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Theorizing Modernities article

On the Rhetoric of Jewish Solidarity: A Hebrew-Israelite’s Perspective


This sketch was made to represent the inauguration of the 19th Street Synagogue in New York. The year is 1860. The artist here “appears” to be drawing different shades of faces. The author believes these are the sketch artist’s references to phenotype, not dress or shadows. Image from M. Angel’s Remnant of Israel, originally published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (Sept. 29, 1860). Public Domain. There is a written record of Black women who attended this synagogue.*

I am a Palestinian Hebrew-Israelite (or simply “Israelite” for short).

By the foregoing confession, I do not mean that one identity or the other is ontologically isolated from the other. Nor do I mean that one is embedded in the other, or even that they are qualifications of each other. For I am also a rabbi who works with gender-nonconforming Jewish teens. None of these qualities inform my Israelite identity. They are my Israelite identity. The radicality of this assertion has been the source of much confusion in the media about who Hebrew-Israelites are. And in light of recent years’ focus on Jewish activism, perhaps it is time for some clarifications.

The Paradox of Faux Jewish Solidarity

My Jewish story begins with the Middle Passage as much as it does with my grandparents’ flight from Palestine. Because slavery, sex, trafficking and diaspora are seminal to my existence, al-Nakba, for example, can never for me be a singular 20th century event. It is rather the entire constellation of violent processes that made modern Jewish coloniality, as well as that singular catastrophe, possible. This is why I have for many years been publicly critical of using allegories and analogies to promote cross-communal solidarity. The problem with their use is not only that they can provoke collective traumas while reasserting Jewish metanarratives that demand my community’s phenomenological disappearance. It is also that they often betray a deep-seated desire for us as Jews to construct mirrors of ourselves without a background context through which to assess the self-images we promote. For example, the “BIJOC” label (Black, Indigenous, Jews of color), in both genealogy and referential axis, is not for me an inclusive signification. In fact, in many ways the acronym provokes in me a cultural memory of rape and sexual violence, a common theme when it comes to the history of how identities are superimposed on people from without. My community, on the other hand, is uniquely and unparsimoniously self-referential, hence the term “Hebrew-Israelite”—that is, people of Israel who by nature “transcend.” This description (as opposed to the racist labels “BlackIsraelite” and/or “BlackHebrew Israelite”) is important for understanding the many anticolonial (not decolonial) complexities found in the global South’s Hebrew-related communities. These peoples may include all future descendants of earthlings, for transcendence to us means moving beyond religion, culture, nationality, humankind, and all other significations rooted in coloniality.

The problem of a jim-crow Torah arises when Jewish affirmations of holiness simultaneously embrace particularity and universality by evoking a cultural memory of alliances with “outsiders,” all while ignoring the intracommunal effects of intergenerational trauma within the Jewish community itself.

Without sounding too dismissive, it seems to me that appeals to Jewish relational analogies, even if drawn upon to promote cross-communal interest-convergences, can powerfully reinflict trauma, particularly when such appeals are made without acknowledging some obvious historical contexts that make them problematic. There is a gadflyish paradox in Jewish attempts to mitigate the violent historical effects of Jewish coloniality through a quest for justice-oriented solidarity with BIJOC and/or other peoples of color. Whether in Israel, Palestine, or diaspora, Jewish colonialism was a catastrophe. It led to the proliferation of Jewish races and imposed a legitimation crisis on Jewish activism: How can Jews claim solidarity with people of color while rejecting those who are Jews because they are people of color? What kind of solidarity is this? In the Hebrew-Israelite community’s case, it can be nothing less than a faux solidarity precisely because the catastrophe (or al-Nakba) of human trafficking that attended African American origins are what have provided us with the whiteness and privilege of many Jews that make such Jewish “solidarity” possible.

Hebrew-Israelites and the Lesson of Community-Building

We Israelites learned generations ago that attempts to evade the inevitable cultural integration resulting from modern colonial violence prove themselves to be futile in the end. All communities are, by definition, in the constant process of growing and renegotiating boundaries. But in the case of Hebrew-Israelites, our intra-communal debates over the margins of identity have been used to not only depict us as kooks in popular media, they’ve also been used by Jewish communities themselves, including self-espoused BIJOC groups, to justify the policing of Jewish existential legitimation. It is my position, however, that such policing has consistently ignored the necessary encounter with Others attending our experiences as people who embrace a variety of genealogies as “Israel.” These are not allegories nor analogies nor metaphors “of” Israel, but rather Israel as such. Even when acknowledging the nodes of incommensurability between Jewish self-determination and other liberation movements such as that embraced by Hebrew-Israelites, the process of community-building with Others is inevitably aided and abetted. Al-Nakba occurred as a result of efforts to ignore this process. One such effort was the invention of new speech-acts that segregated Jews who are “in” from those who are “out,” irrespective of whether those victims of segregation understood themselves as such through those speech-acts—especially when the mixtures and creolizations inherent in Jewish coloniality made this segregation untenable. While portraying the segregationist as like an “evil sower” from a New Testament parable, Prophet William S. Crowdy describes this very dilemma in one of his sermons:

Evil sowers are those that invent[ed] separation between one blood, for the scriptures said that the Lord out of one blood created all to dwell upon the face of the earth, but the evil sower says, ‘No, we shall not be together, but we shall have jim-crow cars, jim-crow boat lines, jim-crow railways, jim-crow boarding houses, jim-crow churches, jim-crow barber shops, and jim-crow laws for the Jews to live under’ (175–76).

By focusing on the invention of “separation between one blood,” Crowdy appealed to a shared  human dimension of Jewish existence. Unlike contemporary Jewish solidarity movements, he was not referring to an analogy, metaphor, or allegory to establish and/or reinscribe ties between Black and Jewish communities. For him, such kinds of discursive linkages were insufficient to address what centuries of human trafficking engendered. He was instead pointing out the historical and conceptual problem that racial segregation poses for Jews who wish to live beyond the confines of a jim-crow Torah (or a jim-crow law for Jews).

Eliminating Misunderstandings

The problem of a jim-crow Torah arises when Jewish affirmations of holiness simultaneously embrace particularity and universality by evoking a cultural memory of alliances with “outsiders,” all while ignoring the intracommunal effects of intergenerational trauma within the Jewish community itself. Existential ruptures of this kind always feed off the false ideals of ontologically isolated communities. For example, consider the malignant and exoticist narratives promoted about Hebrew Israelites in the popular media. According to these narratives, Hebrew-Israelites are members of militant cults that embrace a racist kind of heretical, and at times criminal, counter-narrative against normal Jewish traditions (including BIJOC traditions).  But this narrative is largely false, and it is false to such a degree that one is tempted to believe that such an account of my community’s history is built more on spite, suspicion and racism than historical accuracy. When members of early postbellum Hebrew-Israelite communities were asked by outsiders where our religious practices came from, there was one historical explanation that was consistently dismissed over and over again: Jewish slavery and sex trafficking.[1] The memories of such events are alive and well in Hebrew communities across the Americas. Yet those narratives are ignored, and exoticist ones are popularized instead, particularly the long and racist tradition of portraying Black people as violent, corrupt, and prone to criminality. And although this aspect of Jewish culture and religion has been intentionally and conveniently ignored by some preeminent scholars of American Jewish history, Hebrew-Israelite communities continue to bear, in the words of Caroline Randall Williams, “rape colored skin.”

 

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Rabbi Bertram Korn sought to argue that no black Jews existed outside of synagogues after slavery’s abolition. But he fell into dispute with Caribbean rabbis who insisted otherwise. In these letters, multiple authors are clear that biological descent is responsible for the existence of many black and mulatto Hebrews in Central and South America and the Caribbean–even though such people of Jewish descent were estranged from synagogue life. Photo Credit: Author’s photographs used with permission from the Jacob Rader Marcus Center at the American Jewish Archives.

Much like Vodou, Conjure, and Santeria, Hebrew-Israelite practices have been criticized because they are more concerned with the historical effects of racism, colonialism, and anti-Black trauma than they are with doctrinal purity, monotheistic orthodoxy, and especially rabbinic norms of Jewish identity construction. People in my community have often been marginalized (and at times blacklisted) for emphasizing and making too much of these facets of American Jewish history. However, I believe such criticisms are misplaced. Convenient historical fictions quite often infect conversations between victims and beneficiaries of atrocities. The notion that Palestinians “willingly” abandoned their homes during al-Nakba is one such example. The notion that Hebrew-Israelite communities didn’t exist before the 1890’s is another.[2] Our communities are maligned because we are inherently diverse and do not allow class divisions and educational privilege to regulate religious discourse in the form of a single hierarchy. As a result, detractors use the more provocative beliefs of some members of our community to slander the reputation of all. Yet the fact that our community embraces large contingencies of humanity—from rabbinic Jews to Biafran nationalists—should be seen as a strength (and perhaps a lesson) in Jewish struggles to work for social justice. The insights of prophetic justice are assumed to be available to all Israelite persons—to the criminal as well as the law-abiding, the illiterate as well as the scholar, and the poor as well as the financially secure. We already assume that human communities are interdependent and connected in forms of solidarity, whether made explicit or not. And it is for this reason that discourses about Jewish solidarity can be alienating: the social deaths of enslaved Hebrew-Israelites, deaths provoked by the trauma of human trafficking, deaths which engendered global understandings of “Israel,” deaths continually and presently ridiculed for revealing “Israel” to be composed of many cultures and peoples, including those presumed to not be Jewish or Hebrew at all—these very same deaths are reinscribed in theodicean clouds of misunderstanding when a muted history of sexual violence informs the coherence of Jewish solidarity movements signified by acronyms such as BIJOC.

Moving Forward Together

By criticizing the move to establish coalitional politics with a focus on activism, it is not my intention to romanticize Hebrew-Israelites or Palestinians. My experience has been that both groups exhibit their own forms of the very same problems I am outlining here for Jewish solidarity movements. Jewish and Muslim rape cultures existed wherever slavery was found in the colonial period. The violent practice has existed for millenia, and although I believe discussions on how to move forward on questions of justice are important, I also believe that in the desire to demonstrate that Jews are on the right side of history, the (white and non-white) Jewish community’s problems with racism are often ignored. Addressing these problems can sometimes be far more effective at alleviating injustice than creating solidarity movements with Other communities. This is because various “in group” avenues, due to being more immediately relevant to the social tasks at hand, can more powerfully employ Jewish communal resources as such to both confess and work against the wrongness of being rooted in Jewish coloniality. Religious reparations to Hebrew-Israelite communities who have suffered damages from white Jewish racial and sexual assault is only one such avenue. But there are many others, and many of them can remind us that Jewish existence itself is often refracted in ways that make cross-communal solidarity movements unnecessary and at times counter-productive. It is quite possible that the coalition one seeks to promote is the very means by which the oppression you fight becomes resurrected.

Jewish and Muslim rape cultures existed wherever slavery was found in the colonial period. The violent practice has existed for millenia, and although I believe discussions on how to move forward on questions of justice are important, I also believe that in the desire to demonstrate that Jews are on the right side of history, the (white and non-white) Jewish community’s problems with racism are often ignored.

In conclusion, I do not believe that what I am proposing here is difficult. The upshot of my argument has to do with maintaining a basic appreciation, respect, and historical awareness of the people we claim to be allying ourselves with. A profound sense of existential humility is required when one commits oneself to the project of human freedom. All too often, Jews of Color (as well as their white Jewish advocates) lack such humility. Neither Hebrew-Israelites, Palestinians, nor BIJOC are exceptions to this note of caution. For some of us, standing up for the rights of Others and demanding that they be invited to participate in proactive coalitions that fight for social justice are important aspects of our spirituality. For Others, the means by which this happens recycles entrenched forms of marginalization that have violent roots as their genesis. But regardless of who one claims to be, if such a person is oppressed, then trust capital from the beneficiaries of one’s oppression is nearly always earned, not given away willy-nilly. One earns another’s trust by being reliably honest and transparent. Yet no matter how sincere one’s efforts to be in solidarity, silence about one’s role in the Other’s oppression will never reflect that kind of honesty. If Others’ “allies” in the fight for justice cannot transcend a dishonest relationship with the history of such oppression, then those Others will always have reason to avoid that solidarity movement like the plague.

[1] There are many references to this phenomenon in the works of scholars such as Jonathan Schorsch, Saul Friedman, Jose Malcioln, Judah Cohen, as well as early 20th century articles on “Negro Jews” in Harlem from the New York Amsterdam News. To begin the investigation of this issue, please see Bertram Korn letters to Caribbean rabbis and vice versa. Folder 12: “Blacks: Jewish Blacks in the Caribbean,” Box 3, (MS-99) Bertram W. Korn Papers, Rabbis, Major Manuscript Collections, the American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio.

[2] As Jacob Dorman has shown, such ideas are still popular, over 100 years after they were first proposed and dismissed. See page 62 of Dorman’s article.

*”It was surprising to me to see some negresses in their synagogue, who prayed with true devotion, but without the exaggerations that are usually characteristic of blacks… I heard that they were formerly slaves of the families in which they still live; when slavery was abolished in New York State, they voluntarily remained with the rulership they had loved, whose faith they also accepted.” Translated via Google translate from Israelitische Volks-Bibliothek. V: Deutsch-Amerikanische Skizzen fur Judische Auswanderer und Nichtauswander  (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1857), 60.

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Rabbi Walter Isaac
Rabbi Walter Isaac, PhD is President of the Afro-Jewish Studies Association, Chair of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Committee on Jewish Research, and former Director of Jewish Outreach at the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. The author of many articles and monographs on Afro-Judaism, he is currently on faculty at Claflin University. He may be reached at: afrojews@gmail.com.
Decoloniality article

They Say “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” Look, We Are All over Palestine


 

Palestinian flag at Brighton, England Pride celebration. Photo Credit: Flickr User Daniel Hadley.

For the past two years, there has been a shift in the public perception of the Palestinian LGBTQI+ issue. It has gone from being ignored or rarely discussed by regional political and spiritual leaders, to becoming one of the most controversial subjects on the Israeli political agenda.

So, what has changed in Palestinian society regarding  LGBTQI+ persons and will it cause a split in the Joint List (a political coalition which represents the Palestinian citizens of Israel, or 48ers, in the Knesset) in the upcoming national election on the March 23, 2021? It is worth noting that this election will be the fourth election cycle in Israel in two years due to the inability of Prime Minister Netanyahu, immersed in a corruption scandal, to form a steady coalition in the past three cycles.

Before explaining this shift, I need to return to a major event that occurred almost two years ago. On July 26, 2019, a man from Tamrah, a Palestinian city within the 1948 borders, stabbed his 16-year-old brother just outside a queer youth shelter where the brother had been staying. The boy was hospitalized and later discharged. This event sparked a public campaign against homophobia in the Palestinian community, as well as the first Palestinian queer protest in Haifa.

Both the campaign and the protest were organized by Palestinian activists from the AlQaws organization with the support of a few Palestinians NGO’S and public figures, such as MK Aida Toma Suliman from the Joint List political party, and prominent leaders from Palestinian civil society.

What instigated the first protest focusing on and organized by queer Palestinians?  After all, violence against queer Palestinians is ubiquitous, whether it is coming from the Palestinian community itself or from Israeli policies and practices as an occupying force.

The unapologetic visibility of Palestinian LGBTQI+ persons did not happen overnight. The visibility reflected in the protest was achieved by the relentless work of many fellow Palestinian queer activists (mostly from queer organizations Alqaws and Aswat) over two decades. That is what I believe caused the shift that put the LGBTQI+ community in a confrontational position with the rest of the Palestinian community. The aforementioned protest wasn’t a one-time event. It was also held in 2020, and was accompanied by a much more visible campaign which called for more inclusion of queer Palestinians and insisted on their belonging to the broader Palestinian community. Another notable point is that the protest was held in the center of Haifa, a Palestinian city that was occupied by the Israeli forces in 1948.  More than that, the location of the protest is well known as a gathering place for Palestinian political and national protests.

While the protest was held as a response to a homophobic instance of violence, only one member of the Joint List described the event as a protest against this specific form of violence. Instead, they preferred vague generalities. For example, the head of the Joint List condemned violence in Palestinian society without specifying what kind of violence it was. This constituted a clear avoidance of potential political fallouts and the risk of conflict with other members of the Joint List whose silence in the face of homophobia has been deafening.

The controversy didn’t end there. In July 2020 new legislation focusing on a ban against conversion therapy was proposed in the Knesset. Out of the 15 Palestinian members of the Joint list party, 3 voted in favor of the legislation, 4 opposed it, and the remaining MKs abstained. These votes further ignited debate in Palestinian society. Three main positions have emerged as representative of Palestinian approaches to LGBTQI+ rights:

(1) The pro queer position. Those who hold this position state that queer Palestinians have the right to exist and are an integral part of the Palestinian community. This approach involves condemning homophobia directly and explicitly using the term LGBTQI+. This position has been associated mainly with activists and civil society organizations.

(2) The “neutral” position. This position is taken mostly by people who self-identify as secular progressives. They hide in the shadows of the conversation on queerness and do not cause controversy. They would, accordingly, denounce violence in general without calling out homophobia specifically. This vagueness also explains why they do not employ the direct and explicit terminology of LGBTQI+.

(3) The antagonistic position is more violent and blatantly homophobic. This position is characterized by the weaponization of religion to justify homophobic violence. This camp deploys religion, citing relevant verses from scriptures, as a justification for violence. It likewise uses homophobic slurs against the Palestinian LGBTQI+ community, even erasing them by say “there are no gays in the Palestinian community.” One of the most vocal members of the Knesset in the Joint List who is affiliated with the Islamic party said in regard to banning conversion therapy law, “we hope the Joint List will keep its alliances and will consider the Islamic, Christian, and Druze beliefs and values of its members.”

The way we use terminology matters. If in the past the “neutral” rhetoric was perceived as enough, today it is a different story. This so-called neutrality itself constitutes a form of violence. The Palestinian LGBTQI+ community is not static. Indeed, it is elastic and changing. It is not in the same place it used to be in terms of its strength. Rather than parting ways with broader Palestinian society, the enhanced visibility of the LGBTQI+ Palestinian community demands inclusion and needs conversation with religious and spiritual leaders in order to achieve it.

I believe that the LGBTQI+ community in Palestine is at a crossroads. Increased visibility has put the queer community in a confrontational position with the broader Palestinian community and it has also led to increased homophobia. Because of the dominance of the antagonistic camp and its explicit deployment of religion in tandem with the “neutrality” of secular “progressives,” queer Palestinians are alienated from their national and religious modes of belonging to Palestinian society. Therefore, tackling the homophobic deployment of religion that defines the antagonistic camp, in my opinion, is an important site for action. It requires using theological tools that expand interpretations of religious meanings and orients them to the suffering of queer communities. At the same time, bridging religious and national modes of belonging with sexual orientations and rendering them as coextensive rather than oppositional binaries would continue strengthening the Palestinian queer community given their multiple forms of belonging. Now, more than ever, we should build a mediating lexicon that will allow us to have a conversation with spiritual and religious leaders. Creating a shared language and terminology that is accepting of the queer community along with the development of progressive attitudes among spiritual and religious leaders is key for queer Palestinian inclusion.

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Halah Abdelhadi
Halah Abdelhadi is a queer, feminist, and Palestinian activist based in south Tel Aviv. During the last two and a half years, Halah has worked as a researcher at "Gisha," a human rights organization that advocates for the right of movement for Palestinians in the Gaza strip. She has a bachelor's degree in biomedical science from Tel Aviv University.
Theorizing Modernities article

White Supremacists Among Us—Discomfiting but True


Ethiopian Hebrews Series, No. 37. Photograph by Alexander Alland c. 1940. Photo Credit: The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY. Used with permission.

The historian Marc Dollinger was recently asked to write a new preface for the 2020 scheduled 4th edition of his book Black Power, Jewish Politics. The racial tumult of spring through summer 2020 led to extraordinary sales of the 3rd edition, as was the case for a variety of books addressing racism in the United States. Controversy over Dollinger’s book arose, however, when he submitted his new preface to the publisher. The editors objected to his use of the word “white supremacy” to refer to the attitudes and social investments of certain communities of Jews who welcomed their designation as white in the U.S. racial hierarchy. Dollinger stood by his position, which resulted in the publisher deciding to publish the 4th edition without his preface and to decline publishing future editions of his book. The copyright for any future editions has been returned to him.

A debate on those events quickly followed. The perspective of several critics in the controversy, which amounts to claiming either that no white Jew can be a white supremacist or that any advantages acquired by Jews who are white are earned, not racially bestowed, smacks of overgeneralization and bad faith. They appeal to a form of intrinsic innocence that ultimately defies their humanity.

Professor Dollinger shared the full rejected preface with me in an email exchange. Having read it, my conclusion is that he doesn’t claim that Jewish people in general are white supremacists. He also doesn’t claim that the Jewish people (as a whole) are white. Beyond the preface, doing so in an exchange with me would be weird since he and I have known each other for more than a decade through meetings of Jews of color at the Institute for Jewish Research in San Francisco. What he is claiming is that many European immigrants to the United States were integrated into U.S. society under conditions of assimilation as whites, and many European Jews were not exceptions from that historical, whitening process. Once a white identity was granted, some went so far as to endorse white supremacist views, including eugenics, segregation, social Darwinism, and anti-miscegenation law. Some also blocked anti-racism struggles through fighting against social remedies such as affirmative action and political movements such as Black Power and Decolonization. Among white Jews, this was and continues to be particularly evident among those who embrace neoconservatism, and one could easily find those who identify themselves as white supremacists by consulting the Southern Poverty Law Center. The presence of neoconservative white Jews in a blatantly racist administration such a President Donald Trump’s speaks for itself.

 The idea that “real Jew” must be white is a feature of unfortunate misrepresentations of Jewish people primarily during the twentieth century, with steam gathered in its support since the late 1960s.

We should bear in mind that, odd and ironic as this may appear, there are nonwhite people who are also white supremacists, and they, too, often embrace neoconservatism, in addition to forms of populism and fascism. Members of those groups, which include black conservatives who endorse white supremacy through regarding themselves as “exceptions” to a generally pathological black people, gained access to institutions of power ranging from being seated on the U.S. Supreme Court to working in Trump’s Cabinet. This overrepresentation in positions of power makes them appear to be representative of a larger proportion of nonwhite people than what reality reveals. For most Jews on the spectrum from centrism to leftism, the reality is that left-wing Jews hardly have a public voice in the representation of Jews in which neoconservatives have acquired the bully pulpit for at least the past four decades. Many—perhaps most—other Jews never abandoned antiracist struggles. As most black and brown peoples do not embrace bigoted celebrations of white supremacy, their outliers should be understood as just that: outliers.

What makes things difficult for Jews who have become known as “white” is that whiteness was not historically part of Jewish identity. The idea that “real Jew” must be white is a feature of unfortunate misrepresentations of Jewish people primarily during the twentieth century, with steam gathered in its support since the late 1960s.

The bad faith issue at work in the controversy over Dollinger’s ascription of “white supremacy” to white Jews who have demonstrated clear investments in whiteness and have endorsed policies that limit opportunities to nonwhite groups is evident in the claims of those who try to argue accusing them of complicity with white supremacy diminishes what such Jews have “earned. It is a coded version of the “qualifications” and “merits” debate. We should ask: If whiteness is irrelevant to the opportunities many white Jews garnered, why don’t they, then, reject whiteness? If it is their Jewishness that made the difference, how can they explain the socioeconomic and structural differences between the lives of nonwhite Jews and theirs? If they reject their Jewishness as the basis of their achievements and appeal instead to their individual grit, how, then, do they explain the inequalities and negative social-economic indicators of black, brown, and Indigenous peoples in the United States without blaming those people for lacking what it takes to ascend in its clearly white-dominated society?

An unfortunate, underlying trend for “having what it takes” is being designated as white. By this I mean that people designated white have greater options available to them than those designated otherwise. Erased in much of this debate is the long history of “whites only” policies that in effect created a social welfare infrastructure for white supremacy. Yes, there are disadvantaged, individual whites, but white structural power has placed white people as a group at a distinct and historically unjust advantage over others. Although there was discrimination against groups ranging from Greeks to Italians to Irish to European Jews, the fact of the matter is that crucial policies concerning resources were made available to whites and barred from nonwhites.

I regard Dollinger’s point as simply this: acknowledge that there are white Jews who embrace white supremacy. They are not representative of Jews, but they are, whether we like it or not, members of what we call the Jewish people.

This is not to say that these white groups are on a level playing field. There is racial hatred of Jews in the United States, and this hatred has terrible health effects on white Jews on a par with blacks across ethnic and religious lines. There are Jews who would prefer to describe this hatred as a “religious” one, but the fact of the matter is that most people who hate Jews know nothing of Judaism or Jewish religion. And more, racism is more sophisticated than a systematic attitude and the rallying of resources on the basis of mere morphology. There are black people who “appear” whiter than many Ashkenazi white Jews. (I added “white” because there are black, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander Ashkenazi Jews.) Among black communities, it is admitted that many—though not all—light-skin blacks have more opportunities available to them than do their darker sisters and brothers. There are light-skin forms of antiblack racism going back to exclusionary African American institutions premised on complexion in the nineteenth century. Similarly, as historians of European Jewish history could attest, there were (and in many places still are) Western Jewish forms of anti-Jewish hatred toward Eastern European and non-European Jews. We would be remiss to make these exemplars of degradation and hate the representatives of each group. But we would also be lying to ourselves if we were to deny their existence.

I regard Dollinger’s point as simply this: acknowledge that there are white Jews who embrace white supremacy. They are not representative of Jews, but they are, whether we like it or not, members of what we call the Jewish people. All peoples have members with values they despise. I take Dollinger to be arguing that even if the majority of Jewish people reject white supremacy, we should identify and put on the table our criticisms of those who embrace it—however deluded or pernicious their reasons for doing so are.

Here are some recent conversations for those interested in podcasts and audiovisual recorded panels on antiblack racism and antisemitism:

Rethinking Black-Jewish Relations featuring Marc Dollinger & Lewis R. Gordon, Adventures in Jewish Studies Podcast, Season 2, episode 7, American Jewish Studies Association (2020).

“AJS 2020 Plenary: Why Racism Should Matter for Jewish Studies Scholars,” December 16, 2020.

“Better Than Nothing Episode 6: Lewis Gordon,” Better Than Nothing, host and interviewer Mark Leuchter (October 2020).

“Jews of Colour: Race and Afro-Jewishness.” Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. Birkbeck University of London. London, UK. (June 26, 2018).

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Lewis R. Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs, where he is also a member of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. He is the author of many books, including Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization. He co-edits, with Jane Anna Gordon, the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs. He is Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and a former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, for which he now serves as its chairperson of awards and global collaborations.
Decoloniality article

Empire and Race in Comparative Religious Ethics


José Clemente Orozco. The Epic of American Civilization: The Coming of Quetzalcoatl (Panel 5). 1932–1934. Fresco. Overall: 125 ½ x 205 in. (318.8 x 520.7 cm). Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College. Used with permission.

Comparative Religious Ethics and Decolonial Thought

As a subfield of philosophy of religion, comparative religious ethics is concerned with the study of various peoples’ ethical dispositions and their production of ethical knowledge that might reasonably be called “religious.” At its best, work in the subfield is marked by a commitment to denaturalizing the normative status of Christian and/or European philosophic concepts, vocabularies, and traditions in religious ethics. Sometimes this commitment takes the form of extensive methodological and metaethical reflection. Other times, it appears in the formation of self-consciously provisional categories for comparison. Whatever shape it takes, this commitment might be regarded as stemming from comparativists’ desire to challenge the longstanding cultural imperialisms of philosophy of religion and religious ethics—or what decolonial theorists would call their coloniality—and what the founding editors of the Journal of Religious Ethics in 1973 called “the parochialism and Western bias that tends to characterize the present state of our discipline.” Even though most comparativists have not adopted avowedly radical or anticolonial perspectives, they have generally maintained that neither Christianity nor European philosophy should set the standard for ethical inquiry.

Viewed from this vantage, comparative religious ethics might appear to be one of the subfields of philosophy of religion most readily amenable to a decolonial turn. For more than four decades, many comparativists have aspired to create a field of inquiry that not only includes ethical perspectives and knowledges once marginalized in religious studies but that also is transformed by them. It is a subfield in which many purport to be skeptical of the universality and explanatory power of Christian and European philosophic concepts for analyzing religiously ethical phenomena generally. Yet, for all their awareness of the limits of western traditions and Christian concepts in the production of ethical knowledge, comparativists have not significantly inquired into them as ethical problems in their own right—particularly in view of their historic roles as imperial classificatory technologies both productive and preservative of racial distinctions. Instead, they have been relatively satisfied to assert that the historicity of these concepts as colonial sorting techniques, as a means of propagating differences between peoples that have justified the subjugation of some by others, is rather inconsequential for present analysis, provided, of course, one is sufficiently self-conscious about their use. In other words, despite their recognition of the provincial character of European and Christian moral vocabularies, comparativists have not yet seen fit to delve into the darker side of their historicity—that is, their active involvement with coloniality, and so to embark upon anything that might be called a decolonial turn.

Prompted by the work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, I’d like to propose one possible set of foci for comparison which might inspire comparative ethicists to begin taking this metacritical turn, or at least incline them to begin thinking with decolonial theorists. What I suggest is that empire and race ought to become central focal points for ethical analysis. Comparativists ought to ask how imperial and racial formations have shaped the settings within which peoples have acted and thought, regarding them not as wholly determinative but as nevertheless integral components of peoples’ ethical lives. Such inquiry might proceed from the decolonial observation that empires, and modern European colonial empires in particular, have generated longstanding racialized and gendered patterns of power and domination that perdure into our purportedly postcolonial present, and that these patterns are some of the most pressing ethical problems of our times. It would then regard as axiomatic the idea that religiously ethical scholarship is incomplete at best, and fundamentally ideological or distortive at worst, when it fails to interrogate the ways imperial and racial formations influence ethical subjectivation and moral discourse.

Empire and Race in History

If empires are provisionally understood as macropolities that rule different peoples differently, and if race is provisionally understood to name a structural relationship for the production and preservation of these differences, then it would appear possible to use these concepts as foci for comparative work in religious ethics without lapsing into theoretical heavy-handedness or presentist anachronism. As concepts, they are sufficiently delimited without also being so content-laden that they predetermine analysis. They are also able, as Geraldine Heng and Sylvester Johnson have recently demonstrated, to provide rich frames for theorizing almost a millennia of race-making, even before the category of race was explicitly fashioned during the colonial period. More importantly, however, the ability to comparatively explore the historic entanglement of religious varieties of ethical discourse with imperial and racial formations may expand our understanding of how these discourses came to be what they are in the present, as well as produce new perspectives on how processes of moral formation unfold. If comparativists were to begin studying how religious persons and communities have negotiated the tensions of empire, then it would seem we may likely come to a better understanding both of the darker side of religious varieties of ethical discourse and of their contestation.

Marcus Garvey during a parade on the opening day of the annual Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World at Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York City. Garvey helped spark movements from African nationalist independence to American civil rights to self-sufficiency in black commerce  (AP Photo/File). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Of course, not every empire has governed its subjects in the same way. Neither have they all engaged in explicit processes of racialization or racial formation as scholars now use these terms. Nor, as Sylvia Wynter argues, are the patterns of differentiation and domination that various empires have installed equally pressing ethical problems. One would not want to suggest that ancient Chinese, medieval Islamic, or early modern West African imperialisms were qualitatively the same as, for instance, contemporary Anglo-American settler colonialisms. Here as elsewhere in ethical analysis, then, historical specificity and normative clarity are needed. Defined thusly, however, taking empire and race as broad focal themes for comparison appears promising for enriching our understanding of the role that religious actors, communities, and their ethical discourses have historically played in the organization of political power, the production of ideas about and representations of human difference, and the shaping of the present. In particular, for those conversant with decolonial theory, it represents an opportunity to gain better understanding of the long-term historical processes that underwrote the transformation of the category of religion in the sixteenth century, as well as the explicit conceptualization of race. Indeed, deploying these terms as comparative foci in conversation with decolonial thought has significant potential for transforming inquiry in comparative religious ethics. How? I offer three concluding propositions.

Critical Prospects

First, it would require that ethicists finally confront the ways that imperial and racial formations have in many cases been constitutive components of ethical subjectivity itself. As David Scott reminds us, imperial techniques of rule have often functioned such that race “becomes inserted into subject-constituting social practices, into the formation, that is to say, of certain ‘raced’ subjectivities” (196–97). Not only interested in establishing political relations of insider and outsider, citizen and alien, imperial statecraft and colonial governance have also sought to shape the interior landscapes of the peoples whom they have ruled. They have used, as Ann Laura Stoler notes, various techniques of subjectivation, or what Ian Hacking refers to as “making up people,” as chief strategies of rule. Consider the ways, for example, that imperial nineteenth-century U.S. discourses of citizenship articulated racial distinctions together with the ideals of liberal egalitarianism, thereby generating citizen-subjects whose universality was made possible by their racial particularity. That is, the ways that the abstract equality shared by U.S. citizens was made possible precisely through the exclusion of non-national, racialized persons from citizenship. Addressing such strategies and techniques of rule may therefore require a substantial rethinking of central ethical categories and the role they have played in instantiating the very divisions of humanity that are constitutive of what W. E. B. Du Bois once called “the color line [that] belts the world.” Dominant conceptions of citizenship, humanity, personhood, reason, affect, action, responsibility, and even ethics, for example, are not simply neutral descriptors of ethical life with respect to empire. They are, in fact, some of the many tools imperial polities have used to subjugate and subjectivate peoples around the world.

Second, as Irene Oh, Danube Johnson, and others have observed on this blog, such foci would likely also call into question both the category of religion itself as a longstanding imperial sorting technique for establishing artificial criteria and scales of comparison between peoples, as well as any comparative endeavor which uses religious designations to naturalize racial distinctions. In other words, it would likely cause comparativists to have to further confront the ways that their very tools of analysis, i.e., the category of religion and the comparative method, are glossed with imperial residues. I will not here rehearse the well-known stories of the colonial origins of religion or the complicity of comparison in colonial domination, but suffice it to say that a focus on race and empire would not, therefore, be simply a matter of incorporating these topics as further specializations in comparative ethical analysis. It would also involve subjecting many of our dominant methods and assumptions to critical scrutiny as ethical problems in their own right and, perhaps, abandoning them when necessary.

Dominant conceptions of citizenship, humanity, personhood, reason, affect, action, responsibility, and even ethics, for example, are not simply neutral descriptors of ethical life with respect to empire. They are, in fact, some of the many tools imperial polities have used to subjugate and subjectivate peoples around the world.

On this note, and finally, a focus on empire and race would demonstrate, I believe, that a mere commitment to provincializing the normative status of Christian and European philosophic concepts, vocabularies, and traditions in religious ethics is not be enough to qualify work in the subfield as decolonial, or even decolonial-adjacent. It would demonstrate, in other words, that becoming an active participant in decolonial projects, both scholarly and political, necessitates a further commitment: that of generating new modes of ethical inquiry delinked from the patterns of power and knowlege installed by imperial and racial formations, modes likely emerging from sources and/or practices that many comparativists have not heretofore considered “religious” or “ethical.” If comparative religious ethicists want to live up to our aspirational self-descriptions as transformative public intellectuals, whose work contributes both to ethical understanding and modes of ethical living, then we will need to significantly rework our own analytical conventions and ethical commitments. Foregrounding race and empire in conversation with decolonial thought can provide the metaethical spur to instigate this transformation.

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Nicholas Andersen
Nicholas Andersen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies and a 2020-2021 Interdisciplinary Opportunities Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. He works primarily in the fields of modern religious thought and ethics, with particular interests in Black religious thought, theories of empire and colonialism, and religion in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americas. His dissertation, provisionally entitled "Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands unto God," offers a novel theorization of nineteenth-century Ethiopianism.
Global Currents article

Weaponizing Antisemitism is Bad for Jews, Israel, and Peace


If Not Now protest during President Trump’s appearance at American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, March 21, 2016. Image Credit: Flickr User Miki Jourdan.

The flag of Israel has been spotted in white nationalist displays of violence such as the insurgency of January 6, 2021. The Star of David was there. There were also white men wearing shirts that read “Camp Auschwitz,” “Arbeit macht frei,” and “6MWE” (a neo-Nazi slogan meaning “6 million wasn’t enough”). These are obvious expressions of antisemitism that reveal a strange and explosive interweaving with Zionism, or rather Israelism. Years of Israeli hasbara (or propaganda) and its elective affinities with the Christian Zionism that has permeated white American evangelicals brought us this moment of “love of Israel” that wants to kill Jews. The absurdities are in plain sight. This constitutes the tragic upshot of Israel’s weaponization of antisemitism to muzzle legitimate criticisms of its continuous occupation of Palestinians, now labeled “apartheid” by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights’ organization. On the global scene the Israeli efforts have been amplified by the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) which has gained traction globally as a mechanism designed to delegitimize criticism of Israeli policies, diminish the Palestinian struggle for dignity and human and political rights, and enhance militant ethnoreligious nationalism in Israel. Framing itself as an intergovernmental effort to combat antisemitism, the IHRA thus has consolidated a definition of antisemitism to better determine what it looks like in political and social life, with the intention to uproot and criminalize criticisms of Israeli policies. One of the IHRA’s list of examples of antisemitism includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” The ramifications of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism reverberate loudly. To begin with, in so far as the insurgency on Capitol Hill in January 2021 displayed its support of Zionism through use of the flag, this support is not inconsistent with the explicit antisemitism captured in the shirts and other neo-Nazi paraphernalia. White nationalists take from Euro-Zionism’s textbook aspirations for ethnoreligious supremacist political hegemony. There is no room for Jews in “White nationalism” as articulated by the likes of Richard Spencer who has expressed admiration of Zionism’s ethnocracy. The ramifications of the IHRA’s nationalist discourse also reverberate, for example, in the U.S. State Department’s labeling as “antisemitic” the long-established practice of nonviolent actions of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) campaigns. Antisemitism, like other forms of racism and bigotry, should be rejected by appeals to human rights and justice, not through the closure of critical thinking and blind acceptance of official Israeli state policies.

The IHRA’s promotion of its understanding of antisemitism is the latest attempt to instrumentalize antisemitism to control how people are allowed or not allowed to talk about Israel. This account of antisemitism, however, is only possible through the flawed equation of Israel with all Jewish people, forcing all Jews the world over to accept and endorse a military occupation and a country that is increasingly more aligned with the wave of neo-fascism sweeping the world than with international law, democratic values, human rights, pluralism, and racial justice. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be much more comfortable with the likes of Victor Orbán, whose consolidation of power has thrived on antisemitic tropes (along with homophobic, anti-LGBTQI, and anti-feminist rhetoric), than with the American Jews whose social justice activism I trace in my recent work and who channel Jewish values of solidarity with the marginalized and powerless “because Jews were slaves in Egypt.” For this reason, the Jewish people I engaged in my ethnographic work recite the lesson of the Passover story. For them, the lesson of the Holocaust ought not be the maintenance of an ethno-nationalist ghetto via a massive security and surveillance infrastructure. While the Israeli government renders such young Jewish activists pursuing anti-occupation outlook as a “threat”—as is evident in the elaborate surveillance of campus activism—the same government engaged in pomp and circumstance for antisemitic and Islamophobic white Christian evangelicals when they relocated the American embassy, which was formerly in Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem. This is an expression of the marriage of convenience between Christian Zionists, the U.S. Republican Party, and the right-wing Israeli agenda. This marriage is bad for the prospect of a just peace for Palestinians and Israelis, as well as for Jewish safety. The IHRA, the Israeli government, and its “friends” all tell Jews that they can only be safe as long as they are Zionists. President Trump chillingly told representatives of the American Jewish community on the occasion of Rosh Hashanna 2020, “we love your country,” suggesting they are not Americans. Ironically, one of the IHRA’s examples of antisemitism also includes: “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”

Jews who resist their equation with the occupation assume as their mantra the ancient Rabbi Hillel’s three interrelated questions: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? For them the weaponization of the legacy of antisemitism and the memories of the Holocaust, which many of them carry within their own families, is threatening and wrong both because it manipulates such memories and because it makes them less safe in the face of real and accelerating antisemitism in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many young activists increasingly recognize that their safety depends on linking the fight against antisemitism to other social justice struggles. Many Israelis have taken to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s regime and many others such as B’Tselem for years have decried the weaponization of antisemitism. Their critical voices are silenced within the entrenched ideological regime that the IHRA represents as it coalesces with white nationalist and Christian Zionist antisemitism. Most importantly, this regime renders invisible and inaudible the Palestinian struggle for human rights and dignity that is pivotal for a real peace. A real peace is not the “peace” or normalization of Israel’s relations with Bahrain, the Emirates, Morocco, Sudan and other political entities that were in no direct war with Israel. This push for “normalization” (in the form of arm deals and economic incentives orchestrated by the U.S.) in conjunction with the chilling effect of IHRA on free speech is therefore bad for Jews, Israelis, and peace with justice.

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

 

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