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Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Policing Analogies

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decolonizing Disenchantment


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decoloniality and Philosophy of Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Literature, Theology, and Abul Kalām Āzād


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Why Was the Decision Made Now?

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

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

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

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

Are Turkey’s Laicism and Multiculturalism Collapsing?

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

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

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

Will the Hagia Sophia Decision Have a Profound Impact?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islamic Law, Secularization, and Modernity: Two Islamic Conceptions of the Human


Trading activity at the Kuwait Stock Exchange. Photo Credit: Flickr user Mark.

That Islam does not distinguish the religious from the secular is a truism that unites many who speak about Islam. For Islamists, this is a point of pride. For their opponents, this proves that Islam is backwards, if not dangerous, and justifies radical policing of Muslims. For others, however, this just means that Islam is “exceptional,” and “we” should just respect difference and let Muslim societies be. These debates often elide the meaning of both the “secular” and the “religious,” and what is entailed in separating them. The work of Georgetown sociologist of religion Jose Casanova is helpful in sharpening the focus of our inquiry and understanding more precisely what is at stake when we use the secular and religious, and what their respective relationships to modernity are. Casanova has identified three forms of secularization that are characteristic of modernity: institutional differentiation, privatization of religious belief, and the decline of religious belief.

He argues that while all three of these modes of secularization are present in modernity, only the first—the institutional differentiation of various social spheres from religious institutions, such as the market, the state, and the economy—is a universal prerequisite for modernity. In this short post, I wish to argue that Islamic law (fiqh), far from reflecting an obstacle to secularization—at least in the institutional differentiation sense—was historically a catalyst for it. What made Islamic law a particularly powerful tool in creating the institutional differentiation of social life were the embedded Islamic metaphysical commitments to the next life. These reflected a dual understanding of the human: one as a servant of God, and the other as a material reality whose fragility requires particular institutional support for it to flourish. While I believe that this duality permeates the entire structure of Sunnī Muslim approaches to law, the Ḥanafīs, uniquely among the historically dominant Sunni schools of law, explicitly theorized the impact of these two different conceptions of the human on the law. Before presenting the Ḥanafī theory, however, I will first give an overview of the structural features of Islamic law that confirm its role in secularization.

Islamic law (fiqh), far from reflecting an obstacle to secularization—at least in the institutional differentiation sense—was historically a catalyst for it.

Islamic law is divided broadly into two categories, ritual (ʿibādāt) and transactional (muʿāmalāt). The logic of the former is avowedly devotional and this logic is reflected in numerous provisions of the rules themselves, such as, for example, the requirement that the person engaged in the ritual practice be a Muslim, that the person have a subjective intention (niyya) to draw near to God (qurba), and that during performance of the ritual, the worshipper maintain a proper kind of inward (and unobservable) disposition, such as awe (khushūʿ) and tranquillity (ṭumaʾnīna). Indeed, jurists have noted that without the existence of the intention of worship and the presence of the proper inward dispositions, the acts themselves would be meaningless, or worse. Oftentimes, before initiating an act of worship, such as ritual prayer (ṣalāt), the worshipper must engage in a symbolic, but nevertheless very tangible, act of purification, and many rituals, once begun, must be concluded, even if the act was not obligatory. Transactional matters, by contrast, are indifferent to the inward dispositions of legal actors, and instead focus entirely on their manifested intentions. Parties can initiate a transaction and then abandon it, generally without any consequence. And no symbolic act of purification is ever associated with transactional matters.

The various topics within transactional law are in turn each governed by the relevant domain’s rationality. The law of international conflict differentiates between how Muslims should relate to hostile non-Muslim others, for example, from how they should relate to Muslims residing outside Muslim territory, non-Muslims at peace with Muslims but not under Muslim rule, and Muslims living in Islamic territory alongside their non-Muslim allies (ahl al-dhimma). Family law differentiates the household from the market by setting out the former as a site for non-commercial economic and sexual exchange organized pursuant to the logic of the good of the household. Included here are the circumstances that require the household’s dissolution and the consequences of that dissolution in terms of property law and obligations toward former spouses and children. Accordingly, it is governed by an ethic of self-interest that is tempered by concern for the welfare of the other members of the household. Accordingly, legal relations within the household are subject to a norm of generosity (mukārama, musāmaḥa). Commercial law identifies that sector of society in which the pursuit of self-interest in the form of commercial profit is paramount and relations are governed by a norm of fairness understood through the lens of profit-maximization (mushāḥḥa). Tort and criminal law (al-jināyāt, ḥudūd) in turn reflect the overriding necessity to deter antisocial behavior and provide compensation for those who have suffered injuries as a result of the actions of their fellows. Significantly, transactional law (with some exceptions, such as wine-drinking) traditionally applied to all persons in Islamic territory, regardless of religion. This is another feature which contributed to the secularization of Islamicate societies, at least in Casanova’s sense of institutional differentiation.

Performance of wu’du (ritual cleaning) prior to prayer.

The only sense in which these rules are not “secular” is their asserted origins in revelation. But in the institutionalized setting of Islamic law of the middle ages and early modernity, law itself had become pedagogically and institutionally differentiated from other religious disciplines such as theology and exegesis, whether of the Qur’an or Prophetic teachings. The differentiation of law from these other subjects was also reflected in how jurists argued that legal doctrines fulfilled different functions and were subject to rationalities appropriate for each sphere of social activity. Accordingly, the logic of religion—with its focus on the cultivation of subjective dispositions toward God as reflected in ritual law—was carefully limited to worship. That concern, however, was absent from the organization of society through law.

The clearest theoretical expression of the metaphysics justifying the institutional differentiation of society through law is found in Ḥanafī jurists’ writings on the concept of the human and the sources for individual inviolability (ʿiṣma).[1] The Ḥanafīs identified two kinds of inviolability, moral inviolability (ʿiṣma muʿaththima) and remedial inviolability (ʿiṣma muqawwima). The former is derived from the Arabic word for sin or wrong, ithm, and is a nod to the notion that the true source of human dignity and inviolability is an individual’s status as a servant of God, and that God will vindicate whatever wrongs done to His servants on the Day of Judgment. Moral inviolability is the truest expression of human anthropology and is therefore the primary source (al-aṣl) of human worth. However, it is vindicated only in the next life, not in this one. Indeed, it would be sufficient for human flourishing if, in fact, we were all truly servants of God.

While from the perspective of divine law, humans are not equal—some of us are sinners, some are saints, some are faithful, and some are deniers—remedial inviolability treats us all as equals insofar as we are all tangible objects whose existence requires that certain material goods be protected.

But there is also a material, object-like dimension to human existence which predominates in this life by virtue of our very real material needs: to eat, to have shelter, to procure the assistance of our fellows, to have protection against aggression, and to procreate, among others. Law is organized primarily around this second dimension of humanness, which produces a conception of inviolability derived from the notion of “value” (qīma).  “Value,” while it is an essential attribute of property, is only a secondary attribute of humanness. Law, according to the Ḥanafīs, protects human beings in this life by treating them as though they were property to which “value” can be assigned. This is evidenced by the law’s assumption of the generic sameness (tamāthul) of individuals. Because individuals are essentially the same from the perspective of their material existence, it is possible to articulate general norms that apply to all with respect to violations of their material integrity. I refer to this notion of inviolability as “remedial inviolability” because it refers to the existence of some procedure authorizing the victim of a wrong to receive a remedy to an injury. Such a remedy is intended to vindicate an interest of the injured party, who is here viewed as a material object and not a servant of God. While from the perspective of divine law, humans are not equal—some of us are sinners, some are saints, some are faithful, and some are deniers—remedial inviolability treats us all as equals insofar as we are all tangible objects whose existence requires that certain material goods be protected. The aim of remedial inviolability is not to vindicate our true natures as servants of God, but to protect our secondary nature as material objects that require protection.

Remedial inviolability, however, is not inherent to our humanity; it is the product of membership in political society. Accordingly, although humans are all equal in the sense that they are all in need of some kind of institution to protect their material existence, in fact they only receive that degree of remedial inviolability that the state in which they live is able to secure for them. Our religious inviolability draws us to cultivate the spiritual virtues that will earn us favor from God, but our nature as objects also compels us to seek out a political society that will protect us insofar as we are also material objects. Works such as the Revivification of the Religious Sciences, by the 11th century Sunni theologian, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, and al-Muwāfaqāt [The Reconciliations], by the 14th century Andalusian jurist, Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī, in turn mediate between these two dimensions of the human by cultivating in legal subjects a private ethic inclined to the pursuit of their interests as material bodies in a manner consistent with their status as servants of God.

Conflict about the place of Islam in the public sphere then cannot be about secularization in the institutional sense. Instead, debates about Islam and the public sphere break down along different conceptions of secularization: stadial secularization versus the secularizing of Muslim reformers who seek to pursue a strategy of institutional differentiation using the internal resources of Islam.  The stadial conception of secularism, which is dominant in continental Europe, views religion as a pre-modern stage of human consciousness that must be transcended for a society to be modern.  Muslim intellectuals who have adopted a stadial conception of secularism seek the decline of religious belief as an end in itself, because that is the measure for successful “secularization” and becoming fully modern. Conversely, to the extent that religious adherence remains high, then such societies remain distinctly unmodern, even if they become highly differentiated from an institutional perspective and thus, from Casanova’s perspective, are secularized in the first and universal sense.  What is at stake from the perspective of stadialist secularists is not securing the conditions for the autonomous flourishing of the different social spheres, but the liberation of society from superstition represented by belief in religion. Conflict about Islam’s proper place in the public sphere in the Muslim world is therefore a conflict between the purveyors of two different secularizing movements: non-religious intellectuals who share a continental view of “progress” and the necessity of placing religion in the past, and secularizing religious intellectuals who, using the language of Islamic legal and social reform with its roots in the 19th century, seek to further rationalize the content of Islamic law so that it can further the institutional differentiation required for an Islamic vision of modernity to flourish.

What is perhaps ironic in the modern battle of the role of Islam in public life is the role that traditional religious intellectuals play. Insofar as they are concerned primarily with the private virtues of religious devotion, they can be understood as pursuing the second of Casanova’s three modes of secularization, namely the privatization of religious belief. The indifference or even outright hostility of traditional religious intellectuals toward secularizing religious reformers can be understood as a function of the fact that they view the latter as direct competitors for the hearts and minds of the religious public, while stadialist secularists are not viewed as sociologically viable competitors in the religious sphere. Any alliance between traditional religious intellectuals and stadialist intellectuals can only be tactical, however. Each side may perceive certain short-term benefits with allying with the other. Stadialists may prefer traditionalist religious intellectuals to secularizing religious reformers because the indifference of traditionalists (and at times their outright hostility) to the secularization of society confirms their view that religion is a stage of development to be transcended on the way to modernity, and the resistance of traditional religious intellectuals to secularization might even accelerate this process if the mass of society comes to view religion as an obstacle to the institutional differentiation of the public sphere as Casanova argued took place in continental Europe. Traditionalists, meanwhile, even though they recognize the ideological threat that stadialist secularism poses to religion, may believe that its views are so socially implausible that stadialists are the lesser of two evils.

Ironically, it is the stadialist secularists who are pursuing a project that fails to distinguish between the metaphysical and sociological. By insisting that societies can only be modern by exiling religions to the most extreme margins of social life, they seek to impose their own metaphysical anthropology on society without the restraint that Islamic metaphysics, with its distinction between “human-as-servant” and “human-as-object,” achieves.

[1] See Ibn al-Humām’s Fatḥ al-Qadīr starting at the bottom of page 28.

Leave a Comment on Islamic Law, Secularization, and Modernity: Two Islamic Conceptions of the Human Array
Mohammad H. Fadel
Mohammad H. Fadel is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Law, which he joined in January 2006. Professor Fadel wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law while at the University of Chicago and received his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Fadel was admitted to the Bar of New York in 2000 and practiced law with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, New York, where he worked on a wide variety of corporate finance transactions and securities-related regulatory investigations. Professor Fadel also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and the Honorable Anthony A. Alaimo of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. Professor Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism.
Global Currents article

The Hagia Sophia Debate: A Muslim-Christian Liberation Theology Approach


 

Hagia Sophia at sunrise. Photo Credit: Flickr User Matthew and Heather, 2013.

Hagia Sophia is not the symbol of any religion, but a symbol of class. It is the temple of kings and sultans. This has always been the nature of it. It was demolished twice following massive popular revolts. There is sweat, blood and tears of slaves in its foundation. No Prophet would ever set foot in there.

– Ihsan Eliacik[1]

The recent decision by the Turkish Council of State and the President to revert the Hagia Sophia into a mosque has garnered much debate across the Muslim world. On the one hand, there are many, both in and outside of Turkey, who support the decision. Some who support the decision argue that the issue is one primarily concerning Turkish national sovereignty. Others may additionally frame it as a popular Islamist correction to the historical wrong committed by secular Kemalists, who changed the Hagia Sophia from a mosque to a museum. On the other hand, there are those who argue that what motivates the decision is President Erdogan’s narrow populist party political agenda, which is fundamentally opposed to the modern liberal secular notions of religious and ethnic pluralism. The Hagia Sophia has been a contested site for over a millennium, and plays an important symbolic role in how the histories of imperial Byzantine and Ottoman civilizations are remembered in the present.

While these two groups have played important roles in the debate, there is a more fundamental tension at play, particularly for Christians and Muslims who are dedicated to radical understandings of their faiths based on a shared tradition of a liberatory, prophetic critique of materialism and power. Given both the damage and supremacy of modern liberalism and secularism in the Islamicate world, we should fundamentally affirm Muslims’ and Christians’ right and responsibility to build power through religiously inspired lenses and frameworks. That being said, we must always ask: Which religious lenses  and whose frameworks? Is this the Christianity of Emperor Constantine or that of Jesus and his flock of radicals? In the words of `Ali Shari`ati (1958–1977), “It is not sufficient to say that we must return to Islam. We must specify which Islam: That of Abu Zarr or that of Marwan, the ruler […] One is the Islam of Caliphate, of the palace, and of rulers. The other is the Islam of the people, of the exploited, and of the poor.”

As Turkish Muslim political dissident Ihsan Eliacik suggests above, the Hagia Sophia is currently neither a symbol nor a sign of prophetic ethos and power for Christians or Muslims. Why do we need to pray in a building as grandiose as the Hagia Sophia (whether as Christians or Muslims or otherwise)? Eliacik suggests we listen to the blood, sweat, and tears in those walls before thinking that Prophets would even set foot in such a place to worship God. The massive and excessive frescos and calligraphy, columns and domes, and marble and minarets say far more about the place as an aristocratic symbol—as a symbol of the accumulation of wealth and religio-ethnic imperialism—than anything about a God of Justice and Mercy. Jesus’s church was the dirt roads and streets of Palestine, and Muhammad’s mosque was made of clay and palm trees. Can we seriously imagine Jesus or Muhammad being enamored by their followers fighting over a bombastic display of material power and wealth? Muslims and Christians continue to play the same game that our Prophets and Creator taught us to be more critical of and urged us to undermine—even to destroy. In this drama around Hagia Sophia, we worship a religion that is against religion, in the name of religion!

Both Islam and Christianity become further unmoored from their radical origins and potential when their sultans, caliphs, popes, and monarchs become obsessed with constructing palaces, monuments, and symbols of unethical power in the name of their religion—ostensibly to the Glory of God, but actually to the god of the nafs (lower self) of these glorified and glory-seeking leaders.

Historically, this large-scale hijacking first occurred in the 4th century of Christianity in Constantinople and in the first century of Islam in Damascus. (Some Muslims would argue that it started much earlier when some among the Companions of the Prophet already had enriched themselves with war booty and begun to practice nepotism, both leading to the bitter remonstrations against the accumulation of wealth and displays of ostentation by the Companion Abu Dharr al-Ghiffari [d. 652]).

The radical message of Prophets is primarily two-fold:

(A) Contrary to the “Islam is peace” discourse of the “moderate Muslims,” to relentlessly attack tyranny and to destabilize—or “render ungovernable,” as we said during the years of the struggle against South African Apartheid—unjust orders, and

(B) to seek justice for all on the margins of society and strive to establish just socio-political orders inspired by our sacred sources.

Rulers should not live extravagant lifestyles, nor should their symbols of sovereignty represent the gross accumulation of wealth and power. They should always do their best to stick to the earthly (not to mention ecologically friendly) and humble homes of those who follow the eternal path of righteous guidance.

Thus, we constantly have to return to asking ourselves: Are we following Jesus, or Emperor Constantine? Are we following Muhammad, or the murderers of his family and prophetic tradition?

Would we rather have a palace in Damascus and Constantinople? Or a humble abode in this life which causes less damage, and benefits us multifold in the Hereafter when our palaces and palatial temples—as all earthly constructions—lie in ruins and the Transcendent weighs our righteousness on the scales?

Interior photo of Hagia Sophia where symbols of both Christianity and Islam can be found. Photo Credit: Flickr User Schezar.

These are the questions we must honestly and critically ask ourselves when the names and symbols of our religions start to get hijacked by “non-idolatrous” idolaters. Outward displays of piety and ethno-religious supremacy have been critiqued as hidden forms of idolatry by the Holy Books and Prophets for a long time. Many of us worship an Islam or Christianity that is cloaked in much more than the otherwise sincere commitment to grappling with existence and attempting to understand what we should be doing while on earth as sojourners returning to the Transcendent.

In Islam, a place of worship of is called a ‘masjid, a place of prostration. Here we are expected to tremble in the presence of the Transcendent, not exult in the glory of a narrow ethnic national chauvinism masquerading as Islam, nor to pay homage to the sultan of the day. Neither the fact that others—the Greeks, the Armenians, the Spanish or whoever else—may have done this to us, nor that those crimes continue against former symbols of the Islamicate, provide us with a license to do this to others.

The suggestion by Sahak Maşalyan, the Patriarch of the Armenian Church of Turkey, that the Hagia Sophia be opened to all religions is an interesting one which moves beyond the pathetically bigoted “God is really a soccer or basketball mascot for the nation” discourse. “Why not keep it as a museum for part of the week and open it for an Alevi semah ritual Thursday nights, for Sunni prayers on Fridays, for the Jewish community on Saturdays, and for Christian congregations on Sundays?” he asked. “Such a transformation,” says Baki Tezcan, in another essay, “would keep the Hagia Sophia alive and better serve its long-term preservation as a cultural heritage site, offer an alternative to Islamist political hegemony, recognize Turkey’s diversity, and set an exemplary international precedent for other similar sites globally.”

The games played by the powerful and the willingness of the masses to cheer them on is not going to get humankind through the critical challenges facing all of us as inhabitants of the earth—our only home which we until recently have been destroying one brick at a time, but have now moved on to one wall at a time. Perhaps we need to go beyond Patriarch Maşalyan’s seemingly noble suggestion, which is aimed at appeasing different tribes, all of them which, again, seemingly, but only seemingly, are obsessed with their tribal deities whom they have created in their images.

I have a far-fetched proposal.

In the context of massive socio-economic inequities, ongoing ecological destruction, and rising tides of religio-ethnic supremacist ideologies in Turkey and around the world, the theological and social response of clerical or governmental leadership should not be guided by the false consciousness of narrow-minded symbolism. Why not convert the Hagia Sofia into something like a shelter for the homeless, a hospital for the sick and needy, a radical education or arts center to raise consciousness, or an indoor garden?

Regardless of how far-fetched this proposal may appear, I am convinced that Muhammad and Jesus would then be far more comfortable stepping into it than they would be if it were to be a cathedral, a museum, a temple, or a mosque.

[1] Eliacik is a Muslim theologian and activist with the Anti-Capitalist Muslims Collective in Turkey

 

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Farid Esack
Farid Esack is a leading Muslim liberation theologian who cut his teeth in the South African struggle for liberation. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advance Studies. In 2018 he was presented with the Order of Luthuli, South Africa’s highest national award, for “his brilliant contribution to academic research and the fight against race, gender, class, and religious oppression”. He serves on the board of Africa4Palestine.
Decoloniality article

Sovereignty, Blackness, and the Decolonial Task: Thought Experiments


Igbo’s Landing at Dunbar Creek, St. Simons Island, Georgia. Photo Credit: Elisabeth Hughes, New Georgia Encyclopedia. Image used with permission.

In Michel Foucault’s series of 1970s lectures, “Society Must Be Defended,” the French author describes a transition regarding political power’s capacity to hold sway over life and death, a shift from sovereignty to biopower. According to Foucault, sovereign power over life is exercised through the right to kill, i.e. to take life, while biopower involves the right to create life, to regulate populations, and to manage variation and randomness (244–46). Even though he suggests that sovereign power is on the decline, he also contends that modern racism exists at the intersection of sovereignty and biopolitics. Racism is how the state creates a break between those who deserve to live and those populations that must die. It is what makes killing acceptable, and what allows certain bodies to be positioned closer to (social) death in the name of preserving the life and health of the social order. As Foucault puts it, “If the power of normalization wished to exercise the sovereign right to kill, it must become racist” (256). While Foucault’s discussion of racism is motivated by the ascendance of the Nazis in twentieth-century Europe, he reminds his audience that “racism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide” (257). As such, any understanding of how sovereignty remains and operates alongside biopolitics must traverse colonial modernity and its enduring legacy.

Foucault’s reflections on sovereignty, violence, and racism generate a series of questions and queries. Beyond the “right to kill,” what is the relationship between sovereign power and coloniality, or more specifically the sovereign and the slave? Does the general conception of sovereignty change when we shift from Europe to other spaces and contexts, when we refuse to only think with authors like Foucault, the German jurist Carl Schmitt, and the political theorist and philosopher Giorgio Agamben? When Cedric Robinson introduces the notion of black sovereignty, what does the modifier “black” accomplish? What aspects of sovereign power does blackness unsettle and reconfigure? Why should religious studies scholars be interested in the fraught relationship between blackness and sovereignty, especially as it has been expressed in unfamiliar spaces and discourses? In what follows, I respond to these questions with some sketches and lines of flight.

…any understanding of how sovereignty remains and operates alongside biopolitics must traverse colonial modernity and its enduring legacy.

Foucault’s conception of sovereign power invokes the writings of Schmitt, who develops a similar idea in his oft-cited text, Political Theology. According to Schmitt, the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” and is therefore “associated with the borderline case and not with routine” (5). Against formal and legalist conceptions of political power, Schmitt underscores the concreteness of the particular case that the sovereign ruler must decide on and act against. And since all political categories for Schmitt are “secularized theological concepts,” the “exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (36). The exception lies at the edge of the existing legal order; it is associated with “extreme peril,” danger to the state’s existence, and various states of emergency. In response to these moments of danger, the sovereign has the authority to decide whether normal law will be extended or suspended and the authority to conscript subjects to kill and die for the state. Consequently, sovereignty exists within and outside the law; paradoxically, “although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it” (7). And yet even as the sovereign’s decision occurs at the parameters of the law, this exceptional act operates according to a certain logic of preservation. The exception, in other words, is always already consigned to the principles of protection and obedience, to the territorial state’s need to maintain order against the threat of anarchy and chaos.

As many authors have demonstrated, the grammar of sovereignty, law, and exception has direct implications for thinking about race, slavery, and settler colonialism—political and social arrangements that place the darker denizens of modernity at the edges of the law and human recognition. Walter Benjamin anticipates some of these contemporary discussions when he writes, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (392). A German Jew writing in response to the Nazi takeover in Germany, the confiscation of citizenship from Jews in Germany, the systematic endeavor to exterminate European Jews, and the Soviet-German non-aggression pact in 1939, Benjamin supplements and revises Schmitt’s conception of the state of emergency. From the perspective of the oppressed, Benjamin suggests, crisis is the norm. From the perspective of the dispossessed, being positioned at the edges of the law is constitutive and not an aberration; being the targets of state (and other forms of) violence is the mundane condition of possibility for order and rule. If Schmitt’s sovereign is authorized to act and make decisions outside the law in a moment of peril, Benjamin indicates that treating certain populations as threatening forces that require suppression, and the suspension of norms and laws, is all too normal.

Black radical practice revises, reinterprets, and in some cases refuses the logic of sovereignty.

George Shulman makes a similar intervention into these discussions about sovereign power and the exception, dealing with these matters in the context of US slavery and anti-black racism. According to Schulman, the racial order in the United States is a secularized political theology. Whiteness is associated with redemption and wholeness while blackness is condemned; blacks, Native peoples, and other groups have embodied the racialized exceptions to liberal norms and principles. On this reading, national sovereignty and belonging are constituted and solidified by creating racialized frontiers and exceptions. As Shulman puts it, “The racial state of exception in American liberalism is constitutive not anomalous, permanent not temporary” (28). In opposition to this predicament, as Shulman describes, black thinkers and critics like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison have gestured toward alternative forms of sovereignty. Exemplified by the tradition of black prophecy, these are self-authorizing practices and modes of resistance that cannot be contained within the law, formal politics, or stable boundaries, like the sacred and the secular. This uncontainable excess is not the occasion for re-establishing order but a call for an interruption, a break with the order of things.

What Shulman refers to as “countersovereignty” resembles Cedric Robinson’s terse allusions to black sovereignty. Robinson’s affirmation of black sovereignty is an extension of his broader formulation of the black radical tradition. This is a constellation of practices extended in time that have been forged in the crucible of “racial capitalism,” a term that Robinson uses to register how the expansion of capital is mediated and made possible by racial hierarchies (making some populations more exploitable and disposable than others). Exemplified by slave rebellions, fugitive slave communities, anti-racist and anti-imperial activism, aesthetic and literary creations, and the remaking of African-derived religious practices in the Americas, the black radical tradition is a disruptive intervention into Western civilization and its reigning logics and operations. As Robinson puts it, “Black radicalism critically emerges from African culture, languages, and beliefs, and enslavement. What emerged from that conjunction were powerful impulses to escape enslavement” (3). Here escape refers to the desires and strategies of actual slaves in places like Jamaica and Brazil, but also to ongoing endeavors, in the aftermath of slavery, to resist and abscond renewed forms of anti-blackness and containment.

The 24th U.S. Infantry at drill, Camp Walker, Philippine Islands. Photo Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Wikimedia Commons.

Black radical practice revises, reinterprets, and in some cases refuses the logic of sovereignty. Insofar as sovereign power, in the context of chattel slavery and settler coloniality, has been associated with mastery (including the unlimited power of the master over the slave), territorial expansion, and the accumulation of property, Robinson suggests that black sovereignty offers something different. On his reading, black sovereignty is a “plague” to Western sensibilities and aspirations. He points, for instance, to maroon communities and republics formed by fugitive slaves, modes of inhabitation that were temporary and ephemeral and that subsisted at the edges of official settlements. He mentions the Haitian Revolution and the fear that this protracted slave rebellion against European powers invoked in US slave masters. Robinson also offers as an example of black sovereignty the defection of black American troops during the 1899 war in the Philippines and these soldiers’ decision to join Philippine independent armies. In this particular case, an extra-legal decision is made within and against imperial sovereignty and in solidarity with the targets of America’s imperial projects. In all of these cases, black sovereignty is inseparable from loss, precarious achievements, failure, instability, movement, conversion, and a kind of excess that refuses to be assimilated into the operations and protocols of racial capitalism.

Another image that Robinson offers is a scene from Julie Dash’s 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust, a film about a Gullah community living on Igbo Landing off the coast of Georgia. In this scene, one of the characters, Eula, tells a story about her African ancestors who were brought across the Atlantic Ocean in chains but refused to accept a future of enslavement; instead they turned around and walked back into the ocean. While Robinson reads this moment as an example of liberation, we might also see traces of black sovereignty. If Hegel’s famous Master/Slave, or Sovereign/Slave, relationship is made possible because the slave fears death, and chooses submission over death, then Eula’s ancestors instantiate a form of liberation through death. Conjuring the trope of the flying home slave, this scene in Daughters connects flight with dissolution, home with the oceanic (or the edges of the ocean and settled land [1]), and sovereignty with the right to take one’s own life, to make one’s life unproductive for the master and settler. And yet this escape through death is not incompatible with a life that lingers on through memory, story, mourning, and honoring the ancestors.[2] What we might infer from Robinson and Dash is that black sovereignty takes the power associated with the sovereign to its limits, without the Schmittian demand to recuperate order. This edge points to a moment of collapse and falling, when sovereignty would have to become something else—vulnerability, exposure, entanglement, and what Jared Sexton calls the unsovereign.

Those of us interested in religion, race, and coloniality, in decolonizing religious studies, should be invested in tracking the afterlife of sovereignty. This task does not need to be motivated by the desire to show that the secular world is simply parasitic on Christian theology. And yet it should aim at interrogating how recurring tropes, figures, and paradigms, in both their religious and secular expressions, have been devastating for those on the darker side of the color line. In addition, religious studies scholars can examine how idioms like sovereign power, exception, and excess have been re-enacted, contested, and refused in spaces and contexts that we don’t often look to for theoretical insights.

 

[1] Here I am indebted to Tiffany King’s work and her use of the term “shoal” to think at the intersection of slavery and settler colonial projects.

[2] See for instance LeRhonda S. Mannigault-Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Woman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

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Joseph Winters
Joseph Winters is Associate Professor at Duke University in Religious Studies and African and African American Studies. He holds secondary appointments in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. His interests lie at the intersection of African American religious thought, black literature, and critical theory. His research examines the ways black literature and aesthetics develop alternative configurations of the sacred, piety, and (black) spirit. Winters’s first book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress was published by Duke University Press in 2016. He is currently working on a second manuscript tentatively titled, Disturbing Profanity: Hip Hop, Black Aesthetics, and the Volatile Sacred. 
Global Currents article

Between Minneapolis and East Jerusalem


March for Eyad al-Hallaq in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, Haifa, June 2, 2020. Photo Credit: Rabeea Eid.

On May 30, 2020 Eyad al-Hallaq, a young Palestinian man from East Jerusalem who was on the autism spectrum, was shot and killed by Israel’s border police. Al-Hallaq was on his way to his special needs school when two border police officers decided he was carrying a suspicious object and ordered him to stop. Terrified, Eyad started running. The officers chased him and opened fire. He fled into a nearby garbage room where a guide from his school tried to defend him, explaining to the officers that Eyad had special needs. There, in the garbage room, lying on his back, hurt from the first gunshot, the officers shot him again from close range. All that al-Hallaq held was a COVID mask and a pair of rubber gloves.

Eyad al-Hallaq was killed five days after George Floyd was brutally murdered by Derek Chauvin, who pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds while two other officers helped to restrain the unarmed man, and a fourth prevented bystanders from intervening. George Floyd’s death ignited dozens of protests and solidarity acts across the U.S. and around the world. These protests were not only against his murder, but also against the wrongful deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the many others who have been victims of police brutality and systematic racism. While these protests are part of a long struggle, Floyd’s death generated, more than ever before, multiracial coalitions to fight against anti-black racism and ample conversations about the racist legacies and structures of the U.S.

Eyad al-Hallaq’s death did not stir up much debate amongst the majority of the Israeli Jewish public regarding engrained forms of ethnoreligious supremacy, which also manifest in recurring acts of police brutality against non-Ashkenazi Jews, such as the Ethiopian Jewish community. Among the many demonstrations by the Israeli-Palestinian public, a shared Jewish-Palestinian protest occurred in Tel Aviv on June 6, 2020, which took up al-Hallaq’s death, the Israeli occupation, and the annexation of Palestinian land. Protesters held signs saying, “Palestinian Lives Matter,” “I hope I don’t get killed for being Palestinian,” and pictures of al-Hallaq stating, “This is the face of the occupation.” These signs, as well as the Palestinian flags held in “Black Lives Matter” protests across the U.S., should not be read merely as a nod to current events or isolated acts of solidarity, but rather as calls, in Israel-Palestine and in the U.S., to make broader connections between interlocking systems of oppression very much associated with the dark and violent legacies of modernity’s multiple isms—militarism, imperialism, globalization, capitalism, and sexism. These isms interact with one another to oppress people of color, or who Fanon referred to as “the wretched of the earth.” While all these isms constantly interact, in this blog post I will be focusing on the interlocking of militarism, sexism, and racism. This provides one example of why it is important to connect social struggles to broader discussions of oppression, domination, and liberation.

This is not a call to equate the struggle of Palestinians with that of black and brown people in the U.S. Nor is it a call to reduce either group to their struggles. Such an equation indeed gestures to the ways in which Ashkenazi Euro-Zionism can be assimilated into a global analysis of whiteness but conceals the many ways in which Jews (including European Jews) are not white (as discussed in Atalia Omer’s recent book, Days of Awe). The construction of Jews as white, as Omer shows, has deep roots in the history of modern Christian Europe in which both Muslims (employed interchangeably with “Arabs”) and Jews functioned as the “other.” European Zionism enshrined in racialized Israeli nationalism has relied for its establishment and perpetuation on operationalized orientalism, eurocentrism, and settler colonial frames. As a result, Jews are no longer the “other” of Europe. They (white Ashkenazi Jews) embody its ills. They are no longer “the barbarians.” They became assimilated into whiteness and civilizational discourses. The dichotomy between the barbarian and the civilized later enabled Ashkenazi hegemonic discourse to construct Israel as a “villa in the jungle” (a phrase coined by Ehud Barak while acting as Israel’s Minister of Defense), differentiating it from its geographical region of the Middle East and associating it with Europe and the US. As Omer demonstrates, these processes must be contextualized, historicized, and deeply explored if one’s hope is to decolonize Judaism and reimagine it in solidarity with Palestinians.

Many of the Israeli Jews who attended the protest in Tel-Aviv would probably be perplexed by the idea of decolonizing Judaism and relinquishing Zionism. Many, in fact, held signs protesting the death of al-Hallaq and the occupation in the name of Zionism. While I too share the emotional difficulty involved in these debates on decolonizing Judaism, connecting Eyad al-Hallaq and George Floyd—East Jerusalem and Minneapolis—helps clarify how these two struggles are entangled with one another via race, militarism, and sexism. Zionism’s reliance on a nationalist discourse of self-actualization reveals Zionism’s modernity. As such it is entangled and implicated with modernity’s other creations, including race, which is reflected in its political project of bolstering Jewish supremacy. The Israeli occupation is an expression of modernity’s dark legacies but in complex ways that defy simplistic explanations and analogies. It also cannot be denied that for some Israel is also an expression of religious longing, and the precise relation between this longing and the modernist history of Zionism as a political movement and its realities needs to be interrogated. The occupation does not only oppress Palestinians, but also, albeit differently, oppresses non-hegemonic Jewish groups, women, and the LGBTIQ community, and sustains Israel’s racial formations and heteropatriarchy. This is especially true for groups who challenge the binary of (white Ashkenazi) Jews versus non-Jews, such as Mizrahi and Ethiopian Israeli Jews. Amongst this latter group, those whose identities intersect with other social groups who suffer ongoing discrimination, such as women and/or LGBTIQ persons, face unique and particularly harsh forms of oppression. Their struggles for equality should therefore be inseparable from the question of the occupation much as Black Lives Matter should be inseparable from the MeToo movement. All of these struggles (including along class lines) are bound together by the broader framework of militarism, racism, and sexism. But, importantly, they cannot be reduced to their oppressions.

Only five years ago, in 2015, thousands of Ethiopian Jews protested in Israel against police brutality, carrying signs stating: “We are the right color it is the world that’s gone crazy,” “I am black but transparent to society,” “blacks are only good for war,” and “I’m black, don’t make it a bad thing.” The Jewish-Ethiopian community in Israel suffers from “over-policing.” The percentage of indictments against Ethiopian Israelis is twice their proportion of the population. In 2015, the percentage of Ethiopian minors sent to prison was almost ten times that of their proportion to the population. Over-policing is a clear manifestation of a militarized society in which groups that lack political and social power are suspected of defying the hegemonic order. Bryan K. Roby provides another example over-policing, this time against Mizrahi immigrants. He has shown that in the early days of the Israeli state a constant police presence was maintained in the Maabarot (transit camps for new immigrants) in which most of them lived.

“They’re not Nice” Alley in Mursara Neighborhood in Jerusalem. Photo Credit, Wikimedia User חדוה שנדרוביץ

While the connection to “Black Lives Matter” might seem conspicuous, it has not been systematically researched or even widely referred to by Ethiopian Israeli protesters themselves. It has, however, been made by Mizrahi protesters who recognize how the European Zionist elites and institutions intentionally separate them from their Islamic and Arab linguistic inheritances and cultural practices. This separation effectively creates a separation between them and Palestinians. During the 1970s, Mizrahi protestors took inspiration from the black protest movement in the U.S., naming their movement “the Black Panthers.” The Israeli establishment’s reaction to these protests was highly aggressive. The establishment prevented the Mizrahis from protesting, claimed that they were prone to criminal activity, and held their leaders in preventive detention. At the time, the prime minister Golda Meir declared that the Israeli Panthers were “not nice.” In their response, Mizrahi protestors highlighted how the same establishment which discriminated against them sent them to fight on its behalf, proclaiming that “in the [Suez] Canal we are all nice.” This was echoed in the signs carried by Ethiopian demonstrators in 2015, which stated, “blacks are only good for war.” The border police—the branch of the police whose officers shot Eyad al-Hallaq work—are primarily Ethiopians, Druze, Bedouins, and Circassians. By enrolling minority groups to serve in combatant roles, the Israeli hegemonic establishment offers these groups a false sense of belonging and a never-fulfilled promise for equality and assimilation.

The Israeli border police also takes pride in enrolling female soldiers in combat roles. Women’s integration into combat roles within the army has become a source of pride and an arena for feminist activism. The feminist struggle that advocates for women’s role in the army is framed by activists mostly as a clash between religion and gender. This binary, much like the Jewish-Palestinian binary, renders the context in which such exclusion occurs unimportant and fails to make broader connections between women’s roles in the army and Israel’s multiple forms of segregation and exclusion, the most conspicuous manifestation of which is the occupation. By focusing on the exclusion of women in the army and not on the institution in which it is enacted, feminist activists can fight for women’s equality in the army without questioning the role of the army in affecting women’s status in Israel. But it is Israel’s militarism and its commitment to national security that best explains Israel’s lack of commitment to women. Strong links have been identified between conflicts, militarization, male hegemony, and hierarchies of gender and race. In a militarized society like Israel, security is often used to justify unequal social relations, and policymaking and civil discourse are made subordinate to security discourse.

While in the U.S. people might not feel the daily burdens of living in a conflict zone, a militarized society is not unique to Israel. The U.S.’ imperialist-capitalist ambitions are not only evident in its sending troops around the world under the pretense of maintaining order and security, nor in its efforts to uphold the Israeli occupation. As Judith Butler suggests, military violence and its murderous capacity to eliminate whole communities, even when enacted outside the geographical boundaries of the U.S., is symptomatic of deeper patterns of dehumanization that render some populations (domestic and international) ungrievable. In other words, for black lives to matter, the deaths of “others” need to matter. Militarism can, therefore, be thought of as the antithetical to solidarity because it not only dehumanizes the other but also separates and compartmentalizes different groups and struggles and silences them in the name of protecting the public from the threat of violence it associates with them.

Black Trans Lives Matter poster from protest in New York on May 1, 2017. Photo Credit: Alec Perkins.

When Amy Cooper called the police to tell them “there’s an African-American man threatening my life” in Central Park, she tapped into the intersection between militarization, racism, and patriarchy, activating them by weaponizing her white femininity. These systems of domination work together to paint a picture of a helpless white woman being attacked by a black “savage.” This image of the black man as imbued with threatening, unbridled, and aggressive sexuality is a deeply familiar racist stereotype. Its other half is the modest and pure white woman. The image of a white woman being harassed by a black or brown man is not confined to the U.S. Arab men are often described as trying to lure innocent Jewish girls or kidnap them into unwanted relationships. Similarly, as demonstrated by Raz Yosef, Zionism established the Mizrahi men as sexual predators who are intellectually and culturally inferior to white Ashkenazi men. Maintaining national resilience demands control of both women’s sexuality (by enacting patriarchy through sexual abuse and discrimination) and of black and brown men’s hypersexuality (by brutally policing them), as their mere being embodies a constant threat. Reading the case of Amy Cooper through the lens of multiple interlocking systems of oppression as exemplified through the case of Israel-Palestine also points to the connection between Black Lives Matter and the MeToo movement. This connection underscores that #metoo cannot be the commodity of white female celebrities but rather must be thought at the intersection of other marginalized peoples. Similarly, #blacklivesmatter should also include intersections such as #blacktranslivesmatter.

Understanding that racism, sexism, imperialism, globalization, capitalism, and militarism are interlinked means we cannot myopically call to eradicate one while upholding the other. Israel-Palestine is only one site of these broader connections, but its integration into the conversation helps demonstrate the need for an intersectional lens that interrogates how multiple sites of domination operate to determine whose lives matter. This intersectional lens not only draws a line between Minneapolis and East Jerusalem, but also compels us to deeply examine our own positions within systems of power and oppression. Only then will we be able to further our struggles against these interlocking sites of domination more globally in the pursuit of justice and liberation.

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Ruth Carmi
Ruth Carmi joined  joined the dual Ph.D. program in Sociology & Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2016. Ruth is interested in questions that deal with gender, race and ethnicity, intersectionality, and law and society, and especially in how these questions pertain to Israel-Palestine. Her master's thesis titled "The Israeli Kidnapped Prince - A glance into the phenomenology of Ethiopian ethnicity and discrimination in Israel" examines discursive tactics used by the Israeli supreme court to isolate a case of adoption of an Ethiopian child from the broader socio-economic context and location of the Ethiopian community in Israel. In her dissertation, Ruth intends to analyze other Israeli Supreme Court cases, while suggesting a localized theory of Israeli intersectionality.

Before joining the University of Notre Dame, Ruth worked as a human rights lawyer in Israel, where she litigated in the High Court of Justice and represented in Israeli Parliament committees addressing issues of resource allocation to The Arab minority in Israel and the Arab minority's right to government services and support. She also battled incitement to racism and violence. She has written several widely circulated reports on gender segregation and racism in Israel, which have informed recent public debates and advocacy efforts.

Ruth holds a B.A. degree in Law and Psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an L.L.M. in International Legal Studies (Specializing in Human rights and Gender) from American University Washington College of Law, and an M.A in sociology from the University of Notre Dame.

Ruth is a Notre Dame presidential fellow, a 2017-2018 Mullen Family Fellow, a Graduate Student Affiliate of the Klau Center for Human Rights, and a Gender Studies Graduate Minor.