Blog

Decoloniality article

Towards a Decolonial Approach to the Qur’an


Qur’an leaf in Kufic script. Late 9th to early 10th century. Denver Art Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Is a decolonial approach to the Qur’an possible? And if so, how can such an approach be of benefit to scholars of Islamic and religious studies? In the last few decades, various disciplines in the humanities have witnessed an unprecedented growth in both self-criticism and creative reconstruction. This growth is commensurate with the increased presence of racial and religious minorities in the academy and the subsequent epistemological interventions they have brought. Thanks in large part to the pioneering work of scholars like Edward Said; Gayatri Spivak; Talal Asad; Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh; Dipesh Chakrabarty; Sylvia Wynter; and more, the academy has become a fresh site for the interrogation of existing modes of knowledge and fertile soil for the birth of novel ways to think through the task of decoloniality.

This essay follows in the footsteps of such scholarship by providing a short reflection on what a decolonial approach to Islamic studies can potentially offer scholars of the field, starting with the Qur’an—the central scripture of Islam—as a site for decolonial analysis and praxis. However, rather than review or express preference for a hermeneutical or exegetical approach in the literature, I instead reflect over the Qur’an as an epistemological structure and meditate on the task of students and scholars in appreciating it as such. This essay is thus less about marshaling a methodology of Qur’anic hermeneutics or exegesis than it is about approaching the Qur’an—and by extension the wider Islamic tradition—from a structural and epistemological standpoint.

On the whole, much more work needs to be done by scholars in interrogating how they write about “religion,” both within and outside of the field of religious studies. This may have partly to do with the implicit (or explicit) secularity of western academia as a discursive site, or with residual conceptions of religion drawn from the European Enlightenment—whether liberal or Marxist—as a distinct interior/private domain of belief (as opposed to that which is exterior/public) or as mystification concealing material oppression. As An Yountae writes in this publication, “The large absence of engagement with religion in the study of modernity/coloniality is symptomatic of the coloniality of knowledge which informs the religious/secular binary. Taking decolonial thought seriously means considering the challenges and insights decolonial thought offers to the study of religion.”

This absence of decolonial religion is particularly acute in Islamic studies, where paradoxically, in an attempt to distance themselves from traditional Orientalist scholarship, which had historically relied on an essentialized Islam as the sole unit of analysis and/or explanatory factor, scholars in the field have largely avoided considering Islam as it shapes the subjectivities of the Muslim faithful in meaningful ways, let alone drawing from its resources as a mode of decolonial critique. One notable exception is the work of Salman Sayyid and scholars in Critical Muslim Studies, whose works can offer a starting point for discussion on the subject.

As Talal Asad has aptly noted, the terminologies we employ to make sense of “religion” are not universal but rooted in a Protestant Christian history. Thus, a decolonial approach to the Qur’an also means de-Christianizing how we understand it as a text and its relationship to Muslims. It follows that the themes, motifs, narratives, and frameworks of the Qur’an ought to be understood without having the need to ground themselves first in Christian and Christianizing versions of the same.

The Structure of the Qur’an as a Decolonial Site

The Qur’an is not an easy text for those unfamiliar with its structure. If one is reading it in translation with an eye accustomed to a linear-chronological reading of scripture, it poses a challenge. As Muhammad Abdel Haleem writes, its content “was placed in different sections, not in chronological order of revelation, but according to how they were to be read by the Prophet and believers” (xvi–xvii). The original Arabic reading/recitation is thus central to Qur’anic self-disclosure.

Furthermore, the Qur’an’s stories are framed not as distant tales of the ancients, but as memories to be retrieved: “And remember when We took a covenant from the prophets, as well as from you (Muhammad), and from Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, son of Mary. We did take a solemn covenant from all of them” (Q 33:7). The distance between the reader and the event is collapsed, as if to suggest that the reader was there. Memory is not a thing of historical time, but a metahistorical device that serves to invigorate the present. In every moment, through the pain and the joy, we were with Muhammad, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.

In the rest of this essay, I would like to reflect on three points. First, on the ordering of the Qur’an’s verses; second, on the centrality of the original Arabic recitation to Qur’anic self-disclosure; and third, on the Qur’an’s employment of memories as epistemology, as I believe all three can offer potential avenues for decolonial scholarship.

Qur’anic Organization as Decolonial Subversion

If one were to read the Qur’an in translation, the sudden shift from one story, theme, or concept to another with no indication may strike one as odd, but it is precisely this lack of linearity that makes the Qur’anic corpus a subversive site for thinking about the decolonial. While we moderns may expect—or even demand—a text to have a sense of linearity so that it can be comfortably compartmentalized, the Qur’an structurally defies such terms from the very beginning. It consciously refuses compartmentalization, demanding to be taken holistically on its own terms. The organization of the Qur’an is itself a form of liberation.

The recital of these stories, passed down orally from generation to generation, engages the sensory, cognitive, and bodily senses all at once. They are inseparable, and to view one to the exclusion of others would constitute an act of epistemic violence. It is because of this quality of orality that the Qur’an is memorized by millions of Muslims of all social classes throughout the world, typically starting from a young age. Indeed, both secular and religious scholars alike have marveled at how its prosaic exhortations flow with its poetic virtuosity. One may not know a single word of Arabic and yet listen to a recitation feeling the continuity between its rhythmic verses as if they were exactly where they were meant to be. This is where the text begins to make more sense, for without the embodied recitation of the Arabic verses, engagement with the text can feel frustrating or wanting. One may, however, ask whether it is possible to thus appreciate the Qur’anic text in a language other than the original. Does decolonization necessitate a type of linguistic supremacy or nativism?

Qur’anic Pedagogy as Decolonial Embodiment

In his book Secular Translations, Asad clarifies that it is not the Arabic language per se that is sacred and nontranslatable, but “the enunciation of divine virtues” within the Qur’an “whose full sense is not given in a dictionary” and requires cultivation (60). This cultivation is nurtured not merely through reading the text, but living it, through recitation and other forms of embodiment.

Qur’anic school in Kani Kombolé, Dogon country Mopti region, Mali. Photo by Olivier Epron, 2005. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Here, the work of Rudolph T. Ware III is an instructive example: “We have been missing a basic fact: the human being as a material reality and practices of corporeal remolding are essential for the classical epistemology of Islam to work” (7). Ware’s intervention stands at the forefront of decolonial religion, even if he may not explicitly express it as such. By tracing the history of Qur’an schooling in West Africa, Ware shows how modern (secular) academia and modern knowledge as a whole, with its Cartesian split between mind and body, fail to appreciate—let alone understand—premodern Islamic modes of learning in West Africa.

Furthermore, it is key to see the Qur’an in relationship to the discursive tradition that flows from it. As Asad writes, “the nontranslatability of the Qur’an in a liturgical context makes it difficult for political as well as ecclesiastical authority to control Qur’anic meaning. The original is always present, generating unlimited possibilities of meaning” (60–61). It is precisely the Qur’an’s untranslatability that makes it a generative site for decolonial praxis. The epistemic humility it engenders is a refusal to submit to colonial modernity’s attempts to domesticate the text.

Scholars of Islamic studies might benefit from conceptualizing the Qur’an, and by extension the Islamic tradition writ-large, as sites for the cultivation of subjectivities that can only be formed through terms of their own making, rather than as problems to be solved within or against colonial modernity’s paradigmatic modes of being. By rethinking the terms along these lines, Islamic studies would better be able to cross-fertilize with Black studies, Africana studies, Latin American studies, feminist studies, and more.

Qur’anic Memories as Decolonial Struggle

As Ware powerfully expresses with reference to enslaved West African Muslims forcibly brought over to the Americas, they were “stripped naked, beaten, and starved in the hold of a slave ship, shipped thousands of miles from home, and put to a lifetime of labor in unfamiliar surroundings,” but nonetheless endured all of the above “without surrendering [their] knowledge” (69). They never surrendered their knowledge because they never surrendered who they were, as the knowledge—the Qur’an—was embedded into their being.

Just like in the Qur’an’s call to remember the prophets, in Black radical thought, invoking the ancestors is not merely a rhetorical technique, but an epistemological grounding. It was in reading about others, James Baldwin once said, “that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” The temporal distance between “ancestors” and “descendants” is severed by the transcendental immediacy of the present. There is no “drawing from the past” because there is no “past” in the sense of linear historical time.

“Remember,” as the Qur’an says. The prophets and ancestors are with us now.

3 Comments on Towards a Decolonial Approach to the Qur’an Array
Asad Dandia
Asad Dandia is a Brooklyn-born writer, organizer, and graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. His interests include modern Islamic thought, Sufism, and Islamic intellectual history, and he seeks to bring them into conversation with critical theory, radical/labor politics, and post/de-colonial thought. He is also co-host of the New Books in Middle East Studies podcast at the New Books Network and was a 2020 Fellow at the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop. He holds a BSW from New York University and draws from his experience both as an academic and a community organizer to connect theory with praxis on a range of subjects. His MA Thesis at Columbia is entitled, “Rethinking Islamic Studies: Muhammad Iqbal’s Philosophy as Decolonial Critique.” 
Decoloniality article

A Conservative Decoloniality?: On the Limitations of Irish Decolonization


Executive Council of the Irish Free State as of October 1928. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In a June 2020 post for Contending Modernities, Santiago Slabodsky made a thesis elegant in its simplicity: “Not Every Radical Philosophy is Decolonial.” Introducing his overarching argument through an analysis of The Battle of Algiers, the 1966 classic radical film on Algerian decolonization, Slabodsky makes the insightful claim that within the logic of this cinematic work, “Europe contains the proposal and its dissent while the underside is invisibilized,” with that “underside” being Europe’s colonized. In the anti-colonial (but not decolonial) The Battle of Algiers the actual voices of “the native Arab/Berber resisters . . . are rapidly silenced by legitimized voices.” Whereas radical anti-colonialism is the critique and subversion of colonial power, decolonization is the communal recuperation of power, land, and agency by the colonized—something that is not accomplished in The Battle of Algiers, Slabodsky argues, insofar as the colonized are never substantially granted a voice in the movie’s critique of the colonizer.

Slabodsky’s claim is reflected more broadly in Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Tuck and Yang insist on the conceptual specificity of decolonization: “Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects” (2). In contrast to other social justice concerns, decolonization for Tuck and Yang is “the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted” (7). Both Slabodsky’s claim that “not every radical philosophy is decolonial” and Tuck and Yang’s claim that “decolonization is not a metonym for social justice” (21) effectively distinguish decolonization from other radical struggles and philosophies of social justice.

Yet one should also ask: Does the converse also hold true? If not all social justice philosophies are decolonial, then might it be that not all decolonial thinking necessarily integrates the demands of those other social justice philosophies? Reworking Slabodsky’s claim, I suggest, one should also say that not every decolonial philosophy is radical. In other words, the decolonization of the mind—defined by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as the “struggle” of the colonized “to seize back their creative initiative in history through a real control of all the means of communal self-definition” (4), a struggle that is accomplished by re-empowering Indigenous philosophies—does not necessarily accomplish many of the tasks of radical philosophy being explored on a planetary scale. Here, I understand “philosophy” in its colloquial sense as a framework and system of thinking, and therefore inclusive of theology, political ideology, language, and so on.

To clarify this claim I want to explore one specific example in this post: early twentieth-century Ireland’s hegemonic decolonial Catholic philosophy. This philosophy helped mobilize a nation against colonial occupation and subsequently shaped the postcolonial sociality of the Irish Free State. But it was anything but radical. It was patriarchal, at times anti-Semitic, and based on rigid social hierarchies.

Decolonial James Joyce and Dissenting from the Irish Free State

James Joyce was well aware of this. Late twentieth-century and postmillennial reassessments of his work like those by Maria Tymoczko, Michael Rubenstein, and Enda Duffy have noted that Ulysses, his 1922 modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set in 1904 Dublin, was published almost conterminously with Irish decolonization, a historical event that the novel subtly (though undeniably) supports. Many likely initially approached these decolonial readings with skepticism due to Joyce having willfully exiled himself from Ireland, going so far as to refuse applying for an Irish passport after decolonization. In 1909 he even said that he “loathe[d] Ireland and the Irish.” There was apparently no love lost, as is evident in that fact that the free Irish government refused Joyce’s wife’s offer “to permit the repatriation of [the author’s] remains” after his death.

Perhaps most significantly, however, is Joyce’s lifelong rejection of Catholicism, a stance widely noted dating back to Richard Ellmann’s canonical biography of the writer and discussed in regards to Joyce’s literary work by Chrissie Van Mierlo. The issue at hand, as John Coakley argues, is that by the end of the nineteenth century there had been a conflation of Irish and Catholic identities; belonging to the (colonizing) British or (colonized) Irish community was largely articulated in terms of one’s faith. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, “[the Irish language] word Sasanach (which today means simply ‘English’) was understood also to mean (Anglican) Protestant” (98). Joyce’s rejection of Catholicism was likely perceived as a rejection of Irish belonging.

Catholicism would seep into the very organizational structure of much decolonial Irish politics. For example, Senia Pašeta notes that in the early nineteenth century the Irish activist, Daniel O’Connell, created the Catholic Association, a political organization fighting for Catholic Emancipation whose dues were gathered by priests during Sunday mass (22–23). Moreover, although frequently challenged by their congregations, as Cara Delay has argued, the Catholic priest through the era of decolonization was a powerful hegemonic figure in Irish politics. As Coakley cites David Miller, by the 1930s the Catholic Church had “made the Irish political system serve her interests with consummate skill and determination” (107).

James Joyce. Photo credit: Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Yet, while recognizing the disjunction between Joyce’s lack of allegiance to Catholicism and hegemonic decolonial Irish politics’ symbiosis with Catholic philosophy, we should also note that Joyce also maintained ideological consistency throughout his life with regards to another element of Irish political reality: British colonial occupation of Ireland was unequivocally unjustifiable. As one of the protagonists of Ulysses, the 22-year-old Irish intellectual, Stephen Dedalus, says when describing his life under colonial occupation: “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (34).

This anti-colonial position is expressed in Ulysses when Joyce compares Penelope’s suitors in Homer’s Odyssey, who greedily consume the riches and labor of Ithaca, to an Englishman, Haines, who lives rent-free in the home of Stephen Dedalus. Indeed, after thinking to himself, “He [Haines] wants the key. It is mine. I paid the rent” (20), Dedalus announces to Haines that as an Irishman he is forced to be the “servant of two masters . . . [t]he Imperial British state . . . and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” (20). It could not be clearer: Joyce opposed both Catholicism’s stronghold on Ireland as well as British colonialism.

It should therefore be unsurprising that Joyce, at least at times, fiercely opposed the conservative collaborative ties between the Catholic Church and the Irish Free State. As quoted by Van Mierlo, his friend, Arthur Power, even remembers Joyce having said at one time, “Now I hear since the Free State came in there is less freedom. The Church has made inroads everywhere . . . and I do not see much hope for us intellectually” (Van Mierlo, 71). Joyce critiqued the conservative union forged between the politics of the Irish Free State and the hegemonic Catholic philosophy that underpinned decolonized Ireland’s communal self-definition.

Joyce was not without reason for making this critique. As Caitriona Beaumont has shown, within only a few years of postcolonial Ireland’s existence hegemonic Catholicism was already insisting on repressive patriarchal measures to limit women’s autonomy. For instance, a 1932 marriage bar “prevented women teachers, and later female civil servants, working after marriage” (573). By the time a new draft constitution was written in 1937, citizenship for women had been redefined “solely in terms of her function as wife and mother” (563).

The rejection of women’s autonomy was not the only limitation of the partnership between Catholicism and the Irish Free State. While the identification of Irishness with Catholicism principally served to cohere a decolonial national identity and philosophy in contrast to British Protestantism, this binary ignores that not all Irish were Catholic. To give just one example, Cormac Ó Gráda has extensively documented the lives of Jewish communities and individuals throughout Ireland during the early twentieth century. Catherine Heszer has particularly argued that there was a consistent tension between Catholic and Jewish Irish, with some Irish Jews, like writer David Marcus, expressing that their Jewish identity prevented them “from feeling like a full-fledged Irishman” (163).

While the identification of Irishness with Catholicism principally served to cohere a decolonial national identity and philosophy in contrast to British Protestantism, this binary ignores that not all Irish were Catholic.

This social marginalization of Jewish Irish people at times boiled over into explicit anti-Semitic violence that drew on conservative Catholic theology. Often unmentioned in scholarly literature on Ulysses is the fact that the novel takes place in the midst of what has been called the Limerick Pogrom or Boycott, a phenomenon analyzed by Dermot Keogh in which a Catholic priest, John Creagh, catalyzed a boycott of Jewish-run businesses since, when he stated, “the Jews have proved themselves to be the enemies of every country in Europe, and every nation had to defend itself against them. . . . Let us defend ourselves before their heels are too firmly planted upon our necks” (36).

This tension between Jewish identity and Irish belonging is registered in Ulysses with one of the protagonists of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, being seen as “not Irish enough” (700), to quote Bloom’s wife, because he was often identified as Jewish by fellow Dubliners (Marilyn Reizbaum extensively shows that his own relationship to his Jewishness is difficult to parse out). As Neil Levi, Margot Norris, and I, among many others, have discussed, Joyce’s Ulysses is an explicit attack against modern anti-Semitism and its relationship to Irish decolonization.

Moreover, against the perception of Jews being “not Irish enough” and despite discussing how “creed” can serve as a “separating force” between Catholic and Jewish Irish (630), Ulysses addresses how “points of contact existed between these languages and between the peoples who spoke them” (641). As Maria Tymoczko argues more extensively, the novel explicitly and affirmatively supports religious and international pluralism within a liberated Ireland. Tymoczko even identifies the mythical medieval Irish collection, The Book of Invasions, as the literary model for Joyce’s decolonial image of “old Ireland becoming renewed” (49), an imagined Ireland that, she continues, is populated by Jews, Greeks, Irish mythical beings, and Spaniards, among others. Joyce’s decolonial vision was explicitly intercultural, interreligious, and international.

For a Radical Decolonization

Joyce is therefore consistent: absolutely and without hesitation favoring Irish self-determination and decolonization, he nonetheless abhors how the politics of Irish Free State was predicated on a conservative Catholic philosophy. Yes, not every radical philosophy is decolonial. But, as decolonized Ireland demonstrates, not every decolonial philosophy is radical. Even many decolonial Irish Catholics would likely have agreed that they were not radicals, with Kevin O’Higgins famously describing his group of Irish decolonizers as, “the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution.”[1]

What Joyce illuminates is the following: there is no justice without decolonization, but decolonization alone does not sufficiently guarantee justice. In other words, a reading of Joyce articulates the following: hegemonic decolonial Irish Catholicism enabled rigid social hierarchies, patriarchal repression of women, and at times anti-Semitism, but none of these conservative, ill-begotten, repressive cultural and political positions justify the brutalities of colonialism or the stripping of the right for collective self-determination.

Acknowledgment: The author would like to acknowledge and thank Santiago Slabodsky, with whom he had a stimulating virtual discussion about his piece for Contending Modernities prior to writing this post.

 

[1] Jason Knirck cites, contextualizes, and complicates this quote. The conservative reputation of postcolonial Ireland has been additionally challenged by Andrew Kincaid.

1 Comment on A Conservative Decoloniality?: On the Limitations of Irish Decolonization Array
Maxwell Woods
Maxwell Woods is a member of the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Viña del Mar, Chile. His work often focuses on the relationships between urbanism and decolonial insurgency. In addition to his book, Politics of the Dunes: Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City (Berghahn Books 2020), his scholarly work has appeared in Social and Cultural Geography, Literary Geographies, Cultural Politics, and Cultural Dynamics (where he has also discussed the relationship between James Joyce, decolonization, and anti-Semitism). 
Global Currents article

Secularism’s Prisoners


Departure from Saint Louis for the Eighth Crusade. Illumination of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 14th century. Paris, BnF, Manuscripts department, French 2813, folio 298 verso.
Čeština: Ludvík IX. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

They’ve taken us prisoner,

they’ve locked us up:

me inside the walls

you outside

But that’s nothing.

The worst

is when people—knowingly or not—

carry prison inside themselves . . .

Most people have been forced to do this,

honest, hard-working, good people

who deserve to be loved much as I love you

–Excerpt from Nazim Hikmet, 9-10pm. Poems.[1]

In his signature analysis of European society, the late Tony Judt wrote about how the burden of history weighed heavily on the continent in the twenty-first century. Judt reflected on Europe’s self-image, memories, and culture at a time of great change.  At this time, globalization was increasing the exchange of goods across a variety of cultural and political boundaries. As such the people exchanging these goods were also experiencing the world in new ways.  Judt’s insight, in a nutshell, was that “the problem was not so much education . . . [but] the public uses to which the past was now put. . . . Governments no longer exercised a monopoly over knowledge and history could not be altered for political convenience” (768).

As a historian Judt was not wrong about Europe’s burden of history. But no one in Paris seems to have heard him when he said that the government cannot control knowledge and history. Currently, ultra-secular French politicians vainly insist on pursuing forms of secularism that do not resonate with all its citizens. Provocatively one might ask: Which history and knowledge of Europe are we talking about? Today’s Europeans also include Muslims and their experiences ought to be part of the moral and political conversation.

The public use of France’s history was most recently put on display in an episode that injured and wounded the sentiments of the country’s estimated 5 million Muslim citizens. How? Sadistically laser projected onto Paris’ government buildings were highly inflammatory and demeaning caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, a figure cherished by Muslims around the world. In doing so, a sector of the French public and its government took delight in abuse under the guise of the right to free speech, a cherished value with deep historical roots in French political society. This episode followed on the heels of a terrorist beheading of Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher who displayed satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in his classroom to cement the doctrine of free speech in his students.

Colluding in this outrage was president Emmanuel Macron, who, in an act of collective psychic punishment, abetted the public display of the caricatures. This collective punishment recalls colonial modes of governance which the French used with abandon in its North African and Sub-Saharan colonies (126–27). To Macron’s mind such retaliatory measures were a corrective to the conduct of the “barbarians” in the heart of the Republic, namely the Muslims, ironically described by Houria Bouteldja as the “wretched of the interior” (121).

Playing the role of secular theologian-at-large, but more accurately as a trainee exorcist, Macron deigned to teach French Muslims how to become assimilated French citizens. He repeatedly signaled his expertise to exorcise the supposedly non-French Islam out of the bodies of his Muslim wards. Actually, Macron was merely rephrasing the infamous words of the dreadful Belgian king Leopold, the founder of the International Congo Society, who on September 12, 1876 told the Geographical Society in Brussels how to civilize Africa: “Civilization opens up the only part of the globe it has not yet reached, piercing the darkness, enveloping the entire population. That is, I wager to say, a crusade worth of this century of progress” (216). The theater of Macron’s crusade is his own backyard, the banlieues—from where the uncivilized darkness will lift when floodlit by the vaunted French version of secularism, laïcité.

Judt’s 2005 sprawling Postwar ironically spoke of French anxieties of the loss of civilization and memory. France’s remedy was to construct the Muslim as the “other.”  Two decades into the twenty-first century France finds itself in the midst of a crisis over knowledge and history. While the issue ought to be more complex given decades of immigration by the “unassimilable” Muslims and Arabs, the difference in perception between France’s Muslims and apologists for a xenophobic vision of France is stark. History and knowledge, namely the experiences of those inhabiting France’s economically deprived banlieues, stands in glaring contrast with the Republic’s account of knowledge and history, the latter of which is symbolized by the Arc de Triomphe at the western end of Paris’ Champs-Élysées.

The theater of Macron’s crusade is his own backyard, the banlieues—from where the uncivilized darkness will lift when floodlit by the vaunted French version of secularism, laïcité.

For decades citizens of Europe who are of non-European descent—or as one analyst put it, immigrants who are “extra-European”—were frustrated to the point of despair in their bid to ensure that the rules of governance also reflect their sensibilities (157). Anthropologist Talal Asad long ago noted how Europe’s new immigrants and citizens in the context of Britain were denied a say in “the construction of a domain within which legitimate politics can be practiced—a politics to defend, develop, modify, or redefine given traditions and identities” (305). The continuous formation of the European state ought to include the views, emotions, and feelings in laws, norms, and values of those who are excluded, albeit in constructive contestations, as Asad implies.

In ways not unlike resurgent white power in North America, the Germans, the British, the French, and other European nations have resorted to nostalgia to recover lost memories. The presence of persons of “extra-European” origins have displaced the memories of white Europeans. Now Europeans, and more so the French, feel they are not heirs to history but are cast as its orphans and victims. The creative re-imagining of the national past in France, wrote Judt, was of another order altogether, where history was now replaced by nostalgia (769).

Stripped of territory and resources by war and decolonization, France’s confidence and the security of its global empire were in the latter half of the twentieth century replaced by a search for the nation’s le patrimoine in initiatives led by Presidents Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac. They supported efforts to recover selected memorabilia of the French past. Overtaken by demographic transformation and the anxiety of loss, they inflated France’s cultural patrimony by physically enlarging heirlooms. During the Mitterand era this included enlarging the Port du Gard near Nîmes and Philip the Bold’s ramparts at Aigues-Mortes. During the same period, the prominent Parisian historian Pierre Nora was commissioned to edit a monumental three-part, seven volume, Les lieux de mémoire, translated as Realms of Memory. The French took care to preserve their historical, political, and cultural memories to the exclusion of the memories and symbols of its newer citizens, whose culture only deserved to be ignored.

French Jews were lucky: they received one entry in Realms of Memory. In a few paragraphs Claude Langlois wrote about Muslims and Arabs on the coattails of the following thought, namely, that between 1950 and 1970 some 250,000 to 300,000 Jews emigrated to France, many of whom were Sephardic Jews from North Africa whose ethnic presence went largely unnoticed. More worried was “a public much more keenly aware of the new presence of Islam on French soil” (115). Nothing captures the awareness of the presence and “problem” of Islam and Muslims better than the words of Archbishop, and later Cardinal Lustiger of Paris. Addressing a parent-teacher school event in 1982, he hailed Napoleon I’s recognition of Catholicism, the Protestant Church, and Judaism as a great milestone. “But what difficult problem we face now,” a traumatized Lustiger wondered, “with the unforeseen arrival of large numbers of French-speaking children of Islamic background!” (115).

The exclusion of Islam, France’s second largest religion, from the detailed analysis as an aspect of French culture “was not an oversight” but was deliberate, for there was “no assigned corner for Islam in the French memory palace,” observed Judt (774). On the face of it, this might appear to be an instance of mutual entrapment between the dominant French establishment and the Muslim subalterns in France. But on closer scrutiny, there is greater reluctance on the side of the establishment to provide Muslims any corner. France might profit from an exercise in remaking its national “knowledge economy” (121). Secularism as a modality of life has become, as social scientists would say, too “path dependent” to assume the exclusive right to the production of knowledge and is insufficient as a knowledge economy to deal with the range of experiences of people (238). In the words of Talal Asad, one will have to come to terms with the fact that for some Muslims being Muslim “is first and foremost a way of life and death oriented by a religious tradition in which moral freedom is not conceived of as the identity of the self with itself” (24). Collective flourishing and peace might only be possible when immigrant experiences are more fully integrated into the national life. This requires going beyond the integration of celebrity Franco-Arab football players and rap music artists, who are nonetheless pioneers in this new effort.

April 26, 2018 – President Emmanuel Macron at the OECD. The president attended the No Money for Terror global conference which was organized by the French Government. OECD, Paris, France. Photo Credit: OECD/Victor Tonelli.

Terrorist acts by Muslim actors who avenge their political outrage in the theological rhetoric of blasphemy of a bygone era and those secularists engaging in the collective punishment of Muslims both contribute to a setback in human relations on the global stage.  Human solidarity and global interdependence are indispensable for our collective survival as the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change dramatically make plain.

If France and Europe value their symbols then they will have to learn to respect the symbols of multiple cultures and civilizations. Deliberately mocking the sensibilities and religious symbols of religious minorities amount to psychic pain, as Elaine Scarry points out in the Body in Pain. Similar to sensory pain experienced by the body is the pain experienced in the working of the imagination. Why? “While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects,” writes Scarry, “the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects” (162). Imaginary pain, Scarry suggests, is more immediate, causing deeper and more lasting pain. As architectural historian Samir Younés writes, “Intellectual meanness procures satisfaction to the minds of those who enjoy inflicting emotional pain with the intention of causing feelings of inadequacy in a victim.” This amounts to the artistic elimination of the “other” (101). Commodifying Muslim religious symbols and turning these into weapons of torture, bullying, and offense are deplorable acts of violence clothed as free speech, especially when other acts of free speech such as Holocaust-denial and the denigration of people based on their race and/or gender are rightly deemed as hate speech and crimes.

Denigrating and dehumanizing Muslim subjects by turning their religious symbols into weapons of psychic torture allies the Western secular with revanchist Christian culture in a bid to redraw crusader-like boundaries of civilization once more. Muslims inside the West are the unthinkable “difficult problem,” in Cardinal Lustiger’s words. Actually, Macron and his allies at Charlie Hebdo and at Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten are icons of a new secular crusade masquerading as free speech.

Talal Asad described Britain in the 1980s in haunting commentary equally applicable to France today. Asad observed, in remarks soaked in satire, that European states are suffering a post-imperial identity crisis “as an unhappy instance of some immigrants with difficulties in adjusting to a new and more civilized world” (241). Proponents of the European Enlightenment once lectured the rest of the world about the need to embrace complexity. But many Europeans continue to think in straight lines, binaries, and reductionist models. Therefore, Asad’s analysis deserves repetition: “If Europe cannot be articulated in terms of complex space and time, which allow for multiple ways of life and not merely multiple identities to flourish, it may be fated to be no more than the common market of an imperial civilization, always anxious about (Muslim) exiles within its gates and (Muslim) barbarians beyond.” His question was: “In such an embattled modern space—a space of abundant consumer choices and optional lifestyles—is it possible for Muslims to be represented as Muslims?” (24–25). Things have since worsened. French police continue to round up scores of 10 year-old Muslim kids at dozens of schools and terrorize them for hours at police stations for allegedly supporting terrorism. In this case secularism, like terrorism, makes “people carry prison inside themselves” in the poet Nazim Hikmet’s compelling words.

 

[1] John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance,  36. Translated by Randy Blasing and Muten Konuk.

1 Comment on Secularism’s Prisoners Array
Ebrahim Moosa
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
Decoloniality article

The Decolonial Turn in Liberation Theology: Between Theory and Praxis


Colors blend on the horizon. Photo Credit: Flickr User Stuart Rankin.

The term liberation theology was consolidated in the context of Latin America in the 1960s. Many currents of Black Liberation Theology in the United States were also developed at the same time. Immediately after the Iranian revolution and during the rise of subaltern movements across India, the first work explicitly named as Islamic Liberation Theology written in 1979 was published by Asghar Ali Engineer. At this time, feminist liberation theologies also developed as part of a minority history of mainstream currents of liberation theology. In short, there is no single origin for liberation theologies, and thus it is impossible to write a single history of liberation theology. Liberation theology is a contested category, both in terms of its naming and in the reality of what counts as liberation and theology in any given political setting.

Even so, the praxis of liberation theology across different horizons has emphasized the preferential option for those on the margins. Praxis is a hermeneutic circle of action and reflection that happens in communities of oppressed peoples and names what liberation theology is in a particular context. The struggle to determine the meaning of liberation theology as a praxis—to make it meaningful for the marginalized—has been filled with interesting twists and turns within the multiple horizons of liberation theology. Caste, gender, nation, class etc. have served as different horizons for it. The constant reinvention of text and context in liberation theology has led it to become a mode of theological engagement that always oscillates between “action and reflection-based” praxis, which in turn makes its theoretical foundation unstable.

The “decolonial turn” in liberation theology is part of a larger global decolonial praxis and also part of the reinvention of liberation theology in a new context. The decolonial turn, according to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, refers to the repositioning of power, subjectivity, and resistance beyond modernity/coloniality. Such a repositioning is made possible by creating a horizon of liberation in terms of symbols, language, being, epistemologies, and spiritualities. The emergence of decoloniality as theory and praxis has influenced the way in which scholars envision politics and theology across several fields of social theory and political praxis, including liberation theology.

The decolonial turn in liberation theology helps various liberation theologies to comprehensively connect with one another in solidarity against oppression, and, at the same time, to delink liberation theology from the elitist aspiration of the coloniality of power and knowledge in both the Global South and North. For instance, the post-Cold War world order witnessed the end of strict class-based social analysis in liberation theology. This was because this form of analysis was unable to mediate between various forms of oppression in different parts of the world. The emergence of decolonial studies and decolonial movements in the post-Cold War era has connected various modes of social analysis and resistance at a global scale. The achievement of decoloniality as a paradigm of global social theory has been to stitch together various modes of social analysis in a pluriversal conversation on liberation theology from multiple contexts of oppression. At the same time, liberation theology was primary in the formation of decoloniality itself, especially with regards to the methodological foregrounding of praxis, as well as the preferential option for those on the margins. Praxis is the common element, and common strength, that holds both liberation theology and decolonial theory together, and they both run afoul when they forget this aspect of their methodologies.

Two Components of Liberation Theology

Historically, there have been two components in the varying praxes of liberation theologies. The first component is called the “core concern.” The core concern in liberation theology has been the preferential option for the oppressed. Though it is the key component, there is no fixed meaning of the preferential option for the oppressed in all contexts. It is a type of floating signifier which escapes essentialist attempts to fix its meaning towards a final end. The second component is a “historical project.” This second component is contingent upon the historicity and context in which the core concern is embedded. The colonial and postcolonial context has determined the historical projects of different types of liberation theology by foregrounding the context of oppression in the form of class, gender, race, religion, caste, nation, ecology, etc. in any given historical context. Because of the disputed question of how to contextualize the various historical projects that have been carried out in its name, there has been a struggle to determine the meaning of liberation theology.

The decolonial turn in liberation theology helps various liberation theologies to comprehensively connect with one another in solidarity against oppression, and, at the same time, to delink liberation theology from the elitist aspiration of the coloniality of power and knowledge in both the Global South and North.

During the heyday of liberation theologies, the postcolonial historical project in terms of class— or “the poor”—was an over-determining factor. Later, gender became a central paradigm after the rise of various feminist theologies in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. These complicated the strict class analysis of the early historical projects of liberation theology. In the context of Islamic liberation theology, categories that changed the shape of liberation theology included the “poor” and “powerless and rightless masses” (Shabbir Akhtar); the “other,” “marginalized,” or “oppressed” (Farid Esack); and the “subaltern” or “multitude” (Hamid Dabashi). These complicated both the historical project and core concerns of Islamic liberation theology.

The emergence of a decolonial turn, however, more radically changed the meaning of the historical project and core concerns of liberation theology. The coloniality/decoloniality paradigm of Enrique Dussel was more sensitive in understanding the problem of the preferential option for the oppressed as a core concern within a decolonial historical project. Dussel defined this preferential option as an “other” within the periphery of the modern/colonial world-system. The Dusselian notion of the “other” is a broader decolonial category of alterity than the preferential option for the poor in traditional liberation theology. It is without the baggage of economic determinism or other forms of eclecticism that were present in earlier avatars of liberation theology, and contains within it a strong emphasis on praxis.

Limits of the Decolonial Turn in Liberation Theology

The decolonial turn in theology was an immanent phenomenon that emerged through the fragmented/dispersed epistemologies of various liberation theologies. The multiple experiences and theories of liberation theology from different contexts enriched and contributed to the arrival and emergence of the decolonial turn in liberation theology. For instance, Latin American liberation theology and Africana liberation theology see “race” as an organizing principle of religion and liberation after the decolonial turn. The earlier attempts to find a common denominator for different types of liberation theology failed due to the lack of a coherent narrative that could bind different geographies and epistemologies together in terms of colonial experience. In other words, the counter-hegemonic efficacy of a global liberation theology as pluriversal praxis was not historically successful due to the absence of a global paradigm such as decoloniality.

The decolonial turn in liberation theology situates the coloniality of being, knowledge, and power as part of a global struggle, without reducing the complexities of “local” contexts. For instance, a dialogue between  the politics of caste—a major  historical project in understanding South Asia—and decolonial paradigms around race in other parts of the world demands serious attention. This critical dialogue has the potential to change the decolonial turn in South Asian liberation theologies in particular, and in turn can influence more generally the global praxis of decolonial liberation theology. The pluriversal construction of various horizons of liberations in the decolonial turn is thus a unique advancement of the praxis of the marginalized in different social and political contexts.

The evolving praxis of a decolonial liberation theology underscores that the conversation between decoloniality and liberation theology is not unidirectional. The historical experience of liberation theology as a praxis teaches us that there is a need to develop a critical eye towards the way contemporary decolonial scholarship has failed to emphasize praxis. Like the history of liberation theologies, the decolonial turn must not become another elitist exercise in the production of knowledge/power. The evolution of liberation theology all over the world has demonstrated that the praxis of the marginalized has repeatedly built new horizons of liberation. This strong methodological emphasis on praxis marks the uniqueness of liberation theology. In a recent introduction to decoloniality, Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh write about praxis without foregrounding it as the first step in the decolonial method. Against this seeming error, the foregrounding of praxis must come as the first methodological step for the decolonial turn in liberation theology. The problem space of praxis makes the decolonial turn in liberation theology an unfinished, unstable, and ongoing process of liberation.

The author is grateful to Iskander Abbasi, Joshua Lupo, and Atalia Omer for their valuable suggestions and comments on previous drafts.

Leave a Comment on The Decolonial Turn in Liberation Theology: Between Theory and Praxis Array
Ashraf Kunnummal
Ashraf Kunnummal is a research associate at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He completed his PhD at the University of Johannesburg in Islamic Studies. His thesis was titled, “A Critical Decolonial Reading of Liberation in Islamic Liberation Theology: The Works of Asghar Ali Engineer, Shabbir Akhtar, Farid Esack and Hamid Dabashi.” He is currently revising his thesis as a book, and aims to work towards a theory and praxis of decolonial Islamic liberation theology.
Global Currents article

Radical Free Speech


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

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

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

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

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

 

Anti-Racism as the Ideological Accomplice of Terrorism

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

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

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

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

PB: Yes. You did a petition in 2011…

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

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

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

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

 

“Free Speech” as a Root Cause of Radicalization

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

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

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

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

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

________

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

France: A Sacred Union against Terrorism or against Muslims?


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

Translated by Isis Sadek.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

From Danish Cartoons to French Separatism: Mobilizing Culture Wars


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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is many things—but it is not secularism.

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

 

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

Beyond Analogy


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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

The Day of Atonement brings no forgiveness

Till he has become reconciled with the fellowman he wronged.

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

When will you atone? How will you atone?

For you, like us, will be judged.

You, like us, will return to dust.

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

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decolonizing Comparative Theology


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

Introduction

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

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

Religionswissenschaft and Orientalism

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

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

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

Comparative Religious Studies and Comparative Theology

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

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

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

Deconstructing Eurocentric Comparative Theology

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

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

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

Decoloniality Beyond Idealism

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

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

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

Archipelagic Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Response to Gendered Morality Symposium


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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