice of the Diasporic Jew


Eduard Bendemann, Die trauernden Juden im Exil. Wikimedia Commons.

Can There Be a Prophetic Voice Today without Diaspora?

The paradox of Jewish exile is that it never happened. There was no edict of exile from the land of Israel after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE; Jews continued to live in Palestine, even composing the Palestinian Talmud and various Midrashim. Most Jews lived in diaspora, at least since the sixth century BCE, flourishing and transforming Israelite religion into Judaism.

Although Jews were never exiled from the land of Israel, the Jewish belief that Jews live in exile shaped Jewish self-understanding as a major theme in religious literature and liturgy. The reality is that Jews settled in diaspora in lands around the globe, assimilating various cultures, languages, and religious ideas. Although diaspora constituted the political and cultural state of Jews, exile became internalized as an existential state, with Jews alienated from society while awaiting redemption. Liturgical fantasies that Jews lived in exile fostered not an alienation from the surrounding society, but an absence of responsibility for it. Zionism arose to address a political exile that had not happened, but its timing was fortuitous: a moment of rising antisemitism that made Jewish assimilation in diaspora unviable, destructive, and ultimately murderous. The existential exilic state supposedly ended with Zionism, which promised to restore normality and masculinity while offering no such restoration to women. Yet, life in the State of Israel continues for some Jews as a state of alienation, living at a distance from meaningful Jewish identity, increasingly distanced from the politics and societal problems in the country in which they live, especially as they affect Arab Israelis, Bedouin, Druze, Christians, and other minorities. Neither exile nor the promised end of exile achieve the prophetic stance of justice. The diasporic position, by contrast, is the condition for the prophetic: standing at the boundaries between society and the reins of governance, the prophet demands justice from the governing, while giving voice to the unheard who suffer at the hands of the regime. Can there be a prophetic voice today without diaspora? The prophet is an iconoclast, refusing to align with king or Temple, warning against the seductions of power: “Behold you trust in deceptive words to no avail” (Jeremiah 7:8). The prophet speaks in the name of God, retaining independence from worldly power; it is a position of diaspora from seats of power, whether king or priest. Isaiah’s vision proclaims “Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth” (19:24), co-existence rather than triumph over enemies, with all of equal merit: “the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage” (9:25). There is no claim of superiority, chosenness, nor distancing from former enemies.

Exile Is a Paradox

The destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE by the Assyrians, who deported the entire population (who then disappeared from history) is simply forgotten in Jewish history. The more important event was the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, along with the transport of Israelites to Babylonian exile. These events formed the basis for how exilic experience is remembered by Jews. Yet the Babylonian exile of Judah was also paradoxical: a few decades later, Cyrus the Great offered the Israelites safe passage back to Jerusalem, but relatively few returned and the majority remained in Babylonia for over 2500 years, composing the Babylonian Talmud, medieval Jewish philosophy, and turning Israelite religion into Judaism. All the while, rabbis in the land of Israel composed the Palestinian Talmud, various Midrashic texts, and, in the sixteenth century, a Code of Jewish Law along with Lurianic mysticism. Exile became diaspora, and even the prophet Jeremiah, who lived through the Babylonian conquest, advised turning exile into diaspora: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce…. Work for the good for the city to which I have exiled you, since on its welfare yours depends” (Jeremiah 9:4–7).

Was any of this an “exile”?

Exile as Affect

Exile became a theological doctrine defining Judaism not in response to a political decree banning Jews from living in Israel, but rather, as the historian Israel Yuval argues, in response to the rise of Christianity and its supersessionist claims in the fifth century CE. Religious polemics faded but exile remained as a Jewish mentality: being a Jew is to be exilic. Jews not only live in exile (galut), exile lives in them. Indeed, exile has come to define the condition of the collective Jewish people and the self-understanding of the individual Jew. Exile is not only a theo-political doctrine, it is also a regime of affect, defining the subjective, emotional experience of individual Jews. Doctrine and affect have reinforced one another and been fortified by rituals, such as breaking a glass at a wedding, fast days of mourning, such as Tisha B’Av (which commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem), numerous references to exile in Jewish prayers, and various customs, such as leaving a tear in a wall covering or table cloth to indicate that nothing can be perfect while Jews remain in exile.

The destruction of the Temple marked the end of animal worship and its replacement by verbal worship; the Temple, the home of God and priests, the dwelling place of God and the symbol of Judaism around the world, supplanted by the word, by Talmud and Midrash. Metaphor became law, and exile became a state of being, not a physical location.

In diaspora, exilic trauma was imagined and expressed in Psalm 137:

1 By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
3 For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4 How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
6 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Raze it, raze it! Down to its foundations!”
8 O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you
with what you have done to us!
9 Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!

The Spread of Exilic Existence

What is remarkable is the widespread adoption of Jewish exilic trauma. In his famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Langston Hughes writes of African exile, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The Bible itself renders exile a universal experience, with the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The Exodus from Egyptian slavery is an exile into the wilderness that is necessary before the conquest of a land that was never home can be attempted. Hellenistic writers presented the Exodus as the banishment of the Israelites from Egypt by the Pharaoh during a plague and mocked Jews for claiming a heritage as slaves, the most exiled state of existence. As an internalized experience, exile came to define the inner life of the Jew. Lech l’cha: go inward, writes Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, find yourself, the authentic inner being because your Judaism will only be meaningful if it is an expression of your authentic self. Just as Abraham left his home in Ur and went into exile to find his home in the Promised Land, there is a sense of home in exile.

“Who am I without exile,” asks Mahmoud Darwish in the title of a poem, echoing the Hasidic understanding. “Stranger on the river bank, like the river, water binds me to your name. . . . What shall will we do without exile?” (113–14). The poem is remarkable because it speaks of the exile of Palestinians that resulted from policies of the State of Israel and yet the poem could have just as easily been written by a Jew to express the traditional Jewish sensibility of exile. The irony is well-known: just when Zionism overcomes the exile of the Jews, it creates the exile of the Palestinians.

Overcoming Exile?

Or has Jewish exile been overcome by Zionism? Can it be overcome if it simultaneously creates a new exile for another people? Moreover, if twenty-first century Jews have finally (supposedly!) escaped the theology of exile and the existential burden of being exilic, what is the purpose of being a Jew? In recent years, the Argentinian Jewish thinker Santiago Slabodsky has proposed a path: to articulate a decolonial Judaism. During the course of diaspora, he argues, Judaism was colonized by the hegemonic Christian West in which some Jews lived; now it is time for Jews to forge alliances with those displaced and dispossessed by European colonialism, those labeled as “barbarians,” that is, as Sidra Ezrahi describes  them, those standing outside the framework of “the speech community, the community of selves” (18).

The Prophetic

Christian supersessionism is a form of theological colonialism and Slabodsky asks us to imagine recovering a Judaism unsullied by Christian colonization, not a postcolonial Judaism but a decolonial Judaism. For too long, Jews have striven to integrate and assimilate into a fictional Judeo-Christian tradition that has equated itself with a supposedly superior Western European civilization and has been used to justify imperialist and colonialist ambitions that have had horrific consequences. In part, Zionism challenged that goal, demanding that Jews renounce assimilation and escape the incurable antisemitism of Europe and instead constitute themselves as an independent nation-state that would take its place alongside the other nation-states of the world. Yet, Zionism ultimately adopted the political strategy of Europe, becoming an extension of the European Christian West and assuming “the hegemonic position of the agent of civilization,” as Gil Hochberg writes (187). Arriving in Israel has removed Jews from the alterity that defined them in diaspora and initially turned Israel into an ally of the hegemonic Christian West, and has now made it into an ally of the global neo-liberal and authoritarian order. Rejected by Europe, Jews arrived in Palestine to create an outpost of Europe that both negated and appropriated the Arab Orient and now seeks an alliance with its dictators, most recently with the UAE, presumably soon with the Saudis. Rather than focusing on a critique of Zionism and the State of Israel as reproductions of the colonial project, however, Slabodsky argues that Jews should “privilege the knowledge of the colonized to subvert normative thinking in the midst of the colonial divide” (167).

For too long, Jews have striven to integrate and assimilate into a fictional Judeo-Christian tradition that has equated itself with a supposedly superior Western European civilization and has been used to justify imperialist and colonialist ambitions that have had horrific consequences.

Slabodsky’s argument is that Jews need to divorce themselves from the self-proclaimed Christian universalism of Europe that conceals its colonizing goals and instead should realign themselves with the so-called “barbarians” of the Global South. This will allow them to become ethical figures who are disruptive of identitarian, exclusionary politics. Exile would then become a state to be embraced by those rejecting the Eurocentric universal, turning the Jew from a figure of melancholy into, as Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg put it, a “herald of disruptive politics, a politics that challenges the rigidity and dichotomy of identity politics and favors empathy, partnership, joint dwelling, and integration instead of separation, segregation, ghettoization, and oppressive assimilation” (298).To live as a Jew in diaspora is to live as a figure of disruption, rejecting the universal that masks the hegemony of the Christian European West and to think with others who have also been rendered “barbaric.” Instead of isolated identitarian politics, Slabodsky urges an “identity in politics” in solidarity with others in the struggle for epistemic and social justice that would unite the diasporic ethical stance of the Jews with new political alliances.

Slabodsky’s proposal suggests to me a call to Jews to revive the prophetic tradition. By this he does not mean the ethical monotheism touted by German Jewish theologians who identified the prophetic message of justice with Kant’s religion of reason. Rather, what is needed is prophetic passion. Religion is not a series of propositions, nor a social order that creates community through ritual performance. Religion demands affect, emotional commitment, and stirs the basic human need for engagement with other human beings.

Prophetic Passion is Needed

It is only when prophetic justice is read with the lens of Hasidic passion and compassion that the meaning of the prophets becomes clear: not as a messenger of God, but as Abraham Heschel notes in quoting Jeremiah 15:19, “a person who stands in the presence of God” (21). That marks the difference, according to Heschel, between the Christian West and its proofs for the existence of God, and the crucial Jewish distinction: to be a witness to God.

Transcendence, too, is about passion: divine pathos that demands strong emotions. Heschel writes that “The prophet’s ear perceives the silent sigh” of human suffering (9). “The prophet’s word is a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven” (16). For some, the prophetic critique of society might be called hysterical, but then “what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?” (5).

When Jews arrived in the United States from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, they felt they had arrived in the promised land. Dedicating a new synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina in 1841, a slave trading city, Gustav Poznanski proclaimed, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple” (467). A few years later, in 1857, Reform rabbi Samuel Adler, shortly after arriving in New York, then a city with slaves and supporters of slavery, declared, “Behind us lies Egypt, the Middle Ages, before us the sea of Talmudic legalism. . . . The spirit indwelling here in the West, the spirit of freedom, is the newly-born Messiah” (483). Viewing Europe as Egypt might be understandable in the nineteenth century, although many Jews were flourishing. But viewing the antebellum United States, where slavery was legal, as the Promised Land?

White American Zion

Portrait of David Einhorn. Wikimedia Commons.

Not all rabbis were spiritually and politically unaware. The goal, David Einhorn declared in his inaugural sermon in Baltimore in 1855, was “the liberation of Judaism for ourselves and for our children, so as to prevent the estrangement from Judaism” (481). Within a few years Einhorn was preaching against slavery—and was run out of town by his pro-slavery congregants.

Jewish religious life in America has often been less about faith in God and more about politics. German Jews who arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century identified as white, with whites, and flourished like other whites as bystanders and beneficiaries of the economy and social stratification produced by slavery. Whether or not they believed in God, they strongly believed that “America is our Zion,” as the leaders of Reform Judaism in America stated in an 1898 statement.

Prophetic justice, as Atalia Omer conceives it, is a revival of religion. To stop injustice and to address and transform violence requires religion. She describes the internal Jewish critique that uses key religious symbols, holidays, and liturgy to criticize Jewish political positions: for example, building a sukkah in front of the Israeli embassy to protest the Israeli government’s treatment of Bedouins. Indeed, Heschel writes that to pray and ignore the injustices of society is blasphemy.

The identification of America as a messianic Zion made the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in October 2018 come to Jews as a huge shock: How could this happen in America? And that shock is precisely the problem. For too long, Jews in America not only identified themselves as white, they identified America with the white experience. Innumerable Black churches have been burned by arsonists and Black worshippers murdered by shooters—think of the 2015 murder of nine worshippers at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. That, too, is America and it is not part of the messianic vision. 

Even before white Jews can begin to question their own identity as white people and recognize Jews of color, they have to develop the epistemic ability to recognize the white supremacy of America. When the psalmist writes (Psalm 135:16), “they have eyes but do not see,” idolaters are implicated. But perhaps by turning America into a messianic Zion Jews have made themselves idolaters, or, perhaps, arrivistes: tourists, immigrants, bad observers who have come to sojourn for a time, but not live in America.

Epistemic Resistance

If Judaism is to be decolonized, what must be removed are not only the distortions caused by Euro-Christian hegemony, but also the patterns of Jewish thought and political practices that have arisen in response. These might include Hasidism’s association of piety with particular sexual repressions, Zionism’s assumption that statehood will overcome exile, and German-Jewish thought’s repudiation of both movements, along with its imitation of Lutheran Protestantism. As the racist American rabbi and eventual politician in Israel Meir Kahane correctly noted, removing Jews from exile is easier than removing exile from Jews; the existential sense of being in exile has functioned for too long to justify Jewish indifference to the wider society, downplaying racism while being profoundly attentive to antisemitism. The observation points to the additional question of how Euro-Christian hegemony’s shaping of Judaism can be excised from the minds and emotions of Jews and Judaism.

If Judaism is to be decolonized, what must be removed are not only the distortions caused by Euro-Christian hegemony, but also the patterns of Jewish thought and political practices that have arisen in response.

Perhaps a contrarian embrace of the colonial might be effective in subverting its power. In a similarly suggestive way, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes that “the Jew must be part of the dominant culture but maintain a critical relationship to this dominant culture . . . basing Jewish existence in Israel on the concept of exile means removing the land ‘as place’ and turning it instead into a spiritual concept, thus separating the concrete land from the idea of redemption.” Turning the place of Israel into a spiritual concept would mean re-entering an exilic consciousness that cannot be eradicated by a nation-state, army, or even political sovereignty. But a deeply ingrained exile may also offer the possibility of an ethics of transcultural encounter that links Raz-Krakotzkin with Slabodsky into a political project. Insisting on the state of exile has placed Jews in alliance with conservative evangelical Christians in the belief that Jews stand outside the course of history, living in a theological realm of Heilsgeschichte, governed by an unknowable divine plan. While ostensibly differing from Zionism’s claim to bring Jews back into the course of history, there are surprising links between the exilic and the Zionist claims: both are responses to Euro-Christian hegemony.

The decolonial Judaism that Slabodsky proposes would no longer need to respond to Christian supersessionism with a theology of exile, and a shift to identifying as Jews with the “barbarians” of the Global South would also mark a leap away from the Euro-Christian imperial domain. Indeed, the political decolonization of the twentieth century is no doubt an additional reason for Christian questioning or even withdrawal from its supersessionist theology. Can the existential sense of exile that has pervaded Jewish identity over the centuries be transformed into an active voice for social justice in diaspora?

CLOSE THE CAMPS – Day 26 of a month of actions outside ICE San Francisco. Photo Credit: Flickr User Peg Hunter.

In diaspora the souls of Jews, too, can grow deep as rivers. In Babylon, “we lay down and wept,” but today there is no time for weeping. Authoritarian regimes abound, massive corruption prospers, racism is now recognized as a public health crisis, antisemitism is growing yet is cynically manipulated by some Jews for political gain, the gap between the wealthy few and the impoverished many is turning the world into a giant slave plantation. And yet even in our anger, the prophet Habakkuk reminds us, we must remember mercy (3:2).

We Cannot Walk Away from the Prophetic

What the prophets accomplish is a transformation of exilic mentality into a position of marginality within diaspora: the lonely but very loud voice of justice, compassion, and hope that constitute the promised redemption. Jeremiah’s voice is clear: “They know no bounds in deeds of wickedness; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things, says the Lord, and shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?” (5:28-29) According to the prophets, the ultimate expression of God is not wisdom, magnificence, land, glory, nor even love, but rather justice. Zion, Isaiah declares, shall be redeemed by justice, and those who repent, by righteousness. Justice is the tool of God, the manifestation of God, the means of our redemption and the redemption of God from human mendacity. Isaiah asks, “Can we abandon despair and find the inner resources to respond when God asks? Who will speak for me? Who will remember the covenant of peace and compassion? 

As prophetic, the diasporic Jew is never entirely at home, never content or complacent in a world of injustice. Diaspora transforms exile into Jewish creativity, as has happened for over two millennia. The prophet is a diasporic exemplar, leaving home and journeying to the urban seat of the political, military, and economic power to demand an end to corruption, exploitation, cruelty, and indifference. The prophetic position cannot exist by trying to end exile with statehood or by embracing exile as the essential mentality of Jewishness. To abandon diaspora in favor of exile is to walk away from the prophetic; to reject exile while embracing diaspora is to retain the prophetic passion for justice.

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Susannah Heschel
Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. The author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung, she and Umar Ryad have just co-edited The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism. She has also edited Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel. The recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has held research grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.  
Theorizing Modernities article

The Price of (non) Whiteness


American Jewish Congress member holding sign at Montgomery March, 1965. Photo Credit: Center for Jewish History. Via Flickr.

In the Civil Rights era, Jews were disproportionately involved in fighting for the rights of African Americans, or so the story goes. While this is true to a large extent, what is often overlooked is that many Jews, particularly in the south, were far more ambivalent about civil rights than we think. Many southern Jews were quite critical of “northern” Jews coming south to instigate what John Lewis famously called “good trouble,” and then returning home. What bothered many southern Jews was that the presence of Jews from the north would destabilize a very fragile balance Jews had with white southerners. They understandably feared that when the northern Jews went back home, they would be the recipients of white southern wrath. And in many cases, they were right (see P. Allen Krause, “Rabbis and Civil Rights in the South). There were notable exceptions, for example, Rabbi Seymour Atlas whose civil rights sermons in his synagogue in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s almost cost him his pulpit. His synagogue board demanded that they vet his sermons before they were delivered.

The complex position of southern Jews during the civil rights movement is an apt frame to revisit the question of Jewish whiteness in these days when renewed race consciousness in Black Lives Matter (BLM) meets an upsurge in antisemitic incidents and the troubling new definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The latter claims critique of Israel may be included as an antisemitic act. Internal Jewish debate about whether or not to support BLM can be seen as representing a broader unspoken anxiety about Jewish whiteness in a world where critical race theory about both Blackness and whiteness is far more developed than it was in the 1960s.

As Eric Goldstein has shown in his book The Price of Whiteness, in America Jews worked hard to achieve the status of whiteness. Doing so allowed them to climb the economic ladder to success in ways that non-white minorities such as African Americans could not. This is in part the thesis of James Baldwin’s 1967 essay “Blacks are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” which argued that it is precisely the social positioning that enabled Jews to succeed in what Baldwin called a “white supremacist” nation that served as at least in part the basis for the animus against them among African Americans. Whether Baldwin’s thesis was correct then, or still holds now, namely that it is largely the “becoming white” of the Jew that African Americans find so distasteful, the success of Jews in America cannot be viewed apart from their “whiteness” in the American Jewish imaginary. When the Tri-Faith America project in the 1930s was underway— this project viewed America as a country of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—the assumption was that all three religions were white. As Tisa Wenger shows in her book Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal, Black Christians were not part of that movement. An important caveat to all this is that there also exists the non-white Jew, a category that often suffers from double exclusion within the American imaginary. This imaginary views Jews as white which, by definition, has no room for Jews of color. The complex status of Jews of color is a topic for another analysis.

Whether Baldwin’s thesis was correct then, or still holds now, namely that it is largely the “becoming white” of the Jew that African Americans find so distasteful, the success of Jews in America cannot be viewed apart from their “whiteness” in the American Jewish imaginary.

What made the Jewish whiteness project so successful in America was that Jews were able to enter whiteness and absorb all its privileges without erasing their Jewishness, thus succeeding as Jews in part because of their whiteness. Aptly labeled successful integration, this also had a darker side as David Schraub shows in his recent essay, “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach.” Schraub makes an incisive argument about the intersectionality of Jewish whiteness and antisemitism. In fact, Schraub argues, the coming together of Jews and whiteness feeds too easily into existing antisemitic tropes rather than diminishing them.

In America, whiteness is largely viewed as a neutral, or unmarked, category. Schraub puts it this way, “Whiteness is a facilitator of social power and status, yet it is typically rendered unmarked. Consequently, the privileges and opportunities afforded to persons racialized as White are often not recognized as such—they are woven into the basic operating assumptions of society, such that their beneficiaries do not even perceive of their existence” (384).

Jews have a different social valence. The classic antisemitism we find, for example, in Houston Stuart Chamberlin’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century first published in 1899, or the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” claim that Jews are dangerous because they are a “superior race.” It is Jews’ power that makes Jews a threat to any society in which they live. Chamberlin claims this is in part due to their low exogamy rates throughout history that have produced a pure race that can easily dominate mixed races. The problem arises when these latent notions are then evoked in response to Jews achieving power in society. Thus modern antisemitism arguably emerges, as David Engel argues, in response to the excesses of power Jews achieved after emancipation in nineteenth-century Germany. Emancipation confirmed what Christians feared about Jews all along. In America, Schraub argues, this results in claims like “I always thought that Jews had all this power and privilege—and see how right I was.” Schraub puts it this way: “The Whiteness frame looks at its subjects and asks that we see their power, their privilege, their enhanced societal standing. So far so good. But stereotypes of Jewishness sound many of the same notes: they look at Jews and point out their putative power, privilege, and domination of social space” (401).

The irony in all this is that Jews in America were able to achieve their power in part because of their whiteness and yet such power is viewed, by whites and non-whites alike, as a result of their Jewishness. George Soros and Sheldon Adelson are two examples from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Soros’s Jewishness is “marked” critically by those on the right, and Adelson’s Jewishness is equally “marked” critically by those of the left. Yet each one attained their wealth in large part because both were beneficiaries of whiteness. Jews, by choosing to retain their Jewishness as they enter whiteness, are not unmarked as “whites” but marked as “Jews” who also have the privilege of whites. And this is arguably what Jews want; they want to take advantage of the opportunities whiteness offers while retaining a sense of difference as Jews. But it may be precisely this dual-identity that is a source of negativity against them. This is not to say that Jews have not been marked simply as Jews and become victims of antisemitic acts. Rather, it is to say that the social tolerance for Jews in America is quite high. In today’s America, a Jew will not likely be shot by a police officer because he is a Jew (although a Jew of color may be shot because h/she is Black). That was not true of Jews in other historical periods, and that is not true today of Blacks in America.

The irony in all this is that Jews in America were able to achieve their power in part because of their whiteness and yet such power is viewed, by whites and non-whites alike, as a result of their Jewishness.

An additional component that speaks to the contemporary situation has to do with the complex relationship of Jewish identity to religion and race/ethnicity. As can be seen through the Tri-Faith American project, Jewishness was defined by religion. For example, Father John Elliot Ross, part of the “Tolerance Trio” that toured America in the 1930s (also including Everett Clinchy and Rabbi Morris Lazaron) as part of the Tri Faith America project made a speech that read, “In all things religious we Protestants, Catholics, and Jews can be as separate as the fingers of a man’s outstretched hand; in all things civic and American we can be as united as a man’s clenched fist” (39). This attitude morphs into the concept of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “Judeo” being a Latinized form of Judaism and not Jews. Jews become part of white America in large part because they are viewed as carrying a tradition that is integral to Christianity.

But as this “Judeo” was being concretized, serving as an entry point for Jews into whiteness, something else was happening to Jews in America: the rise of Zionism. One of the early interventions of Zionism in the American Jewish landscape was to question the religious identification of Jews by arguing that Jewishness was rooted in one’s membership in an ethnic nation or “racial” group. Thus the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the premier statement of Reform Judaism at the time, expressed that Jews were not a “nation” but a “religious community.” To provide one example within Zionism: Louis Brandeis, one of the early proponents of Zionism in America, made the case in a famous 1915 speech that Zionism and Americanism were compatible because they shared with one another the same values of democracy and humanism. Other American Zionists were highly critical of Brandeis’s unwillingness to shift the focus of Jewish identity from religion (Brandeis was raised in the Reform tradition of “ethnical monotheism”) to nationalism, which was in part a “re-racialization” of Jews. Louis Lipsky (1876-1963), president of the Zionist Organization of America, editor of The American Hebrew and The Maccabean, and later secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, spoke out strongly against Brandeis’s Zionism/Americanism symbiosis. In Lipsky’s words, the old Zionists (referring to Brandeis) refused “to become part of the race and associate themselves with our problems” (71).

The move to re-racialize the Jews, making them primarily an ethnic group as opposed to carriers of a religious tradition, continued through the twentieth century. This complicated the religious dimension of Jewish inclusion in white America (the Judeo of Judeo-Christian), thereby attenuating Jewish whiteness but not erasing it. In fact, in some white Christian circles, Israel actually strengthened the resolve for Jewish inclusion, albeit in a way that also comes with the price of Israel being a part of Christian dispensationalist theology that does not, in the end, affirm Jewish difference but subsumes it into Christianity. For Jews, Zionism is an exercise in political sovereignty. For many Christian supporters of Israel, it makes Jews a part of the Second Coming when they will have one more chance to accept Christ.

Boston-area Jews gather in Coolidge Corner to protest police brutality and systemic racism. Photo Credit: Flickr User JaccobWakeUp.

In any event, all this reaches our day in a complex way. Jews are still white in America in the sense that they still have access to opportunities open to whites and closed to people of color. Yet Jews are not neutral, and thus not fully white or “unmarked white.” Rather, they carry with them their Jewishness, which has adapted through everything from the Tri Faith Movement to Christian Zionism. Many Jews are also devoted to the fight against anti-Blackness through BLM and to other movements. They have also emerged as critics of Israel’s policies. Yet their participation in BLM and opposition to systemic racism also poses a problem for some within the Black community because Jews participate in them as products of white privilege and all the protections that entails. “Blacks are antisemitic because they are anti-white” may not apply now as it did in 1967, but the whiteness of the Jew has not diminished since that time. How much can Jews as recipients of white privilege truly be a part of a movement against the systemic racism that in part has enabled them to rise to power in white America? Are American Jews willing to forfeit some of that privilege, whatever that might mean, as a gesture to those whose who cannot “pass” into the space of whiteness?

Understandably, Jews want to have both; they want to have the privilege that whiteness offers, and they want to retain the difference that Jewishness requires. Yet it may precisely be this mix that, as Schraub argues, evokes negative reactions against them, both from whites and from Blacks. Their power emerges in part because of their whiteness, yet is invariably “marked” because of their Jewishness. So when Jews support an Israeli regime that is oppressing Palestinians, for many blacks they are simply exercising uber-whiteness as an expression of their Jewishness, showing that they have become so white that they are exporting it as a justification of Jewish power in another country. And when Jews are critical of the Israeli state but still maintain an allegiance to Zionism, some progressives view that as tacit acquiescence to a political structure that systematizes inequality.

Today the fight is not about civil rights, or about equal access to the law. Today the fight is against the white supremacist character of America, it is not about inequality, it is about what Afropessimists call a political-ontology of anti-Blackness. For Jews, as whites, and as Jews, to fully be a part of that fight means to attenuate their whiteness, something we saw was a vexed compromise for southern Jews during civil rights. Jews can certainly fight anti-Blackness as Jews, but that may come at a price; both in terms of their whiteness and in terms of their Jewishness (as many Jews are still aligned with Zionism).

One of the big differences between the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and BLM today is that the former was, as Stokley Carmichael said in his famous Black Power speech in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966 “By Blacks, for Blacks,” while BLM is a multi-racial progressive movement intent on dismantling systemic white supremacy in America. Those who carry whiteness, including Jews, thus have a role in that project. Jews cannot erase their whiteness (they too easily “pass” as white) nor do they want to erase their Jewishness. But Jews can enter this multi-racial movement acknowledging both the benefits of their whiteness and the complexity of their Jewishness that often, although not always, aligns them with a political ideology, Zionism, that today openly engages in racial/ethnic discrimination. Some may disavow Zionism altogether and others may not. But in my view, those who do not must at least recognize the complexity of such an allegiance, and the exceptionalism implied therein, in light of their commitment to fight against the systemic racism on American shores. Jewishness and whiteness in America have always been precarious, and remain so today. Fully acknowledging the knottiness of that equation and closely examining its consequences may be a first step toward more open and honest alliances and partnerships.

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Shaul Magid
Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and the Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His latest books are Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021), and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press). He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Black Jews Matter: Solidarity Begins Beyond the Limits of Whiteness


 

Jews for Racial and Economic Justice marching in support of Black Lives Matter, New York City, August 11, 2016. Photo Credit: Gili Getz. Used with permission.

Analogy is all I’ve ever really known. The only child of an Ashkenazi Jew and an African American, I’ve always experienced identification as coupled with recognition of difference. I have no experience of homogeneity to fall back on; even those closest to me are also unlike me in significant ways.

I am used to people thinking of me as a problem. My parents married less than five years after Loving v. Virginia guaranteed the legality of their union throughout the United States. As recently as when I was in college, I’ve been in discussions where the creation of “mixed” children was cited as a reason to avoid interracial relationships—because, the argument went, mixed children suffered a confusion so debilitating that it made their lives not worth living.

But I am not confused. What I am is confusing. In other words, the problem is not my sense of self or belonging, but the way that my very existence unsettles the carefully circumscribed categories that for so many people pass for reality. Even sophisticated treatments of identity fail to account for the possibility of people like me. For example, Aaron Hahn Tapper’s Judaisms: A Twenty-First-Century Introduction to Jews and Jewish Identities centers the diversity of Jews and Judaisms, but assigns Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans to non-overlapping categories. He remarks, “Ashkenazi Jews exist in terms of what they are not; they are not Jews of color” (21). But I am the descendant of “those Jews who trace their lineage back to Eastern European and Russian, Christian majority places” (19), and I am also the descendant of enslaved Africans. I do not shuttle between those identities like a child in a shared custody arrangement. I am always both of those things, at the same time.

A focus on the purported confusion of the interracial person serves to maintain a problematic system for assigning identity by distracting from its failures. In a similar way, fixating on the problem of analogy can obscure the larger structural dynamics that govern the way that analogies function in the realm of identity. Because of the way in which acting literalizes the issues of representation and identification in play here, film can provide a helpful way to approach this subject. Consider the case of a controversy about a film’s casting of a White actor in a role that the original source material had identified as Asian. Framing the matter as a question of whether actors should only portray characters whose identity characteristics they share ignores the broader context that gives the matter its urgency. Whitewashing roles does not reflect a philosophical position about identity and acting. It reflects the strength of Hollywood’s preference for White actors. Because of this preference, a White actor can expect to play almost any character, while an Asian actor can’t even count on full consideration for a role originally imagined as Asian.

In a similar way, when it comes to racial justice, the problem of analogy is not so much a problem with analogy per se, as it is the problem of the preference for Whiteness. Whiteness is so deeply ingrained in US American culture as the baseline human experience that it functions as a kind of skeleton key that opens all doors. In that context, analogy stops being a way of making a connection between two experiences by highlighting their commonalities while acknowledging their differences. Instead, it becomes a kind of whitewashing, a way of overwriting one experience with another one that has more social capital.

Better analogies between Black and Jewish experience begin with decoupling Jewishness from Whiteness and acknowledging the Blackness within Jewishness. The reduction of Judaism to White Ashkenazic Judaism not only erases large numbers of Jewish people, but also neutralizes certain tendencies within Jewish tradition. As Lin-Manuel Miranda reclaimed Alexander Hamilton’s immigrant identity and its continuities with the experiences of contemporary immigrants to the USA, so a similar recognition is needed that white people are not the only legitimate heirs to and representatives of Jewish history and tradition. Many Jews became (sort of) White, but that doesn’t mean that the trajectory to Whiteness is the only arc though which Jewish history should be understood and invoked. When Jews move beyond American racial logic and view their tradition with a greater flexibility not constrained by the limits of Whiteness, the foundation has been laid for truly fruitful partnerships with all manner of groups.

Since the pandemic began I’ve spent more time with Birkot HaShachar (a Conservative version), and I’ve been struck by the depth of their correspondence to central themes in African American religion. African Americans have long turned to religion to counteract the experience of racism and cultivate another basis for identity, to be reminded, in the words of Beyoncé, “If you feel insignificant, you better think again…you’re part of something way bigger.” Through the blessings I acknowledge my interconnectedness with all creation, affirm the fullness of my humanity (or in contemporary terms, that my Black life matters), and embrace my God given freedom in the face of experiences that make me feel powerless.

The blessing that identifies God as the one who made me a Jew speaks to my experience of having my Jewishness called into question by people who don’t think I look the part. African Americans have historically gravitated toward modes of religious expression that emphasize a connection with God not mediated through Eurocentric authority, and to me, this blessing expresses such spiritual immediacy.

The blessing that invokes God as the one who clothes the naked employs imagery that has long captivated the African American religious imagination. In the Black Church, prayers frequently reference the gospel description of a man formerly possessed by a demon by offering thanks that one is “clothed and in [one’s] right mind” (Mark 5:15 KJV). Within the spontaneous prayer tradition of the Black Church, this language functions as part of a preliminary to prayers created in the moment, a regularized way of taking stock of the self and expressing gratitude to God. For me, the image of nakedness captures the vulnerability of being Black in the US and living under a constant threat of sanctioned violence.

In the blessing that invokes God as the one who releases those imprisoned, I hear the dismantling of mass incarceration. I also hear the possibility for metaphorical forms of release, such as from ideologies that imprison the mind, like the assumptions about race, gender, and work to which I all too easily succumb.

Then, when the once-crooked self stands upright, the blessings invite me to contemplate the cosmic power of God, a power that far exceeds those social structures that feel so all-encompassing, and that works toward a different end. In When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele observe, “…the only plan for us, for Black people living in the United States—en masse, if not individually—is all tied up to the architecture of punishment and containment” (203–4). In contrast, the blessings affirm that mighty God with loving attention makes a way for us. Beyond the miracle of survival, the blessings remind me of my connection to powerful heritage and hope of overcoming and invite me to draw strength. The closing prayer to be seen, by God and people, through a gaze marked by grace, loyal lovingkindness, and compassion powerfully expresses my desire as a mother sending Black children out into a world in which their ordinary behavior might be coded as criminal and used to justify violence against them.

The prayer to be seen is also a prayer to be recognized and not defined out of existence or bracketed out of relevance. An important step in dismantling the unique form of oppression that is racism in the US is to transform the perception of the color line as an impenetrable barrier stretching across all of human existence. Race as we know it emerged in history. Neither God nor nature assigned each person a place in a discrete, homogenous group. The limitations of making analogies between groups are just as relevant to the process of designating groups as such. Even those who share Blackness or Jewishness, for example, share them differently, including by sharing both at the same time. In the end, it is all analogy.

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Amanda Mbuvi
Amanda Mbuvi is Assistant Professor of Religion at High Point University. She was drawn to her specialization in Hebrew Bible because of the vivid stories and rich language, and because of the way it connects the various streams of her identity. She approaches biblical studies from an interdisciplinary perspective, engaging questions of identity and community that are prominent in both the biblical texts and current conversations about how we live with those texts and with each other. In addition to her biblical scholarship, her work also examines the relationships between Jewish and Christian identity and racial identity as they play out in contemporary literature and film. Her first book, Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Politics of Identity Formation, was published by Baylor University Press.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Policing Analogies

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“Jews for Black Lives.” Photo Courtesy of Gili Getz and JFREJ—Jews For Racial and Economic Justice. Used with permission.

The 2020 uprising for Black Lives following the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota shook the public debate in the US around white supremacist systems and anti-Black racism. Floyd’s killing was just the latest in a long list of murders of African-American women, men, and trans-people. This uprising occurred at the same time that the COVID-19 pandemic was growing in locations across the country, which cruelly and disproportionately inflicted pain upon communities of color. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mainstream options for responding have been reduced to choosing either the liberal narrative of promoting the common good, or a reactionary identitarian individualism—options which usually share elective affinities with one another. Black Lives Matter (BLM) presented another option: the dismantling of a system of white supremacy that was responsible for police brutality, economic inequality, and for the sacrificing of the frontline black and brown bodies of workers for the sake of capitalistic consumption during the pandemic. In a matter of days almost three-quarters of the adult population in the US seemingly supported the movement. This sudden and overwhelming support for a tireless movement, which until recently was largely vilified, led to a quick re-alignment of discourses around a critical engagement with the enduring legacies of white supremacy.

The concern that has been raised for many in Jewish intellectual and activist spaces is how “white American Jews” can draw on the history of Jewish oppression in solidarity with the current anti-racism movement led by BLM without glossing over their own implication in white supremacy and relatedly, in the occupation of Palestinians. Some mainstream Jewish institutions, organizations, and individuals showed their solidarity by creating or alluding to analogies between Jewish experiences of discrimination and oppression and the experience of Black Americans. At the same time, a growing number of intellectuals took an alternative route. By presenting this issue as a problem of “analogies” these intellectuals usually overlook pre-existent historical relations between the events. Departing from their “white Jewishness,” they objected to the relationalities of histories, explaining that analogizing between different experiences of oppression does not necessarily lead people to develop empathy and, as such, is a failed strategy for practicing anti-racism. At worst, analogies between the suffering of Jewish people and African Americans erases and literally “whitewashes” Jewish participation in white supremacy and, by extension, the colonization of Palestinians. While this critical intervention and self-reflexive interrogation of Jewish whiteness could be a corrective to some mainstream institutional excesses, it also seems out of touch with current developments in anti-racism work in Jewish activist spaces and the attendant reimagining of Jewishness as multi-racial, multi-gender, and oriented towards solidarity with others. The interrogation of normative representation and the creation of multi-racial and multi-gendered spaces are inadvertently rendered invisible and inaudible within the anti-analogizing stance. This deflates the validity of this stance as a challenge to simplistic claims to “Jewish [white] innocence.” Ironically, some of the very same scholars harshly objected a year ago when the Holocaust Museum rejected making analogies between the camps in the Holocaust and near the US/Mexico border because doing so did not take into account the complex and entangled global histories of violence and racism.

The question animating this series is as follows: Does the rejection of Jewish histories, experiences, meanings, memories, and texts as foundations for the cultivation of cross-communal solidarity (because of normative Jewish assimilation into whiteness) itself participate in detrimental erasures of openings for multi-racial and solidarity-focused forms of Jewishness and social justice praxis? Relatedly, can there be Jewish solidarity that is indeed substantially “Jewish” if any appeals to Jewishness are suspect of being false equivalencies? The authors will explore whether speaking from the enclosed positionality of “white Jewishness” ends up, perhaps inadvertently, erasing relational histories, reifying the notion of pure identities, narrowing the conversation of racism to self-identified “white voices,” and policing the emergence of a much more diverse American Jewish landscape as well as multi-racial coalitional spaces. Furthermore, some will explore the incongruence between support for Israel and Israeli policies and commitments to Black lives, Palestinian lives, and anti-racism.

The path forward is clear: to disengage from the whiteness into which the above-mentioned Jews became assimilated. To do so, scholars of Judaism in activist spaces must learn from current international coalitions led by non-white communities such as BLM, and they must take an anti-Zionist stance. But because this position can become incongruent if it leads some to internalize their supposed whiteness not as an outcome of a specific history, but as an all-encompassing identity, caution is needed. Acknowledging their whiteness requires that they reject any appeals to Jewish experiences as points of connection between anti-racist struggles. Others author in this series will survey if this enclosure suggests a tacit acceptance by mainstream Jews of their assimilation into European whiteness and the curious geopolitical construct of the “Judeo-Christian.” For example, this is a good time to interrogate privilege and romanticized accounts of Jewish solidarity with African-American struggles such as the participation of Jews in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Nonetheless, in a historical moment in which support for racist immigration policies is wedded with white nationalism and the promotion of the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation is led by Jewish figures at the highest levels of the White House—where explicit antisemitism is also telegraphed and condoned—it is equally important to de-center white Jewishness. Furthermore, it is also critical to analyze the complex ways in which anti-Jewishness relates to anti-Blackness and where and how creating a marked differentiation between Jewish and non-Jewish experiences itself participates in a logic of internalized Jewish oppression. Most critically, it is important to explore if the reification of Jewish whiteness invisibalizes “non-white” Jewish experiences and knowledges and makes building intersectional coalitions that denounce the interlocking axes of racism, classism, and sexism by multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and “non-white” Jewish communities more challenging. Knowing the importance BLM places in building coalitions, the possibility of creating connections between invisibilized peoples seems to be a task that is challenged by the current intellectual resistance to relationalities and analogies.

The Contending Modernities blog will publish essays by Amanda Mbuvi, Lewis Gordon, Shaul Magid, Susannah Heschel, Walter Isaac, Shahar Zach, Jesse Benjamin, Keith Feldman, and others in this series over the next several weeks.

 

 

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Santiago Slabodsky
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Decoloniality article

The Provincializing Work, or What Remains After and Outside Philosophy of Religion


The procession of the Spanish Inquisition in Goa entering the church with standards and banners. Engraving. Photo Credit: Wellcome. Wikimedia Commons.

Rather than being subject to colonization, philosophy of religion has often been an agent of colonial knowledge-production and apologetics. While modern Western philosophy has auto-narrated its projects in terms of equity and emancipation, its impulses to universalization emerged co-terminously with justifications for colonial suppression of non-European populations. Uday Singh Meta describes this violent imposition in Liberalism and Empire. Rather than allowing for equity, Meta writes that such philosophical “generalities make it possible to compare and classify the world…in a single glance and without having experienced any of it.” The consequences of this have been, and continue to be, severe: “But that glance is braided with the urge to dominate the world, because the language of those comparisons is not neutral and cannot avoid notions of superiority and inferiority, backward and progressive, and higher and lower” (20).

Given these formative practices, efforts toward decolonizing continental philosophy of religion should first ask if the task is possible, and to what end? One possibility to contend with is that a “decolonialization” of philosophy of religion might mean divesting from the category altogether. While philosophy of religion, like every academic field, is capable of novel stylization, an urgent question remains: What is at stake in reforming and thereby preserving a discipline that is constituted through and invested in excluding the very perspectives that decolonial practice would seek to affirm?

Another possibility is that a liberatory approach to the history of philosophy of religion might mean the particularization of its major epistemological claims, or what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “provincialization.” In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (1999), he writes, “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought—which is now everybody’s heritage and which affect us all— may be renewed from and for the margins” (17). Because the materialization of European philosophical imaginaries have shaped the world as we know it through its ongoing projects of colonial epistemicide, engagement with philosophy’s legacy is necessary to understanding it.

Chakrabarty’s call to action is simple—to shrink European thought and its universalizing tendencies down to size so as to put them in conversation with marginalized forms of knowledge, practices, and histories. This is done so that the social sciences of our time can give credence to the “normative and theoretical thought enshrined in other existing life practices and their archives” (20)—life practices and archives that have been lost, and presumably will continue to be lost if Eurocentric forms of knowledge-production remain the guarantors of epistemological legitimacy. Despite the clarity of vision, reaching this goal has remained quite difficult for some disciplines, including philosophy of religion.

More recently, scholars in philosophy of religion like Kevin Schillbrack and Thomas A. Lewis have worked to resolve these stubborn tensions. In Why Philosophy Matters to the Study of Religion—and Vice Versa, Lewis provides a helpful survey of contemporary work written under the banner of philosophy of religion, while addressing the discipline’s most pertinent obstacles, one of which is an ongoing tension between historical analysis of religion and attendant concepts, versus efforts towards normative construction. One of the main challenges Lewis seeks to address is “the general lack of conversation between philosophers of religion, on one hand, and those probing the construction of the concept of religion and its consequences for the study of religion” (29). Lewis observes that as a result of this lacuna, the latter scholarship “suffers from a flatted vision of modern Western religious thought inattentive to the depths and extent of debate in the West” over constructions of “religion” and attendant categories like ritual. A way for philosophy of religion to add to contemporary conversations is through normative work, and Lewis observes the tendency in religious studies towards a “suspicion of [philosophy of religion’s] normative claims” (43). Following Chakrabarty, closer engagement with intersecting (sub)disciplines might be a path forward for philosophy of religion and its ability to generate new normative horizons. Such horizons could model the benefits of philosophy of religion that Lewis rightfully notes it can provide.

Thinking with Lewis, a compelling upshot of Chakrabarty’s “provincialization” heuristic is that our normative understandings of social scientific categories like religion should not be separated from a critical account of the harm done through ahistorical reifications. Engagement with the work of scholars like Talal Asad, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Brent Nongbri might be of help here, as they show that the category of religion is a constructed, contingent one, the meaning of which has always been varied and contested. If one finds this work generally convincing, then there is a corollary mandate: that “religion” be understood as a provisional category in the present and future as well, informed by and limited to the vocabularies, grammar, and empirical resources that are available to us. Indeed as these authors have shown, especially Asad and Masuzawa, an analysis of religion’s historicity is necessary for understanding formations of modern colonial subjectivity.

In considering what this provincializing work might look like for philosophy of religion, I turn briefly to  J. Kameron Carter’s critique of Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government in “The Inglorious: With and Beyond Agamben.” While more explicitly concerned with Christian theological concepts, Carter’s approach might serve as one example of the kind of interdisciplinary intervention needed in philosophy of religion.

Carter focuses on Agamben’s argument that early modern theological discourse on human will—specifically, the will to govern and manage earthly activity—increasingly identified human will as a sign of God’s grace. In other words human will is vicariously God’s will. The theological payout of this conceptualization is providential—to bring order to the world, not for the sake of its salvation but only for the increased glory of God. For Agamben, this can be seen in 15th and 16th Jesuit missionary activity, for example. To this end, Agamben is helpful in raising questions about the concrete, historical-material ramifications of this providential disposition toward government, though he doesn’t go quite far enough.

Carter reality-tests Agamben’s analysis against the history of early modern colonialism. In “The Inglorious” Carter asks: If the managerial logic of modern European political economy is co-extensive with a providential theological imaginary that exceeds the formal powers of sovereign territorial states (what Agamben calls “glorification”), does this not render non-European subjects of imperialist imposition and colonial violence “the inglorious”?

The wager of this question is not simply a matter of Agamben’s scope, or what’s being “left out” of the text—he shows that representation of colonial history in Agamben’s project would alter its foundational components. As Carter writes, Agamben provides a blueprint for the process of Europeanization, “while yet repressing the complementary process of non-Europeanization” (81). Projects of “glorification” were also always projects of globalization (80). While Agamben aims for a generalizable account of how “glorification” influenced modern political reason on an axis of sovereignty, this generality belies a deeper fissure on an axis of subjectivity— “glorification” instantiates, and indeed requires, an ongoing “racializing and colonializing, a Europeanizing/non-Europeanizing, social and historical process” (81).

Occlusions of colonial knowledge do not merely render accounts of modern subjectivity incomplete; they render them fantasies.

What I find particularly helpful about Carter’s analysis is that it works “with” Agamben by thinking historically and empirically about the development of modern theological ideas; Carter thinks “beyond” Agamben, however, by challenging the presumption that this genealogy is generally and laterally applicable to all subjects of modern political economy. Rather, Carter contends that if the work of scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Marie-José Mondzain were properly attended to, Agamben’s work could pave the way for an analytic of European/non-European difference as a founding function of modern political economy.

Extending the general logic at play for Carter here, provincializing work can push back the frontiers of European epistemological expansion—frontiers which are always both theoretical and material. In doing so, we can show that occlusions of colonial knowledge do not merely render accounts of modern subjectivity incomplete; they render them fantasies.

Carter concludes “The Inglorious” by invoking the work of Sylvia Wynter, whose research has been tremendously helpful in naming Western theological and philosophical legacies as articulations of one “genre” of humanity—the genre of “Man.” As the modus operandi for providential theology is the will to govern, countless modern philosophical projects were founded on a similar drive to universalization, as Meta has shown in his work. While the category of philosophy is frequently extended to non-European movements and traditions, its institutional representation has remained intractably Eurocentric, further highlighting the need for new genres of thought, new forms of reason, and new modes of human expression.

Carter ends “The Inglorious” by arguing that Agamben’s project would need to turn towards Black studies to generate “a new way of being beyond the (in-)glorious economy of ‘Man’” (86). Similarly, if philosophy of religion is to undergo the needed transformations, the force of its history should be met with a will to provincialize its legacy.

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Danube Johnson
Danube Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the entanglements of early modern natural philosophy, Christian political theology, and constructions of race, slavery, and consent in natural rights discourse. She is currently writing her dissertation on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan
Decoloniality article

Decolonizing Disenchantment


1579 drawing of the Great Chain of Being from Didacus Valades. Image Credit: Rhetorica Christiana. Wikimedia Commons

One of the dominant continental philosophical myths or narratives about modernity is that it emerges as a process of disenchantment, of the disappearance of magic and mystery from the world. But such narratives rarely explore the relationship between what is described as disenchantment and the beginning of racial chattel slavery and European colonialism. I want to suggest that the work of Sylvia Wynter might help us better understand the interplay of modernity, disenchantment, secularization, and the invention of race.

The notion that the advent of modernity marks the beginning of a process of disenchantment is commonly attributed to Weber, but has very old roots in Western thought. This includes, as Jason Josephson-Storm has recently argued, European folk and fairy tales, which, as far back as Chaucer, were mourning the passing of the age of magic. For Sylvia Wynter, this process of disenchantment—or, as she sometimes refers to it, “degodding”—is the result of an epochal shift in the “genre of the human” in the West, the fundamental schema which organized Christian social life. What happened at the advent of modernity, Wynter argues, was that what she calls the “Christian” genre of the human gave way to what she calls “Man1.” Under this new “descriptive statement,” rather than being defined primarily as the religious subject of the church, the archetypal human came to be defined primarily as the political subject of the state. Where the human-as-Christian was defined in opposition to heretics, infidels, and lepers, the human-as-Man1—sinful and excluded from participation in the church—was instead defined in opposition to indigenous and Black people, who were seen as irrational and savage, and therefore excluded from citizenship. Where the world configured by the human-as-Christian concept was organized by proximity to the church and therefore by degrees of spiritual perfection, the world configured by the human-as-Man1 was organized by participation in and extension of the state. Wynter says that this transformation of the genre of human represents the “first degodded … ‘descriptive statement’ of the human in history” (266). She argues that by releasing the physical world from its primary relationship to God, it became possible to know it as it was in itself, rather than as it was in relation to human beings and as a reflection of the hierarchical values of the society which examined it.

Here Wynter’s account echoes that of Charles Taylor‘s, for whom the disenchantment which marked the birth of modernity meant a new separation of the self from the rest of the universe and the loss of the sense that moral forces exist outside of human beings in the physical world around us. For both, this separation is connected to the flourishing of the natural sciences. For Wynter though, what happens is not simply the loss of any sense of the broader universe as the mirror of human societies, but the transposition of the key distinctions between good and evil from the physical world to biology—from a belief in the separation of the earth into earthly and heavenly, habitable and inhabitable, to a belief in the separation of humankind into rational and irrational, citizens and slaves. This shift is in turn followed in the 18th and 19thcenturies by a second “degodding,” or secularizing, move in which Man1 became Man2. Where Man1, defined by possession of God-given rationality, was only partially secularized, Man2, defined by evolutionary success, is fully secularized. Man2 is defined without relation to God but instead defined solely by reference to nature and to biology. Wynter repeatedly describes these shifts in terms of disenchantment—as processes of  “desupernaturalizing,” of “degodding.”

I want to suggest that it’s not so much that God became less capricious, less sovereign, as it is that European men became more sovereign, precisely insofar as they—as kings, reformers, explorers, or property-owners—appropriated for themselves sovereignty which had previously belonged only to God.

What Wynter’s work suggests is that the process of disenchantment is related to the transfer of sovereignty from God (implicitly, the Church) to the king-as-sovereign (implicitly the State). Wynter suggests that one of the limitations of the medieval European order was its insistence on God’s absolute sovereignty, and therefore God’s absolute ability to intervene at random and change the laws of nature. The modern transformation of nature from an order held together by the will—and therefore also the caprice—of God into a more regularized and rule-bound order which could be mapped and travelled (that is, Wynter’s shift from Christian to Man1 as the genre of the human), was made possible by the emergence of a new, humanist understanding of the relationship between natural man and the Christian God. On this account, God had created the universe specifically for humankind, such that its laws were “rational” and “nonarbitrary.” But I want to suggest that it’s not so much that God became less capricious, less sovereign, as it is that European men became more sovereign, precisely insofar as they—as kings, reformers, explorers, or property-owners—appropriated for themselves sovereignty which had previously belonged only to God. What we see from this period onward is the transposition of characteristics previously attributed to God onto human beings. The Great Chain of Being so beloved of medieval theologians placed man-as-Christian firmly in his place, a little higher than the beasts and a little lower than the angels, bound firmly in place below God by the chains of the created order. But with the birth of modernity, this structure began to mutate. For Hobbes it was the sovereign of the nation state who acts as the lynchpin. For Descartes, God was reduced to the link which holds together the sovereign individual subject with the ordered universe. And for Kant, the categorical division of the world was effected solely by the individual mind. As sovereignty is transposed from God to the sovereign human being, so too the ordering of the universe comes to be in the hands of the sovereign figure of Man.

Where Wynter sees this process as one of a de-humanizing of the physical world such that nature is liberated from its spiritual meaning, I think we might instead see it as something more like a deifying of the secular state, such that nature is subjected not to the free and gratuitous will of God, but to the free and arbitrary will of human beings, whose sovereignty comes to be defined ever more in terms of ownership of private property. What are the papal decrees which divide the whole inhabited world into the property of nascent European states if not the appropriation of the divine power to create by dividing? How else are we to account for the mania for classification and division which accompanied the emergence of new and previously unimaginable violent powers of property-owning human beings over the people and lands which were thus newly created as property, or for the inexpressible violence of the newly invented private sphere, the nation, the colony and—above all—the plantation? What disenchantment tracks, I am suggesting, is the shifting role of religion, the state, and the natural sciences in organizing both law and sovereignty.

Taking seriously Wynter’s account of the entanglement of disenchantment with epochal shifts in the genres of the human begins to suggest, then, that disenchantment is not so much about the disappearance of magic and mystery so much as their transformation. It is about the violent destruction of old social and metaphysical bonds which tied people to one another and to the world around them in order to bind them to new masters who were appropriating for themselves both legal and sovereign power—to nation states and European citizens, which is to say, to slavers and colonizers.

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Marika Rose
Marika Rose is Senior Lecturer in Philosophical Theology at the University of Winchester. She works at the intersection of continental philosophy and theology; her current project focuses on angels and cyborgs. Her first book, A Theology of Failure: Žižek Against Christian Innocence was published by Fordham University Press in 2019.
Decoloniality article

Decoloniality and Philosophy of Religion

and

 

Islamic illustration of Aristotle teaching a student, c. 1220. Wikimedia Commons.

To think about (continental) philosophy of religion of religion and decoloniality calls for a critical interrogation of the very category philosophy of religion. Does philosophy of religion name a genre of thought or a delimited tradition? Can it be more broadly conceived to encompass modes of critical theorizing that have not heretofore been considered part of the field? We believe it is possible and valuable to apply the categorical designation philosophy of religion to anti-colonial projects that will rearrange the epistemological assumptions of much of the work carried out under that heading. This project requires accounting for the dual forms of violence that define Euro-descended Christianity by its Others while also paradoxically claiming to represent and speak to humanity in its totality. These claims, today as in centuries past, are only coherent if the non-European and non-Christian are understood as less than human. The loftiest and most basic forms of human valuation are thus directly connected: those said to do “philosophy” are those who (really) count as human.

Philosophy of religion’s relationship to race and coloniality is also tightly connected to European understandings of the term “philosophy,” which took shape in the eighteenth century and continue to be prevalent today. The dominant understanding and definition of philosophy developed then has a particular genealogy that was born out of the modern imaginary of the west. The claim that philosophy has Greek roots intentionally portrays Europe as the first and greatest agent of critical and rational thinking and relegates non-western traditions of philosophical thinking to culture and religion. Greek thought is taken as the forebear of universal norms and ideals of science, medicine, aesthetics, ethics, and politics (democracy), all of which reflect the universal progress of history, while non-western traditions are identified as lacking rational rigor and critical perspective, and therefore universal relevance. (It should be noted that the tightly intertwined modern definitions of race and religion are based on distinct yet related civilizational hierarchies; we address this confluence in more depth in the introduction to our forthcoming volume Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion).

This philosophical lineage relies on a number of distortions, oversimplifications, and erasures. In Isonomia, Kojin Karatani displaces these age-old assertions of western metaphysics’ and political philosophy’s claims of Greek origin by identifying their origin in Ionia, an ancient Greek colony in Anatolia. The reduction of philosophy’s root to a single European origin also underestimates the long and persisting influence that Arabic-Islamic thought had on western philosophy during the Middle Ages. The thirteenth-century Arabic-Latin translation movement had significant impact on the formation of European disciplines of science and the humanities, particularly in natural philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and ethics. Indeed, it was Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes) original reading of Aristotle that reintroduced Aristotle to Europe. Rushd’s influence persists widely through the western philosophical tradition, most notably in the work of Spinoza. However this history is usually downplayed in intellectual genealogies.

Before the eighteenth century, it was common for philosophers to attribute philosophy’s origin to places outside of Europe such as India, Egypt, China, and Persia. According to Robert Bernasconi, the eighteenth-century reinvention of philosophy as a Western tradition was due to a specific concern that needed to be addressed: the existence of what seemed like philosophy in China. It was around this time period that historians of ideas began to deny the existence of philosophy in Africa and Asia. While religion had previously been a marker of civilization, it became a category used to distinguish non-European spiritual cosmologies from the rational operations of philosophy.

This is not simply a matter of exposing the racist moments tainting an intellectual history, but of understanding the extent to which philosophical claims are inseparable from questions of narrative, context, and power. The field of philosophy as commonly recognized has retained relative immunity to the various challenges emerging from global geographies of power and knowledge. A similar tendency prevails in radical philosophical (neo-Marxist and postmodern) critiques of modernity and capitalist globalization when Europe remains the sole agent and reference of knowledge production. As Santiago Slabodsky rightfully insists in his essay published earlier in the series, “not every radical philosophy is decolonial.”

Scholars working within more normative bounds of philosophy of religion do attempt to apply and revise its texts and authors for present contexts. Some have, in search of an alternative to rationalism, turned to Spinoza’s monism or to the existential-phenomenological tradition. Phenomenology’s (and deconstruction’s) contributions to analyzing the limitations and potential of western philosophy cannot be underestimated. The problem is that they are often viewed as solutions to the limitations and epistemic violence of western metaphysics (this is especially the case when the reception of these works is devoid of analytics of power). The religious turn in continental philosophy, concepts of pluralism and secularity, and comparative studies that displace the universality of Christian thought, have garnered significant attention in philosophy of religion over the past two decades. Its relevance for addressing issues of ecology, social inequality, democratic theory, and religion’s place in politics is argued as both a defense of and challenge to the field’s accumulated ways of producing knowledge.[1] These are all important initiatives to rework the sedimented habits of thought and argument that tightly guard the boundaries of philosophy of religion. Yet even among these more recent works, the basic canon of thinkers and texts is left relatively untouched.

Questioning the normative status of the term philosophy and attempting to reclaim and decolonize the term itself involves deconstructing the racist history haunting the archive of philosophical canons. Underlying this problem, however, is the epistemic edifice that sanctions exclusion and hierarchy. This edifice is inseparable from the European colonial ideology driven by imperialist desires and racist worldviews. This same gatekeeping labels philosophers from outside the traditional Continental canon as theorists, critics, artists, writers, poets—at best, thinkers. Philosophy as a concept and as a field self-segregates from the analytics of power, a key tool of analysis that is crucially relevant across the broader humanities and social sciences.

Questioning the normative status of the term philosophy and attempting to reclaim and decolonize the term itself involves deconstructing the racist history haunting the archive of philosophical canons.

To question the validity as well as the effects of epistemic hierarchies on centuries of scholarship and politics intervenes in—and performs, actually constitutes—philosophy of religion. We do not aim to secure the comprehensiveness of philosophy of religion by adding to its competencies issues of race and coloniality. Rather, we would argue for their centrality in reading and interpreting the normative tradition. To read decolonially is to undo certain possibilities of approach, even as one offers others.  There are numerous examples of philosophers from the Global South whose works have made invaluable contributions to decolonial philosophy of religion, even when their work does not go by that name. Gloria Anzaldúa, Enrique Dussel, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Albert Memmi, and María Lugones are just a few among many others who inspire our work of reconfiguring philosophy of religion in the Americas. Our endeavor to engage their work is reflected in our previously mentioned forthcoming co-edited volume. There are, moreover, many who have already begun the work of decolonizing philosophy of religion in ways that inspire, complement, and intersect with our work.[2]

In Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion, editors Purushottama Billimoria and Andrew Irvine suggest that philosophy of religion as a form of knowledge must be reconfigured to account for, respond to, and address the experiences of colonized people (4–5). Yet the relationship between knowledge and experience is precisely what is at issue. Decolonizing philosophy of religion cannot be a straightforward matter of inserting “experiences” of colonized and racialized persons to qualify or even determine the content and propositions of philosophical work. A more fundamental and epistemologically oriented examination is needed. We should instead ask how philosophy of religion is itself a colonialist project, and what other options develop among those who not only experience racism and colonization but also actively work against their ways of seeing and shaping the world.

[1] See, for example, the work of Molly Farneth, Jeremiah Hackett and Jerald Wallulis, Tyler Roberts, and Kevin Schilbrack.

[2 Just to name a few, George “Tink” Tinker, Sylvia Marcos, Mayra Rivera, Gil Anidjar, J. Kameron Carter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Santiago Slabodsky.

 

 

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Eleanor Craig
Eleanor Craig is Program Director and Lecturer for the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights at Harvard University. Spanning literary, philosophical, and theological discourses, Eleanor's work focuses on critically theorizing relationships between race and religion. Eleanor is co-editor with An Yountae of the forthcoming Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion from Duke UP. 
An Yountae
An Yountae is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at California State University, Northridge. He specializes in Religions of the Americas with a particular focus on Latin American/Caribbean religion and philosophy. He is the author of The Decolonial Abyss (Fordham University Press, 2016) as well as the co-editor with Eleanor Craig of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021). His new book, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World Making is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2023).
Field Notes article

Literature, Theology, and Abul Kalām Āzād


Illuminated frontispiece of a manuscript of Bostan, a book of poetry by the Persian poet Saadi. Photo Credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen. Wikimedia Commons.

Madrasa education in South Asia suffers from a lack of a robust engagement with modern forms of education, including literature, science, theology, and philosophy. As a graduate from a women’s madrasa in Rampur, India, I know this through my personal experience. While the Madrasa Discourses program at the University of Notre Dame has successfully tried to remedy this gap by bringing the fields of science and philosophy to bear on Islamic thought, one area to engage with that could enhance its curriculum is that of literature, which can shape critical discourses in the humanities. One example of such engagement with literature for the formation of thought can be found in the life and writings of Mawlānā Abul Kalām Āzād (1888-1958).

Āzād, a prominent Muslim religious figure on the Indo-Pak subcontinent, deployed literature as a significant discursive resource in theological and religious conversations. The name Mawlānā Abul Kalām Āzād might not elicit instant name recognition with an international literary audience, but he was almost a household name on the subcontinent for the better part of the twentieth century. Āzād was a leading freedom fighter in India’s independence movement and went on to become the first Education Minister in post-independence India, a position that he held until his death in 1958. Āzād was a loyal member of the Indian National Congress and was its president twice, the first time from 1923-1924 and the second from 1940-1946.

I briefly explore a thread of his work that links the study of Islamic theology, the role of traditional madrasa education, and the use of literature. Thanks to Āzād’s deep connection with a range of Islamic literary resources he was in a position to both critique theological education in the madrasas and also frame a new inclusive theology for a multicultural and multi-religious India.

Born in the holy city of Mecca in 1888, Āzād hailed from both Indian and Arabian ancestry. His father offered spiritual leadership as a pīr (Sufi master) to tens of thousands of followers at his headquarters in Calcutta. Āzād was educated at the hands of his rigorous father and a set of private tutors his father scrupulously vetted. In his autobiographical essays known as Ghubār-i Khāṭir (The Accumulated Dust of the Conscience) he mentions how rigorous his education was while not so subtly registering his disagreement with the content of that education, describing how he increasingly found it suffocating.  Out of this disagreement, Āzād came to espouse modern ideas that informed his thinking about religion that went beyond his traditionalist training.

Āzād was grounded in the Arabic and Persian theological, juridical, and literary classics at an early age.  At home, he spoke a pidgin Arabic with his Arab mother and Urdu with his father.  At a very early age he became interested in journalism, much to the chagrin of his father. His father had expected him to succeed him in the leadership of the charismatic Naqshbandi Sufi order. But Āzād diverted from the family tradition.

As a young adult he wrote as a journalist in Nairang-i- Ālam (Deception of the World) and thereafter in his own paper called Lisān-ul-Ṣidq (The Speech of Truth). His articles in Lisān-ul-Ṣidq reflected his progressive views on the subject of education and he drew on his own experiences. In those articles, he argued that educational reform was key to social reform. He launched a publication called al-Hilāl (1912-1914), which was nothing short of a revolution in Urdu journalism. Al-Hilāl played a transformative role in India’s freedom movement. It became an epitome of boldness and fearless journalism. Readers were often baffled and impressed as to how he intertwined religious ideas and political issues. Each publication bore the hallmarks of Āzād’s distinctive Urdu writing style, for which he set a new benchmark. The two newspapers, al-Hilāl and later al-Balāgh, are the most outstanding examples of his animated journalism.

Portrait of Mawlānā Abul Kalam Āzād. National Repository of Open Educational Resources. Wikimedia Commons.

Āzād’s traditional education remained foundational for his thought and he never gave up on his honorific “Mawlānā”—which signalled his status as a theologian—despite his turn to the virtues of modern education. His personal journey between two streams of education is captured in this observation: “The ancient belongs to me as a legacy from my forefathers, and so far as the modern is concerned I have carved my own way” (7). Gifted with a brilliant mind, Āzād acquired modern education thanks to his intellectual rigor as an autodidact. Bridging the old and the new, he arrived at a unique synthesis of Islamic humanism in the early twentieth century context of a multicultural, multilingual, and multi-religious India.

Even though he was deeply attached to his tradition, he was unwilling to follow it blindly. His interpretation of Islam was not conventional. He believed in independent thinking based on reason. For example, he believed that the madrasa system, which was intended to produce religious leaders in the Indian subcontinent, was outdated. Anguished in Accumulated Dust he described this educational system in an unvarnished manner:

“It was an outdated system of education which had become barren from every point of view. It is deficient in selection of the subjects of study, choice of books, modes lecturing and dictation, to mention but a few” (97).

Āzād agonized over the need to adopt a critical posture towards tradition, but he also recognized its immense power. In Accumulated Dust he criticizes the suffocating narrow-mindedness of his education but characterizes the power of tradition in these revealing words:

The biggest obstacles in the way of a person’s mental development are his traditional convictions. No power can incarcerate a person in the manner that the chains of traditional convictions can fetter one. One cannot break these chains easily, because one does not really wish to do so. One cherishes these fetters of tradition as precious ornaments. Each belief, practice and viewpoint gained through one’s family heritage and by means of one’s foundational education, accompaniment and apprenticeship (sohbat) appear to be like a sacred inheritance. One will defend this at all costs. But one will never have the courage to meddle with it. Sometimes the grasp of inherited convictions is so strong that even the most effective education as well as environmental changes cannot unshackle its hold. Education can to some extent influence the mind but cannot change the structure of the mind. The mind’s edifice is always constituted by a line of descent, family and centuries of successively handed down traditions whose hand will always be the most effective. (100)

One may thus ask how Āzād attained the power and courage to distance himself from tradition and then critically re-engage with his own tradition. I would argue that literature was the critical tool that enabled his critique. In fact, one can say that what set Āzād apart from his contemporaries was the literary bent of his mind, which made it possible for him to explore new domains of thought and re-deploy tradition in interesting ways.

Āzād took to poetry as almost an essential component of his critical thinking. In some of his most insightful writings he draws freely on Persian and Arabic classical poets to renew thinking without offending too many conservative religious scholars (ʿulamā). Intensely imaginative and romantic, he looked at the world through the eyes of a poet-philosopher and a visionary and refused to let himself be confined to the traditions provided to him by his family and education.

His literary taste and intellectual depth enabled him to confront the uncertainties and qualms about his inherited religious values and traditions. There did come a time in his early life when he was confronted with a tempest of questions. He wondered, for example, about the existence of the truth. His study of religions, philosophy, and poetry stirred many questions in his mind. The upheaval of confusions that shook his inner world of ideas can be traced to the many Persian, Arabic, and Urdu couplets he cites in his writings. These couplets not only satisfied the aesthetic sensibilities of Āzād as a reader but also enriched his mind with new insights and possibilities.

The divine, Āzād concluded, was a mystery and there were multiple ways to access God. In Accumulated Dust, a couplet from the poem of the late 16th and early 17th century Persian poet of Indian origin Muḥammad Ḥusayn Nazīrī Nisapūrī (1560-1614) allows him to tell us that God’s face is a mystery. We human beings try to find God through our own subjectivity and therefore the Divine comes to us in different forms:

“If the face of the truth is veiled, then the sin of looking at things nominally;
Is a flaw in your form-worshipping eyes” (41)

Āzād finds inspiration in a couplet of late medieval Persian-language poet of IndiaShaykh Abū al-Faiẓ Ibn Mubārak, better known as Faiẓī (1547-1595):

“The she-camel and its ringing bells are indispensable to the beauty of our caravan;
My desire for you allows me to cross the roads; but your pain only increases my desire” (41).

Faiẓī allows Āzād to think of life and religion as a journey of love in search of the eternal beloved. He draws on the visible beauty of a she-camel ploughing through the desert who breaks the silence of the desert by the jingling and ringing of the bells hanging around her neck. But this journey is not only about bells and their movement or the mellifluous sounds they make. There is another desire. The traveller is going in search of God. The traveller is in search of the Divine, the object of one’s love. Here God is personified as Love. These visible mediums that make it possible for one to travel through the desert—like the she-camel and bells— do not and cannot fully represent the enthusiasm in the heart of the traveller. The plight and quandary faced by the seeker in pursuit of the Divine only increases the enthusiasm.[1]

This literary insight allows Āzād to explain that humans look at the divine differently over time. Although religions walk and talk separately, their destination is one. “The unity of [humankind] is the primary aim of religion,” writes Āzād in his famous commentary Tarjumān Al-Qur’ān. “[T]he message which every prophet delivered was that [humankind] were in reality one people and the one community, and there was but one God for all of them, and on that account, they should serve [God] together and live as members of but one family. Such was the message which every religion delivered” (138; see here also).

Group photo of Madrasa Discourses participants during 2019 Winter Intensive. Doha, Qatar.

Under the leadership of Professor Ebrahim Moosa and his colleagues in the Contending Modernities program at the University of Notre Dame, the Madrasa Discourses (MD) program is an attempt to bridge different knowledge and cultural traditions. As an active participant, I have been a beneficiary of this program whose goals are to inculcate critical thinking and allow participants to explore multiple analytical approaches. The MD syllabus has been designed in a thoughtful way. It offers a variety of subjects and topics ranging from Islamic and Western philosophy, Muslim political thought, discussions about interreligious encounters, and debates that deepen our insights into language, logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of science.

My background in Arabic literature led me to realize that an additional emphasis on literature would add to this already immensely successful program. Following Āzād and the famous poet and literary Alṭāf Ḥusayn Hālī (d. 1914) among other thinkers, I believe that drawing on the literature that the participants already know so well from Arabic, Urdu, and Persian sources would propel them to develop a different kind of propensity for deep and critical insight. Literature has an invisible power. It resonates primarily in the body, soul, and the mind. It turns one into a contemplative mystic, a philosopher, a social critic, and a romantic, all at once, by its tender touch.

To think critically means one has to closely study one’s surroundings and look at things in unprecedented ways. We know that the voice of literature has the power to create such new ways of seeing. Literature speaks intimately to the reader, providing an insight into the inner working of the mind and body, leading to the production of innovative ideas and practices. Literature exposes the reader to new experiences both in the past and present. It also makes us bold and empowers us in what we believe in passionately and gives us new resolve to effectively oppose what is harmful.

Perhaps those of us who studied in the madrasas missed out on this valuable aspect of literature during our foundational training.  I can say without any hesitation that what is alleged to be literature in the madrasa curriculum is a travesty. Classical Arabic and Persian literature is reduced to a few texts, mainly poems, and is used only in order to facilitate the memorization of some ancient vocabularies. We spent an inordinate amount of time analyzing and explaining new vocabulary, but we failed to grasp the soul of the narratives and poetry: their moral and aesthetic dimensions.  Perhaps this is also a reason why our approach to every text and reading turns out to be dry, simplistic, and monotonous. Often, we fail to go beyond the words. Therefore, the inclusion of literature in the MD syllabus may turn out to be a fruitful and productive step in enhancing the learning experience through the imagination.

Āzād is an exemplary figure for Islamic thought. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that it was through literature that Āzād gained his critical bent of mind, insight, farsightedness and most of all a strong pen that moved generations and shaped their minds and imaginations. Madrasa Discourses may yet benefit and flourish if it explores literature most earnestly as a part of its intellectual framework.

[1] I thank Prof Ebrahim Moosa for his assistance in translating the Persian couplets into English and for his gracious help in editing this text.

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Sameena Kausar
Dr. Sameena Kausar is Assistant Professor in the Department of Arabic, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad, India. She received her Ph.D in Arabic Literature from Jamia Millia Islamia. She is a member of the Literary Committee, Dairat-ul-Maarif, Hyderabad. She has translated Al Ghirbaal, a book of modern literary criticism in to Urdu from Arabic. Her research interests include literature, women’s issues, the environment, and religion and society.
Global Currents article

Turkey’s Hagia Sophia Decision: The Collapse of Multiculturalism and Secularism or Something More?


Hagi Sophia with Turkish flags draped across its front. Photo Credit Flickr User Alper Çuğun, 2007.

On July 10, 2020, the Council of State removed the obstruction preventing the Hagia Sophia—which had been converted into a museum in 1934 during the Mustafa Kemal era, and which had long been on the list of World Heritage Sites—from being given the status of mosque. Immediately after the decision, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that the Hagia Sophia would be opened for worship on July 24, 2020, a date that is not arbitrary. The 24th of July is significant for Turkey’s Kemalist elements—though perhaps not for Erdoğan and other Islamist actors—because it is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey’s founding text. That day, President Erdoğan arrived at the “mosque” for Friday prayer, sat on the new mosque floor, bowed his head, and listened to a melodic recitation of the Qur’an. This historical moment was carried live on most of the Turkish TV channels, which have been significant propaganda tools for his regime.

Apart from this historical show for Erdoğan, the Hagia Sophia decision turns a new page in the battle between Kemalists and Islamists, one that has shaped Turkish politics for decades. But the decision, I believe, also encompasses much deeper motives regarding the production of a politically expedient appearance of a clash of civilizations and the marriage of populism-nationalism with the instrumentalization of religion in service of the political desires of repressive political actors.

Why Was the Decision Made Now?

Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II by Gentile Bellini. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Wikimedia Commons.

The conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque is one of the most critical points where the political and religious aims of Islamists and conservative nationalists intersect in Turkey. For both of  them, Sultan Mehmet’s conquering Constantinople in 1453, renaming the city Istanbul, and converting of the Hagia Sophia—a symbolic house of worship for the Christian world—into a mosque marked the date when Islam and Turkishness began to collectively experience a golden age. According to the Turkish Islamists and nationalists, Mustafa Kemal’s decision to convert it into a museum was a concession to Christian-Western world, and indicated weakness in relation to it. In this regard, history, according to the Turkish Islamists and nationalists, has, no doubt, immortalized Erdoğan as the leader who forced and implemented this decision. In the future, when the histories of Istanbul, Turkey and, perhaps, Islam are written, Erdoğan will be remembered for this decision.

But Erdoğan, until a year ago, defined himself as a leader who had not “gone off the rails” enough to make such a decision, despite the demands of the Islamist groups in Turkey. He expressed that he desired to convert the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, but he also knew that to express this desire in action would exact a severe toll from the rest of the world. Though the cost of the incident is unclear for Turkey, almost the entire world, from Russia to Greece, and from the United States to the European Union, have announced their condemnation of the decision. It has become one of the most discussed issues in recent weeks.

Some commentary claimed that Erdoğan’s decision pertained directly to domestic politics. According to these voices, Erdoğan faces a mounting challenge. He finds himself confronted with a decaying economy, extreme authoritarianism, newly established political parties, and the opposition’s proficient administration of metropolitan municipalities. He undoubtedly adopted such a radical decision to stave off this challenge, and there is now commentary suggesting that, as a result, his falling share of the vote will rise. However, interpretations along these lines ignore one critical point. Research has shown that this decision, however symbolically impactful, will sway the voting preferences of the electorate by no more than 1 percent. Despite this, however, it appears that this decision will, in a much broader sense, have a profound meaning and contain significant consequences for both Erdoğan and the political vein he represents; most of his supporters see the conversion as a victory against the Christian West.

Are Turkey’s Laicism and Multiculturalism Collapsing?

Immediately after the decision was announced, Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel award winning Turkish author, declared that the decision spelled the end of Turkey’s laïcist state identity. Numerous other scholars claimed that Turkey’s multicultural configuration now faced a grave threat. If we are to fully grasp what Turkish secularism embodies, we must understand that this decision originates, somewhat paradoxically, from the environment that laicism cultivated. Turkish laicism, as the continuation of a Byzantine-era practice, is inherently dependent upon the state’s control and guidance of religion in line with the state’s interests and objectives. Here it diverges from the French and Anglo-Saxon understanding of secularism. In other words, Turkish laicism relies not on the separation of religion and state but on the state’s control of religion. In this context, the way that the state decided on the status of the Alevis’ Cem houses of worship mirrored the way that the state—and the mentality that dominates it —decided on what the Hagia Sophia would be. This reveals to us that Turkish laicism has begun to be used instrumentally beyond this collapse to further indurate the roles of religion and the state because it protects Sunni Islamic values as well as Turkish nationalism, and is consistent with the ideological conceptions of the current regime.

As I recently underlined elsewhere, one must contemplate the issue of multiculturalism in a similar way. Turkey, as is known, was founded in the ashes of the Ottoman Empire as a nation state with certain normative boundaries that coincided with the conditions of that period. Compatible with modernist nationalistic discourses, after Turkishness, being a Sunni Muslim was one of the unwritten stipulations for a person to be a desirable citizen, within, of course, the boundaries of what constitutes being Sunni that the state demarcated. Incidents such as the events of September 6–7, 1955, the suppression of the Kurds’ native language rights, and the state’s ignorance of the Alevis’ places of worship, demonstrate that the melting pot in Turkey has not been one that has successfully promoted multiculturalism and religious tolerance.

However, Erdoğan’s gradual deviation from liberal values after 2010, and his synthesis of nationalism and Islamism in this departure, have mangled Turkey’s already problematic multicultural structure. While domestically demanding conformity, Erdoğan internationally began to consolidate his supporters by broadcasting the West’s opposition to him. This, by necessity, precipitated an expansion in the definition of the “other.” Following the Hagia Sophia decision, serious discourses were wielded in Turkey to portray it as a victory seized from the clutches of the West, damaging the country’s already waning stature of tolerance and co-existence.

Will the Hagia Sophia Decision Have a Profound Impact?

The Hagia Sophia decision has three underlying normative causes and three potential repercussions associated with it. These issues have not occupied much space in previous debates.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey arriving at NATO meeting. Photo Credit: NATO.

First is the moral superiority that both Erdoğan and the Islamist, nationalist, and conservative segments in Turkey have attained in opposition to Turkey’s founding Kemalist ideology, which has long been hegemonic. Ultimately, Erdoğan directly inverted a situation that represented one of Ataturk’s own decisions and eliminated what his ideological base of support had for years considered taboo. Though perhaps somewhat excessively, some may view this situation as “revolutionary.” However, this absolutely does not mean—even though it might seem so in the wake of this decision—that the current regime can codify in the constitution the phrase: “The official religion of Turkey is Islam.” The other historical desires, such as to restore the caliphate of Turkish Islamists, are not applicable for the state structure of Turkey, or at least will not be for many years to come.

The second point passes beyond Turkey’s borders. “The resurrection of the Hagia Sophia heralds in the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” Erdoğan proclaimed in a speech he gave about the Hagia Sophia decision on the evening of July 10, 2020. Although the decision is purely symbolic, it should be pointed out that it is also concerned with the broader Muslim world. It is recognizable in light of the debates about Islamic soft power on the one hand, and the referencing of historical battles in foreign policy on the other. In other words, some often recognize such deployment of pan-Islamic sentiments as examples of religion’s function as a soft power in domestic and international policies, and Turkey has always been a country case for these discussions. Discussions persist between the Muslim nations of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran regarding who will amass influence over Muslims around the world. These nations are opening mosques in a multitude of other countries, from Cuba to Australia, and are providing assistance to Muslims. They are fundamentally engineering propaganda for various interpretations of Islam. Though this battle appears to be waged between nations, the role of leaders is significant, and Erdoğan has sought to secure his own advantage with the Hagia Sophia decision. The discomfort this situation arouses becomes particularly evident when we see publications in the Saudi press criticizing this decision. But, regardless of the current situation, this battle will have neither an end nor a victor.

Erdoğan would have certainly utilized the clash of civilizations and ethno-religious discourse in domestic politics, as he has done previously, if a harsher reaction had emerged from the West.

The final point has a more global dimension. This point concerns the way that Turkey has synthesized religion and nationalism and has become absorbed in a rigid and aggressive clash of civilizations framework. Having produced agreements and joint initiatives—particularly with Spain— that were labelled as an alliance of civilizations under the Erdoğan administration in the early 2000s, Turkey has become a vanguard of the rightist, populist, and nationalist authoritarian governments that began to appear in the 2010s. Turkey, drawing on religious-nationalist rhetoric, has positioned itself as a challenger and rival to the West with whom conflict must be maintained. That the Hagia Sophia decision effectively commissions a communal world heritage site to serve the interests of a single religion via the use of sovereigntist discourse demonstrates that Turkey wishes to continue with this battle. This conflict will end with Erdoğan clinching his natural base of electoral support. And Erdoğan would have certainly utilized the clash of civilizations and ethno-religious discourse in domestic politics, as he has done previously, if a harsher reaction had emerged from the West.

Religion, Right-Wing Populism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond

Finally, Turkey’s Hagia Sophia decision, while met mostly with shock, worry, and concern outside of Turkey, appears to be fairly consistent with the direction in which both Turkey and the much of the world veered in the early 2010s. Turkey, like many nations around the world, is gradually withdrawing from international cooperation and is resorting to a new distinction between civilizations by synthesizing nationalism with nostalgic visions of history, memory, and religion. This will undoubtedly create a jarring effect, although perhaps not directly or immediately, and will unfortunately hasten Turkey’s disintegration. Furthermore, it is clear that in the Turkish case the reconcilition of the instrumentalization of Sunni Islam with Erdoğan’s right-wing populism and Turkish nationalism has created various tensions with other cultures and civilizations. In this regard, one also might claim that we have been experiencing a relatively new dimension in the political and societal role of religion and in its global instrumentalization. We can read this situation, which arises through a complex confluence of factors, as the concentration of religion at the core of a politics implemented by oppressive and populist political actors who position religion as the premier element in both their personal identities and the national identities they administer or pursue.

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Ahmet Erdi Öztürk
Dr. Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is an assistant professor (lecturer) of politics and international relations at London Metropolitan University. Between 2021-2023 he will work as Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at Coventry University in the UK and GIGA in Germany. He is also an associate researcher (Chercheur Associé) at Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes and editor of International Journal of Religion. He was a Swedish Institute Pre- and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), at Linköping University, and was Scholar in Residence at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He is the author of more than 20 peer-review journal articles, numerous policy reports, opinion pieces, and co-editor of four special issues on religion and politics and Turkish politics. Dr. Öztürk is the coeditor of Authoritarian Politics in Turkey: Elections, Resistance and the AKP (IB Tauris 2017), “Ruin or Resilience? The Future of the Gulen Movement in Transnational Political Exile” (Politics, Religion, & Ideology, 19.1 [2018]) and Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey (Routledge 2019). His first solo-authored book, Religion, Identity and Power: Turkey and the Balkans in the Twenty-First Century will be published by Edinburgh University in early 2021. He is a regular contributor to media outlets such as Open Democracy, The Conversation, Huffington Post and France 24.