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.
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.
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 (ʿiṣmamuqawwima). 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Engraving of Spaniards enslaving Native Americans by Theodor de Bry (1528–1598), published in America, Part 6. Frankfurt, 1596.
The body is central to religious life. Religious practices and teachings include insights about food, cleanliness, ritual, sex, and death. But scholarship in the study of religion has at times been oddly forgetful of the embodied grounds of religious traditions and of knowledge. This occlusion of the constitutive role of bodies and materiality is recognized as part of the legacy of modernity. Modern thought construed abstract reason as more reliable than sensibility and imagined rationality as exercising control over one’s body and non-human materiality. But these well-known elements of modern thought are intricately related to colonialism and its organization of the world.
Decolonial scholarship on the body entails not just adding a new category of analysis; it requires a shift in approach. Rather than treating religion, coloniality, and the body as self-contained or self-evident categories, we analyze their imbrication in particular contexts and the ways such terms evoke each other, even where their relationship is forgotten or hidden. In this very short essay, I point to two temporally distant, but paradigmatic examples of the intertwining of religion, bodies, and coloniality. I travel imaginatively to a point of entanglement, as Édouard Glissant suggests, in order to surface connections.
Postcolonial studies in the US academy has tended to start in the eighteenth century, while decolonial studies attends to the earlier period of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. As a consequence, decolonial studies make visible connections between coloniality and religion that are less explicit in scholarship of the later empires. Religious identities were a defining element in the formation of the Spanish empire. Walter Mignolo observes, for instance, “Christianity established itself as intolerant to Judaism and Islam as well as to the ‘idolatry’ of the Amerindians, whose extirpation became a major goal of the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (21). The relationship to Jews and Moors shapes later Spanish discursive and material practices toward the Amerindians.
The distinctions between Christians, Jews, and Moors were based on well-established categories of religious identity, and they were represented as corporeal and inherited differences. As David Nirenberg has argued, categories of religion “were replaced by the genealogical notion that Christians descended from Jewish converts (Cristianos nuevos, confessos, conversos, marranos) who were essentially different from Christians by nature” (242, italics mine). Indeed, according to the doctrine of “limpieza de raza,” “Jewish and Muslim blood was inferior to Christian; the possession of any amount of such blood made one liable to heresy and moral corruption; and therefore any descendent of Jews and Muslims, no matter how distant, should be barred from churches and secular office, from any guilds and professions, and especially from marrying Old Christians” (242). (“Old Christians” referred to those born of Christian parents.) Predicting moral character based on inheritance and managing the risk of contamination through the control of sexual relationships are today associated with “biological race.” But in 14th to 15th century Spain, religious identity was similarly woven through the body to naturalize socio-political hierarchy. This mobilization of bodily discourse in describing religious difference was transposed to the Americas, though not unchanged.
In the Americas, the term “Moor” was used for anyone of dark skin, making skin color a metonymy for a myriad of markers of religious difference. The subordination of Amerindians was asserted through arguments about their religion, practices, and embodiment. The tensions between the bodily and cultural frames for perceived inferiority are evident in the well-known debates of Valladolid between Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas (1550-51). The issue at stake was the right of the king of Castile to subjugate the Amerindians. But the significance of the debate is that the arguments revolved around the status of Indians as human beings, which was treated as an inquiry into their rationality. Sepúlveda, a humanist and translator of Aristotle, based his defense of the conquest on Aristotle’s theory of “natural slavery” as well as on Augustine’s argument that slavery is a punishment for sin (112f). [1] His position was that the Indians were slaves by nature, displaying “an innate weakness of mind and inhuman and barbarous customs” (115). They are as different to the Spaniards as “monkeys are to men,” he claimed (117). In contrast, Las Casas challenged the applicability of the category of “natural slave” to the peoples of the Americas. He explained his position by appealing to cultural evolution. Turning to classical writers like Aristotle and Cicero, in addition to Thomas Aquinas, Las Casas argued: “All the races of the world are men, and the definition of all men and of each of them, is only one and that is reason” (140). If their behavior was starkly different, even seemingly abhorrent, it was not because of an inherent flaw in their capacity for rationality. The differences in the behavior of Amerindians, he argued, was the effect of their primitive culture and religion. The behavior in question included quotidian embodied practices concerning food, the use of the land, and sex. Christianity was deemed necessary to transform these barbarians into civilized men. The Spaniards had the duty to teach the Amerindians as children until they achieved the level of civility of European Christians.
Attributed to José Vivar y Valderrama, Baptism Scene, 18th century, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional de Historia, CONACULTA–INAH, Mexico City. Wikimedia Commons.
Bodily practices were mined for evidence of humanity or lack thereof. Bodies were also the site of religious/colonial intervention, the entry-point for the transformations of those subjected to colonial/religious power. Souls would be conquered through the imposition of specific forms of labor, diet, ritual, sexuality, and family. María Lugones highlights the implications of coloniality for gender by showing that colonialism entailed imposition of distinct gender systems for colonizer and colonized. Native gender identities and familiar arrangements were regarded as “unnatural.” Colonialism broke the links between communities, the land, and their ancestors. Colonialism dismissed and destroyed forms of embodied existence to impose others forms of being that it represented as “natural” and thus universal.
The problematic role of the body in these formative moments of coloniality might tempt us to veer away from theorizations of the body altogether. Indeed, I wonder if the attention to the scrutiny and debasement of colonialized bodies bolsters the appeal of the fantasy of disembodied subjectivity. After all, Christianity defined its universalism against the Jews, represented as too corporeal. The more racialized others are associated with corporeality, the more normalized an ideal disembodied subject becomes. A decolonial philosophy of religion includes the critical insights from other scholarly critiques concerning the occlusion of bodies and materiality, while also tracing the relationship between disembodied universalisms and the projection of debased materiality onto colonized and racialized others.
I have foundMaurice Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of flesh productive in its attention to the ways in which bodies, all bodies, are shaped by the materiality of the world. He attempts to think beyond the Cartesian suspicion of the senses and beyond the separation of the subject from the body. Neither bodies nor materiality are static; both shape and are shaped by human action, including ideas and imagination. Inasmuch as ideas and imagination orient human action they transform the world. And the world in turn shapes our bodies. But even as Merleau-Ponty imagined a world in which all human beings belong to the world, where we all reach toward the world and are received by the world, he lost sight of the ways in which coloniality has transformed the world. He lost sight of how encountering the world meant something starkly different for Hernán Cortez and for the Amerindian subjected to the Spanish crown and its mission. We are all constituted by our relations to the materiality of the world, as Merleau-Ponty beautifully describes, but we inhabit it differently.
Frantz Fanon articulates this critique by focusing on inter-human encounters. He dramatizes how his move toward the world is met with the violent gaze of those whose perception has been distorted by coloniality. Their reactions to Fanon’s body interrupted his approach and impeded the constitution of his body in relation to the world. His body was thus shattered. Sylvia Wynter builds on Fanon’s insights to propose a reconceptualization of the human as a nexus of bios and logos, that is, as constituted by culture and religion as much as by biology. This allows us to analyze how representations of religious differences appeal to embodied differences, or how bodily differences shape the representations of the religious practices of a particular group. It can also help us track how those representations in turn shape the lives of those affected by them—where we can live or work, what we can eat, who we can embrace—and through all of these patterns shape our bodies. A decolonial approach to religious studies might also help us imagine differently toward the transformations of our bodies and the world.
Mayra Rivera is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University. Rivera’s works at the intersections between philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race and gender—with particular attention to Caribbean thought. Her most recent book, Poetics of the Flesh (2015), analyzes theological, philosophical, and political descriptions of “flesh” as metaphors for understanding how social discourses materialize in human bodies. She is also author of The Touch of Transcendence (2007) and co-editor of Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology(2010) and Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire(2004). Rivera is currently working on a project that explores narratives of catastrophe in Caribbean thought.
On Monday February 3, 1919 a delegation of the World Zionist Organization, led by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, submitted to the victorious High Contracting Parties heading the Paris Peace Conference a 3 page document asking them “to recognise the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine and the right of the Jews to reconstitute in Palestine their National Home.” The West Bank was a minuscule part of the territory requested. During the 101 years that followed the sole empirical-material process that has been unfolding throughout the territory of mandatory Palestine is one that is probably best labelled “Israel’s One-State Solution,” that is, ceaseless consolidation of Zionist/Israeli domination over the area stretching between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. It is no surprise that some ponder whether a game changer can be spotted on the horizon.
“Game changer” is a concept that involves individuals, tactics, strategies, and more. As such, it saturates the mind of every losing player, team, and/or party; a player who is winning a game, let alone decisively, is rarely interested in a game changer. In the hazardous Israel/Palestine playing-field, the issue may well be more complex or counterintuitive. That is so not because the losing collectivity is somehow uninterested in a game changer (Palestinians are interested); it is because the leadership of the winning Israeli collectivity has convinced itself, perhaps paranoidly, that the “game” is not yet over and that it still needs to settle on what the endgame is. I wish to suggest here that annexation-cum-apartheid may not be this endgame.
“Peace to Prosperity”?
Conceptual Map, “A Future State of Palestine.” From The White House’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan.
A significant development—possibly even a game changer—has been three years in the making, and is led by a group of American-Israeli policy makers linked to Israel’s “Block of the Faithful” settler movement. The development reached an important point in Washington, D.C. in January 2020 when Donald Trump’s administration introduced a 181 page plan entitled “Peace to Prosperity”—colloquially referred to as “the Trump Peace Deal” or “the deal of the century.”
The Plan is mainly comprised of data-tables and what are labelled “conceptual” maps. Its thrust is to annul established international conventions that regulate border demarcations. The goal is realized through permission to Israel, given by the Republican Party, to formally annex (illegal) settlements in the West Bank unilaterally. The Plan dictates an unequal land exchange between the two asymmetric parties: while Israel is to incorporate the Jordan Valley’s fertile land, desert plots, located to the southwest of the Gaza strip, will be provided to the Palestinians. Trump’s Plan ultimately reserves a stretch of fragmented land for a future de-militarized Palestinian statelet which institutionally cannot escape the label Bantustan. As visualized in one of the official maps, the combined size of the Palestinian archipelago is set to include 19% of the 26,320 square KM of former Mandatory Palestine, assuming no Israeli infringements.
Map of Bantustans in South Africa. Image Credit:Htonl. Wikimedia Commons.
In Israel, meanwhile, a coalition government was finally formed in April following three exorbitant rounds of general elections within a span of a single politically grotesque year. The new coalition is comprised of eight parties, three of which are the most crucial: the Likud, headed by the immortal Benjamin Netanyahu; the pseudo-oppositional Blue & White Party (Kahol Lavan), headed by former IDF Chief of Staff Benjamin Ganz, who has managed to renege on every promise made to his constituents; and the junior partner, the Labour Party, headed by Amir Peretz, who has been in the past a member of the celebrated Peace Now movement and Israel’s Defense Minster during the 2006 Lebanon confrontation. This coalition includes a staggering 73 Knesset Members out of 120. Their first act as a body was to endorse Trump’s Plan. Netanyahu declared that annexation will happen within “a few months,” by which he subtextually meant prior to the November 2020 American presidential election that—at this moment of writing—still stands some chance to oust Trump, who is searching for the widest possible evangelical support.
Israeli implementation of Trump’s Plan will in all likelihood transform the West Bank’s extant de facto apartheid into a de jure one. Is that a game changer? If yes, in what direction/s? Most crucially, is de jure apartheid by definition more ruinous empirically vis-à-vis the long-term future than de facto apartheid? Attempts to unemotionally address this puzzle are morally obliged to acknowledge two issues at the outset. First, it is Palestinians who must ultimately have the final word and verdict on this non-hypothetical question (Palestinian Jews possibly included). Secondly, both de jure and de facto apartheid are abominations; they must as such be morally opposed, and socio-politically resisted, in the West Bank as much as anywhere globally. If one were to attempt and make sense of such a chilling scenario as apartheid formalization then there is no choice but to first rewind to November 29, 1947, the day the UN General Assembly voted to affirm Resolution 181(ii) to partition mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state (that were supposed to share a single economic union).
Partition as Mantra
From 1947 to date the notion of territorial partition has remained the organizing international mantra for resolving the Palestine/Israel question. As explained in detail elsewhere, the international community’s long-lasting fixation on partition has dominated, notwithstanding that there never was a consequential pre-1948 Zionist constituency, nor has there been a post-1948 Israeli-Jewish constituency in support of a viable two-state partition. Anti-partition has likewise been the historically dominant Palestinian stance, save perhaps for the 1988–2000 period. Most Palestinians and Israelis have never supported the idea of slicing into two viable states what they see as their respective “historic” homeland. Following its monumental triumph in 1967, however, Israel was able to maintain effective control over 100% of mandatory Palestine. Since 1967, the principal solution the international community has offered to resolve the collision has ceased to rest on the 1947 Plan. The new idea envisions an Israeli return to the 1949 armistice Green Line and the establishment of a modestly viable independent Palestine in the Gaza Strip and West Bank (East Jerusalem included). Not enough Euro-Americans know that this bifurcated territory consists of 6205 square KM—smaller than the state of Delaware and one-fifth the size of occupied Crimea or pre-1967 Israel.
As neat and soothing as the newer partition vision was for the lethargic international community, it faced a barrier immediately: it was sliced like a salami because of Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem (against the vote of the UN Security Council), by Israel’s confiscation of public and privately-owned West Bank land, and by colonization activity involving the implantation of 620,000 Jewish settlers east of the Green Line (notwithstanding the contravention of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention). Recall that Israel’s settler population also grew by 49% during the most conciliatory government of Yitzhak Rabin from 1992 to 1995/6. The latest stage in this take-over is Trump’s Plan. Is transformation from de facto to de jure apartheid a game changer? If yes, is it exclusively for the worse? It is illogical to address this unsettling conundrum without appraising alternative options, that is, whether there are—right here and now—forces capable of unleashing into Israel/Palestine dynamics of liberal democratization in the opposite direction of apartheid. Four asymmetric power-containers could theoretically spark liberal-democratic modification: Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab world, and Euro-America.
Contra-Apartheid?
Consider Israel first. A worldwide wishful thinking spread after the 1993 Washington, D.C. signing of the Oslo Accords. On this line of thinking, a sufficiently formidable Left-Zionist force was present that was capable of reversing the 1967 occupation and delivering a viable partition. If such a Left-Zionist power ever existed empirically, it doubtlessly faded in 2005 upon Ariel Sharon’s implementation of the “Disengagement Plan”: from 2005 onwards, all Israeli leaders have (nominally) embraced the slogan “two-states”—foremost Netanyahu in his June 14, 2009 Bar Ilan University speech—for the sole purpose of its suffocation; in wrestling they term this position a “bear hug.” Note that Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” is also framed/marketed as a “two-state” solution. In the 2009 Israeli election the Meretz party—the only Israeli-Jewish party between 1993 and 2005 that promoted a viable, non-deceitful two-state solution—was erased. Save for those who willingly blind themselves, now in 2020 it is evident that only bold and less-bold shades of colonizing right-wing Zionism exist. Israel’s phantom-left can at most deliver symbolic protests. It is thus impossible to detect domestic forces emerging from within Israel that could spark liberal modification. An Israeli De Klerk likewise does not exist.
Anti-Annexation Demonstration, Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, June 6, 2020. Photo courtesy of photojournalist Oren Ziv/Activestills
Consider now the Palestinians who are currently quite weak, divided, and fragmented. Liberal-democratic modification of the status-quo is unlikely to emerge in the near future from within Palestine nor, so it seems, from the dispersed Palestinian people globally. This results from the Palestinians’ structural inability to amass by themselves a sufficient Vietnamese/Algerian-type of anti-colonial power. While a Gandhian non-violent resistance, that incidentally typified the first intifada, may stand a better chance to deliver liberation, both resistance types presently seem incapable of countering in a sufficient manner Israel’s massive military, economic, and technological forces. This profound imbalance of power enabled the present apartheid setting to begin with.
The third power-container that can theoretically spark contra-apartheid dynamics is the Arab world that surrounds Palestine. The thoroughly underutilized human “capital” in the Arab world consists of over 300 million people. The Arab collectivity probably embodies the sole potential reservoir for counterweight to Israel’s social, military, economic, and technological force. Yet the derailing of the post-2011 democratic Arab Spring—coupled with the social fragmentation of Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and (pro-Israel) Egypt—seems to mean that some time would be needed before an Arab power could become consequential vis-à-vis the Israel/Palestine question. It is worth reminding that only a democratically inclined Arab force could potentially challenge Israel: non-democratic Arab developments (such as ISIS) merely strengthen indirectly Israel’s standing vis-à-vis the Palestinians globally. The final force left then is Euro-America.
Euro-America until Trump
Unlike Israel, the Palestinians, or the Arab world, Euro-America was, and remains, the most potent power-container; as such, it could have long generated a degree of liberal-democratic change over what is after all an economically dependent Israel—the same Israel that has been exercising de facto apartheid for decades without effects on its trade. Pre-Trump Euro-America did not introduce any liberal-democratic dynamic to Israel/Palestine. It therefore seems that no contra-apartheid development will be delivered for Israel/Palestine by some benevolent Western remote control. This has been thus far the case in relation to (1) Western states that occupy the center-stage of all Eurocentric analyses of the two-state school and to (2) the symbolically pro-Palestinian Western civil society—that occupies in toto the Eurocentric (and non-Arab-centered) analysis of the 21st century one-state school. Recalling pre-1993 South Africa can be helpful comparatively.
Apartheid in South Africa was toppled foremost as a consequence of decades of organized mobilization by a domestic triangular force comprising the African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATO), and the South African Communist Party. These organs have no Palestinian or Arab equivalents. With all due respect to Euro-American civil society and its committed activism, ending apartheid would not have materialized without, first, the non-sectarian counter-power that the triangular South African force amassed from within and, second, state-based international sanctions. The boycott by Western civil society was the icing on the cake, whereas the cake remained what it was: South African bottom-up, domestic-democratic power and activism. In this context, pro-Palestinian forces within the world’s southern and Western civil societies were undoubtedly committed to their cause; yet the fact remains empirically simple regardless of whether or not one likes it: these constituencies are not that powerful and have had only modest tangible achievements since the 1960s activism of the New Left. That said, it is possible that a sophisticated and sustained tapping of pro-Palestinian grassroots activism into the globally transformative Black Lives Matters movement—including via multilingual rap/hip-hop music—could modify the historical equation to some degree.
To date, only one single international intervention over-powered Israel in a top-down fashion: President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s forcing of Israel’s immediate, full, and unconditional withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula in 1956.
Likely Effects of De Jure Apartheid
Forces that could spark anti-apartheid dynamics are thus weak or absent altogether, unlike Trump’s Plan and Israel’s possible annexation. The most crucial subject pertaining to apartheid formalization is the tangible impact on the daily lives of “ordinary” Palestinians. Their property rights are likely to be hit: Israel may deepen its land expropriation by declaring it “state owned.” Specifically, Israel might apply to annexed land its 1950 Absentee Property Act, which was originally enacted to grab property of 1948 refugees; under the Law of Belligerent Occupation such seizing is harder to accomplish.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, the profoundly potent new existential effects that de jure apartheid would generate are finite: de facto apartheid has been in place for decades and it is uncertain whether or not its formalization will substantially modify existing life under prolonged military occupation. Egregious developments might of course emerge (for example, new aggravating legislation). Yet, it seems unlikely that it will take effect immediately.
Israeli soldiers in the occupied Jordan Valley arresting Palestinian Bedouins for (alleged) illegal squatting and grazing. October 22, 2018. Photo by Guy Hirchfeld. Used with permission.
Annexation will present conclusive proof that Israeli rulers have ceased fearing consequential protests from within Israeli civil society. This could simultaneously ignite some corrective to the prevailing wishful thinking from across the globe that a pro-partition, Left-Zionist anti-occupation force exists in Israel (or abroad). The formalization of apartheid may lead honest members of Left-Zionist constituencies to cease relying on phantom forces and ideas and explore alternatives that lean on forces that are tangible. These may include Israel’s Arab-dominated political party “The Joint List,” various campaigns that harshly target bodies operating in the occupied West Bank (as several faith-based groups do), the more “standard” BDS campaign against Israel (presently endorsed by few unions and scholarly associations), or other initiatives or groups that oppose unconditionally all post-1967 occupation and settlement apparatus.
A move to formalize apartheid will clarify something graver: that Israeli rulers overcame fears of the international community. While this may well be so, this feature per se has little to do directly with Israel. The international reality is one of comprehensive inaction vis-à-vis Israeli violations—by American administrations, individual European governments, the European Union, or international organizations. Israeli rulers have good reasons to cease fearing the international community. Yet, introducing de jure apartheid could become a tipping point of sorts—that additional straw needed to begin denting patterns of international inaction. To date Israel camouflages apartheid under an elaborate web of informal settings and this matrix may actually be more insidious than de jure apartheid.
Apartheid formalization will ridicule the countless warning letters international bodies have manufactured since 1967 against the occupation, proving that their worth equals that of their printing paper. De jure apartheid will confirm beyond doubt that Israel neither views the occupation as “temporary”—contrary to what it has argued for decades, including via its Supreme Court—nor that its West Bank activities arise from security considerations, as it argued in The Hauge in 2004. It will be somewhat clearer to see that these policies result from a commitment to expansionist colonization. If annexation is in place formally, the questions of democracy and equal citizenship are bound to surface more visibly at both the international and domestic level. The international community may start initiating a more coherent consensus for counter-actions vis-à-vis official apartheid. While external intervention of a 1956 calibre stands a modest chance to follow formalization of apartheid, it clearly has not preceded it thus far and seems unlikely to materialize without it. Palestinians are cruelly imprisoned between a rock and a hard place. The spectre of annexation did trigger some calls for a more vigorous action.
A cross-party group of 143 UK parliamentarians—curiously including one who defamed Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite—published an atypically strongly worded letter to Boris Johnson: “[…] The UK must work with other states to respond robustly to both the US plan and any annexation of Palestinian territory. It must demonstrate that serious breaches of International Law result in serious consequences just as the UK and European partners have rightly done with regards to Russia in its illegal annexation of Crimea. Double standards would have dire consequences for the role of International Law which would put in danger all nations and peoples, including our own […].” The International Relations & Defense Committee of Britain’s House of Lords meanwhile sent a strongly worded letter to James Cleverly, Minister of State for the Middle East and North Africa. The letter recommends limiting preferential economic access to the UK market that Israel has long enjoyed, notwithstanding its de facto apartheid, if annexation should go ahead. EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell declared that Israel’s annexation is “the most important item” in the meeting agenda of EU Foreign Ministers. EU’s Foreign Affairs Commission was reported to suggest that sanctions could be introduced if Israel annexes. Such a decision necessitates a unanimous vote of support by all 27 EU member states. It does not seem likely that ultra-conservative members such as Hungary, Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy or Bulgaria will support sanctions on Israel even after annexation.
Apartheid as a Means?
Concerns about, and warnings against, apartheid have naturally mushroomed among ideologically diverse observers of Palestine/Israel following the publication of Trump’s Plan. Practically all have overlooked one critical point: Israeli leaders are perfectly well-aware of the fact that de jure apartheid remains a toxic public relations exercise—a commodity difficult to market even in an exponentially more illiberal/authoritarian world (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, China, India, Philippines, the US, Brazil, Austria, Italy, and more). Analysts may thus be better off understanding Israeli apartheid solely as a means to a different end. While Israel is, historically, a resolutely winning player, it neither views the “game” as over nor de jure apartheid as its endgame.
Israel may well strive for a dilution of the apartheid condition. It must be firstly acknowledged that Palestinians are an indigenous national collectivity, and not an emigrant minority. It is the state of Israel that migrated onto their heads, not the other way around. That is one of the reasons why Israel’s interest is dilution and relaxation of de jure, South African-like apartheid. This could happen, for example, if Israel opts to extend to West Bank Palestinians something that legally resembles the current status of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the American “Green Card,” or the British “Indefinite Leave to Remain.” All of these are configurations of permanent-residency based on a categorical denial of voting rights in national elections.
Israel may ultimately aim not just for dilution of apartheid but for its evaporation. Contrary to the hopes of some, that is unlikely to come about by means of legal extension to West Bank Palestinians of citizenship identical to that which Israel extended to Palestinians in 1948. For the foreseeable future Israel is unlikely to join such campaigns as “One Democratic State.” Evaporation of the apartheid setting can paradoxically be maximized via the logic of settler colonialism itself. One thrust of Israel’s one-state project is demographic change: “maximum territory, minimum Arabs.” This is a continuous effort to minimize the number of Palestinians on the ground by bureaucratic, procedural, legal, peaceful, forceful, and/or violent means. Palestinian misery is never coincidental but strives to increase emigration. Military orders 1649 and 1650 of October 13, 2009 are good illustrations: they define all Palestinians in the West Bank as “infiltrators” who may be jailed and deported. The remainder of this essay consequently explores whether Israel may be in search of a game changer that surpasses annexation.
Displacement vs. Apartheid?
Trump’s Plan and/or Israel’s possible annexation are neither the sole issues in motion in 2020, nor necessarily the most critical ones. A State Department official who accompanied Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 13th of May visit to Jerusalem commented on reports that Israel has been intensifying airstrikes in Syria, chiefly against Iranian targets. For him it seems clear that Israel increased its “operational tempo” and broadened its “target set” in Syria. Contrary to most interpretations, a reliable Haaretz analyst explained that annexation was not the prime reason for Pompeo’s visit but the question of Iran’s containment (as well as Israel-China trade relations during the COVID-19 pandemic): Trump fully backs Israel’s anti-Iran actions.
President Trump at the Israel Museum. Jerusalem on May 23, 2017. Photo Credit: U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv. Public Domain.
Israel has acted in an overall provocative manner in the region. It has done so since Netanyahu’s re-election in 2009 and his uninterrupted reign since. Willful regional escalation or confrontation could serve as a game changer for Israel. Recall that the Palestinian Nakba’s pinnacle cleansing materialized in 1948 during a regional confrontation; that was likewise the case during the 1967 Naksa (“setback”) that resulted in an additional massive displacement of Palestinians (and Syrians). Israel’s hunger is for territory, albeit without the Palestinians living in it. Paradoxically, then, colonial displacement, let alone cleansing, are macabre antidotes vis-à-vis the apartheid setting itself. Should heightened regional confrontation erupt—such as between Israel and ISIS or Israel and Iran—some Palestinian communities could find themselves displaced in the same manner as countless Arabs were in war-torn Syria, let alone as happened in 1948 and 1967. Little international attention was paid when Israeli police publicly exercized a transfer scenario on October 7, 2010, or when Israel provoked Syria by bombing its nuclear facility on September 6, 2007.
Regional confrontation need not produce wholesale cleansing; it could still affect existing demography and geography in a mode conducive to annexation sans apartheid. If displacements emerge amid regional confrontations that involve Israeli victims and physical harm, it will be harder to solicit sufficiently vigorous formal opposition to them from (conservative) Euro-America. When the Geneva Convention is cited in the Israel/Palestine context, it is usually done in relation to illegal settlement activities. Yet the legal minds laboring for Israel always emphasize that international law affords sovereign states ample rights to defend citizens and territory. Under confrontations involving civilian Israeli victims/harm, it becomes easier to defend internationally (and frame as legal) acts of displacement as defensive measures. Iranian bombs on Tel Aviv—as happened in 1990 with Iraq—could be rather useful in facilitating disproportionate Israeli aggressions, including vis-à-vis a domestic “enemy-affiliated population.”
It is thus possible that otherwise triumphant Israel remains in search of a game changer as much as Palestinians are. What appears quite clear is that Israel’s endgame is more open-ended than de jure apartheid. Therefore, while anti-apartheid mobilization vis-à-vis Lilliputian Israel/Palestine is obviously needed, a considerably broader anti-war movement, whose scope is explicitly regional, seems equally critical, if not more so.
En Masse Bi-Nationalism as Game Changer?
Against Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Tel Aviv, Aug 11 2018. Photo Credit: יורם שורק. Wikimedia Commons.
Following the 50th commemoration of the Palestinian catastrophe across Euro-America in 1998, employment of the idiom “ongoing Nakba” has grown among scholars and others. Few people, however, seem to comprehend in sufficient detail and depth the idiom’s concrete meanings and continuous inner-workings, as this essay partially attempts to elucidate. This misapprehension may be one of the impediments for formulating—and propagating en masse to broader constituencies—an alternative, contra-apartheid pathway capable of addressing viably both colonial and national formations. Many have realized by now that a game-changing pathway ahead cannot rest on territorial partition. Yet only a handful dare acknowledge that liberalism, and the institutionalization of individual rights including One-Person/One-Vote, are necessary, yet entirely insufficient, conditions to ameliorate inter-communal and inter-religious tensions in post-Ottoman Palestine/Israel. Messianic liberalism that chiefly sees atomized individuals is equally insufficient to heal diverse societies in neighbouring states such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, or Yemen.
Irrespective of one’s liking or disliking, one hundred and forty years of Arab-Zionist enmities have been socially-constructed in the (empirical) Middle East as two collectivities that cannot be understood outside the global playing-field of the phenomenon of ethno-nationalism: Palestinian-Arab and Hebrew-speaking Israeli. The non-partitioned pathway ahead cannot become a game changer that magnetizes new secular and religious constituencies so long as eyes remain obliviously shut to the foundational notions of federalism and bi-nationalism. Non-partitioned settlement in Israel/Palestine stands thus only a modest chance to materialize as long as liberalism and individual rights remain as unfastened as they presently are to bi-nationalism and collective rights. Collective identities that are informed by religious, ethnic, or national ties are unlikely to “disappear”—or be wishfully willed away—through the liberal privatization of them to some imaginary non-public sphere. It is worth rereading Edward Said’s seminal 1999 essay, preferably without bypassing its single most central contention: “real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.”
How to cite this essay:
Moshe Behar. “In Search of a Game Changer in Israel/Palestine.” Contending Modernities, June 2020.
Screen shot from The Battle of Algiers (1966). Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Representing
One of the most iconic films of political decolonization, Pontecorvo’s 1966 Battle of Algiers, has a memorable scene I would like to recall with my reader. Colonel Mathieu, the commander of the colonial forces, discusses with journalists the power of discourse in the midst of the uprising. For Mathieu, the role of activist-intellectuals in the public sphere is diminishing his possibilities of military success. Dismayed by their role and clearly containing his anger, he exclaims: “Why are the Sartres always born on the other side?” After expressing exasperation at how dangerous the existentialist philosopher is as his foe, Mathieu abruptly exits the scene.
In a film full of nuances, the scene leaves very little space for doubt. From the gaze of the colonizer, the radical continental philosopher is seen not only as a contributor to the task of political decolonization, but also runs the risk of becoming naturalized as a born-barbarian (from the colonizer’s perspective a betrayal of civilization seems inconceivable). This naturalization, however, is not innocent. “The Sartres” are made, more times than not, into the representatives of the struggle and emerge as the rational alternative to the colonial status quo. The colonizer’s gaze assumes a battlefield where there are clean, all-encompassing sides: the rightful civilizational project and the subversive radical continental philosophy, the latter appointed as the epistemological representative of political decolonization.
Yet, when we reflect on the radical continental philosopher’s role from what Enrique Dussel calls the “underside of modernity,” doubts undoubtedly emerge. When the tables are turned, the positionality of even the most radical among continental philosophers, Sartre being one example, is questioned. In recounting his personal encounter with Sartre, Edward Said reflects on the silences and paradoxes in Sartre’s political thought. He reads Sartre’s solidarity as “flat,” “innocuous,” “unrewarding” and ultimately “a bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who admired him.” More recently, Algerian Houria Bouteldja completes Said’s reflections. She argues that the limitations that Said rightly recognized were a consequence of Sartre’s reified framework that was unable to leave behind a Eurocentric conception of selfhood. Heir to a continental philosophy that has obscured its situatedness since Descartes, “Sartre did not know how to radically betray his race” (23).
Sartre’s “other side” is definitively a contribution from a specific European location, but may not be the “underside” of decolonial theory. In a stage set by the Mathieus of the world, Europe contains the proposal and its dissent while the underside is invisibilized. In the socially-committed film, the native Arab/Berber resisters are powerfully represented in countless scenes with dark, intense eyes full of rage, portraying the thirst for revolution. But in the few opportunities they have to intervene in the public debate, they are rapidly silenced by legitimized voices. Following the famous postcolonial dictum, they cannot speak and remain largely voiceless.
Christianizing
The attempt to erase the underside is not a problem of the past. In a series of essays published by Al-Jazeera in 2013, Hamid Dabashi and Walter Mignolo interrogated the celebration of another radical continental philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. Confronting the Euro-Marxist oblivion of the universalized claims of his framework, Dabashi asked a pungent question: “Can the non-European Think?” When Mignolo responded in the affirmative, confronting the idea that Europe has the universal monopoly of dissent, he went beyond frameworks of political colonization and entered into the realm of epistemological decoloniality. To understand the reasons for the erasure of the underside it is necessary to explore the patterns of domination that emerged during colonization but nonetheless transcended the context to develop global hierarchies that continue to exist to this day. From the perspective of those on the underside, the “universal radicality” of continental philosophy, represented by Žižek in this case, is premised on the silence and erasure of non-European thinking.
I invite my reader, therefore, to think of the revolutionary representation of radical continental philosophy as a colonially sanctioned dissent that universalizes a provincial difference while invisibilizing the underside of modernity. Coloniality not only monopolizes the only sanctioned path to universal redemption—in what Anibal Quijano calls evolutionism—but also selects its legitimate form of dissent. This is perhaps one of the most perdurable modern strategies of coloniality. In the now famous debate of Valladolid(1550–1551), conceived by critics as one of the most influential legitimizations of early modern racism, the imperial state appointed Euro-Christian theologian-philosophers to discuss “the nature” of Natives. In this discussion, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, retrieving Aristotle, offers one of the first modern formulations of biological racism and proposes to forcefully convert Natives into subservient Christians. Bartolomé de las Casas, enthroned as the radical and later liberationist alternative, develops one of the first formulations of cultural racism, insisting on Natives’ adaptability through conversion without physical force. If for the continental philosopher there is no possibility of thinking outside Europe, for the colonially appointed philosopher of religion there is no possibility of existence outside a totalizing Christian framework.
This is one of the legacies of the multiple “1492s.” As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have shown in their work, and I have also explored, this starts a process in which a diversity of communities were negated, rejected, or invisibilized. Ultimately, most had their humanity put in question and were intertwined as victims of Christian evolutionist genocides. One could think, therefore, that the first step toward decolonizing philosophy of religion would be to contest the Christian frameworks that provide the hegemonic sources of its ontology and epistemology. Some pioneers writing before the current explosion of decolonial philosophy of religion (such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Marc Ellis, Salman Sayyid, Tomoko Masuzawa,Gil Anidjar, and Abdulkader Tayob) have called for leaving behind disciplinary frameworks. From distinct standpoints, they challenged the hegemony of Christian schemes, the coloniality of the concept of religion, and/or its secular reiterations. For several of these authors, deeply knowledgeable of religious studies as a discipline, decoloniality delinks from evolutionism because it opens paths toward pluriversality, not toward a new Christian universality with multiple local paths.
While some trends in the field follow this early insight, in many others this impetus is missed. It is not surprising that philosophers of religion continue to privilege Christian frameworks. After all, one of the privileges of coloniality has been universalizing its provincial framework. What we need to interrogate, however, is why several works in decolonial philosophy and theology are repeating some of the same patterns. These works are valuable in other important aspects. Some, for example, offer persuasive challenges to ontological dualism. Yet, they employ frames that more often than not make discourses intelligible insofar as they are expressed within a Christian framework, or its secular reiterations. Either reproducing overt coloniality or its sanctioned dissent, often these proposals inadvertently reproduce the same evolutionism they are formally contesting.
Luis Fernando Camacho, a Bolivian civic leader, in a Cabildo calling on the people to regain democracy. Photo Credit: Ayrton. Wikimedia Commons.
This does not mean we should rule out some forms of Christianity as sources for decolonial knowledges. It is true that Frantz Fanon called Christianity the Church of “the white man” before critiquing the evolutionism of its “calling” to the colonized “not to the ways of God” but “to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor” (7). And Mignolo argued that previous radical liberationist projects, that may have called Fanon’s wretched of the earth to other ways, changed “the content but not the terms” of the conversation (92). Yet, current readers of either author may not object to the idea that, as part of a pluriversal project, some self-identified Christian communities in some contexts can depart from systemic fractures, engage critically with the encounter of cosmovisions in their own midst, and ultimately contest evolutionist coloniality. Today, however, philosophers of religion in the American academy often employ Christian frameworks that may not fully address Fanon’s and Mignolo’s concerns.
“Hernan Cortés fights with two Indians.” Image credit: Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer. Wikimedia Commons
The problem is not necessarily Christianity, but the omnipresence of Christian normativity in discourses of dominance, rebellion, and re-existence. This creates a very narrow setting that reproduces the allure of totalization. In the field, there are some incipient tendencies we may want to interrogate. A first tendency is to follow the critique that the secular is not a neutral space in order to intervene in public debates with normative Christian resources instead of delinking from them. A second tendency is to reify a world religions model, presenting other alternatives as foreign (this time) latecomers to coloniality, thereby making Christian resources the most natural fit for a decolonial project. A final tendency is to universalize an American interpretation of “Christian hybridization,” overlooking the suspicion communities around the world have of hybridity as a strategy that ignores power differentials, sublates knowledges, and enshrines European Christianity as the normative locus of existence. I am not arguing that we should universally question the potential of some forms of Christianity as decolonial resources. Unmasking secular neutrality, establishing conversations from cosmovisions one inhabits, and exploring groundbreaking accounts of “popular Christianities” can be truly useful resources for decolonial projects. The task is to confront the role that Christian normativity plays when it is predicated in evolutionism, one of the primary strategies of coloniality.
Decolonizing
Today a decolonial philosophy of religion in the American academy may be at risk of becoming a sanctioned space of dissent within an omnipresent Christian normativity permeated by evolutionism. It is then necessary to find alternatives. Dussel, no stranger to evaluating Christian forms of dissent, challenges evolutionist models by appealing to another methodological resource: barbaric philosophies’ analectics. Confronting those models that attempt to create universal consciousness by sublating all other possibilities, he uses this resource to challenge totalizing frameworks. Objecting to narrow epistemological alternatives to internal contradictions of a hermetic framework, he elaborates decoloniality from a positive reaffirmation of cosmovisions that live under the pressure of coloniality, but have not been swallowed up by modernity. As such, they resist demands of hegemonic universality and work toward a world where, as the Zapatista movement has proclaimed, “many worlds can fit.”
While the abrasiveness of totalitarian evolutionism spread throughout the whole world, the knowledges that were rejected, negated, and/or invisibilized were not ingested. In many cases they not only resisted colonially imposed frameworks of dissent, but also took distance from essentialist, apolitical, romantic claims to return to utopian pasts. These barbaric lenses provide a framework to learn from the work of dynamic, heterogenous, and transversal communities that, suffering from the wound of coloniality, have found ways to transform, translate, and create knowledges to resist centuries of evolutionist epistemological genocide. Christianized and not, within and between these communities we find social movements, political coalitions, and intellectuals who are practicing a dual critique against both coloniality and power structures within their own collectives, opening spaces for intersectional and pluricultural conversations. They provide other frameworks the philosopher of religion can draw upon for decolonial critical theories, practices, and horizons.
Philosophers of religion in the American academy, then, have options in front of them. They can opt to develop a radical critique from already legitimized sources in the field, but may need to question how they became legitimized (and sacralized) as colonially sanctioned dissent. They can opt to creatively subsume coloniality and resistances into a hybrid third space creating a new superseding option, but should consider the unequal weight of a Euro-Christian framework that may inadvertently result in the fulfilment of the work of colonial evolutionism. Or they can unmask the systemic allure of totality by acknowledging colonial difference and think from, and with, critical thought emerging from barbaric (rejected, negated, or invisibilized) cosmovisions. These can all be radical options, but not all of them will be decolonial proposals.
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.
Courtesy of Girlie Press. Used with permission. Available for download here.
In the last sentence of Robert Orsi’s recent post on the Contending Modernities blog, he confesses to worrying about an Ohio woman killing “us all.” What has she done during this pandemic to elicit his worry, apparently more than any politician or sneezer might have done? She gained a short-lived viral fame for saying, in a report filed to CNN by its reporter Gary Tuchman, that she was not concerned about her health because she was “covered in Jesus’s blood.” We might be able to reason with a politician who utters falsehoods for political gain, for example by showing evidence that got Mitch McConnell to confess that he had lied in saying that the Obama administration had left no pandemic guidelines when Donald Trump became President of the US. I might be able to turn to etiquette when confronted with a sneezer in the baking aisle of the grocery store, noting that we customarily turn away from others when we sneeze. But for Orsi, there is no commonality with the woman covered in Jesus’s blood. She is far from us scholars; she lives in a radically different ontological reality; we scholars should not delude ourselves that we could have any power with which to pathologize her difference; we should not fantasize about becoming “deputies of law and order” who could get our fellow citizens to judge her as we deem appropriate.
I, for one, am not particularly worried about this specific woman killing me. I live far from her. She most likely has no desire to visit Leon County in Florida. I have no desire to travel to Monroe, Ohio, near the border between Warren and Butler counties—both located between Cincinnati and Dayton—where Tuchman interviewed her as she departed from the Solid Rock Church. (In the wake of Tuchman’s story, Solid Rock Church has posted guidelines for worship during the pandemic.) I feel fortunate, at present, that we both live in counties—assuming that she lives in either Warren or Butler county—that have a fairlylow number of positive cases and deaths per capita. I am happy to learn, as I write this, that her area has not recently seen an increase in the rate of daily new cases. No matter how much confidence these facts give me that I will not soon die as a result of something that has its origin in virus-laden droplets that she will emit, these facts might not mean much. An outbreak may start in the future no matter what the current statistics say, and our relatively good fortune should not preclude us from caring for and worrying about our fellow citizens in the many many counties in the US that have higher rates, or the sick in counties with lower rates than ours.
Nevertheless, I am worried for this woman’s neighbors, since Butler County was the site of a recent rally against Ohio’s governor Mike DeWine and the director of Ohio’s Department of Health, Dr. Amy Acton. Such distrust of political and public-health leadership that was universally praised in early April may very well kill Ohioans in the future. Solid Rock Church’s guidelines for worship close with an affirmation of gratitude for Acton’s and DeWine’s leadership, and pray for their “continued wisdom.” Given this affirmation, I wish that Tuchman would return to that congregation, and ask people there for their thoughts about the rally organizers and attendees in Butler County. That would be more productive than Tuchman’s modeling what we now know to be bad public-health guidance, by sensationalizing the brief hugs that members of Solid Rock Church gave each other at the entrance to their church. After all, the risk that they run of becoming infected has to do with the length of time that they spend in each other’s vicinity, especially indoors.
In the midst of this pandemic, I am the sort of person who thinks about statistics and practical concerns (how long is too long for me to spend in the grocery store?). My pearl-clutching thoughts about religion and its dangers are not any greater in quantity or intensity at this moment than they were before the pandemic started. This is perhaps an odd temperament for a professor in a religion department to confess. Shouldn’t I be thinking about religion all the time? Shouldn’t I be thinking about it more deeply when matters of life and death are at stake? But perhaps I might justify this temperament by explaining why, at the same time that I do not understand the religious life of the woman in Ohio who is far from me, I neither feel a secure hold on the story that Orsi—a scholar whom I take to be close to me (whenever I feel a need for happy memories of my late fiancé, invariably among them is a morning when he made breakfast for Orsi)—tells about plural ontological realism, and his implication in that story that there is nothing for scholars to do except proclaim a need for, and develop, “new ways of thinking.”
“God Works.” Exterior sign of Solid Rock Church. Photo Credit: Joe Shlabotnik.
In reading various friends’ reactions on social media to Tuchman’s CNN piece, I am continually surprised that attention has fixed on the white woman who says that she is covered in Jesus’s blood. While Orsi mentions that nonwhite evangelicals say similar things, no one in my networks has turned to the African American woman in Tuchman’s story who, almost ninety seconds into the story, says “The blood of Jesus cures every disease! Psalms 91—read it!” This is perhaps one of the key moments of biblical prooftexting in recent media stories on religion. And certainly, that woman is reading the plain sense of the psalm correctly; those who trust in God (and follow God’s commands) will see themselves as the addressees of the verses in that Psalm (91:9–11) that claim that “because you took the Lord … as your haven, no harm will befall you, no disease touch your tent. For He will order His angels to guard you wherever you go.”
This woman’s worldview is biblically grounded. There is nothing prima facie wrong with her calling herself a Christian, holding Psalm 91 to be sacred, and holding membership in a church that affirms “divine healing of the sick.” Yet we should hesitate before continuing to say that Psalm 91 expresses the essence of the biblical worldview. The blood of Jesus may indeed have ontological properties that cure every disease, but it is the epistemological story about this cure—about how a woman might come to know for certain that she is covered in it, about how she might come to know that it will either heal her or prevent her from contracting illness—that is more vexing for the Christian than the ontology of disease. As Paul says in the complex argument of Romans 3, it is both true for the Christian that “there is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding” (Romans 3:10–11, restating the early verses of Psalm 14) at the same time that the true Christian is “justified by [God’s] grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). Without understanding, how can one know that one has received the divine grace that will lead one to be cured of any disease that one might contract? How could one say with any command of fact that one is bathed in Christ’s blood? Elsewhere, Paul writes that the peace of God “surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). But is not such understanding precisely what the members of Solid Rock Church claim to possess?
Where is the secure grasp of ontology, for the Bible-believing Christian? How is it evident? It would seem that the extent of human sinfulness would make it impossible to know for certain whether one is covered in Jesus’s blood, or in a placebo. The Bible opens up plural ontological realities, but it also opens up the possibility for skepticism about (but not dismissal of!) the ontology to which one is committed.
This skeptical space ought to be common to me, to Orsi, and to the churchgoers interviewed by Tuchman. We each may arrive at it through different paths—Orsi and I through the university curricula, the churchgoers through the Biblical text—but it is shared nonetheless. It allows Orsi and me to judge these churchgoers, to be the “deputies of law and order” that Orsi fears we cannot be. It allows these churchgoers to be deputies and judge Orsi and me as well; neither being an insider in a community nor being an outsider is sufficient to make one’s claims correct.
To the extent that North American undergraduates know Orsi’s published work, it is likely that they know his critique of Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain for arbitrarily positioning Covington hierarchically above the snake-handling preacher Punkin Brown, with whose community in northeastern Alabama Covington spent almost two years in the early 1990s. Orsi’s response to the Ohio woman displays more anxiety than his response to Covington, but both share a commitment to the belief that “the point of engaging other religious worlds should not be to reassure ourselves and our readers that we are not them” (192). With this I agree. But Covington had reasons for suddenly judging Brown negatively. Covington gave a sermon in that community that endorsed women’s equality, and cited Mark 16, in which the risen Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene, as evidence for this view. For this, a member of the community tells Covington that he is “out of the Word,” and Brown agrees. It is at this point that Covington turns to his othering of Brown that “makes the world safe again for Covington and his readers” (100). Nevertheless, Mark 16 says what it says, although it is also the case that its narrative is not quite paralleled in the other Gospels. To point this out is not to reassure myself that my ontology is right. It is to point to the difficulty of finding a secure footing in a tradition, whether one takes that tradition as reporting on an ontologically true reality (as Covington and Brown do) or an ontologically false one (as I do).
One can think of secular versions of this story as well. In his 1993 book A Place Among The Nations (reprinted with some changes in 2000 as A Durable Peace), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly places himself in the tradition of the Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom Netanyahu describes as almost a lone seer in comprehending the importance of Jewish military power (359). Yet in his own writings, Jabotinsky saw Jewish power in Palestine as something that would cause moderate Arab voices to emerge, and peace with them (43). Almost a century later, one has the right to ask those who claim Jabotinsky as an intellectual forebear why there is as yet no peace. Was Jabotinsky wrong about the Palestinian Arabs (as Netanyahu’s anti-Arab racism in A Durable Peace implies), or was he wrong to believe that Jewish power would generate peace (as the fact of the passage of almost a century implies)? What would be the criterion for deciding between these two options? How would one know that it is the correct criterion? Here too, the ability to engage in immanent critique leads ontological security to recede as one grasps for it.
Nowadays, scholars of religion are not always scholars of texts. There are good reasons for this. An emphasis on textuality can reflect a bias for the modern (and its critical techniques), a bias for the elite (who read and discuss these texts), or a bias for the mainline Protestant (as so much of Orsi’s work on Catholic religious practices has shown). As a lapsed Catholic who studies Jewish philosophical texts, I am wary of replicating these biases in this response to Orsi. Nonetheless, if Orsi is wondering how to respond to the threat that he sees in the Ohio woman and her ontological reality, I suggest that he turn not to a new way of thinking, but to an old way of being with a believer, with a text that the believer takes to be sacred. If he were to offer to read the Bible with her—asking her questions about the text, letting her ask him questions, allowing the far to become close—the fragility of both of their ontologies might very well come to the surface.
Bible Study. Photo Credit: WELSTech Podcast.
Or it might not. This conversation, were it to happen, could collapse after a few moments. She might show herself to be irresponsible: perhaps by refusing to see other justifiable readings (even if she does not commit herself to their truth), perhaps by refusing to wear a facemask with Orsi if he were to ask her to do so. So be it. As Max Weber wrote in “Science as a Vocation” (recently retranslated as “The Scholar’s Work”), the role of the teacher, in a time when multiple values collide against one another in a sort of “polytheism,” is to show the effects of some commitment or other “on social conditions and people’s lives” (27). This makes it possible for the listener to take responsibility for one’s commitments by gaining a clear knowledge of the full range of their consequences (36). Whether one sees the teacher as Orsi or as the Ohio woman, the possibility of being judged as an irresponsible student (failing to read, failing to take seriously the wages of sin) is always possible. Cultural politics is a matter of trying to persuade my fellow citizens that this other person is irresponsible, and not I.
Orsi is correct to note that death is at stake. Even if the Ohio woman will not kill me or “us all,” people have died in the past due to others’ irresponsibility. Hundreds have died today, and many more will surely die in the future. In the midst of all that death, I choose to wager that some respite—perhaps more than I might dare to hope—can be found in studying a complex text with another.
The author is deeply grateful to Ryan Donovan, Joshua Lupo, Atalia Omer, and Jason Springs for their comments on previous drafts, as well as to Robert Orsi for the integral role he plays in a happy memory.
Martin Kavka is Professor of Religion at Florida State University, where he also directs the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is the author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, which won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought in 2008 from the Association for Jewish Studies. With his colleague Aline Kalbian, he co-edits the Journal of Religious Ethics.
Corrina Gould, Chochenyo Ohlone, speaks at an Occupy Oakland decolonization protest at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Photo credit: dignidadrebelde, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Image size has been modified.
Comparative religious ethics, as a subfield of religious studies and as a method of inquiry, assumes that the categories of both religion and ethics apply across cultures. Is our assumption of the possibility of comparison across cultures with regard to religion or ethics valid? In its purest form, comparative religious ethics examines ethics in various religious traditions and draws similarities and differences among them. In its practical form, comparative religious ethics typically involves comparison between Christianity and a non-Christian tradition, or the study of ethics in minority and non-Christian traditions. Comparative religious ethicists may compare influential figures in different traditions, for example as Lee Yearley does in Mencius and Aquinas (1990); explore an important theme in a non-Christian tradition, as William LaFleur does in Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (1994); or examine an idea, such as human rights, that has been adopted in multiple traditions, as I do in The Rights of God (2007). In any case, when scholars engage in comparative religious ethics, they do so with the understanding that both religion and ethics are categories that exist across traditions.
Decolonizing Religion and Ethics
Work on the theme of decolonization by scholars such as Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller, Kathryn Lofton, and Tomoko Masuzawa questions the integrity of the category of religion, and by extension, of religious ethics. Endeavors to decolonize religion unearth the many ways in which the study of religion has contributed to, if not created, the conditions for oppression. The origins of the idea of religion are in European Christianity, which took the primacy of scripture and the centrality of humankind—especially white men—as archetypical of a valid belief system. Beliefs and practices that did not fit neatly into this mold were classified by scholars and clergy as inferior, less highly developed, or even evil. As such, these descriptions of other traditions provided justification for the subjugation, colonization, and conversion of Asians, Africans, indigenous peoples, and other groups at the hands of “enlightened” European Christians.
Sculpture of Plato and Aristotle in conversation. Photo Credit: Sailko. Wikimedia Commons.
The very existence of comparative religious ethics—indeed of religious studies as a discipline altogether—has grown out of a deeply unjust European colonialist legacy. Within the study of ethics outside the modern study of religion, the process of decolonization is perhaps a bit more muddled. Ethics has a much longer history than the study of religion, dating at least as far back to the ancient Greeks, whose meditations on concepts of the good, the right, and virtue influenced countless traditions, not just Christianity. One would be hard pressed to find any community that lacks some notion of preferred behaviors, acceptable social structures, and customary ways of relating to other members of the society. If we consider societal laws to be a type of ethics, in that laws approximate the dominant ethical norms of a given community, then the idea of ethics dates back even further to at least the ancient Mesopotamians, the laws of Moses, and the laws of Manu, among others. Decolonizing ethics and the law would likely take on a different form than decolonizing religion. Of course, ideas of ethics and the law have—like religions—been utilized by imperialists to oppress non-Christian subjects, but ethics and the law likely existed as discrete topics in many cultures prior to colonization.
Given this, what are our options with regard to the future of comparative religious ethics? First, we could abandon the discipline altogether given its compromised origins. Second, we could continue to carry on with our research as we have previously and ignore the efforts to decolonize religious studies. Third, we could acknowledge the validity of efforts to decolonize religious studies and make adjustments accordingly.
Option 1: Abandoning Religious Studies
The first option, to abandon religious studies altogether, is simply unrealistic, at least in the foreseeable future in the United States. While it is the cleanest theoretically of the three options, the academic study of religion is deeply embedded into the structure of colleges, universities, and research institutions across the globe. Of course, universities and colleges do eliminate departments, but usually as the result of financial distress; and this strategy is often met with backlash from students, faculty, and alumni. An alternative option, as described by Birgit Meyer, is to follow the model in the Netherlands, where public universities folded theology faculty into humanities departments, and then replaced theology with religious studies. While this does not erase religious studies altogether, this does more to place religious studies within a larger interdisciplinary context. As such, religious studies becomes part of an academic community that considers equally relevant the knowledge produced in history, literature, philosophy, languages, and other humanistic disciplines.
The elimination of religious studies as a discipline, however, does not provide strategies for analyzing a massive body of literature about religions. We have libraries, both physical and online, full of books, essays, articles, as well as films, movies, and documentaries all dealing with the theme of religion. The category of religion as a means to describe peoples has become part of polling statistics, the national census, and international research data. Religion has been incorporated into national and international legal structures, most notably in those structures’ protection of freedom of religion. Although the origins of the idea of religion are rooted in unjust colonial practices, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres has described, how would we possibly dismantle the juggernaut that religion has now become? To do so would present an impossible task, and would not necessarily be a wise one to take up. Given that religious minorities in many countries may now turn to legal systems to seek protection, doing away with religion as part of a larger decolonization strategy could have the ironic and unintended consequence of jeopardizing the survival of marginalized religious communities. Legal systems, of course, are not without their own flaws when it comes to the use of religion as a category. As Winnifred Sullivan and others have described, religious freedom is a highly politicized concept that dominant parties have wielded to protect their own interests at the expense of weaker minorities, both domestically and internationally. As Sullivan and others note, however, there is no easy solution to this problem. There are some religious minorities that have definitely benefited from such protective laws, including—as I describe below—Muslim women in France who had been penalized for wearing “burkinis” until France’s highest court, the Conseil d’État, determined that burkini bans violated fundamental freedoms.
Option 2: Ignoring Decolonialism
The second option would be to carry on with our research and teaching as if decolonialism had no direct impact upon scholarship in comparative religious ethics. Many of us—even if we do not or have not specifically addressed decolonization in our scholarship or teaching—are sympathetic to the larger project. In particular, comparative religious ethicists are 1) keenly aware of, and try to avoid, a hierarchy of beliefs and practices based upon an inherited notion of the supremacy of Christianity; and 2) supportive of research that investigates non-Christian and minority traditions as rich sources of ethical knowledge.
If we consider the origins of contemporary comparative religious ethics as emerging from the 1978 publication of David Little and Barney Twiss’ Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method, the work done in the field has been sensitive to concerns about stigmatizing the cultures and traditions of the colonized, oppressed, and marginalized, and committed to elevating the status of non-Christian traditions as serious sources of ethical material. Comparative Religious Ethics, although not without fault, takes seriously the structures of moral reasoning found not just in Christianity, but also in the Navajo and Theravada Buddhist traditions. There is no discernable motivation to rank these traditions in terms of their moral superiority. There are clear attempts to show how these traditions share some similarities concerning “other-regarding” norms, as well as to show how these traditions differ from each other.
Applying a decolonial lens to Comparative Religious Ethics—as well as to other works that have since emerged from the discipline—would help to uncover some of the assumptions about the categories used in ethical analysis. The commonly accepted definition of ethics as other-regarding, for example, can be scrutinized as a perspective that requires first, the separation between self and other, and second, that other-regarding actions are praiseworthy, rather than assumed. In one of the early critiques of Comparative Religious Ethics,Donald Swearer points out that the Buddhist concept of no-self presents significant complications to a notion of ethics in which individual persons exist as discrete beings. Similar critiques in religious ethics have been previously offered along similar lines by feminist and womanist scholars such as Katie G. Cannon, Deidre Nicole Green, and Virginia Held.
Option 3: Incorporating Decolonization
The third option, to acknowledge the validity of efforts to decolonize religion and adjust our approaches to comparative religious ethics, is not just practical, but may also improve our methodology in comparative religious ethics. Although the field—like so many other academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences—has been affected by the self-reflexive turn advocated for by Pierre Bourdieu, comparative religious ethics has thus far not been explicitly concerned about its broader origins in colonial practices. What might scholarship in comparative religious ethics that addresses decolonialism look like?
First, work in comparative religious ethics ought to make explicit whether the object of inquiry—whether it be religious clothing as Elizabeth Bucar discusses in Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, or just war as explained by John Kelsay in Arguing the Just War in Islam—exists from the perspective of the practitioners of the tradition itself. Perhaps one of the most egregious missteps ethicists can make is to force the moral relevance of issues onto another culture. The heated debates in France over Muslim women’s clothing, for example, have revealed how divisive and oppressive traditional French norms about women’s appearance can be. French “burkini” bans that essentially required Muslim women to reveal their bodies when sun-bathing were not only unnecessary from a security perspective—this had been the prevailing argument against the face-covering burka—but rightly condemned and eventually overturned by higher courts for violating civil liberties, including religious freedom.
“No Burkini Allowed.” Photo Credit: Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño. Flickr.
Second, we ought not to assume that simply because a specific word or phrase does not exist in another linguistic culture, that the idea does not have resonance there. The concept of human rights, for example, may have been borne out of North American and European legal traditions, but has found audiences in communities around the world. The clear majority of cultures support human rights as a general principle, even if violations of human rights continue to occur. The process by which representatives from highly diverse cultural backgrounds discussed, debated, and then created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reveals how dialogue can lead to a shared understanding of important issues. Hans Georg Gadamer’s term Horizontversmelzung (“fusion of horizons”) captures this phenomenon well. Horizontversmelzung describes an understanding that takes place among participants in dialogue, whereby each person standing at a distinct vantage point is nonetheless capable of sharing a metaphorical horizon with others, who likewise stand at their own distinct vantage points.
Third, recognizing the full humanity which should be accorded to subjugated peoples means insisting that they be recognized as intellectual and moral agents, and not be objectified as carefully preserved museum pieces. As with the interlocutors from Gadamer’s dialogues, people regardless of their location are agents who may themselves initiate exchanges with others, agitate for change and progress, and, unfortunately, engage in oppressive practices both within and outside their communities. Work in comparative religious ethics can illuminate the ways in which people from various communities have applied and responded to colonial pressures, as well as the ethical implications of using religion to further and to protest the aims of empire.
Conclusion
Mural of Frantz Fanon. Photo credit: photographymontreal. Flickr.
The application of decolonial theory to comparative religious ethics would emphasize the necessity of bringing forth distinct voices and perspectives from non-Christian and non-European traditions to represent ideas on their own terms, rather than mediated through the theories and categories of colonialism. This requires the inclusion of theoretical frameworks developed by peoples, both from the past and contemporaries, whose worldviews have been shaped by and are critical of colonial histories. Although comparative religious ethicists take seriously the ideas advocated by thinkers from multiple traditions, many of us rely almost exclusively upon frameworks informed by European and North American male scholars—Bourdieu, Durkheim, Habermas, Marx, Rawls, Weber, and Gadamer, among others. This is not, of course, to condemn such influential scholarship, but rather, to press the necessity of evaluating and incorporating alternative methodologies relevant to comparison. How might the works of Frantz Fanon, Aníbal Quijano, Sylvia Wynter, and other thinkers help us to push and to question the boundaries of comparative religious ethics? The responses to this question will likely engender new directions in comparative religious ethics by interrogating dominant modes of thinking in the field and by expanding discussions about the environment, the economy, race and ethnicity, and gender.
Irene Oh is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at The George Washington University. She is the author of The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics (Georgetown UP, 2007) and is a founding member of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. She has served on the board of the Society of Christian Ethics and on the steering committees of the Comparative Religious Ethics and Human Rights and Religion working groups of the American Academy of Religion. Her research focuses on contemporary issues concerning motherhood, justice, and comparative ethics.
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I invite my reader, therefore, to think of the revolutionary representation of radical continental philosophy as a colonially sanctioned dissent that universalizes a provincial difference while invisibilizing the underside of modernity. Coloniality not only monopolizes the only sanctioned path to universal redemption—in what 
