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Theorizing Modernities article

Muslim Mimesis: Almost The Same but Not Quite?


Ottoman miniature of Mukhayriq agreeing to fight with Muhammad. From Siyar-i nabī, by Mustafa Darir (ca. 1594–95). New York Public Library Digital Collections. CCO 1.0.

Islamic tradition portrays jinn as mysterious shapeshifters who can morph into different forms, usually invisible to the human eye. Constantly in motion, they are elusive, evading human capture. Like the mysterious jinn, knowledge possesses an uncanny ability to transform into something new and unexpected. As time passes and I look back at my study of Muslim difference, it takes on a new shape, barely recognizable from the form it first took when it entered my view two decades ago. More than an inert object of study, Muslim difference reminds me of its own agency, its capacity to evade definition despite my futile attempts to set limits and boundaries upon it.  The brilliant contributions to this book symposium remind me that once any piece of scholarship enters the world it is transformed by those who read, engage, critique, and refashion it in new contexts—discursive, social, and historical. The responses take us on a thrilling tour across the heterotopic spaces of the madrasa, Sufi lodge, hospital, and clinic, revealing the varieties of Muslim difference, past and present.

Between Muslims

Although The Muslim Difference draws attention to the fragile line distinguishing Muslims from non-Muslims, all respondents, to some degree, reflect on the lines dividing Muslims from other Muslims. Martin Nguyen asks, “What can we say about the differences that divide our Muslim communities or those that divide our own selves?” Concerning the physical, psychic, and spiritual landscape of ‘afiya, Ashwak Hauter explores “how different traditions of Islam are expressed and negotiated between my interlocutors.” Anna Bigelow considers how adepts in the medieval Suhrawardi Sufi community grow spiritually through their social encounters with one another. Haroon Sidat reflects on how his postgraduate training in the secular academy transforms his relationship to the Muslim scholars and students at the British Deobandi madrasa in which he first studied Islam traditionally.

The respondents’ turn toward inter-Muslim difference is not as strange as it may first seem. In my book, I advocate for conceiving of Muslim difference not as a binary opposition to non-Muslims but as a continuum that also cuts across heterogeneous groups of Muslims—Sunnis and Shiʿis, men and women, Arabs and non-Arabs, free persons and slaves, young and old, human and jinn. By framing Muslim interreligious relations within a wider field of social and political associations beyond religious identity, we come to see that Muslims are not cut from the same cloth—that Muslim identity is relational and intersectional. All the responses, through their unique interpretive lenses, highlight the diversity and heterogeneity of Muslim lifeworlds.

The Gog and Magog Outside and Inside Us

The Qur’an (18:94) describes the monstrous figures of Gog and Magog as “spreaders of corruption on earth (mufsidun fi’l-ard).” They are so disruptive and dangerous that a mysterious hero, dubbed as Dhu’l-Qarnayn, “The Two-horned One,” builds a wall to divide Gog and Magog from humankind. But the Qur’an warns that this wall will one day fall. In the End Times, Gog and Magog will finally break through the wall and overwhelm their helpless victims, like water breaking through a dam and engulfing all who come in its way (Qur’an 21:96). The Bible likewise speaks of Gog and Magog in apocalyptic terms. Although it makes no mention of a wall, Revelations 20:7–10 warns that Gog and Magog will wreak havoc in the End Days, joining Satan in a final battle against humankind.

Drawing on a seventh-century apocalyptic composed in Syriac, Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, both Muslim and Christian exegetes came to identify the figure who built the wall as Alexander the Great. Medieval mapmakers, Christian and Muslim, portrayed the foreign land where Gog and Magog resided as an actual physical place; it was a land of unbelief, danger and chaos, a place to be feared. Blurring the line between fantasy and reality, Christians and Muslims across time and place imagined a host of dangerous Others as monstrous embodiments of Gog and Magog: Christians saw Gog and Magog as Romans, Goths, Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, and Mongols; Muslims saw them as Turks, Vikings, Portuguese, and the Dutch. As harbingers of danger and disorder, Gog and Magog helped materialize the boundary between self and other.

But Gog and Magog not only represent our deepest fears of the monsters that reside outside us; they also represent the monsters that reside inside us. Both Hauter and Nguyen provoke us to confront the alterity not merely outside us but within us. Nguyen asks, “What is disclosed when we seek to understand the fine line of difference within us all? What separates that which makes us human from that which makes us otherwise?” Nguyen explores these existential questions through a profound theological meditation on the “darker side of difference” that revisits human history’s first murder: the Biblical/Qur’anic story of Cain and Abel, which bears witness to the unleashing of Cain’s monstrous inhumanity. In Nguyen’s psychospiritual reading, “Cain represents an inner impulse focused solely upon the self—a self (nafs), the Qur’an warns elsewhere, that commands to evil” (Qur’an 12:53). Cain, in other words, lets loose the monster within, resulting in “violence-unto-death, the inhuman.” Abel, by contrast, retains his humanity. This polarity between human and inhuman, avers Nguyen, resides within us all. As I argue in my book, we are all difference-makers, drawing lines between who we are and who we are not. But we cannot allow these differences to transmutate into subjugation, violence, terror—lest we become monsters ourselves.

Hauter likewise exposes the alterity within. She turns away from the dark side, however, toward the potential light within. Drawing on her fieldwork on individual and collective ‘afiya in hospitals and clinics, she sees a believer’s focus on the nafs not as innately nefarious, but as potentially generative. The nafs, “self/soul,” is not static, but dynamic, oscillating. “The unknowability and oscillation of the soul imbues individuals with a radical otherness or alterity.” Far from being an exercise in monstrous self-absorption, Hauter sees “vitality and potentiality” in a person’s daily repertoire of ordinary practices that disclose how the self relates to the soul. “In the gap between self and soul and self and other,” she argues, “there is a field of possible exchange, recognition, and innovation.” In this way, difference, whether small or great, is not exclusively a pathway to subjugation of the other.

We are all difference-makers, drawing lines between who we are and who we are not. But we cannot allow these differences to transmutate into subjugation, violence, terror—lest we become monsters ourselves.

Both Hauter and Nguyen make compelling arguments. Both suggest, in different ways, that difference need not deteriorate into domination. How people attend to their nafs, and subjugate it to themselves, determines whether difference in its myriad forms will become a means to subjugate others. Those whose nafs overwhelms and consumes them, as it did Cain, may seek to dominate others. But those who vigilantly watch over and overwhelm the nafs until it is broken, as the Sunni theologian Ghazali urged, have no need to claim victory over others—for they have triumphed over themselves  (Qur’an 23:1).

Technologies of Self-Cultivation

While Nguyen and Hauter draw attention to the possibilities and consequences of cultivating particular kinds of subjectivities, Bigelow and Sidat illustrate the essential but oft-neglected role of imitation in that process. Indeed, my book can be read as an extended commentary on the Prophet’s pithy but potent dictum, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” Whether read by Muslim thinkers as an admonition or encouraging homily, the hadith advances a universal truth about human becoming and belonging: people become who they are based on whom they emulate—and whom they don’t.

Anna Bigelow’s nostalgic, empathetic, and insightful reflection on the spiritual and social dynamics of emulation in the Suhrawardi Sufi community reminds us that people can learn from imperfection; people learn from their mistakes—and from the mistakes of others. Sufi adepts learn how to be better Sufis through their encounters with boorish Sufi novices who lack self-discipline and social etiquette (adab). They learn how not to be. When Sufi adepts shun emulating the uncouth behaviors they witness in others, they not only distinguish themselves from them, they also spiritually grow  The unexpected self-cultivation Sufi adepts gain from these social encounters transforms these boorish neophytes whom they look down upon into their teachers worthy of reverence and love. After all, these novices help them progress on the spiritual path and realize the fullness of their human potential. In this sense, all social encounters are teaching moments that lead to the Sufi adept’s spiritual transformation.

Between Academia and Alimiyya

Sidat also underscores the power of imitation to shape Muslim being, becoming, and belonging. He wonders if his liminal position in the barzakh between academia and alimiyya can become a productive space that bridges different epistemes and builds new ones. Alimiyya refers to the curriculum of the traditional madrasa that produces ulama (sing. alim), religious scholars who become custodians of the Islamic discursive tradition. This is not purely an intellectual role. They are expected to live what they learn, embodying what they know in their everyday conduct. As a result, they become spiritual exemplars, communal leaders who inspire ordinary believers to become better. Sidat refers to this socio-spiritual role of the Muslim religious scholar as imitatio imam (imitation of the imam). These scholars model Prophetic behavior, Sidat tells us, by being imitators of the malakut, the angelic or imaginal realm that cannot be apprehended by the physical eye. Imitation thus becomes a chain linking ordinary believers to scholars and scholars to angels across the realms of the visible (mulk) and invisible (malakut). Imitation, in other words, leads to collective solidarity across the cosmos.

Muslims, Mimesis, Modernity

In response to the encounter with colonial modernity, Muslim thinkers across the Muslim world—South and Southeast Asia, North and West Africa, the Levant, Arabia, and Europe—composed Islamic treatises warning ordinary believers against becoming Muslim mimics estranged from their tradition and themselves. While neither uniform nor universal in content, the global spread of these discourses during the 18th–20thcenturies speaks to the collective trauma experienced by Muslims under colonial rule.

Imitation thus becomes a chain linking ordinary believers to scholars and scholars to angels across the realms of the visible (mulk) and invisible (malakut). Imitation, in other words, leads to collective solidarity across the cosmos.

Many of these treatises were borne of violent political upheaval, from the Spanish-Moroccan War and civil strife in Nigeria to the British colonization of India and the creation of a secular republic in Turkey.  Iskilipli Aṭĭf Hoca (d. 1926), was executed by the newly formed Turkish Republic for composing a treatise forbidding European style hats on the pretext that it undermined a state law banning the tarbush.  In this new social imaginary, to reject a European way of life was to reject civilization itself.

Although built on a premodern Islamic discursive tradition, the shape of these modern Islamic discourses against imitation were different; they displayed Muslim anxieties over aping the west in everything from wearing brimmed hats and bowties to celebrating Valentine’s Day and Christmas.  The Prophet’s mantra against imitation transformed into a slogan of anti-colonial and anti-western resistance.  In fact, Muslim adoration of all things European became so pervasive that Iranian intellectual, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969), dubbed it a plague, gharbzadegi, translated variously from Persian as Westoxification or Occidentosis.

Nevertheless, it was, and is, an Islamic discourse that assumed a religiously plural public space where Muslim encounters with Christians, Jews, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and others were possible. It is propelled by the conviction that social encounters with Others are potentially transformative, that mimesis, conscious and unconscious, is normal but dangerous.

So what does the present and future of Muslim mimesis look like?  Well, one thing is for certain: it won’t look the same everywhere.  In the epilogue of my book, I offer a preliminary sketch of how to reread the Prophet’s dictum on imitation beyond confessional lines—as an exhortation to emulate what is best in others regardless of belief and to be mindful of the divine breath that inheres in all humans.  To be clear, this reading is an attempt to expand the contours of Muslim difference, not to erase it.  Whether or not my audience finds my rereading of tradition persuasive, I hope that the genealogy of Muslim difference presented in my book will help scholars and laypeople think more clearly and critically about a politically loaded, misunderstood, and poorly theorized subject.

The shape and style of Muslim difference continues to matter.  Today, it is common to hear peacemakers and politicians make anodyne public appeals to “overcome our differences.” That is, they portray difference as an obstacle to solidarity—that conflict, even violence, is the inevitable outcome of difference. But if we listen to Muslim thinkers across time and place, as I urge readers of my book to do, we learn that being different can be a very good thing. Today, a call to Muslim difference is not a call to reject modernity or to reject the west. It is not a call to despise the Other. It is, I believe, a call for Muslims to shape and style their own modernity, a modernity that is almost the same but not quite.

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Youshaa Patel
Youshaa Patel’s scholarship explores how Islam has shaped—and been shaped—by Muslim interfaith encounters in the Middle East and beyond. He is author of The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (Yale University Press, 2022), which was named a finalist for two American Academy of Religion book awards: “Best First Book in the History of Religions” and “Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Textual Studies.”  His work has been supported by grants from Mellon, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and includes extended research stays in India, Qatar, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria. Most recently, Professor Patel was the Abdul Aziz Al-Mutawa visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, an independent center of the University of Oxford.
Theorizing Modernities article

Imitatio Imam: Reimagining Imitation as a Bridge to the Other


Dome of the Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran. Image via Flickr User Seier+Seier. CC BY-2.0.

 

Pride is only for the people of knowledge, as they are
The teachers, well guided, for those seeking the path

Every person’s worth depends on what he knows best
While the ignorant are enemies for the people of knowledge

Succeed with knowledge and you will live forever
The people are dead and the people of knowledge are alive.

–Ali ibn Abi Talib

The Positive Valence of Imitation

Youshaa Patel’s book, The Muslim Difference, explores the Islamic discourse on reprehensible imitation (tashabbuh) that seeks to distinguish Muslims from others in the public space. In this piece, I want to use his insights to think about the positive valence of imitation, the moral meanings it expresses, and how it facilitated my own research at a madrasa in Britain.

Transcending Life-Worlds

Often the rhetoric filling our airwaves is about scapegoating anyone who is different, whether they are Muslim or otherwise. This rhetoric is divisive and guided by an Othering logic. This is not new. When 9/11 happened, I was a student at a madrasa in Great Britain. Buried in books, I was completing a six-year intensive classical curriculum and had very little time for anything in the outside world. Yet I recall how Muslims were portrayed as the Other, vilified and demonized. I was raised under the long shadow of America’s War on Terror that followed 9/11. It was this darkness that inspired me to undertake the first-ever ethnographic study of the modern madrasa, a dar al-uloom in Britain. Scholars had written about how madrasa students were among those Muslims who were most vilified in the western mainstream media and about the lifeworld of Muslim religious scholars (ulama) in the context of South Asia. But I wanted to speak to this misunderstanding of madrasas and Islam in a different context that broadens our understanding of the roles of madrasas in the Muslim community. The Madrasas are at the heart of serving and responding to the needs of the Muslim communities in Britain.

There were challenges to conducting this research. It would be wrong to assume that just because I graduated from a madrasa, I would be welcomed back with open arms to undertake research.  I was worried that I would be perceived as a foreign “virus.” Viruses carry genetic information that invades healthy cells, or hosts. Having entered the secular academy to pursue Islamic Studies, would those in the madrasas think that I had become a virus that could infect my hosts with foreign ways of thinking and being? A madrasa graduate-turned-academic, Ebrahim Moosa highlights the general mistrust of the academy and antipathy towards modern secular education, which leads to graduates being stigmatized and marginalized. Although my identity as an academic at a secular liberal university had the potential to “Other” me as an invading virus, it is important to note that viruses also play an important role in breaking and restructuring cells in more productive ways. In Sufi thought, the term barzakh can denote a place between Paradise and Hell, whereas, in the Arabic lexicon, it is defined as a “barrier” between two things. My positionality as ‘alim and academic is like being between two worlds. Could my liminal position give birth to new ways of engaging in epistemic inquiry and sociality?

I want to answer this question by reflecting on how my role as an imam—that is, as a prayer and community leader at a mosque—at the time of my research, and my imitation of other imams and the ethical and social meanings it radiates, granted me access to my research subjects. This experience speaks to the broader question of living with Muslim difference under conditions of modernity, and this is where Patel’s book is also particularly insightful. Second, given my positionality, I want to place academic writing on Islam in conversation with traditional Islamic scholarship, which is part of a larger project on which I am currently working. This attempt speaks to the need to bring together different epistemes in order to produce fruitful harmony.

Imitatio Imam

Many of the senior teachers at the dar al-uloom were also imams at mosques. In a sense, I was imitating them in the way I approached my work. Imitation is a powerful social technology of becoming and belonging, which has received attention in recent academic scholarship on Islam. Patel’s pioneering book on imitation in premodern Muslim intellectual thought is based on the politically charged hadith: “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” This hadith forms part of a tradition that has often been used to “other” non-Muslims. Recently, SherAli Tareen has explored a similar theme to show how the discourse on imitation has shaped Hindu-Muslim friendship under colonial modernity. The key Arabic term for imitation, tashabbuh, usually carries a negative valence. Yet, as Patel demonstrates, imitation can also be productive. For example, the hadith above can be deployed by Muslims to “expand the social boundaries of their spiritual communities,” (144) and it is this positive valence of imitation on which I want to reflect.

Across Islamic history, some Muslim scholars have drawn attention to the positive, transformative potential of imitation. In precolonial India, the polymath theologian, philosopher, and religious scholar Shah Wali Allah (d.1762) articulated the inner meanings of the Divine law when he wrote that fasting is “like imitating the angelic realm” (ka-tashabbuh bi al-malakut). Before him, Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240) envisioned fasting as a way to imitate God’s self-sufficiency. For such thinkers, external acts express ethical meanings. This synthesis of ritual and law, ethics and mysticism, is embodied by many of my teachers, who are both Sufi masters and jurists (fuqaha). For them, the imam is the embodiment of the highest ethical virtues, something that classical Islamic legal manuals also emphasize. Shah Wali Allah argues that the imam is the preeminent object of ethical imitation for his congregationYet this congregational prayer led by the imam also symbolizes the transcendence of difference, with social inclusion where “hermaphrodites,” for example, are given a space to pray. As a scholar of Islamic law, reading Patel’s work alerted me to how this ritual act, though an individual obligation to God, emphasizes both a horizontal form of inclusion and an ethical philosophy. The opposite of this is both harmful and inauthentic to the Islamic tradition. As he states:

It is incumbent upon Muslims to acknowledge the moral damage that exclusivist religious discourses may inflict upon others in order to apply the Prophet’s universal ethical teaching: “Do not harm nor reciprocate harm” (219).

Alongside being an “imitatio imam,” I maintained a sociality of companionship (suhba) with my teachers. No human is an island. The tradition in which I was trained requires one to fully embody Prophetic guidance by imitating others in order to intuit wisdom. Just like pages are bound to books to produce a coherent narrative, bodies, placed together, generate wisdom and moderation. What our project on researching imams in Britain demonstrated, and what madrasas expect their graduates to embody is a selfless service (khidma) to society. This is important, Cyrus Zargar notes, “since a virtue-based society will be led and populated by those who have also perfected their own characters” (9). Imams ought to be the most visible embodiment of this vision. It was this imitation of fellow imams and the ethical meaning it embodied, I argue, that inscribed itself on my identity while researching a madrasa. I think my experience at the dar al-uloom speaks to a broader conversation about how the Sharia, as a socially based moral system of values, can play a productive role in engaging and living with the other in modernity where morality is an afterthought. The Sharia, on the other hand, is infused with moral and spiritual concerns.

A Morally Infused Theocentric Worldview

Mosque in Msheireb, Doha. Image via Flickr User Omar Chatriwala. CC BY-NC-ND 2.

As Wael B. Hallaq reminds us, even the so-called “ritualistic” parts of faith are deeply imbued with a synthesis of morality, law, theology, mysticism, and philosophy but also an anthropological foray into Muslim subjectivity all of which engenders a paradigm that is intellectual, social-communal, and psychological. The Prophet, we are told, deftly combined all of this with what I would term an imitative art form. For example, Shah Wali Allah shows that the wedding sermon (khutba) in pre-Islamic society was a mechanism for blameworthy ostentation and showboating. Yet, it served a positive function. It publicly announced the coming together of two people, and thus crucially served as a beneficial civilizational purpose (maslaha). The Prophet thus imitated this practice while coloring it with a theological-moral hue by emphasizing an awareness of God (the supreme Other) over and above oneself. In doing so, he kept “the original [act] while changing its [negative] attribute.” Following this example, we can note that the spiritual and legal tradition of Islam provides a reservoir to replenish ways of living wherein Muslim political theology is no longer the de facto state of affairs. Crucially, Patel recognizes the need for the humanistic impulse of Islam in a context of virulent discrimination:

This principle is particularly relevant today amid the alarming spread of Islamophobia across the globe, which has normalised anti-Muslim discrimination. Instead of reciprocating harm, Muslims must struggle to “respond in a better way [ahsan]” by exhibiting self-restraint and refusing to categorically demonize the Other. The outcome of treating the religious Other with dignity, equality, and humanity, promises Q 41:34, is that “your bitter enemy will become like an old friend (219).

The emphasis on ethical living—that is, everyone living as “imams” in a socio-moral sense—transcends the destructive distrust pervading society. For Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111) love is a unique characteristic of a sentient being. One cause of this love is a beautiful character: someone who possesses moral traits of knowledge and intellect, chastity, bravery, piety, and generosity, among others. This is because there is something in our very nature, freed from the calls of the ego, that is innately attracted to inner beauty. It is to this beauty which transcends otherness that is key:

… the spiritual objective of subjugating the self to God prevails over the social objective of subjugating others to the self…. The spiritually undisciplined self (nafs) obsessed with power seeks to be above others, but the spiritually disciplined self shuns self-aggrandizement, fearing abasement before God. By denying the impulse of the self to rise above the religious Other, the flattening of religious hierarchy onto a plane of social equality acts as a form of spiritual discipline (ta’dib) that cultivates a virtuous self (nafs) (223)

Transcending the Self

In Sufism, one seeks to erase the facile border between self and other. The mystic Jalaluddin Rumi (d.1273) writes that duality can only be erased through self-annihilation, exemplified in the statement by the martyred mystic Mansur al-Hallaj (d.922): “I am the Real” (Ana al-haqq). He paid the ultimate price in his search to remove ontological difference. For Rumi, Hallaj’s friendship with God reached an apogee, where duality—between him and God —ceased. For, as the mystics tell us, it is pretentious to say “He is God” due to the “stench of duality.” The third person “he” only emerges when there is an “I.” Once erased, sameness turns enmity into amity.  Another cause for love is benevolence (ihsan). Friendship is the outcome of serving and caring for others, something that madrasas seek in producing carers of others. I would say that it is this very “social suhba” of living with others ethically while being theologically rooted that paves the way for a productive imagining of Muslim difference with others today. Muslims in the West, like others, can maintain and hold on to their theological claims, while beautifying their social presence with and among others. Patel’s work has helped me think outside of the “insider-outsider” dichotomy of research access, and how imitation, infused with ethical meanings, can open up doors not only to madrasa but others in our often fractured and increasingly pluralistic world.

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Haroon Sidat
Haroon Sidat is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK at Cardiff University and a Trustee at the Cambridge Muslim College. He specializes in the study of Islam in Britain and the intersection of sociology and Islamic Law. He is the author of Competing Spaces of Religious Belonging: Deobandi Debates on Interest/Usury as a Case Study  and has worked on the largest study of British imams. He is currently working on the Legacies of Learning: from Turath to Transformation project that explores the lives and works of Islamic scholars, with a focus on their biographies, socio-political context, and institutional connections, as well as their intellectual work to answer questions that are pertinent to civilizational flourishing today.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Difference Within Us: Our Humanity and Inhumanity


Reflections in Alhambra. Image via Flickr User Inge Knoff. CC BY-NC 2.0.

Difference is everywhere. It is always at work. We make difference as much as we encounter it. We practice it, perform it, and embody it in how we choose to live in the world. The ethical dilemma, of course, is what do we make of these differences?

Youshaa Patel’s The Muslim Difference

In the The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present, Youshaa Patel adroitly directs our attention to the many differences in ritual performance, cultural practice, and sartorial preferences that have emerged as Muslims have sought to define themselves against the religious Other. Over the course of eight chapters, Patel traces the currents and counter-currents that Muslims across the centuries have, in various ways, attempted to understand, define, and embody what it means to be “Muslim.” He does so by guiding us through how different religious and cultural distinctions—from funeral prayers to European-brimmed hats—have figured in this ever-shifting identity discourse. As Patel observes, these carefully studied windows into the past reveal that “change is built into the architecture of Islamic tradition” (220).

Moreover, in our times when discussions of identity are increasingly fraught, I believe Patel’s turn to supposedly “minor” differences to be especially salient. What might we learn, then, if we move beyond the lens of the religious Other? How might Patel’s vector of analysis inform our understanding of other varieties of othering? What can we say about the differences that divide our Muslim communities or those that divide our own selves? Put another way, what can difference disclose for us theologically and ethically?

Patel answers some of these pressing questions in a notable transition from the analytical to the ethical in the epilogue. He presents a constructive vision of how contemporary Muslims, in all of their heterogeneity, might engage with other social divisions and structures of oppression. He has us imagine how we might “heal and repair” and even expand “the circle of belonging” that emerges from “the darker side of difference: conflict” (228). It is on this last point that I take inspiration for my own work on religion, race, and systemic evil. Beyond the religious Other, how might we use difference to understand othering more broadly experienced and conceived?

The Darker Side of Difference

The discernment of difference, I argue, is an innate trait that human beings share with other biological entities. We make sense of the world through this divinely endowed ability to distinguish and categorize similarities and differences. The Qur’an repeatedly attests to this intrinsic sensibility for difference: Humankind was but one community, then they differed (Q. 10:19), But they have fragmented their affair among themselves (Q. 21:93), truly you are of differing claims (Q. 51:8), joined with the continual refrain that wherein they differed (Q. 10:19) that wherein they used to differ (Q. 10:93, Q. 32:35, Q. 45:17), that wherein you used to differ (Q. 22:69). Our sense of safety and danger, and hence our ability to survive and thrive, depends upon it. Yet, in our case of human beings—as servants of God—how does difference figure into the larger spectrum of our activity, a spectrum that encompasses acts of personal transgression (individual evil) to socially instantiated forms of oppression (systemic evil)? To understand these degrees of wickedness, I would have us return to that “darker side of difference.” This same divinely endowed sense of discernment also has the potential to end in divisiveness and death. Our ability to differentiate can easily be arrogated into a sense of subjugating supremacy. This is especially evident, for instance, in the hierarchical differentiations born out of the modern concept of race first formulated by European colonizers, scientists, and writers and then continued and further developed by many others.

More fundamentally, the Qur’anic story of Satan attests to the possibility of this social human impulse. When the figure Iblīs, who would become Satan, is presented with the creation of the first human being by God and then commanded to prostrate before him, we are told that Iblīs waxed arrogant (Q. 2:34, Q. 38:74), claiming his existential superiority over the human being (and by extension, us): I am better than him. You created me from fire, but him You have created from clay (Q. 7:12, Q. 38:76). In effect, we are being cautioned against succumbing to a similar sense of superiority based on difference.

When a notion of supremacy prevails within the human self, a rippling disfiguration occurs. The personal seeps into the social. We transpose differences in identification into hierarchies, which are then taken to structure society itself. It marks a tragic human pattern. Seeking to order the world, a group envisions itself as categorically superior to others in a gross misapplication of difference. The ancient Greeks set themselves against all others who they named barbarians (barbaros), a pejorative reference to their inability to speak “clearly.” Likewise in Late Antiquity, the Arabs named all non-Arabic speakers ʿajamī, a pejorative based on the incomprehensibility of their speech. For some, sentiments such as this transformed into an idea of Arab preeminence as demonstrated by the range of positions taken in works of jurisprudence (fiqh) or more literary apologetics like Ibn Qutayba’s The Excellence of the Arabs. It is to such particular sets of differences—phenotypical, socio-cultural, ideological, linguistic, religious—that we often attribute hierarchical lines of division. Ethno-centrism, nationalism, colonialism, and racism among other hierarchical orientations are born from and fed by this social predilection to differentiate with prejudice. The theological utility of difference is hardly restricted to religious identity. In fact, as Patel rightly states, “it is not necessary to construct the non-Muslim as a foil to forge the ideal Muslim” (222–23). We should turn our ethical gaze introspectively in order to more keenly apprehend what it means to be human from the horizon of Islam. In other words, what is disclosed when we seek to understand the fine line of difference within us all? What separates that which makes us human from that which makes us otherwise?

The Difference Between Cain and Abel

Consider the Qur’anic story of the two sons of Adam (Q. 5:27-32), which the Muslim commentarial tradition identifies as Cain (Qābīl) and Abel (Hābīl), the first generation to follow the initial creation of humankind. In the account, each brother offers a sacrifice to God. For one, Abel, the sacrifice is accepted, while for the other, Cain, it is rejected. After this rejection, he declares his commitment to slaying his brother. Recite to them, with truth, the account of the two sons of Adam. When they each made a sacrifice, it was accepted from one of them, but it was not accepted from the other, who said, “Surely I will kill you.” [The other] said, “God only accepts from the reverent” (Q. 5:27). On one level, it is a tale of fratricide that explains how murder first entered the world. On another, it is a bitter disclosure about human nature. While the biblical account of Cain and Abel makes much about what each brother offered in sacrifice (Genesis 4:1–18), the Qur’an is altogether unconcerned with that difference. What it emphasizes instead is the manner in which each brother presents himself. Cain proclaims a commitment to deadly violence—Surely I will kill you (la-aqtulannaka)—using the socially differentiating language of “I” and “you.” Abel, meanwhile, responds with words aimed at restoring the primacy of the Divine—God only accepts… (innamā yataqabbalu Allāhu)—obviating entirely the distinction between “I” and “you.”

Ethno-centrism, nationalism, colonialism, and racism among other hierarchical orientations are born from and fed by this social predilection to differentiate with prejudice.

For the Iranian revolutionary thinker Ali Shariati, this Qur’anic narrative was significant for what it revealed about human potential: “Cain is not inherently evil. His essence is the same as that of Abel, and nobody is inherently evil, for the essence of everyone is the same as the essence of Adam” (107). Cain might have acted otherwise. Instead the brothers represent something more fundamental within ourselves. Cain represents an inner impulse focused solely upon the self—a self (nafs), the Qur’an warns elsewhere, that commands to evil (Q. 12:53). In contrast, Abel represents an impulse that takes God as its center instead. Each brother embodies a different way of being human: one of violence-unto-death, the inhuman, and another of devotional reverence (taqwā), the human. Through this story of the first generation to follow, revelation is calling us to recognize that we each bear within ourselves the capacity for the human and the inhuman.

Discerning Differences Today

What does this mean for Muslims today living in a world wracked by war, suffering, and interlocking forms of structural oppression? It concerns how a person of faith ought to understand and confront the injustices of the world. It concerns the ethics of faithful response. All too often, as Viet Thanh Nguyen describes in his ethics of recognition, we are quick to identify the inhumanity of others, while remaining blind to our own inhumanity:

Identifying with the human and denying one’s inhumanity, and the inhumanity of one’s own, is the ultimate kind of identity politics. It circulates through nationalism, capitalism, and racism, as well as through the humanities. Reminding ourselves that being human also means being inhuman is important simply because it is so easy to forget our inhumanity or to displace it onto other humans. (72)[1]

The failure to recognize the fullness of who we are, the human and inhuman, renders us susceptible to re-inscribing division and violence ourselves. The path of social complicity in oppression is the path of least resistance. It takes very little to cross into the inhuman. A similar sentiment underlies Paulo Freire’s warning in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn the oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both” (44). To be human is to recognize that we might one day do the same as the oppressor, the colonizer, the occupier, and the dehumanizer. To be human is to recognize that we might, at any turn, descend into the fallenness of Cain.

Indeed, Patel invites us in his epilogue to consider the United States as “an imagined community,” given the polarizing divisions wracking the nation (228). I feel compelled, however, to think more broadly, even if more abstractly, on the scale of humankind. Our history testifies to how easy that descent of Cain is: a continual history of complicity in war and colonialism, slavery and subjugation, displacement and exploitation, and apartheid and genocide. The challenge lies in maintaining the fine line between our humanity and inhumanity. Indeed, we would be mistaken to conceive of humanity and inhumanity as diametric opposites or inversions of each other. Rather, they are, like Cain and Abel, brothers to one another separated by only “minor” differences. They are deceptively alike. Inhumanity does not lack in love, conviction, or a sense of justice. Like our humanity, our inhumanity has its share of intimacy and empathy, relationality and community, creativity and artistry, even faith and righteousness. But our inhumanity holds each of these differently—more selectively and narrowly—in contortions and distortions of how they ought to be. Inhumanity loves its own dearly, but only its own. It draws its arms tightly around its beloved community in disregard of others. Its dreams extend to sustain a select few. Its imagination is exercised for its own exclusive ends. It believes in itself so deeply that it will even fight and die for itself. It is precisely in this proximity of our inhumanity to our humanity that we are most challenged and tested. God calls us to recognize our potential for inhumanity—our capacity to be Cain—because it is nothing more than the subtle disfigurement of our humanity, a difference of but a little. It is to this “Muslim difference” that I believe greater work in theological ethics is called to disentangle. How ought that fine line between them be understood and maintained? How exactly ought our humanity be made to subsume and circumscribe the darker side of difference? How can we work instead to restore and sustain the humanity of all?

[1] With respect to identity politics, I follow Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s critical engagement in Elite Capture. Identity politics may have begun as a concept for “fostering solidarity and collaboration” by those in positions of subjugating power, a sentiment with which Viet Nguyen’s comments are aligned.

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Martin Nguyen
Dr. Martin Nguyen, Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University, is an Islamic studies scholar and Muslim theologian. His work revolves around Islamic ethics, theology, spirituality, Qur’anic studies, and the intersection of race and religion. He is currently writing on global mass displacement and modern structural racism from an Muslim theological vantage. Among his books is Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination (2019) and An American Muslim Guide to the Art and Life of Preaching (2023), which he edited and revised with the late Imam Sohaib Sultan at Princeton. More about Prof. Nguyen’s work can be found at https://drmartinnguyen.com
Theorizing Modernities article

The Necessary Alterity of Mimesis and its Effects


View of the main lobby of the hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Photo by Ashwak Sam Hauter.

Youshaa Patel’s The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line Between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present is a refreshing genealogy of how Muslims distinguished themselves, following the Prophetic injunction to not imitate non-Muslims. Patel beautifully traces how Hadith-inspired scholars think about what it means to inhabit the Islamic tradition— and the ways this reflection evolved over time. What emerges over the course of the book is the historical texture of how Muslim scholars understood “Muslimness” and a deft interrogation of the momentum of their inquiries. Patel delves into the anthropologies at stake for Muslim scholars, as well as their anxieties regarding the porosity of the Muslim soul and its impact on the communal body during times of crisis. Focusing on how styles of difference evolved over time—accentuating, waning, and becoming obsolete in times of stability—he debunks the often-projected narrative about a clash between eastern and western civilizations. Patel’s lament of the potential ossification emanating from the entrenchment of small differences has led me to revisit the ways the interlocutors I engage with in my own work point to the alterity that already exists in the ethical cultivation of the self.

As an anthropologist, I commend the author for engaging an anthropology of Muslim difference through the scholarly commentaries about what imitation entails and how it elicited an anti-imitation corpus bearing on Muslim embodied practices. Patel digs through textual archives to showcase how aspects of difference, particularly small differences, are thought of and used over history to foster communal cohesion, solidarity, pride, and belonging. In The Muslim Difference, Patel examines how practices such as comingling in cafes and adorning top hats and beards are debated amongst scholars as they grapple with the cultivation of one’s self/soul, the performance of one’s identity/style, and one’s affinity toward the Muslim community and others. Within Patel’s meticulous examination of the power of mimesis lies a lesson regarding alterity. The latter, he shows, grows over time and begins with small differences (not big theological ones) and concerns the question of alienation. In this post, I suggest that the question of difference does not necessarily lead to what the author describes as the subjugation of the other to the self, but also could open up a gap, a site of potential encounter akin to the very space of potential transformation that internal cultivation of the self renders, which Patel recommends.

As Patel argues, the idea of religious difference rose alongside Muslim empire and as part of its ethos. As such, Muslim scholarly understandings of religious difference moved from a Qur’anic egalitarianism to a stronger formalization of the laws of the empire. Patel cites Muhammad Asad’s caution about tashabbuh (imitation) as a weak form of pedagogy that does not develop into a full agentive autonomy, a warning that I would describe as a caution against the imitated other (2–3). As such, one may approach the anxieties of Muslim scholars—from Ghazzi to Ibn Taymiyyah and Mohammed Abduh to Muhammad Asad—as tools for thinking about how the radical otherness of what is absent and its looming pedagogical form and discipline in imitation is already a form of alterity. Alterity is not taken for granted in practices of cultivating the self in Islam. The question of how and when to be different is actually preceded by another question that one poses to one’s self/soul and in relation to the Islamic tradition and the Muslim community (umma) about the potential paths (215). This allows us to better understand how Muhammad Asad shifts his stance in the “The Business of Imitation,” cited by Patel, on the imitation hadith, away from admonishing imitation of the west toward a search for those truly worthy of emulation (215). In the epilogue, Patel asks us to heed Asad’s advice and consider a move away from fixating on external expressions of difference (non-/imitation as cultural orientation) toward a focus on cultivating the spiritual self (non-/imitation as self-cultivation) from within. It is with this in mind that I consider how my interlocutors linked self-cultivation to meditations of Muslim difference.

‘Afiya and Muslim Difference

Some of these questions have been critical in my own fieldwork, which examines how Muslim physicians and patients come to understand what aspects of the Islamic tradition, small or otherwise, are needed to secure physical, psychic, and spiritual well-being (‘afiya) within the spaces of the clinic and the hospital. My work situates this effort in a time of crisis and collectivity in ruins, which mirrors the contexts of the scholars whom Patel examines. Though much biomedicine being practiced in the Islamic World today resembles that occurring in some state-of-the-art facilities in the US and Europe, the gestures, supplications, recitations, and general orientations toward treatment and prescription in Muslim medical sites invoke Muslim difference. My interlocutors both revere the importance of imitation of the west as a form of Islamic self-cultivation but also emphasize the importance of Muslim difference. From physicians supplicating for patients’ ‘afiya and God’s aid to drive a cure, to physicians claiming to be mere messengers of evidence they have been granted by God (as prophets do—and opposing the figure of a magician who promises a cure), practices of small difference evoke a Muslim cosmology that bends modern medical epistemology. This attention to the psycho-spiritual realm of individual and communal healing marks Muslim differences.

Although many of the questions I receive about my fieldwork center on how different traditions of Islam are expressed and negotiated between my interlocutors (regarding the proper relationship between religion and medicine, medicine and magic, justice and oppression, communal obligation and state mandates, and more), the concerns that lie behind such questions revolve around how to secure both individual and communal ‘afiya. Communal ‘afiya in particular concerns the cultivation of ethico-religious virtues in medical practice, rather than the consensus of global medical expertise and the proper means to understand illness. In turn, my interlocutors look to reform (islah) medicine by cultivating an ethico-medical and religious practice that focuses on affinity and patient-physician relationality, and to rethink contemporary methods of scientific inquiry. Therefore, these marks of Muslim difference are both external and internal. In turn, physicians enacting these small differences reformulate epistemologies, infuse bioethics with an Islamic ethico-religious register, introduce ontological realities such as the domain of the ghayb (unseen/unknown) into the clinical space, and cultivate their intuition (hads).

Reading the historical trajectory of the imitation hadith and its anthropological implications alongside concerns raised by my interlocutors suggests that the alterity of the other, manifested in small differences such as dress and beard length, also refracts onto the alterity between self and soul. By examining the incremental choices a person makes every day and their impact on their comportment and orientation in community with others, we can see that the relationship between the self and its embodied practices and unconscious drives are also a site of alterity. A relationship between the self and the soul is one that a Muslim returns to again and again while attending to their oscillating nafs (self/soul). They do so in order to maintain their vitality and potentiality so that they can attend to shifting conditions and work toward a contented self/soul (nafs radiya). The unknowability and oscillation of the soul imbues individuals with a radical otherness or alterity. This otherness can be extended to others not simply to create distinctions but also to relate to the gap that exists by virtue of difference. In the gap between self and soul, and self and other, there is a field of possible exchange, recognition, and innovation. Therefore, small differences do not necessarily subjugate the other to the self, but instead offer a field of exchange between Muslims and others marked by the very subjugation of the self to God in the internal work of the soul/self. As my interlocutors look from within after parsing out the field of differences in Muslim approaches to individual and communal ‘afiya, they turn to reform, to innovation, and to repair.

Innovation as Difference

Innovation is precisely what Claude Levi-Strauss claims is a result of difference. In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss mourns what we may consider global mimicry, which has resulted in a monoculture and reconstruction of the world as the mirror of the West (38). It is precisely these pivotal questions regarding difference that Patel generates for his readers in a time where difference is both celebrated but also seen as a threat to tolerance and national unity. For the umma, small differences arise vis-à-vis other religious communities due to historical encounters and contingencies. Yet, as Muhammad Asad is quoted as holding in the introduction to The Muslim Difference, much of this stems from a recognition of the internal coherence of the tradition and community. Internal coherence continues to shape how differently the community sees itself and the ways difference pushes it to continually renew and reform.

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Ashwak Hauter
Ashwak Sam Hauter is Assistant Professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of “Fright and the Fraying of Community” (Cultural Anthropology 38, no. 2 [2023]), “The Reparative Work of the Imagination: Yemen, ’Afiya, and the Politics of the Umma,” (American Journal of Islam and Society 41, no. 2 [2024]) and “Madness, Pain, & Ikhtilāṭ al-ʿaql: Conceptualizing Ibn Abī Ṣādiq’s Medico-Philosophical Psychology” (Early Science and Medicine 25, no. 5 [2020]) Her research centers around questions of ethico-religious Islah (reform) within medicines in Southern Arabia and mental healthcare provisions amidst wars under the rubric of 'afiya (physical, spiritual, and psychic wellbeing).
Theorizing Modernities article

Imitation as Becoming: Didactic Mimesis in Youshaa Patel’s The Muslim Difference


Dervishes and Sufi Shaykhs Gathering. Image via Flickr, San Diego Museum of Art. CC BY NC-ND 2.0.

Man tashabbaha bi qaumin fa huwa minhum—whoever imitates a people becomes one of them—is the prophetic saying at the center of Youshaa Patel’s The Muslim Difference. Of the many ways in which this report is interpreted through Islamic history and analyzed through this compelling book, I was most captivated by the didactic and salutary potential of imitation as a spiritual practice. So I was excited when The Muslim Difference delved into this possibility in Chapter 6, “A Person Belongs with the One He Loves.” In this short but provocative section, Patel engages with a number of Sufi luminaries who saw “imitation as a technology of self-cultivation” (145). While many of Patel’s interlocutors in this rich and expansive book looked askance at imitation as potentially duplicitous, deceptive, or dangerous, this was not a universally shared skepticism. For some, emulating our spiritual superiors could be a form of training and growth on the Sufi path. In focusing on this chapter and the didactic power of imitation, I hope to pick up a key thread in Patel’s rich tapestry that explores the many ways in which Muslims theorize internal and external difference.

Among the thinkers cited in this chapter, Patel includes the founding figures of the Suhrawardī Sufi order, Abū Najīb al Suhrawardī (d. 1168) and his nephew Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al Suhrawardī (d. 1234), who were among the most prominent Sufis of Baghdad in their time. As it happens, these two Suhrawardī masters are also old companions of mine. Seeing their names took me back to a graduate school term paper I wrote (many years ago) about didactic friendship for a class on Islamic texts with R. Stephen Humphreys. The questions I explored in that paper concerned what a fellowship of imperfect Sufi seekers learn from each other and how they learn it, given that they were perforce companions within a teacher’s circle. I was interested in the etiquette of companionship (ādāb al ṣuḥba) and how Sufis at different levels of spiritual accomplishment and ability might learn interactively as they associate outside of the more obviously hierarchical and structured relationship between guide (murshid) and disciple (murīd). After all, these are the people with whom one is likely to be in constant company, both during and outside of audiences with the principal teacher. These companions are not like the guide whose perfection would be a distant aspirational model for those in the early stages of the Sufi path. Companions among fellow seekers are people like us who snore, interrupt, sometimes smell peculiar, take the best food during communal meals, and exhibit less-than-perfect manners and mannerisms as they too strive for self-improvement. Perhaps, just as it is often said that we learn more from our failures than from our successes, we might learn a great deal from imperfect people, especially when perfection seems unattainable to a Sufi novice or even a layperson with a penchant for spiritual practice. We learn from our reactions and impulses, to whom we are drawn and from whom we recoil. All of this is important information for a practitioner at any level, providing opportunities for insight into one’s character and the virtues most in need of cultivation.

The ādāb al ṣuḥba (etiquette of companionship) texts authored by the Suhrawardīs and others facilitated the transition of Sufism from a marginal, esoteric, community based around a charismatic leader to a social institution through which that leader’s authority is routinized and extended. After all, adab as an ethical code is, of necessity, enacted in relation to others. Whether the “other” is God, the guide, or the community, the very nature of adab reveals that a central concern of the Sufi is the right conduct of companionship. As Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) writes in his famous work, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, the shortcomings of a brother provide an excellent opportunity for self-awareness and spiritual progress. Confronted with a challenging companion, “patience is best of all, since your object where your brother is concerned should be to correct yourself by having consideration for him, fulfilling your duty towards him, and bearing his deficiency patiently—not merely to enjoy his help and fellowship” (from On the Duties of Brotherhood, 58). Inspired by other aspirants as well as by the guide to contemplate and improve, even a minor interaction (whether positive or negative) can provide an opportunity for self-cultivation through self-correction. It is not just unethical to eschew a difficult companion or associate only when they are helpful and pleasant, it would be a missed opportunity to practice the key Sufi virtue of patience (ṣabr) and to reflect on ourselves scrupulously (wara’).

Much has been written, especially since Foucault, about the technologies of the self, the ways in which people come to cultivate particular ideals of being in the context of their epistemic locations. Following Talal Asad and his interlocutors, studies proliferated that consider how religious traditions produce authorizing discourses and inculcate affective responses. Yet as Patel points out in The Muslim Difference, Muslim intellectuals have long grappled with the same questions. They have also theorized about the nature of the self in relation to other selves. The scholars considered by Patel ground their analyses of how imitation works in different sources than most contemporary critical theorists, delving into the Qur’an and Hadith literatures, and interpreting them through Islamic hermeneutics, such as the literature on adaband akhlāq (etiquette and ethics) that permeate the Sufi literary corpus. In the contemporary academy, decolonial modes of scholarship recognize such works as themselves theoretical, rather than as merely source material for the critical theory emerging from the Euro-American academy. In The Muslim Difference, Patel invites us to think with these scholars from the past and to recognize how their conceptions of how imitation works as a form of spiritual self-cultivation resonate with contemporary trends in the anthropology of religion.

Returning then to the Suhrawardīs and their discussions of the power and purpose of companionship and the role of imitation (tashabbuh) among friends, both Abū Najīb and Abū Ḥafṣ argued that even the most superficial forms of imitation, such as a style of dress or wearing a particular garment, can have a transformative impact on the imitator and therefore should not be discouraged. Despite the potential that such imitative practices could be deceptive, dissimulative, or hypocritical, the Suhrawardīs both argue for the agentive power of the material aspects of imitation and the moral suasion of exemplary companions. This imitation is actually self-cultivation, associating with good company and engaging with inspiring things works on a person, drawing them deeper into the Sufi path on multiple levels. It also makes it possible to begin the journey along the ṭarīqa (road or path) toward ḥaqīqa (ultimate reality) without imposing barriers to entry for those not yet spiritually realized or fully committed. For the Suhrawardīs, the positive potential of opening the Sufi path to a wider audience and accepting people with a larger variation of capacities and aptitudes outweighed the possible dangers. Patel points out how much the Suhrawardīs sought to expand the boundaries of the Sufi community, rather than establish or police its limits, inviting potential aspirants to try it out to whatever degree possible. Indeed, we often practice the habits that we strive to embody more fully, knowing that it takes time, effort, and energy to feel authentic and integrate these habits into our lives and characters. This theory also suggests, in keeping with Charles Hirschkind for example, that this type of associative, mimetic learning, helps to sediment particular virtues in the characters of the aspirants, producing an “affective-volitional structure” that works on them consciously and unconsciously. Imitation, in this sense, is a means of becoming better.

Considering companionship in this expansive and didactic mode recalls Patel’s chapter title “A Person Belongs with the One He Loves” (144) and the story from Abū Ḥafṣ’s ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (The Perceivers of Gnosis) that elaborates on that quotation from a prophetic hadith. In this narrative, a person asked by the Prophet what he had prepared for the Day of Judgement replied with his only virtue “I love God and His Messenger,” to which Muhammad replied, “a person belongs with the one he loves” (149). Patel offers Abū Ḥafṣ’s own interpretation, that such an impulse towards love and imitation of the beloved is redemptive, in spite of myriad shortcomings and failures. This is just one of many ways to conceptualize imitation that Patel explores in The Muslim Difference. The scope of the entire book sweeps across the history of Islam, an ambitious time frame, but remains coherent as each chapter reflects on a different period, intellectual(s), and interpretation of imitation. Offering his readers ways to enter into a conversation that draws together the Suhrawardīs and other major Muslim thinkers (such as the al Ghazālī brothers, Ibn Taymiyya, Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī, and Rashīd Riḍā) along with René Girard, Marcel Mauss, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, Patel disrupts the common, extractive direction of scholarly inquiry. Like the Suhrawardīs, he softens the boundaries between intellectual realms, the ʿulūm al dīn (religious sciences) and Euro-American critical theory, often seen as so distinct as to be alien discourses. Patel leads us to a generative space of inquiry, offering multiple routes (ṭuruq) of exploration as we seek to understand human nature and the human quest to know ultimate reality (ḥaqīqa).

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Anna Bigelow
Anna Bigelow is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Bigelow's current book project is a comparative study of shared sacred sites in India and Turkey, exploring how everyday devotional life in shared spaces illuminates the shifting terrain of these ambivalently secular states. Another project traces the lives of devotional objects circulated by Muslims, Hindus, and others around a Sufi tomb shrine in India. She is editor and contributor to a volume on material objects in Islamic cultures, Islam through Objects (Bloomsbury, 2021). Bigelow’s earlier work Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a study of a Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and civic spaces in that community. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on The Muslim Difference


In The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present, Youshaa Patel outlines what he terms a “genealogy of Muslim difference” (4). He traces how Muslim scholars, the ‘Ulamā, since Islam’s inception, articulated what it means to be uniquely Muslim as opposed to Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, pagan, etc. These differences are sometimes expressed at the level of doctrinal difference—for example, concerning the unity of God—and sometimes concern seemingly smaller differences, like the types of clothing one does or does not wear. These various forms of difference are treated by Patel with equal concern, for both are significant ways of distinguishing one form of identity from another, and both are realized in embodied historical actors. The admonition to not “imitate” and to retain one’s difference is traced by Patel through various on-the-ground interpretations of the “imitation Hadith,” which says, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” While often carrying a negative valence in the interpretive tradition, several of Patel’s interlocutors show in this symposium that it need not necessarily carry that meaning. Sometimes imitation is the way to cultivate a particular character or disposition.

As noted already, Patel resists treating Muslim difference solely in terms of abstract philosophical or theological disputes between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. To do so would assume that disembodied discourses govern the lives of concrete historical actors. This problematic approach, he contends, reflects a western Protestant bias that “creates rigid (and artificial) dichotomies between belief and practice, texts and things, subject and object” (25). The former terms, often, are conceptualized as eternal and existing outside the rumble tumble of history. At the twilight of our secular age, these biases remain no less present—despite claims that they have been overcome—since this age was in part born from European Protestant Christianity, as numerous scholars cited by Patel have shown. Patel’s genealogy, for this reason, remains relevant not only to Islamic studies scholars, but scholars of religion, secularism, and modernity more broadly who seek alternative ways to conceptualize difference. Even as we witness turns to the “postsecular” and the “postliberal” as alternatives to the political and social world of modernity, we should remain alert to the way previous biases take on new forms while retaining the same flawed assumptions.

One of the key interventions that Patel makes into the discourse on Muslim difference is to suggest that imitation, by itself, is not negatively charged. Anna Bigelow brings this feature of Patel’s book out when she trains her attention on Chapter 6, “A Person Belongs with the One He Loves.” She describes the significance of thinking about Sufi models of emulation as not only objects of study, but as interlocutors who might help us unpack the ethical significance of imitation. Uniquely, Bigelow points out, the Sufis that Patel analyzes reveal imitation as a mode of self-cultivation the result of which might prove to be redemptive.

Ashwak Hauter, meanwhile, puts Patel’s history into conversation with her own ethnographic fieldwork among Muslim physicians and patients. She focuses especially on afiya, which are the “ethico-religious virtues” that guide Muslim physicians. Difference here is marked by the way physicians seek to incorporate Islamic ways of understanding into their medical practice, rather than simply imitate the practices of doctors in the US and Europe. This notion of difference, Hauter contends, is deeply embedded in the Islamic tradition, penetrating into the difference between the self and the soul. Such theologically robust understandings of difference make possible a “field of possible exchange, recognition, and innovation.”

Martin Nguyen switches the register of engaging difference from the “cultural” or “religious” to the broader level of the human species. On Nguyen’s account, we are programmed, as human animals, for difference. The danger is when we place ourselves at the center of humanity and inscribe the differences we see in others with a negative connotation. To recognize one’s own “inhumanity,” Nguyen contends, is necessary if we are to deflate the triumphalism that attends to those in power who reject or ignore difference.

Haroon Sidat, finally, draws on Patel’s work to better understand his own experience of working among imams in the UK as part of his ethnographic fieldwork. He notes how he was transformed as he imitated the imams with whom he was working. This transformation, he makes clear, is one that cultivated a unique ethical and religious worldview in him. In this way, Sidat shows how imitation is not of relevance only for those we “study,” but also for our own moral cultivation.

Patel, in his response, takes up the themes engaged with by his interlocutors, focusing especially on the ethically ambiguous nature of imitation as understood within the historical Islamic tradition. He ends his piece by suggesting that his wider goal in the book is to make possible a positive vision of “Muslim difference” that neither rejects nor assimilates to the west. Indeed, his hope is to offer resources for building a “Muslim modernity” from the sources that have sustained the tradition.

Taken together, these essays represent the many paths of inquiry that Patel’s book opens up, whether that be in how we conduct fieldwork, think about the problem of difference philosophically, or understand the aims of the study of religion. As we continue to grapple with the rise of populism, oligarchy, and nationalism across the globe, Patel’s study of religious difference reminds us that imitation and difference are multilayered and contain the potential for influencing various forms of political and social life.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Field Notes article

Safety through Solidarity: A Book Launch


Photo of authors Ben Lorber and Shane Burley with cover image of their book Safety through Solidarity.

How can we stand in solidarity with Palestinians when faced with those who weaponize antisemitism to silence critics of Israel? How can we simultaneously stay vigilant against real antisemitism in our scholarship and movement work?

Authors Shane Burley and Ben Lorber joined Contending Modernities Co-Director Atalia Omer for a public lecture on Thursday, December 12th, 2024 to discuss their most recent book, Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. Drawing on personal stories, historical reflections, and interview data from their book, Burley and Lorber clearly defined antisemitism. They traced how antisemitism is often woven into narratives that seek to oppress other communities, such as anti-Black and anti-Trans discourses. This shared danger motivates joint action and solidarity between Jewish and other groups. “We [Jewish movements] connect with communities that have like threats and build that alliance,” said Burley, referring to the Jewish left concept of solidarity to build true safety for Jews and all people.

While espousing antisemitic conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory and QAnon, actors on the political Right have simultaneously weaponized allegations of antisemitism, accusing most notably universities of endangering Jewish students and scholars. This recent development conflates Jews and Zionism, equating a critique of Zionism and of Israeli state policy with the oppression of Jews. Lorber and Burley cautioned that movements for equality and justice need to carefully educate themselves on antisemitism, both to fight antisemitism as part of a shared liberation struggle and to reclaim the terrain from the Right. And while Jewish activists might be hesitant about taking up space, they argued it was necessary to “call in” antisemitic language when movement partners use it. In this way, movements can form intentional coalitions to combat all forms of oppression and identify where White supremacy, under the pretense of fighting antisemitism, mounts an assault on a spectrum of vulnerable, racialized, and minoritized communities. Cultivating awareness and an explicit stance of solidarity is particularly important for a powerful and charged topic like antisemitism, they noted, that has been used time and again to fracture social movements.

The event was co-sponsored by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

 

Lecture Video:

 

Selected Excerpts:

A few selections from the lecture are highlighted below, lightly edited for clarity.

Is antisemitism the longest hatred?

Ben Lorber: I often think the hate frame is an unhelpful way to understand not only antisemitism, but most forms of oppression. Obviously, there is something called hatred in the world, and there could be hatred against a group in our hearts. But it’s more helpful, I think, to understand antisemitism as a system of oppression, as a structure of domination in our world, as a series of power relations that are irrespective of what love or hatred one might hold in one’s heart.

And the “longest,” I mean, I think patriarchy, for one, is probably tens of thousands of years old. But often, yeah, we hear phrases like the longest hatred a lot, and in our Jewish community conversations. And often I don’t think it’s very helpful. It mystifies antisemitism as a kind of larger than life, you know, force, detached from history, detached from politics, detached from the structures of our world. It turns it into kind of a specter, and it turns it into like a monster so overwhelming and overpowering that there can be no way to defeat it. We tend to think that antisemitism is a form of oppression that humans have built in our unjust societies, just like anti-Black racism, just like xenophobia. And we can work together to fight and to end those structures of oppression. So that’s a much more helpful way to think about it, in my opinion. 

But it’s more helpful, I think, to understand antisemitism as a system of oppression, as a structure of domination in our world, as a series of power relations that are irrespective of what love or hatred one might hold in one’s heart.

Shane Burley: I think, to pick up on what you’re saying, is that a lot of times when you frame antisemitism as this, what we call, “eternalist narrative,” that it has lasted for all time, it implicates it as being something that really can’t be solved but only mitigated. You really can’t go at the underlying foundations of it. We can’t fundamentally change the dynamic. No. Instead, we just have to find a way to manage it, maybe by funding police more, by having a militarized state of Israel. Something, other kinds of methods, of just pushing back on the encroaching threat. 

It also ends up telling a story about antisemitism that in a lot of ways is just fundamentally inaccurate. You know, we talk about antisemitism in the book as something that has contours, you can identify it. It’s not just quote unquote “hatred” or “dislike” of Jews. It’s actually an ideology. It’s a way of telling the story about power and telling a story about the world. And instead, when you frame it as the longest hatred, you end up telling a story that all oppression that Jews have faced as Jews, or in Jewish communities, likely comes from the same source. So it flattens that history entirely, and you lose the specificity, and when you lose specificity there’s nothing you can do about it.

 

Antisemitism and its modern tropes:

Shane Burley:  We look at antisemitism as fundamentally a conspiracy theory about power, and a belief in the malevolent, evil nature of a particular Other. In this case, Jews, but it can oftentimes be someone that is projected to look like a Jew, but maybe they don’t use the term Jew. And this was created specifically in a European Christian context. It emerged out of very specific versions of Christian theology, changed over time, and became radicalized, particularly in the second millennia, and then evolved into what we know as a secularized version of theology. So ideas about Jews as a sort of malevolent cabalistic force that’s actually controlling power.

Ben Lorber: European Jews, especially Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, we bear the scars and the traumas of centuries of these Christian anti-Jewish tropes. Jews became associated with the devil; demonizing means literally turning into a demon. Jews were associated with evil, with sin, with usury, and all these fantastical tropes evolved out of the imagination of the European Middle Ages of Jews, as you know, feasting on the blood of Christian children, for example. That’s where the blood libel comes from, and these tropes fueled massacres, expulsions, ghettoization, second class status. These anti-Jewish tropes also helped to fuel anti-Blackness as Shane was talking about. If you look back into the 19th century, modern European racism and modern European antisemitism evolved out of the same imaginary stew of demonizing an Other, of developing all these tropes that imparted upon another inferior status and supernatural powers.

And so you fast forward to 2018. And you have the QAnon conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy theory developed by the MAGA movement, you know, during the first Trump presidency that says that “a secretive cabal of blood-drinking elites is feasting on children,” and this cabal is focused in the government, in the media, among Democrats and liberal elites. And this conspiracy theory helped mobilize folks to storm the Capitol on January 6th. It serves as a connective, you know, glue, a narrative kind of glue of the MAGA movement. And it has all the hallmarks of modern antisemitism, right? Like Shane was saying, a conspiracy theory, a demonic, literally a Satanic cabal of elites who are clustered at the heights of society.

The reality is that for the last 200 years, right-wing, nationalist, and fascist movements have used these tropes to mobilize millions, and we see it today, like you were saying with great replacement theory: a cabal of liberal elites is bringing in immigrants. Or with the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is another one that you hear of on the Right: a cabal of intellectuals is changing our kids’ gender, right? Basically, this image of the cabal is used again and again, you know, to demonize a group and to say, here’s why society is wrong. And here’s, you know, who we have to attack to fix it.

The reality is that for the last 200 years, right-wing, nationalist, and fascist movements have used these tropes to mobilize millions.

Shane Burley: As Ben mentioned, you know, right now, there’s like an all-out assault on trans healthcare. But when you look and listen to how those attacks are being done. What are people putting in their testimonies at state houses? In the articles they’re writing about it? They have a pretty clear idea of who’s responsible for this trans healthcare. Right? “It’s George Soros.” “It’s the Rothschilds.” “It’s globalists, right?” There’s actually an alignment in their mind of how this works. And so we should have an alignment in how we respond. We connect with communities who have like threats and build that alliance.

 

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Field Notes article

David Grossman’s Camouflage of Violence


Guest: David Grossman, Israeli writer. October 30, 2016, Theatro São Pedro/Porto Alegre.
Image credits: Fronteiras do Pensamento | Luiz Munhoz. CC BY-SA 2.0.

When the city of Düsseldorf decided to give Amos Oz the Heinrich Heine Prize in 2008, historian Zvi Ben-Dor Benit ridiculed the investment of the German establishment in the prophet of the Israeli left. Oz received the Goethe Prize just three years earlier. Ben-Dor Benit rebuked Oz’s many celebratory speeches to European audiences where he condemned “extremists of both sides,” Palestinian and Israeli. For Oz, in a racialized fashion, it was the mizrahim who represented the extremists on the Jewish side. Sixteen years later. Düsseldorf found a new champion of Israel’s “universalistic” and “humanist” idealism in David Grossman. But Grossman’s politics, not to mention his relation to mizrahim, are much more sophisticated than Oz’s, and for this reason have not received the same attention by critics.

As with much writing on Mizrahi politics, Grossman’s public claims about Israeli politics are cleverly camouflaged when presented to English readers. Just a few days after October 7, Grossman published a lengthy essay in Haaretz, where he presented a version of Netanyahu’s infamous argument in the Knesset from 2015: Grossman argued that Hamas’ onslaught revealed the depth of hatred among Palestinians, which has no context and was beyond reason, and forces us, “the Jews,” to always be alert and prepared for battle. It was almost a replica of Netanyahu’s notorious “ḥayim ‘al ha-ḥerev” (living by the sword) statement. The article was never translated into English and readers of Haaretz English edition will have to go back to August 2023 to read contributions from Grossman in this venue. Conversely, in February 2024, Grossman was described in the most important newspapers of the German language (Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zuericher Zeitung) as a harbinger not just of Israeli humanism but as a pioneer in accepting the necessity to negotiate with Hamas. Until today I have not been able to find any trace of that in the Hebrew media. This dual tonality, saying one thing in Hebrew and another in English or another outward language, constitutes a form of strategic marketing.

This marketing is subtle but quite prevalent among Israelis. In the two songs that Israel offered the Eurovision Song Contest in 2024, what they included, despite pushback, is notable. After the first song, “October Rain,” was disqualified for being too political, Israel sent “Hurricane” and kept only the line “Who’s the fool who told you Boys don’t cry?” unchanged. A manifestation of a progressive ethos by which also “boys”—that is, probably soldiers—are sensitive, it encapsulates the ethos of Israeli wars since the Nakba, which has been critically named “shooting and crying.” The film Waltz with Bashir (2008) was a paradigmatic example of this ethos. In literature, we associate it with S. Yizhar and Yehuda Amichai, but not with Grossman, whose book The Yellow Wind (1988) is regularly praised for its reckoning with the First Intifada.

Eden Golan Eurovision Song Contest 2024 Dress rehearsal. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In “shooting and crying,” Israeli soldiers are not only sensitive (which many of them in fact are) but the violence which they inflict on their opponents is also always forced on them because no other alternative is purportedly available. This allows fighters to escape confronting their own position as perpetrators. In the 1980s, in the wake of the First Lebanon War and the First Intifada, a fault line was drawn in the Israeli public between violence bound by reality and sheer violence which was obscene and unjustified. The latter was then identified with Menahem Begin’s government and his brutal Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon. Latently, this violence—without a cry thereafter—was also ascribed to mizrahim (Oz’s “extremists”). The generation of Bashir’s director and protagonist, the blue-eyed Ari Folman who recounts his feelings over the Sabra and Shatila massacre to his psychologist, is now the generation waiting to usurp Benjamin Netanyahu via the figures of “moderate” and “sensitive” generals such as Benny Gantz and Yair Golan.

Interestingly, throughout the years, critics of the “shooting and crying” trope have focused solely on Palestinians as the distinct other. Critics’ own discomfort with colonialism led them to secure an imagined identity as Europeans, New Jews who were secular and “sensitive.” For them, responsibility requires one only to stop shooting. They shy away from any reckoning with shooting itself as something necessary to war and to the Jewish and human condition more broadly. The many critics of “shooting and crying” thus embark on the same cultural performance of repressing not only the “Old Jew” of the European diasporas but also the Arab-Jew—i.e., the mizrahi whose “oldness” is a function of eurocentic civilizational teleology of “progress.” This mizrahi “Old Jew” is—(as in Oz) allegedly “oriental,” “religious,” and “bloodthirsty.” The tormented and enlightened Jew-combatant and the postcolonial critic of this combatant’s eventual complacency are both able to consolidate their conscience based on the ability to see only one object: The Palestinian as an ultimate Other.

In recent years I have tried to better understand how violence and its camouflage (“shooting and crying”) function against objects of domestic, internal violence, such as against women, mizrahim, and of course against Judaism itself as a melancholic horizon because of its association with what is old, oriental, and primitive. I dwelled, for example, on the racist representations of mizrahim in the Israeli television series Prisoners of War, in which three male protagonists return from captivity and are engulfed by emasculation and tears. Like Waltz with Bashir, Prisoners of War came out in 2008. This was the same year that David Grossman published his most important work, the novel To the End of the Land, which amounted to a groundbreaking critique of the Israeli military. Over 650 pages it delved into the tormented conscience of a mother and a soldier. This no doubt reflected in Grossman’s own life circumstances. At the time, he was in grief over his own son who died as a soldier in the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

The many critics of ‘shooting and crying’ thus embark on the same cultural performance of repressing not only the ‘Old Jew’ of the European diasporas but also the Arab-Jew—i.e., the mizrahi whose ‘oldness’ is a function of eurocentic civilizational teleology of ‘progress.’

Prior to October 7, 2023, captivity was particularly associated in the Israeli public with the Yom Kippur War (1973). This war forms the dark core of this epic family novel, To the End of the Land. The book tells the story of Ora, the mother of two sons from two different men. The eldest son was born to her by her partner Ilan, and the younger, who had just embarked on a dangerous military operation, was born while she was married to Ilan, who acted as his father. But the second child came from a relationship she had with Avram, an intimate friend of the couple. Ilan, Avram, and Ora first met in their youth during the 1967 War. They matured into military service during the Yom Kippur War and became a family during the First and Second Intifadas. The latter events are depicted in the book via the military service of the younger son and the dissolution of Ora and Ilan’s marriage. Indeed, this is an exceptional national epic that not only describes Israel’s wars but also brings to light the emotional and psychological ordeals of Israeli civilians living amidst violence.

During the twenty years that passed from the birth of Ofer, the younger son, to the time during which the story takes place, amid the Second Intifada, the liberal hope of the Oslo Accords passed, which the novel describes with great longing. The time of hope and “sanity” is accompanied in the novel with unwelcomed guests, those that Oz might have dubbed “extremists”: the mizrahim, who also represent Jewishness. With their explicitly religious attributes, they are a reminder of the breakdown of secular and liberal utopia. Zionism promised the Jews to be like all nations, that is, to love like the people of the west, but that was unachievable because of the ostensibly war-oriented (and not love-oriented) ”orient.” Perhaps, Israelis also feel abandoned by the west which has promised them love, but instead, forsaken them, its Children (as in the Christian-biblical trope of “Children of Israel;” the Hebrew original talks about Israel’s, that is Jacob’s, sons, not children) and exposed them to “the beast” (of “the orient”).

In accordance with the free love counterculture of the Hippies, To the End of the Land is also full of descriptions of sex, “the most beautiful […] in Hebrew literature”; but among these scenes is also a description of rape inside the marriage of Ilan and Ora, which occurred while she was pregnant with Ofer (Avram’s biological son). This rape scene is not mentioned in the enormous bulk of scholarship that has been written about the novel, nor is the novel’s aversion to mizrahim, who are framed as responsible for the breakdown of western utopia.

In keeping with the racialization of the political geography of Israel, all the many scholars who wrote on Grossman’s epic were Ashkenazim, something that perhaps explains why they all preferred to stick to the state’s involvement with the occupation and violence against Palestinians. But the interesting thing is that the rape scene (on pages 564–66 in the Hebrew version) has a double function: on one level it is an instance of sexual coercion, and on another level, it is a reminder of captivity in war. During this repressed scene, Ilan not only penetrates his wife against her will, but also tells her about their friend Avram’s captivity on the Egyptian front during the war, when Ilan tried to reach him. This story defines the posttraumatic state of Ora, the loving mother who had to feed the fetus in her womb with the story of war.

This rape scene is not mentioned in the enormous bulk of scholarship that has been written about the novel, nor does the novel’s aversion to mizrahim, who are framed as responsible for the breakdown of western utopia.

Ora’s rape by her intimate domestic partner is the other side of Israel’s Ashkenazi ethos of lack of choice: in committing acts of war, but more than that, in living in the “violent Orient.” But whereas so many articles were written on the latter—the Jew who is being coerced into the position of a perpetrator—Ora’s trauma is not even acknowledged as such. From this point of view, To the End of the Land is a moving example of the divided Israeli psyche, which is first of all in a position of blindness to its own pain, not only in relation to mizrahim, and Jews in general, but first of all to its innermost intimate family, in relation to women and children. Even if we accept the paradigm of “wars of no choice”—Israelis are forced to subject their loved ones to it during every family dinner and in their bedrooms. Grossman’s story is first of all the story of a mother whose burning love for her young son collapses under the national narrative of violence and death. It therefore outlines rape as essentially deniable, by characters themselves as well as by critics. Again, critics and writers share the trope of “shooting and crying” because it is a dyad that functions on both ends: it not only simply denies violence, but needs denial (cry, camouflage) to enable violence in the first place.

Grossman’s story is first of all the story of a mother whose burning love for her young son collapses under the national narrative of violence and death.

Like the story of Ora, October 7 was a confrontation with that denial. In many videos Israelis were disgraced, sometimes sexually, and deprived of their honor as humans at their most intimate domestic surroundings. Grossman’s novel, where the Israeli secular everyday living room takes on such importance, is a reminder of what has been suppressed in the public sphere. Living the national bourgeois family narrative calls for constant camouflage, which in Ora’s case leads her also to panic attack within her family unit as she, Ilan, and the two boys are having dinner (494–95). Even today, after reading and writing so extensively on the novel, I find it hard to explain its title and main gesture: in being A Woman Fleeing the News, Ora is not trying to avoid death but rather the very possibility—and thus de facto imaginary—news of death. In many ways being in this limbo—not being able to confront death (and thus reality; not being able to confront her partner as perpetrator and her children as soldiers)—became a prefiguration of Israelis during this unprecedented onslaught on Gaza: finding themselves in a position of very real vulnerability while at the very same time placing themselves in an imaginary constitutive victimhood that makes them incapable of bearing responsibility for their actions.

Adania Shibli, author of A Minor Detail in conversation with Michał Nogaś, Góry Literatury Festival 2024. Via Wikimedia Commons.

It is interesting to compare Ora’s trauma with the rape of the Bedouin girl who is the historical focus of Adania Shibli’s acclaimed novel Minor Detail (2017). In Shibli, rape is entirely admitted by its many readers, although the novel avoids a description of how it unfolds; we readers understand it is a rape precisely because the mimesis avoids description. In Grossman’s novel, the rape scene is carefully outlined (so many times Ora asks Ilan to stop), but its reception entirely denied. Perhaps it relates to the fact that Shibli’s novel is about the loneliness of a single woman, who lives on her own, while Grossman’s heroine almost drowns under the relentless discourse of family unity. The relations that exist within a family—like those within a nation—often make it difficult to reckon with facts. Exactly at the age of maturity, when her younger son has stopped being a minor, Ora’s 20-year marriage is ending, and thus the promise it offered—the promise of a sane Jewish place “among the nations,” that is, western nations; the promise of Oslo and of the Eurovision—turns to denial. She, like the many scholars who wrote on her, does not confront Ilan, the perpetrator, and thus instead of reaching maturity—of being sovereign as an adult—she collapses in nostalgia and denial. Much the same could be said of current Israel. Thus, David Grossman’s camouflage of violence, is first and foremost our own, Israelis and their families.

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Omri Ben Yehuda
Dr. Hannah (Omri) Ben Yehuda is a scholar of comparative literature in Tel Aviv University. This essay is based on her academic paper “The Flight of a Mother: Rape and National Coercion in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land”, Shofar 42:3, 2024, 155–180.
Field Notes article

Israel’s Genocidal Assault on Gaza: A Lecture with Raz Segal


Photo of Professor Atalia Omer introducing Professor Raz Segal
Steve Toepp /Midwest Photographics

Within days of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 mass murders across rural communities around the Gaza Strip, 1.1 million Gazans had been ordered to flee northern Gaza. At the same time, the death toll in Gaza was rising under Israel’s constant bombing of the densely populated walled-in strip. Raz Segal, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, was among the first in his field to raise the alarm, calling Israel’s response “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” By November 2nd, 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned “Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since the start of its large-scale war on 7 October, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.”

The International Court of Justice has since ruled the Israeli assault a “plausible genocide.” Against the backdrop of the Jewish High Holy Days and the grim one-year anniversary of the conflict, Professor Raz Segal visited the University of Notre Dame on October 10, 2024 to discuss the Genocide Convention as it applies to the Israeli attacks on Gaza and more recently on the West Bank and Lebanon. Professor Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics at Notre Dame and Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, South Bend-based MD OBGYN who volunteered in Gaza in June 2024, responded. Below is a recording of the lecture followed by a short summary of key ideas from the lecture and question and answer section. The event was co-sponsored by Contending Modernities, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, and the Center for Social Concerns.

 

Key Ideas and Highlights from the Lecture:

“I have to admit I’m just mostly very sad these days,” opened Segal. Marking one year of this most recent assault and over 100 years of historical context leading up to it, Segal detailed examples of an “intent to destroy” an entire community of people–not just fighters–expressed publicly by Israeli government officials with command authority. He then matched this intent with Israeli military action in Gaza. He highlighted in particular the tactic of mass starvation, noting: “at a certain point of these long processes of starvation, right, perpetrators cannot anymore deny that they [don’t] know and understand the consequences of their actions”; that they have “created conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part.”

The war in Gaza is unprecedented in many ways, Segal noted, but key among them is the rise of global Nakba memory, not least in the repeated Israeli government claims of creating a new “Gaza Nakba.” The history of the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 by proto-IDF forces during the creation of the State of Israel, while the Genocide Convention was being written and signed, has long been silenced. “Nakba denial is structural in Holocaust memory, but also in the international legal system,” Segal told the audience. But now, “the Israelis are saying the quiet part out loud.”

Ernesto Verdeja, himself a scholar of genocide and mass atrocity, followed up on Segal’s comment that the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies was in crisis and that for many scholars of the Holocaust, it was “business as usual,” per Segal. “Many genocides were always examined and assessed to the extent that they were in conformity with what we knew about the Holocaust,” Verdeja explained. ”The crisis of Genocide Studies that Raz has emphasized for us, means also questioning some of the foundational concepts at the very heart of how we make sense of mass atrocities. What does it mean to be a perpetrator? How do we think of the nature of ideology? How do we think of the motives and the intentions of particular actors and the rights of victims, and who is grievable and who is not grievable.”

Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis describes her medical trip to Gaza
Steve Toepp /Midwest Photographics

Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, who lives and works near  Notre Dame, spent three weeks in Gaza in June 2024 as a volunteer MD OBGYN through Baitumaal. It was very difficult to go to Gaza, she shared, flipping through photographs of the approval process and her travel from Jordan into Israel and through a Gaza checkpoint and the rubble of bombed apartment buildings. “They couldn’t guarantee our safety.” She worked in a hospital with no soap, no air conditioning, performing surgeries at 104 Fahrenheit. Through a hospital window she could see the churned earth where a mass grave with over 300 people, including health care workers, was found after Israeli forces raided the Al Nasser hospital. The hospital director was released from 7 months of detention while she was at the hospital. Hospital staff were all living in tents, sick from the lack of clean water, working though they had not been paid in 9 months. Her fellow volunteers were among the 65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics who sounded the alarm that they were frequently seeing young Palestinian children with bullet wounds to the head and chest.

 

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Selected Excerpts

The audience of students, staff, faculty, and community members had the opportunity to share questions after a brief discussion period. A few selections from the lecture and Q&A are highlighted below, lightly edited for clarity.

Does “military necessity” mean there isn’t a genocide?

Verdeja: Part of the point about genocide is that what makes genocide somewhat distinct from other major crimes in international law is the emphasis not only on group destruction and not just group repression but also on the question of intentionality. That is, that the actions have to be committed in such a way that the perpetrators intend to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part.

But this is an important point, because I think a lot of the debates at the present moment tend to obfuscate some of the really important analytical points here. Often you will see, “Well, Israel is not committing genocide because it’s engaged in a war of defense or national security.”

There’s a distinction between intentionality, which is what the crime requires proof of, and the motives that underpin that intentionality. There are many different motives or justifications that are compatible with the intent to destroy: it can be territorial acquisition. It can be a claim to security, it can be ethnic or racial supremacy or eradication, etc. We can imagine a lot of different types of motivations, but the point is that those motivations are compatible with the intention to destroy a group in whole or in part. So, the issue of whether it’s genocide or not is an issue that is irrespective of the motives underpinning what the perpetrators themselves are doing.

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How do you navigate discourses that we need to “engage with both sides of the conflict”? 

Segal: I don’t think there are sides in this sort of violence, whatever we want to call it right? And you know, we have to understand also that even in cases [where] there’s a significant consensus that they’re a genocide, right? I mentioned the Herero and Nama, for example, in German Southwest Africa…. The genocide was a result of the uprising of the Herero, which was very violent, that is, they attacked German settlers and their families and murdered them.

The German colonialists were acting from their perspective of what we would call today “self-defense.” And like the Israelis, they were fighting a war against “barbarians.” This, by the way, harkens back to the origins of international law because international law was always about regulating wars between “civilized” nations. That is, Europeans. It was never meant to apply to colonial warfare. Right? That’s just the basic history of how international law emerges. So that’s what we’re seeing in front of our eyes. Now, there are no two sides to that. I know that’s more complicated.

But I don’t see sides here when we see a destructive assault of this kind against a people and a culture and their society and their lands in this way. Now this, this attack is meant… The rationale of the Israeli State has always been that this is the way to provide security to Jews. Or this is one of the rationales of the Israeli state.

Okay.

Now, this, of course, was a system that meant that my security as an Israeli Jew was based on the insecurity and the oppression of Palestinians. Now, has this worked? You know we can ask Israeli Jews, “has this worked? Do you feel safe today?”

Of course it hasn’t worked. Of course it hasn’t worked.

Verdeja: I think, on the question of how to navigate discourses that talk about both sides, the kind of the both side-ism question, I would simply emphasize that whenever we’re talking about any complex political phenomena you have to take seriously asymmetries in power, right?

And the discourse or the language of both sides sometimes functions to cover up or obfuscate that because it treats all of the different sides, so to speak, first of all as monolithic sides, as if there is a “Jewish side,” and we’ve just heard the complexity around that, or a “Palestinian side,” or a “Muslim side,” etc. So we need to disentangle that a little bit. One.

And two we need to take seriously that there are again power differentials here. And so the language of side-ism, I think, reproduces this myopia around what actually is happening on the ground, which is why, following my earlier comment, one has to start from the perspective of evidence. What is the evidence?

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Not a Post-Holocaust World:

Professor Raz Segal answers student questions.
Steve Toepp /Midwest Photographics

Segal: We still live in a world structured, politically and ideologically, in the same way as the Holocaust world was.

But we are also living in a time of change that few could have imagined before October 7th. For the voices of Palestinians who are facing Israel’s genocidal assault are now, for the first time in the history of the ongoing Nakba, front and center around the world, really front and center. Also in national and international courts from California to the Hague, marking an era beyond impunity for Israel, when the crime of genocide might serve, not as it emerged, to blur the Nakba, to deny Israeli state violence, but now to support the struggle against it, and the effort to envision a truly different decolonial world.

It is indeed the voices of Palestinians that now point to a new era when the promise of Holocaust memory will center the voices and experiences of survivors and forcibly displaced people; that promise, now, at the beginning of what, again, I suggest we can call perhaps the era of global Nakba memory. That promise may finally be realized.

 

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Sacrality, Land, and Conceptual Fluidity: A Synthetic Response to Dana Lloyd and Barbara Sostaita


The Mackenzie Delta where each year the Mackenzie River empties melted snow and ice into the arctic ocean.

There are concepts in the field of religion that have solidified, like water into ice, into a definitive, if not permanent, shape. In the conversations featured here between Barbara Sostaita, author of Sanctuary Everywhere, and Dana Lloyd, author of Land is Kin, several of these concepts—sovereignty, the sacred, religious freedom—are melted back down into a more fluid form. The result is that they are allowed to flow into passageways previously unimaginable, whether in applying the concept of the sacred to practices of resistance or to understanding Indigenous ways of relating to land and the people who occupy it. My reflections here build on the questions and answers raised by Sostaita and Lloyd in their interviews with one another and specifically highlight the conceptual innovations in their interventions into the study of religion, coloniality, and modernity.

Retheorizing the Sacred

In the same spirit as scholars like An Yountae and J. Kameron Carter, Sostaita understands the sacred—which the concept of sanctuary is linguistically linked to—as that which interrupts our normal ways of understanding the world. The sacred is a potential disrupter of hegemonic forms of domination such as White supremacy, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism. The people Sostaita accompanies in her book challenge the authority of border control agents to determine who does and who does not belong and who is and who is not worthy of value. They plant crosses where people have died migrating across the border; they give food and water to those ICE would prefer remain hungry, desperate, and easier to detain; they house those who would otherwise face death under unbearable conditions. As highlighted in Lloyd’s interview with Sostaita, such a study by nature meanders from place to place, topic to topic, in an effort to avoid fixing on one or another particular account of what is or is not sacred, the latter being a project in which the state is often invested. Sostaita, mirroring her subjects, is always on the move with the sacred, discovering and rediscovering it in unlikely places.

Sostaita traces her account of the sacred through classical theoretical sources such as Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, and others who saw the sacred as disruptive of the ordinary and thus a powerful means by which to challenge the status quo and traditional authorities. Of course, in the study of religion the sacred has often been understood as a uniquely conservative, even reactionary, force. For Mircea Eliade, one of the most influential twentieth century historians of religion, the sacred does interrupt our day-to-day experiences, but it does so in order to reestablish a premodern order to society. If scholars following in Sostaita’s genealogy seek to evoke the sacred in order to challenge modernity’s hierarchies, Eliadean-influenced scholars evoke it in order to reestablish a premodern hierarchy.  For Sostaita, sacrality’s fluidity is to be embraced, whereas for Eliade it is to be resisted.

This challenge to the ordinary that the sacred represents in both Sostaita and Eliade is nonetheless one that scholars have mostly abandoned, as Sostaita briefly notes in the book and reiterates in the interview. Beginning with J.Z. Smith and becoming most pronounced in the work of Russell McCutcheon, the construction of notions of the sacred have been understood to stem from the specific interests of those defining the term rather than any essential content the term might represent. The sacred most often has served to universalize Protestant Christian visions of religion and their accompanying liberal humanitarianism. Thus its “analytical” value is seen as suspect and lacking in rigor.

For Sostaita, sacrality’s fluidity is to be embraced, whereas for Eliade it is to be resisted.

But scholarly critiques, like the concepts with which they engage, can become too set in stone, too resistant to new formations, especially when guilds and conferences are structured around either their preservation or deconstruction. Sostaita reminds us that a fluid conceptualization of the sacred need not serve reactionary purposes. Indeed, it might afford quite the opposite. This is a possibility that those who critique Eliade and other “historians of religion” foreclose when they treat the sacred as immutably tied to its previous formulations. The critique of the sacred, in this case, is parasitic upon what is critiqued. For critics of the sacred and its defenders, the concept is less like ice and more like stone.

Religious Freedom and Indigenous Sovereignty

Sostaita’s approach to the sacred is rooted in her desire to make sense of the actions of those she spent time with in the Sonoran desert during her fieldwork. Oftentimes, the sacred is a term she applies to their actions even when it is not one they themselves apply. It is a pragmatic tool used to analyze actions rather than an ontological claim about the reality of the sacred. Lloyd, in a slightly different vein, investigates the very real way religion and the sacred have been mobilized in the legal realm to manage and control Indigenous peoples and their land. Focusing on the Lyng Supreme Court case, she brings to light the way “religious freedom” was mobilized by Indigenous plaintiffs and government defendants alike to claim sovereignty over a portion of land that the national forest service hoped to build a road on in order to transport timber. The case was won by the Indigenous plaintiffs at the lower level on religious freedom grounds, but lost at the Supreme Court when it ruled that the government’s property rights superseded the right to religious freedom for the Indigenous population. In the majority opinion, Justice O’Connor made clear that the Indigenous claim to the land went beyond the religious freedom that the constitution was required to protect. In separating religion from the Indigenous worldview, Justice O’Connor in effect subjected it to an alien US/European colonial framework. As Lloyd makes clear in her interview, this framework is also ontological. As Sostaita’s questions and Lloyd’s response to them help unpack, treating Indigenous claims as ones that are “religious,” and therefore a matter of private belief, has the effect of Protestantizing Indigenous beliefs and removing claims to sovereignty over land from the conversation. In other words, it frames the conversation in such a way that the Indigenous worldview is excluded from the start.

But Lloyd also goes beyond this framework to show how resistance to practices of land theft by the US government require using, at times, the settler colonial framework of sovereignty and religious freedom. The Yurok people, she shows, use concepts like the sacred and religious freedom strategically, often to successful ends. What Lloyd shows then, like Sostaita, is that the concepts of religious freedom, the sacred, and sovereignty are not frozen in their genealogical ice mold. Rather, they are terms that hold possibilities for resignifying and reimagining. A binary framework that would see Indigenous and governmental claims to sovereignty as exclusive would be unable to account for this kind of creative agency among Indigenous actors.

What Lloyd shows then, is that the concepts of religious freedom, the sacred, and sovereignty are not frozen in their genealogical ice mold. Rather, they are terms that hold possibilities for resignifying and reimagining.

In the study of religion, modernity, and secularism, there is no shortage of attempts to frame the secular/religion binary and the modern/premodern binary as a good/bad binary, with the value attached to them dependent upon the motives of those employing the terms. Yet, by focusing on what the sacred does, as each of these books seeks to do, we see that that there are multiple ways of contesting authority, often in subtle ways that challenge those in power. In this manner, Lloyd and Sostaita show us how we might move beyond the sacred/profane binary that both its defenders and critics are parasitic upon. By treating such concepts as heuristics that are contingent upon the particular circumstances in which they are applied, they loosen the constraints of modern/colonial frameworks and chart new arroyos down which they may travel.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.