Aerial photograph of the new Parliament Building in New Delhi, India. The building was constructed under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Narendra Modi’s recent inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya not only celebrated the culmination of a Hindu nationalist dream; it also marked a crucial moment in reimagining India as a “civilization state” instead of as a republic. The term “civilization” was splashed across media reports quoting the reactions of senior leaders in the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) to the event. The external affairs minister S. Jaishankar remarked “the soul of a civilization finds expression once again.” The chief minister of the state of Goa declared this to be a “moment of civilizational resurgence, civilizational renaissance in the country.” Media figures quickly mirrored this framing and a number of television commentators reiterated that this was “a civilizational moment.” The normalization of this terminology belies its deep implications for the state that Hindu nationalists wish to create.
The current vision of India as a “civilization state” has found widespread expression since Modi’s election in 2014.[1] This development reflects the growing tide of authoritarianism worldwide as well as the internationalization of far-right political movements. The claim of being a “civilization state” is not unique to India—many in China, Russia, and Turkey also invoke a similar rhetoric. Indeed, the discourses and practices of aspiring civilization states have much in common. Their proponents imagine the state to be the embodiment and fulfilment of an abiding civilization. This idea of the civilization state opposes liberal democracy’s claim to universality, a universality that is perceived to be western rather than truly for all.
But the term civilization itself is a neologism that emerged in mid-eighteenth-century France. It was deployed during the period of European colonialism and thereafter, often to underscore European superiority and to further the modernizing projects of colonial rule. Today, however, these new visions of the civilization state embrace a nativism that rejects Euro-American hegemony, combined with a notion, stemming from nineteenth-century European thought, of the nation’s spirit or soul finally unshackling itself to achieve its destiny. In today’s India, a sizeable cohort of right-wing intellectuals promotes such a civilizational vision. They are supported by a media that is pliant before the government and its oligarch allies. As Rodrigo Nunes points out, such “political entrepreneurs” now constitute an influential organizational form for the right-wing, not just in India but elsewhere, including the United States and Brazil.
Hindu nationalists are not the first in India to link the modern nation to the idea of an ancient civilization. However, unlike secular nationalists, such as India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, they infuse this notion of Indian civilization with a markedly Hindu character. Often adopting a decolonial rhetoric, they portray past Muslim rulers as colonial oppressors. In this view, for India to flourish, she must avenge a host of historical wrongs perpetrated centuries ago by Muslim kings. For example, when in 2019 a Supreme Court verdict allocated the site of the former Babri mosque for a Hindu temple, Jaishankar exultantly declared this “a pledge redeemed, a heritage reaffirmed.” This obsession with the past functions as a metonym for the Hindu nationalist goal of dominion over India’s roughly two hundred million Muslims. Politicians regularly engage in rhetorical dog whistles that frame Indian Muslims as co-extensive with the historical rulers who are now targets of hatred. On a daily basis, Muslims in India also face routine discrimination and disproportionate violence.
Unlike secular nationalists, such as India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Hindu nationalists infuse this notion of Indian civilization with a markedly Hindu character. Often adopting a decolonial rhetoric, they portray past Muslim rulers as colonial oppressors.
Civilization states do not exist in and of themselves; they must be built—through force, erasure, rhetoric, grand spectacle, and, in this case, bulldozers together with plenty of concrete and stone. By the time Modi inaugurated the Ayodhya temple, he had overseen several other giant infrastructure projects across the country. These include a mammoth restructuring of central Delhi already underway, with a new parliament building and a prime minister’s mansion planned with room for several hundred staff, abundant watchtowers, and a secret tunnel. Another project in Varanasi razed old residences and stores in a dense neighborhood to create a huge path and complex around the Kashi Vishwanath temple. Activists now seek to demolish a seventeenth-century mosque abutting the temple; a court has already handed it over for Hindu worship. Meanwhile, untold numbers of Sufi shrines, some hundreds of years old, are being demolished on the grounds that they are illegal encroachments, or that they come in the way of necessary infrastructure development.
Prime Minister Modi performs Darshan and Pooja at Shri Kashi Vishwanath Temple, Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh on March 09, 2024. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In this civilizational project, the reconfiguration of time, past, present, and future, accompanies this restructuring and resacralization of space. A common element binding these temporalities is the presence of a sacred king or king-like figure. As regards the past, a pamphlet prepared for the G-20 summit of world leaders in Delhi held in 2023 illustrates this kind of Hindu nationalist historical narrative. It traces the genesis of democracy in India to the Vedas, as, apparently, these ancient texts contain words that could mean a council or an assembly. However, kingship rather than participatory governance has pride of place in this account. Several examples present idealized images of Hindu kings who were beloved by their people and took counsel from their ministers. According to the view offered here, these rulers were thus presumably progenitors of the modern democratic state. This vision extends to current times. As far as the present and future are concerned, it is Modi, as a redemptivephilosopher-king, who will usher the nation into a new and better age. For example, Modi reimagines a dominant Sanskritic conception of time according to which the present era is called Kaliyuga, or the “age of darkness,” by declaring that under him India has now inaugurated the era of Amritkaal, or the “epoch of ambrosia.”
The idea of the Indian civilization state benefits from its conceptual fuzziness. Its markers are embedded in an assemblage of myriad aesthetic forms and practices such as yoga and lacto-vegetarianism that are not always obviously or exclusively linked with Hindu nationalism. According to its proponents, civilizations are not religions; that is to say, they are wider and more encompassing up to a point. For instance, a senior intelligence and national security official in the current administration frequentlydeclares India to be a civilization state, whose basis is not language, religion, or ethnicity but civilization itself, which forms the nation’s “collective unique common consciousness.” It is striking that here he also invokes Israel as a similar case of a civilization state.
Nonetheless, this notion of the civilization state is infused with a worldview of Hindu supremacy, which pervades its various and sometimes contradictory articulations. On the one hand, this civilizational rhetoric resonates with the widespread idea that Hinduism is no mere religion, but rather the foundational matrix of Indian civilization. It is for this reason that Vinayak Savarkar, premier ideologue of Hindu nationalism, distinguished Hindutva, or Hindu-ness, from Hinduism as a religion. Hindus do not agree on the essence of Hinduism, observes Savarkar. By contrast, for him, Hindu-ness, defined by claiming the nation as both holy land and fatherland, unites all Hindus with Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, and excludes Muslims and other members of the Abrahamic religions. On the other hand, when expedient, this rhetoric also embraces the colonial idea of Hinduism as a world religion. Thus, Hindu nationalist supporters unironically compare the new Ram temple in Ayodhya to the Vatican or to Mecca. The implication here is that India is the seat of Hinduism, which ought to be regarded as the only authentic religion of the Indian people.
This civilizational rhetoric resonates with the widespread idea that Hinduism is no mere religion, but rather the foundational matrix of Indian civilization.
Political opposition to the ruling BJP has at times invoked the Constitution of India as a uniting symbol. The Preamble to the constitution, adopted by India’s Constituent Assembly in 1949, calls for securing justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity as the goal of this newly independent republic. While this idea of a republic is still ensconced within the limiting framework of the nation state, it is based on universalistic and forward-looking principles that are at odds with the Hindutva civilizational imaginary. Just like the republic, however, the civilization state is an unfinished project; a project that can potentially be resisted, interrupted, diverted, or remade. It is the opposition’s task to determine how to do so—a challenge made all the more difficult by the ongoing onslaught of political repression.
[1] The concept of the Indian civilization state has recently begun to garner critical scholarly attention. See, for example, a special section devoted to the subject in the March 2023 issue of International Affairs.
Supriya Gandhi is a historian of South Asian religions who is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. She is the author of The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India(Harvard University Press, 2020). She has also written a number of articles and essays on topics related to Mughal history, Persian literature, early modern Hindu thought, modern Hinduism, and Hindu nationalism. Her current book project explores genealogies of religious universalism and secularism in modern India. Gandhi grew up in India and studied there as well as in the United Kingdom, Iran, and Syria before earning her doctorate at Harvard University. Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright and ACLS/Mellon foundations.
Groups gather in Ayodhya, India to celebrate the recent consecration of the Ram Mandir in March 2024. Photo by Dinesh Khanna.
A New Incarnation
On January 22, 2024, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi performed a religious rite to consecrate the idol of the Hindu god Ram, in child form, at a huge temple in Ayodhya that is still under construction.
In Part 1 of this essay, I explained how the possibility of such an event taking place in democratic India in early 2024 had its roots in the rise of Hindu Nationalist ideology over the past 100 years, beginning in the 1920s. A breaking point came in August 1947, with a chaotic Partition and the tumultuous birth of secular India and Muslim Pakistan as independent but asymmetric nation-states. The conflict escalated further when, in January 1948, fanatical Hindu supremacists assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence and leader of India’s long struggle for self-rule. Gandhi’s killers blamed him and the Indian National Congress under his influence for allowing the creation of a separate Muslim homeland at the price of a painful and blood-soaked territorial division of Britain’s colonial empire on the subcontinent.
The Hindu Right bore a fundamental grudge against the very existence of Pakistan because of which the two countries, though immediate neighbors and in many ways culturally indistinguishable from one another, have been to war several times in their post-colonial history. This unreconciled resentment continues to have serious repercussions even today, more than 75 years later, especially for Indian Muslims with a population of about 200 million people, the largest religious minority in the country.
The more proximate causes of the inauguration of the Ram Temple in August 2020 and the installation of the image of Ram as a 5-year-old child in January 2024—both rituals performed personally by the Indian Prime Minister—take us back to the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992, at the very site where the temple now stands, in a mob attack launched by Hindu militants. The physical destruction of the mosque a little over three decades ago triggered an escalating polarization of Hindus and Muslims, the exponential growth of right-wing Hindu politics, and the ratification of Hindu Nationalism by Indian voters, 80% of whom are Hindu, in the general elections of 2014 and 2019.
Built around the ideology known as Hindutva—which seeks to redefine India as a nation of and for Hindus, without accommodating other religious minorities, especially Muslims, as equal citizens—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), founded in 1980, has been campaigning relentlessly to set to rest what it defines as the “unfinished business of Partition,” namely, the replacement of a diverse, plural, multi-religious India by a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra.
The physical destruction of the mosque a little over three decades ago triggered an escalating polarization of Hindus and Muslims—as also of secular Indians and Hindu Nationalists.
As India, the most populous democracy on the planet, goes to the polls yet again between mid-April and early June 2024—the world’s largest-ever election—how are we to understand the ways in which the ruling BJP, poised for a third consecutive win at the hustings, under the leadership of the authoritarian populist strongman Narendra Modi, is leveraging a set of religious symbols associated with the god Ram? These include his capital Ayodhya, his ideal kingdom Ram Rajya, and what Hindu Nationalists insist is the very location where Ram appeared on earth in human form, the avatar’s birthplace (janma-bhoomi).
By a hardline Hindu construal of the past, Babur, the Chagatai Turk who established the Mughal Empire in India in the late 1520s, destroyed a temple at the exact spot where Ram was born (janma-sthan), replacing it with a mosque named after himself, Babri Masjid. Ram’s devotees (bhakts) say they are reclaiming their deity’s birthplace 500 years after Babur usurped it. In addition to the well-known history of colonial and postcolonial India, is there also a medieval chapter that we need to revisit in order to fully grasp the political significance of Ayodhya?
Rewinding India’s History
It was no Hindu officiant but Prime Minister Modi who performed the rites meant to vitalize the idol of Ram Lalla (pran pratishtha—literally “the infusion of life”) on January 22, 2024. The government declared a half-day holiday, and the event completely dominated print, broadcast, and online media at the expense of other news. The country’s rich and famous, including billionaire industrialists, Bollywood stars, cricketers, and politicians were all in attendance. At the same time, Hindu holy men—i.e., sadhus and swamis, traditional pontiffs like the Shankaracharyas, and members of the opposition from political parties other than the BJP and its allies—were conspicuous by their absence.
Taking away the prerogative of performing the inaugural rituals from Hindu religious leaders, Modi arrogated these tasks to himself. But, as the elected leader of India’s secular democracy, qua prime minister his office ought not associate with any particular religious community. The cardinal separation of church and state as defined in the Indian Constitution of 1950 has been violated. “Hindutva” confuses the categories of politics and religion that India’s founders worked hard to keep apart. Despite Partition, through careful deliberations in the Constituent Assembly 1946–49, India’s first leaders set up an egalitarian state that did not premise the rights of citizens upon their religious identity.
Saffron flags bearing the legend “Jai Shri Ram!” (Victory to Lord Ram!) for sale in Ayodhya. Photograph by Dinesh Khanna, March 2024.
In January 2024, the ruling rightwing BJP and a so-called “cultural” organization of volunteers affiliated with it, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—reminiscent of fascist cadres—mobilized Hindus all over the country, but especially in North India, by going door-to-door and asking people to display saffron flags bearing the slogan “Jai Shri Ram” (“Victory to Lord Ram”) on private homes and public buildings, neighborhood gates and local markets, streets and parks. They were successful, to the point that any vehicle, house, office, or shop not flying these bright orange banners stood out, dangerously signaling recalcitrance from what appeared to be a pervasive and comprehensive social consensus (or could be taken as that, based on the visual evidence).
State machinery, Hindu Right propaganda, and the entirety of the press, with almost no exception, carried the same messages: January 22, 2024, marked the start of a new age of history, “Amrit Kaal” (“Era of Bliss” or “Timeless Time,” a golden age invoking “Ram Rajya” of yore). India would henceforth be redefined as a “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu Nation). Ram Lalla was not installed for the first time, but rather, the idol returned to its original rightful spot at the janma-bhoomi, the birthplace of Ram in Ayodhya, echoing Ram’s own victorious homecoming.
This narrative has been put in place by BJP from the time of the November 2019 Supreme Court verdict allowing for a temple to be constructed at the site of the Babri Masjid, and subsequently the inauguration of the temple construction in August 2020 by the Prime Minister.
The messaging both from the government and in the media seemed unequivocal in its implication that this putative “return” corrected an “atrocity” that had occurred 500 years ago, in the early 16th century. That was when the first Mughal Emperor Babur ordered the destruction of the original temple for Ram Lalla and the building of a mosque over it in his own name. What Babur had removed (in 1528), Modi has reinstated (in 2024). The message hammered home by the BJP’s propaganda machinery is that Ram—after his long saga of exile, war, victory, and restitution—has come back home to Ayodhya.
This is the very core of the meaning of January 22, 2024—taking back the janma-bhoomi from the Babri Masjid and rebuilding at that site a Ram Mandir; the triumph of good over evil reminiscent of Ram’s victory over Ravan; the overcoming of erstwhile Muslim power by contemporary Hindu faith; the long overdue righting of historical wrongs. All of this comes about through the efforts of the BJP-RSS, brought to a triumphant culmination by their present-day heroic protagonist, their warrior-king, Narendra Modi.
Divinization and Demonization
In an important essay published in 1993, “Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India,” Sheldon Pollock showed how the epic had been used for political purposes from medieval times through the colonial and modern periods of Indian history. This is because in its very structure and narrative it lends itself to be read “mythopolitically.” In the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition and the Bombay riots, Pollock pointed to the “ready availability to reactionary Indian politics of central cultural icons like the Rāmāyaṇa.” He noted that the story has always supplied “a repertory of imaginative instruments for articulating a range of political discourses” (262).
Taking a selfie with the idol of a modern goddess, Bharat Mata (Mother India) at the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi. She stands in front of a map of India, and holds the tricolour national flag. Photo by Dinesh Khanna.
The story has two crucial elements which make it particularly useful to the BJP in mobilizing Indians “in the name of a Hindu theocratic politics and against the Muslim population.” These are what Pollock identifies as the “divinization” of political sovereignty and the concomitant “demonization” of a designated Other. Pollock states: “Not only are these two the defining thematics of Vālmīki’s epic, they are two of the most powerful conceptions of the socio-political imagination” (281).
The Rāmāyaṇa was thus deployed repeatedly by polities all across northern India from the 11th to the 14th centuries, as Central Asian Muslims on horseback like the Ghaznavids, Ghurids, and Khaljis penetrated into the subcontinent. Turkic invaders, called “Turushka” in Sanskrit, were identified with Ravan’s demon hordes, called “Rakshasa,” whom Ram had to defeat to win back his wife and kingdom. Pollock points out that the identification of Ram and Ravan, divine king and demonic tyrant, Self and Other, did not everywhere necessarily map onto the Hindu versus Muslim binary—Bengal in the east and Tamil country in the south do not exhibit this sort of dichotomy.
Nevertheless, the relevant point is that the Hindu Right today appears to be tapping into long-running cultural habits of demonizing and othering Muslims—a historical pathology that rather than being resolved and laid to rest at Independence, was instead inflamed and exacerbated by Partition. The BJP’s ideological narrative of Hindus being enslaved, colonized, and humiliated for centuries, first by Muslims and then by White people, draws its toxic waters from these deep wells of resentment.
Haunted by the Past
With this broader arc of history in place, let us turn to a short history of Ayodhya, stretching over four decades from the mid-1980s to the mid-2020s. This brings us to the present moment, as India goes to the polls from April to June 2024.
Map of Rath Yatra path. First appeared in Frontline, October 1990 issue. Fair Use.
On Dec 6, 1992, a mob of armed Hindutva volunteers under Advani’s leadership physically attacked and destroyed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. This led to widespread violence between Hindus and Muslims, the worst of it in the city of Bombay (Mumbai), leaving about 1000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, dead. The Bombay Riots were for Bombay what 9/11 was for New York City—an eruption of such catastrophic violence that it changed the city forever.
The so-called Ayodhya Title Dispute was in the Allahabad High Court from July 1996 and the Supreme Court of India delivered its final judgment in November 2019. The apex court recognized the disputed site as the janma-bhoomi, directed that a temple be built there, and allotted another plot of land at some distance to rebuild a mosque (see the history of the dispute).
Modi laid the foundation stone of the new Ram Mandir in Ayodhya a few months later in August 2020, despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic had broken out in February 2020 and India had a complete nationwide lockdown from March 25 to May 31 of that year. As mentioned earlier, even at the inauguration of the temple, it was Modi who personally performed the rites with the help of priests; this role of the principal officiant was not played by one or more religious leaders representing any of the major Hindu sects around the country.
The top brass of the RSS was prominently present at both inaugural rituals, of the temple (August 2020) and the idol (January 2024), sitting close to the Prime Minister, seemingly approving of the proceedings. As the RSS approaches its centenary in 2025, it is no doubt a matter of profound satisfaction for its leaders to see their ideology of Hindutva, for so long anathema in mainstream Indian politics, replace the founding ideals of the Indian republic.
Past, Present, and Future
The breakdown of the secular compact put in place by the founders of the Indian Republic at independence in 1947 and the promulgation of the egalitarian Indian Constitution in 1950; the growing polarization of the majority Hindu and the minority Muslim communities; the illiberal and authoritarian cast of the ruling regime of the Hindu Right that has been in power for a decade (and looks set for a third consecutive electoral victory this year); the apparently unstoppable appeal of populist strongman Narendra Modi, his political party the BJP, and the RSS ideology of “Hindutva” that he espouses; and the growing normalization of the idea of India as an ethno-nationalist Hindu Rashtra, where Muslims and other minorities are second-class citizens: all of this describes the juncture at which we have arrived.
But there is a long multicultural past, a complex socio-political dynamic between diverse groups, and a deep history of many religions (Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism…) to be reckoned with. Without an account of the prominent place of the rama-katha, the story of Ram ubiquitous in India and the broader Indic sphere; the role of the epic Ramayana in political imagination starting around the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era; and the twin forces of secular nationalism and religious nationalism that lead up to the making of modern India, as emergent from the crucible of British colonialism, we cannot arrive at a full understanding of what happened in Ayodhya on January 22, 2024.
There is a long multicultural past, a complex socio-political dynamic between diverse groups, and a deep history of many religions (Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism . . . ) to be reckoned with in India.
As India votes this summer, the question now is: Can we comprehend what these developments might mean for India’s future as the world’s largest democracy? As a recent pre-poll survey by Lokniti-CSDS showed, an overwhelming number of people polled seemed not to place much emphasis on religious identity as the basis of Indian citizenship or nationality. 79% of respondents came out in favor of religious tolerance and India continuing to be a multi-religious society. Similarly, the Ram Mandir does not figure as a significant electoral issue. However, the temple does seem to help the BJP consolidate Hindu identity in the public perception. And it does seem almost certain that the BJP will be voted back to power for a third term.
Surely we need to take cognizance of history—with its deeply recessed cultural processes, memories and traumas—to comprehend how heroic warriors, sacred sites, epic poems, gods, temples and scriptures continue to exert such a powerful influence on the political imagination of democratic India.
Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is the author of the award winning book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India(Harvard University Press, 2012) and a co-editor of two volumes, Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Minorities and Populism: Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe (Springer, 2020). She writes widely on politics, arts and ideas for newspapers and magazines in India and internationally. She has published in Foreign Affairs, New York Times, The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, New Statesman and World Policy Journal, among other venues. She has recently been a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University and a Charles Wallace Fellow at CRASSH, Cambridge, and is currently a Research Consultant on the Nilgiri Archeological Project at the University of Ghent, Belgium. She was invited to teach at CM's Madrasa Discourses intensive in Nepal in July 2022. At present she is finishing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit, and has a long-term project on the life and ideas of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.
Pran Pratishtha ceremony of Shree Ram Janmaboomi Temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh on January 22, 2024. Prime Minister Modi presided over the occasion. Via Wikimedia Commons
In February 2024, the people of India witnessed a celebration hosted by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the governing political party of the country, that was intended to remind people of the historical narratives of wars and wins of Hindus over their rivals during ancient and medieval times. These reminiscences celebrated the BJP as a conqueror who had both demolished the Babri Mosque and constructed the Ram Temple on its ruins. There is scant evidence—archaeological, historical, or scientific—to support their contention that the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was built by the Mughal emperor Babar in sixteenth-century India on the ancient site of Ram’s birthplace. Yet, a section of Hindus, beginning especially in the mid-twentieth century, have believed that the mosque stands on the site of Lord Ram’s birthplace. This is in spite of the fact that during the Mughal period, the poet Tulsi Das, who was the author of the Ramcharitramanas (which is based on the Ramayana), does not mention the existence of Lord Ram’s birthplace in any of his compositions. Who constructed the mosque in the sixteenth century is also not clearly established, though it is often attributed to either Babar or one of his army officers, Mir Baqi. However, irrespective of the builder, the narrative that the mosque was constructed over Lord Ram’s birthplace became widespread during the twentieth century. This belief has been massively popularized by the BJP since the 1980s through a movement called Rath Yatra (holy chariot procession), which operated under the leadership of Lal Krishna Advani, the former Minister of Home Affairs, who was awarded the highest citizenship award, Bharat Ratna (literally, Diamond of India) in February 2024.
The Ram Temple was finally consecrated on January 22, 2024, on the ruins of the Babri Masjid. This marks the culmination of events that began with the discreet placement of the Ram idol under the main dome of the mosque in 1949 and the consequent stoppage of namaz prayers, followed by the demolition of Babri Mosque in December 1992. In 2019, a surprising Supreme Court verdict awarded the entirety of the disputed 2.77 acres that made up the site of Babari Masjid to the Hindu groups involved in the 1992 demolition; a legal and judicial mystery indeed. The construction of Ram Temple, its consecration, and the associated mega celebrations, were presided over not by the “holy priests,” but by Prime Minister Modi himself, along with the chief of the RSS and in the presence of carefully selected chief ministers, federal ministers, federal bureaucrats, movie stars, and known business tycoons. These celebrations featured symbols of medieval and ancient kingdoms. They indicate a political contrast with India’s modern-day constitutional democracy, and its socialist undertones, which has been in place for the last seven and a half decades.
There are four important points about this consecration. First, among the BJP and its supporters, one hears the claim that even modern secular democratic states can follow medieval and ancient rules of governance. This has the effect of basically foisting majoritarian perspectives and narratives relating to rules and laws onto the entire public. Second, while history remains a contested territory between myth and reality, in this environment it has become possible to propagate unsubstantiated beliefs even when the hard facts of documented history argue against them. Third, India remains a deeply religious society. The state can carry out processes and operations in accordance with religious beliefs, especially those of the majority, even if that requires moving away from constitutional imperatives. Fourth, there has been an attempt to so-called “decolonize”[1] Hindu art, history, society, and culture and create a “pure” version of it, despite such artifacts being the product of multiple syncretic processes of various religions, especially Islam. Importantly, this approach by some on the Hindu Right implies the compromise of the educational and governance system of the nation, which will have profound consequences on the freedom of religion, citizenship, and even the survival of religious minorities (who comprise about 20 percent of the country’s population). At risk in this instance are also the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and many “Backward communities,” which make up over one-half of the total population.
[These celebrations] indicate a political contrast with India’s modern-day constitutional democracy, and its socialist undertones, which has been in place for the last seven and a half decades.
The coexistence of different religious institutions and structures over the years has not been by accident but by design. As an example, we can look at the way multiculturalism evolved during the medieval period in India. The arrival of Islam into a land of multiple and disparate paganistic Hindu religious institutions, many of which were abandoned, led to the creation of mosques and shrines on those ruins. There are no historical records or examples of ethnographic documentation that point to the destruction of temples and other Hindu religious structures by the Muslim rulers in India. Further, the rising existential philosophy of Sufism and the Bhakti movement, as well as camaraderie between the ruling classes, led to the construction of temples and mosques in proximity to one another. These serve as models of civic and religious coexistence. Now, the proximity of these structures is being interpreted with hostility, as a sign of Muslim aggression and occupation of Hindu religious structures. But if this interpretation were true, why do the most significant Hindu structures still stand? And why are there no significant written records of the destruction of the temples and mosques? Even Marathas (Hindus) attacked Hindu temples, including the famous Tirupati temple in 1759 and Shringeri Math in Karnataka, the latter of which was restored by Muslim ruler Tipu Sultan. This shows that historically, the attacks were more about political strategy rather than religion. Otherwise, how can one explain the large number and proximity of so-called rival religious structures that remain untouched and the fact that kings supported the structures of religions different from their own as signs of co-existence and mutual respect?
Attacks on rival religious structures in India have been the exception rather than the rule. However, it is now rare for people to acknowledge this fact, and today’s tamed media and political class are engaged in presenting Hindus and Muslims—including even the proximity of their religious structures to one another—in an antagonistic manner to gain material and political benefits. The Babri Mosque, as such, became a victim of this profit and politics. In fact, the Muslims of India deeply honor and respect Lord Ram and Sita, as they do Lord Krishna. The Muslims’ contention in the case of the dispute over the land of the Babri Mosque was that the mosque was not built on the birthplace of Lord Ram (as there is no evidence of the same) or, for that matter, on any destroyed structure of a Hindu temple (even as the Supreme Court of India awarded the land to Hindus). The respect of Muslims for Lord Rama can be understood from Sir Mohammad Iqbal’s verses, a well-known Muslim Urdu poet, who in the reverence of Lord Rama wrote,
Hai raam ke vajood pe hindostaan ko naaz
[India is proud of the existence of Ram]
Ahal-e-nazar samajhate hain is ko imaam-e-Hind
[Wise people regard him as the leader/guide of India]
British colonialism did massive damage to Indian economy and politics. In addition, its orientalism created new knowledge within the middle and upper classes that divided them along religious lines and promoted “divide and rule” policies. The Hindu and Muslim middle and upper classes of that time,[2] who had coexisted for centuries, slowly became enemies of each other with the consumption of this new knowledge. W. W. Hunter’s (1871) book The Indian Musselmanshighlights the deprivation and exclusion of Muslims that was a result of British discrimination in employing Muslims after India’s first War of Independence in 1857, led mainly by the Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Jafar. Hindu-Muslim communal riots started emerging because of the encouragement of competitive religious politics by the British. Such riots became ubiquitous in northern India around the 1940s. The two communities who had been interwoven for centuries then started perceiving each other as enemies, leading to the partition of the country. Even after the adoption of the secular constitution, the nation of India could not stop religious and political extremism from penetrating state structures. The destruction of the Babri Mosque during the 1980s and early 1990s played a major role in this exclusionary political maneuver. The construction of the Ram Temple in 2024 and its celebration as an example of the “decolonization” of the Hindu religion (and by extension the Hindu people) has deepened the divide across the country along religious lines.
Muslim Response
The Supreme Court verdict of 2019 concerning the construction of the Ram Temple over the spot where the mosque once existed was generally accepted and considered a non-issue by many Muslims. Yet, high-pitch celebrations and majoritarian assertions and overtones supported by the state apparatus have since massively dismayed Muslims. They are largely disempowered and excluded from most public spaces, state programs, and political institutions. Now they are more vulnerable to physical violence both at the individual and community levels and under constant threat of majoritarian security threats. Even the secular leaders and personalities who used to be a hope for syncretism and support participated in the celebrations, tending to ignore the plight of vulnerable Muslim. As such, this consecration event has become a source of worry as it supports solidifying majoritarianism and a disregard for constitutional obligations and guidelines.
Further, the ferocity of majoritarian hate is being injected through political discourses, policy misinterpretations, judicial vagueness, and the media. This new politics of hate, mostly coming from radical Hindu political activists, has turned to policing and monitoring Muslims’ everyday lives. This, in turn, has led to the spatial and socioeconomic incarceration of Muslims. Therefore, Muslim dress, language, food, sociality, occupations, and politics have come under the critical gaze of the majority, and many aspects of these have been criminalized. The mass surveillance and policing of Muslims as well as muscular propaganda have turned into career-building exercises for Hindu youths in politics. The movement that started in the 1980s for the Ram Temple has increased hate against, and exclusion of, Muslims, leading to increased desperation across the social, regional, and economic classes of Muslims. Many Muslims now are desperately looking to migrate to perceived safer locations such as the states in southern parts of India where the intensity of daily and routine religious hate is low. Some have even considered migrating internationally.
Structural Issues with Effects Across India
The Ram Temple building and its state-led celebrations heralded a new chapter in India’s social and political life. Religious minorities, especially Muslims and Christians, are finding themselves increasingly constrained by the apparent failure of constitutional governance, rising of majoritarianism, the surrender of state bureaucracy, the justice system, and electronic and print media. Institutional failure abounds. Yet it is essential to note that demographically just over 200 million Muslims constituting about 15 percent of the total population are distributed widely across most parts of India. They are highly visible due to their unique dress, food, and culture in their residences around mosques. Occupationally, Muslims are artisanal and self-employed and traditionally intertwined into the rural as well as urban economic and social space. Although such interdependence has been reduced due to the interventions of a number of modern technologically enabled supply chains, their supply of labor force generates higher levels of value added, which is clear evidenceof demographic dividends that the country is benefiting from.
This consecration event has become a source of worry as it supports solidifying majoritarianism and a disregard for constitutional obligations and guidelines.
The actual impact of the majoritarian onslaught is vast and diverse both in its intensity and expanse. Further, the social, political, and economic outcomes of (a) the destruction of Babri Masjid in 1992 was violent and broad-based; while (b) the construction of Ram Mandir at the same spot in February 2024 was strategically somber, festive, grand, and mostly concentrated in the state of Uttar Pradesh with streaks of celebrations at localized Ram temples across the country.
The public and street-level display of religious processions, “Melas and Julu” (Carnivals and Processions) are the hot spots that create a sense of insecurity amongst those who believe in ideologies different than what is reflected in such displays. The Ram Mandir construction processions in February 2024, however, were strategically planned to ensure lower violent tensions between the revellers and the minorities, especially the Muslims. Politically, this is the result of direction from the top leadership, none other than the prime minister himself. This strategy was necessary to ensure support for the boisterous claim of India (or, rather, its prime minister) to be the Vishva (World) Guru is sustained. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) groups distributed a small measure of rice dipped in saffron as a sign of invitation to celebrate the consecration of the Ram Mandir, even to the Muslim communities. The insecure feeling amongst the Muslims was much less common at the time of construction and exactly the opposite of what happened at the time of demolition when radical militant Hindu groups (like VHP and RSS) were violent and belligerent. But at the time of construction, a sense of piousness and sublimeness was created and intended structurally not to promote and facilitate violence.
Thus, the aftermath on the minority communities is wide-ranging and contains a great deal of regional variation and diversity. The impact also changes at the local level because of residential patterns, such as separate enclaves and ghettos (underserved types of living spaces), where the majority of Muslims reside. Adverse events in such spots often leads to the whole country getting a feeling of fearfulness, panic, and dreadfulness.
It is also evident that, historically, social tensions arise around religious lands (Muslim burial grounds, waqf properties) and structures (mosques) and that these tensions often lead to physical violence. Yet an analysis of the recorded communal riots suggests that politicians and political parties facilitate violent events to polarize votes towards the Hindu-Right ideology.
The greatest risk for Muslims across India is the impact of marginalization and exclusion from public spaces on the tender and formative minds of children and the youth, especially girls and women. A few data-orientedstudies suggest a steep decline in female school enrolment rates and continuation rates. The odds that Muslim youth drop out after a few years of schooling is the highest among other groups in the country and rising. There are also measurable reports as to the elimination and dismissal of Muslims from the mainstream labor markets. It is essential for socio-psychological and pedagogic studies to be undertaken to better understand the future course of living and survival for Muslims in India.
An analysis of the recorded communal riots suggests that politicians and political parties facilitate violent events to polarize votes towards the Hindu-Right ideology.
The Indian constitution provides for several safeguards to protect and promote minority religions in the form of personal laws. Such laws are now being repealed and modified to reduce or fully eliminate such provisions. However, the majoritarian Hindu-radical ideology that overwhelms current governance at the national and many state levels should be legally and intellectually confronted. There is an urgent need to establish “Equal Opportunity Institutions” at the level of national government, state governments, and institutions, such as universities, hospitals, financial institutions, corporate houses, and legal establishments. One still sees a ray of hope that over 200 million Muslims can live and prosper in India, albeit with the support of independent and autonomous democratic institutions, and the institutionalization of a few new constitutional safeguards. In this context there is an urgent need to legally establish “equal opportunity institutions,” such as equal opportunity commissions at federal and state levels, and at universities, industrial units, corporate bodies, and so on.
[1] Generally, in academic and historic literature, colonization refers to the duration of British rule in India. Yet the recent purely political discourses by the ruling BJP rhetorically contextualize “thousand years of colonization” which includes ancient and medieval Islamic rule of India. Using a similar pitch, BJP discourses routinely refer to Indian Independence as having occurred in 2014 instead of 1947.
[2] The British Parliament ruled the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947, and was also known as British Raj. However, the onset of British presence in governance in India came into being through the rule of the East India Company since the beginning of 1600.
Abusaleh Shariff is Chief Scholar at the US-India Policy Institute in Washington DC (since 2012) and President, Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy, New Delhi. He was a Chief Economist at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi (1994–2012). He also worked as Senior Research Fellow at the Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC between 2008–2010. He was advisor (under a committee setting) to the Indian Prime Minister from 2004-2006 and the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India from 2010–2011 in the areas of inter-state relations and inclusive development policy reforms. He was nominated to the 13th (Indian) Finance Commission by the Finance Ministry, Government of India.
Shariff holds a Ph.D in Demography from Australian National University, Canberra (1986); and an MA degree in Economics (1993) from Bangalore University, India. He undertook post-doctoral research in the areas of household economics, labor markets, and demographic dividends at the Yale Economic Growth Center, New Haven, USA (1991–92). Hehas published articles in refereed journals and over a dozen books published mostly by Oxford University Press. His latest book is is titled Institutionalizing Constitutional Rights in India (Oxford, 2016).
Shariff was selected as one of the India Today Magazine “faces of millennium (Economist)” in its January 2000 issue and one of the 25 identified in Outlook Magazine’s Alternative Power List (April 23, 2007 issue) as a recognition of his ability to influence public policy in India.
The streets of Ayodhya, India in March 2024, two months after the installation of the idol in the Ram Temple. Photo by Dinesh Khanna.
The Unfinished Business of Partition
The Partition of British India in August 1947 yielded two decolonized nations: India, a secular democracy, and Pakistan, a new homeland for the Muslims of South Asia. At 14–15% of the population of independent India, Muslims, numbering a little over 200 million, constitute a minority so large as to rival the populations of Muslim-majority Pakistan and Indonesia.
For the first 50 years after partition and independence, Indians voted consistently to retain the multi-religious plurality of their state, with equal rights for all citizens, and special protections for minorities. But the last quarter century or so since the mid–late 1990s has seen the rise of Hindu nationalist ideology, which seeks to rebuild India as a nation of Hindus. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has led the movement towards majoritarianism, targeting Muslims with a view toward rendering illegitimate their equal claim to Indian citizenship secured in India’s liberal Constitution of 1950.
Today the BJP has been in power for a decade, winning two consecutive national elections in 2014 and 2019, under the leadership of a populist strongman, Narendra Modi. He and his party are expected to win a third term, as India—the world’s largest democracy—goes to the polls in April and May this year, with almost 970 million registered voters and 2,660 registered political parties contesting elections.
The BJP started out in 1980 as a partisan outfit representing a fringe section of Hindus who were politically rightwing and socially conservative, believed that religious identity should be the basis of nationality, and wanted to carry forward what they perceived as the “unfinished business” of Partition, making India a Hindu counterpart to Muslim Pakistan. They had never bought into the central values of India’s struggle for freedom from British colonialism, principally non-violence and self-rule advocated for by Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, and secularism and pluralism enshrined in the Constitution and practiced by Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s immensely loved and universally respected first prime minister from 1947 to 1964.
Such was the resentment among Hindu nationalists about the creation of Pakistan that on January 30, 1948, scarcely six months after independence, a far-right terrorist named Nathuram Godse along with his associates assassinated Mahatma Gandhi at his regular evening prayer meeting. This one act of ideological extremism, while intended to repudiate the Gandhian character of the nationalist movement and brand Pakistan as India’s permanent existential enemy, ironically proved to be suicidal as well. It was enough to send the Hindu Right into the political wilderness for the next 30–35 years.
Starting in 1980 when it was founded, the BJP, in a little over four decades, has built itself up as a behemoth, a seemingly unstoppable force, that now dominates India’s multi-party democracy. In the 2019 election, the BJP captured less than 40% of the vote share but won enough votes to hold 293 out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament (and it controls even more seats in alliance with its supporters and subordinates). The goal of the BJP is to redefine the Republic of India as a Hindu Rashtra or Hindu Nation—something that should have happened straight away in 1947, from the Hindu Right’s perspective.
People’s Nation or Ram’s Kingdom?
The BJP’s ascent to occupy centerstage in India has been built around a campaign to spread its core ideology of Hindu nationalism, called Hindutva, which projects Hindus as the original and rightful Indians, and Muslims as the descendants of invaders and proselytizers. Its most potent symbol has been the Hindu deity Ram, an avatar of the god Vishnu. In his human form as the heroic warrior-king of the kingdom of Ayodhya, Ram is the protagonist of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, authored by the poet Valmiki and popular in different versions across the Indian subcontinent for at least 2000 years.
While the Ramayana as an epic poem has enjoyed a complex and multi-lingual literary career over the past two millennia, reaching every part of India, the BJP has sought to “make Ayodhya great again” so to speak, in a very targeted manner. Ayodhya, Ram’s mythic capital, has been since independence a rather sleepy little town in northern India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, on the banks of the river Sarayu. While it is considered a holy place of pilgrimage for Hindus, it was never as well-known as the much larger and older city of Varanasi (also called Kashi or Benaras), some 250 kms further south and east down the river Ganga. Ayodhya is associated with the god Ram; Varanasi with the god Shiva.
Varanasi, newly built steps and gateway leading from the Ganga river to the Temple of Shiva, Kashi Vishwanath, March 2024. Photo by Dinesh Khanna.
At the end of the 1980s the BJP began to mobilize public sentiment against a small, historically obscure and architecturally insignificant mosque in Ayodhya, called the Babri Masjid, dated roughly to the reign of Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530 CE). Babur was a Chagatai Turk descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, who established the Mughal Empire in India 500 years ago (r. 1526–30 CE). He ruled from Agra, which is about 500 km west of Ayodhya; it wasn’t until the reign of the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal at Agra, that the capital was moved to Delhi (in 1638 CE).
Hindu nationalists claimed that the Babri mosque in Ayodhya stood exactly where there used to be a temple marking the very birthplace (janma-bhoomi) of Ram in his human form, thousands of years ago, as told in the epic. They demanded the removal of the mosque and its replacement by a temple for Ram (Ram Mandir), with the infant Ram (Ram Lalla) installed therein as the idol for Hindus to worship.
Starting in September 1990, Hindutva leaders mounted a nationwide campaign that culminated in the razing of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 by a mob of several hundred vandals and militants, who literally stormed the building and broke it down. The demolition triggered violence across the country, leaving a trail of destruction, and putting India’s Muslims on notice, though it wasn’t clear at that time what eventual fate awaited them in the future.
The next episode of mass violence against Muslims, much of it gruesome, took place 10 years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, in Gujarat, in February 2002. At that time the Chief Minister of Gujarat, a large and prosperous state in western India, was Narendra Modi. Gujarat has several important ports on the Arabian Sea to the west of peninsular India, which gave it a flourishing culture of trade and commerce with the Mediterranean world, the Gulf, and East Africa from ancient times.
Historically, many of Gujarat’s wealthy maritime and business communities are composed of Muslims of different denominations. In 2002 the Modi administration appeared to aid and abet what many called a pogrom that left over 1000 dead and more than 2500 injured (according to government figures— actual numbers were much higher), the casualties overwhelmingly Muslim.
The BJP was voted out of power in the 2004 general election; it would take another decade for Modi to come to power as the head of the national government in New Delhi, in May 2014. Modi chose Varanasi as his electoral constituency, since it is the holiest city for Hindus, but he had his sights set on Ayodhya.
Ayodhya, 1992–2024
On January 22, 2024, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi performed a brief ritual at a new temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, intended to install and infuse with life an idol of the deity Ram, represented as a 5-year-old human child carved out of black granite sourced from the southern state of Karnataka.
In Hindu practice, idols of deities must be ritually “awakened” or “enlivened” before they become active as objects of worship, theologically efficacious and interactively responsive to the prayers of their devotees. As an idol-maker in Tamil Nadu explained to the writer William Dalrymple, it is faith that transforms a mere sculpture into a sacred idol. Crucial in this passage from a lifeless representation to an embodiment of divinity, is the consecration of the idol and the opening of its eyes, which allows not only worshippers to see their god, but more importantly, the living deity to return their gaze. The opportunity for a precious moment of mutual beholding, darshan, is what draws Hindu believers to temples.
The new Ram Temple in Ayodhya which is still under construction as of March 2024. Photo by Dinesh Khanna.
The story of Ram’s career on earth, the rama-katha, finds its definitive source in the Sanskrit epic by the classical poet Valmiki, the Ramayana. Ram the prince of Ayodhya goes into a 14 year-long exile on account of a succession struggle in his father’s kingdom, orchestrated by one of his stepmothers who wants her own son to be king. While Ram is wandering in the forest with his beautiful wife Sita and his loyal younger brother Lakshman, the powerful demon Ravan, king of Lanka, abducts Sita and imprisons her in his magnificent fortified capital.
Ram and Lakshman must find her and win her back. To do so requires Ram to wage war against Ravan. He is unfairly positioned relative to his powerful adversary, since he is in exile, but nevertheless he manages to gather an army of supporters—human as well as animal—recruited over the course of his quest. He goes forth bravely into enemy territory to fight a terrible battle and slay the demon-king.
Thereafter the trio return victorious to Ayodhya. But Ram’s deference to public opinion and his moral righteousness make him subject his beloved queen to a fire ordeal to prove that her virtue is intact despite her long captivity in Ravan’s palace. Only after Sita comes through the fire unscathed does he ascend the throne that was always rightfully his, to establish the perfect kingdom (Ram Rajya).
This tale travels all over the subcontinent and beyond, to Southeast Asia; it is told across languages and historical periods; it is attested for over two millennia in a number of versions and variations. Temples dedicated to Ram, as well as depictions of scenes from the Ramayana in temples for other gods like Shiva, have arisen over the centuries, and can be found today almost everywhere in India and overseas where there are Hindus. Ram appears in poetry and painting, music and dance, sculpture and architecture, prayer and pilgrimage, philosophy and theology coming down to us from ancient times.
The idol in Ayodhya is of an innocent Ram Lalla. The child form is key to the significance of the inaugural ritual on January 22, 2024. The temple in which Ram Lalla has been enshrined is supposed to mark the precise birthplace, janma-bhoomi, where the supreme god Vishnu was incarnated as the avatar Ram, prince and eventually sovereign of the kingdom of Ayodhya, in an earlier age of the world.
What distinguishes recent events at Ayodhya in the new Ram Mandir (temple for Ram that is still under construction), with the child deity, called Ram Lalla? What sets the January 22 ritual apart from the temples, idols, narratives and communities of the devout that have been such an integral part of popular faith, literary culture, and sacred architecture for the greater part of India’s recorded history?
In part 2 of this essay, I will explore the ramifications of the history described so far for the political present.
Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is the author of the award winning book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India(Harvard University Press, 2012) and a co-editor of two volumes, Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Minorities and Populism: Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe (Springer, 2020). She writes widely on politics, arts and ideas for newspapers and magazines in India and internationally. She has published in Foreign Affairs, New York Times, The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, New Statesman and World Policy Journal, among other venues. She has recently been a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University and a Charles Wallace Fellow at CRASSH, Cambridge, and is currently a Research Consultant on the Nilgiri Archeological Project at the University of Ghent, Belgium. She was invited to teach at CM's Madrasa Discourses intensive in Nepal in July 2022. At present she is finishing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit, and has a long-term project on the life and ideas of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.
Jean-Loup Vithien-Gerard portrait of Albert Camus. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the 1947 novel The Plague, his great allegory of the struggle against fascism during the Second World War, French Algerian Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote, “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky” (35). As the razing of Gaza continues, we can learn from thinkers like Camus who confronted the realities of terror in his time with resolute commitment to human equality.
Camus’s context was French rule in Algeria, a North African colony and later part of France until its 1962 independence. Conflict erupted between the pieds-noirs, French Algerian citizens of European descent, and Indigenous Arab and Berber populations who, despite their overwhelming majority, were denied political and civil rights. Despite being a colon, or “settler,” Camus’s lifelong anti-colonialist activism confronted systemic injustice and sought a “fair Algeria, where both peoples can and must live in peace and equality.” He stood athwart an Arab nationalist insurgency that targeted and killed many civilians, led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and state counterterror and settler vigilantism. Amid death threats, Camus insisted that nothing strips human beings of their right not to be murdered.
The Camusian argument to follow is that the wrongness of murder is obvious, straightforward, and sets a normative limit on how one may wage or justify resistance to violence or oppression; and that ignoring this is wrong, not least because it hinders shared recognition of responsibility for harms and blocks solidarity in seeking peace with truth and justice.
Against Executioners
The term “executioner” fills Camus’s writings, reflecting his passionate opposition to capital punishment. His revulsion at what he called “the most premeditated of murders” can be felt in his 1942 novel The Stranger, published in Nazi-occupied Paris where he lived and secretly worked as a journalist and editor-in-chief of Combat, a banned Resistance newsmagazine. And it’s central to The Plague, where Tarrou, Camus’s mouthpiece in the fable of resistance against occupation and oppression, declares, “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences” (236).
I believe that standing against executioners is twofold: we must identify, and avoid identifying with, those who commit or excuse murder. Moreover, we have a special responsibility for wrongful acts we help others do.
We clearly help others harm by materially supporting their efforts. But we also help the harmful when they credibly act in our name or by our authority. If I am in a power-sharing relationship with another, their acts bear my imprint, marking my character. In a way, we act together, which is the basic meaning of “complicity.”
These are plain facts about sharing moral responsibility for what others do. Their truth rests on common sense and experience, not fancy theories. They mean my personal involvement in a crisis has the greatest relevance to what I should say or do about it. Grand narratives and intellectual frameworks deserve a subordinate, defeasible role.
Discourse about Israel/Palestine revolves around concepts like “Zionism,” “apartheid,” and “a nation’s right to exist.” These evoke important realities. In The Plague, Camus has the redoubtable Dr. Rieux, who distrusts sweeping ideals, admit that “when the abstraction is trying to kill you, you have to pay attention to it” (93). But abstractions cannot simply dictate how I should respond to crisis. I must know who I am in relation to it, whether harm is done with my help or in my name.
Against Abstraction
In The Rebel, Camus confronts the tendency to prioritize abstractions over lives. Devotees of stories about historical purity or theories of utopian progress readily find reasons for eliminating real people who appear as obstacles. Venerating ideas risks devaluing individuals. Such “redemptive politics” wears many guises: capitalist imperialism, totalitarian communism, colonialist domination, revolutionary terror. No monopoly exists on this perverse idolatry of the ideal.
Redemptive politics also inspires moral perversions on the far left, as recently illustrated by victim-blaming statements issued by progressive organizations like the Democratic Socialistsof America. Ethically, nothing makes anyone more murderable. Yet blaming terror on its victims is a longstanding moral blind spot on the left. Camus’s contemporaries John-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon theorized that the source of all violence in anticolonial struggles are colonial systems and settler populations, which are therefore “entirely responsible” for it. Some on today’s left inherit these ideas, twisted fictions of agency that reduce human beings to conduits of abstractly described structural forces. This is how an otherwise normal person comes to believe that a grand historical process or myriad institutions, not an angry man aiming a loaded gun at a child he views as a colonizer, is responsible for pulling the trigger.
None of this entails a broad equivalence between far-right demagogues who weaponize antisemitic accusations to justify Israeli atrocities and far-left actors who blame October 7 on its victims. The Camusian lesson is rather that ideology must not be used to justify atrocity any more than to block legitimate resistance to oppression.
“Humanity Isn’t an Idea”
Standing against executioners while keeping abstraction in its place means recognizing our relations to the realities of murder. Two points help: all civilian life matters equally and we are responsible for the destruction of life to which we contribute.
These operations have killed over 33,000 Palestinians, of whom three-quarters are women, children, and elderly. The U.N. Secretary General describes Gaza, one of the most densely populated regions in the world, as a “graveyard for children.” At half of Gaza’s population, children constitute over 13,000 of those so far killed by Israel. This amounts to roughly twelve times as many children slain by Israeli forces as all Israelis killed on October 7. A human-centered ethic means nothing if not solidarity with every child.
This carnage constitutes unjustified killing for two reasons.
Anyone like me, in whose name an ideology or identity is used to justify carnage, must “venture into a no-man’s-land between hostile armies.” The Plague’s Dr. Rieux addresses us too when he reminds his colleague, Rambert, who lapses into abstraction amid crisis, that “Humanity isn’t an idea” (175).
For “A Civilian Truce”
On January 22, 1956, Camus delivered a violently protested speech in Algiers. In a desperate plea to pieds-noirs and Arab nationalists, he begged both to refrain from murder. The foremost reason was “one of simple humanity,” that “no cause justifies the death of the innocent.” He later dispatched over 150 letters to French authorities urging mercy for Arab militants facing execution or imprisonment, some of whom Camus believed had committed atrocities. Some letters spared lives. But Camus’s antiracist appeal for a civilian truce failed. His public voice lapsed into “Sophoclean silence.”
My Sisyphean appeal joins many others’. Jewish Voice for Peace’s declaration, “Not in our name!”, acknowledges a heightened obligation to oppose murder when one’s authority is used to justify it—even illegitimately or indirectly. This is the tragic side of responsibility. When others speak or act on my behalf, they pose, and would answer, the question of who I should be taken to be. They put a choice before me: to define myself or let them do it for me.
Camus understood that withdrawal from a violent world may tempt us but isn’t possible. The effort makes us bystanders, if not strangers, to ourselves. “By our silence or by the stand we take,” he reminds us, “we too shall enter the fray.”
Christian M. Golden is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. He is an ethicist specializing in the impact of identity and difference on relationships of authority, intimacy, and trust. His research explores the normative and psychological dimensions of agency, the character and limits of subjectivity, and the place and value of conflict in human affairs. His latest work examines commitment and citizenship by investigating the nature and scope of virtues like civility, humility, integrity, and justice. He received the 2020 Tropaia Outstanding Faculty Award for Georgetown University’s Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies Program.
Nelson Maldonado Torres speaks to students, staff, and faculty during his visit to Notre Dame’s campus on March 8, 2023. (Photo by Matt Cashore).
Introduction
At a time when decolonization has become a buzzword across the university and wider social discourse—especially under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—clarity about what decolonization entails is required. On March 7 and 8 of 2023 Nelson Maldonado-Torres joined Contending Modernities to present a lecture and to sit for an interview to outline his approach to decolonization. Maldonado-Torres carefully distinguished the decolonial project from piecemeal reforms that do little more than chip around the edges of the status-quo, whether from liberal politicians or university leaders. Drawing on his own activist and scholarly work, Maldonado-Torres outlined a decolonial politics and epistemology rooted in a radical notion of love. In conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and others, he challenged both conservative and liberal posturing that would prioritize law and order (sometimes under the guise of “justice”) that seeks to maintain a status quo that is predicated on the preservation of Whiteness. The result of Maldonado-Torres’ exposition is a radical notion of what decoloniality entails: the reorganization of the university as we know it and the reimagining of what is entailed in radical politics. It is here where religious practices, such as prayer, offer ways of understanding ourselves and relations to others in profoundly revolutionary ways.
Lecture
On March 7, 2023 Maldonado-Torres presented a lecture for the Contending Modernities research initiative titled “Countering the Coloniality of Peace and Justice.” The recording of this lecture, along with timestamps highlighting the various chapters of the lecture, are below.
Interview
Atalia Omer (AO): In your talk and in your work, you are critical of various uses of the terms decolonization and decoloniality in the academy, arguing instead that decolonization entails a careful consideration of abolition and reparations that is typically missing in academic calls for decolonization. So, what is the relation between decolonization and concepts and praxes of abolitions and reparation?
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (NMT): In recent years, different movements/organizations of activists have been making important connections between decolonization and abolition. In the US, for example, decolonization is very much linked to the Indigenous Land Back movement, and abolition has been primarily associated with the abolition of slavery as well as with the abolition of the prison industrial complex. And so there have been increasing efforts to explore the connections and synergies between these concepts and projects. The growing consensus is that abolition is part of the process of decolonization and vice versa. For me, coming from the Caribbean context, the mutual implication of decolonization and abolition is very clear, perhaps most notably, because of their entanglement during the Haitian Revolution. Haiti became independent from France while also abolishing slavery, and so therefore in the Haitian case it was clear that decolonization involves political, aesthetic, spiritual, and epistemic liberation as well as the abolition of slavery and related structures of dehumanization. In short, how I understand decoloniality combines decolonization and abolition, and I trace this back to the Haitian revolution, among similar revolts in what the Zapatistas have referred to as the long night of 500 years. I have described in my work the Haitian revolution as the first major moment of the decolonial turn, and when you take the Haitian revolution as a reference, then, decolonization and abolition are organically connected. It is important today, for a number of reasons, to continue to work in that direction. Haiti is also a very important case because Haiti was made to pay reparations to France because of their losses. So this is the audacity when of course—
AO: When you have the Eiffel Tower!
NMT: When of course, what was due was reparations to the Haitian people, an imperative that remains relevant today. So, clearly in the context of massive forms of colonization, independence is not enough. You need to abolish the institutions that are serving as mechanisms of domination—different forms of domination in your society—and the former colonial powers need to not only pay reparations, but also engage in reparations. It’s kind of a threefold project and demand: decolonization, abolition, reparations as part of decoloniality. By decoloniality I mean both the undoing of coloniality in all its forms and expressions as well as the cultivation of existing and new forms of communality, forms of subjectivity, and forms of sociality that emerge out of the very process of organizing to counter colonization. In the case of the Haitian revolution, it is in the very process of engaging in the revolution, and before that in the process of the formation of what Jean Casimir calls the “counter-plantation system” that provide an anchor of sorts in the unfolding of combative decoloniality.
You need to abolish the institutions that are serving as mechanisms of domination—different forms of domination in your society—and the former colonial powers need to not only pay reparations, but also engage in reparations.
In the counter-plantation system, you find the seeds of a new order, but for that order to happen you need abolition, and you also need reparations. So decolonization cannot work without abolition and it cannot work without reparations. If we take it from there and we think about places like the university, then whenever we talk about decolonization we need to talk about abolition and reparations. If we are not talking about abolition and reparations, then we are not really talking about decolonization. And it is interesting that many of these recent efforts or projects to pay attention to decolonization, they ultimately make decolonization collapse into projects of diversity and inclusion that reject the grammar of reparation. So, we have to be very careful about this academic commodification of decolonization and decoloniality within a liberal grammar that does not admit the question of reparations or that sees it as something completely different from what we are supposed to be asking and doing now.
AO: Perfect! Maybe you can tell us more about why you are thinking specifically about the need to abolish the humanities?
NMT: Abolish the humanities. Yes. As I see it, decoloniality opens up a horizon of multiple imperatives for change, including reparations, different forms of creolization, and abolition. There is no decolonization or decoloniality without engaging in the abolition of the logic of coloniality, which might involve the abolition of whatever it is that one is decolonizing. This prevents us from approaching decolonization as a project that recentralizes practices that need to morph and in some cases disappear in the very process of coming together to combat coloniality. This is at the crux of what the Frantz Fanon Foundation, which I co-chair, has proposed as combative decoloniality.
In that sense, decolonization entails abolition as a necessary step, or as a permanent possibility. Today, more and more in academia, one finds that decolonization tends to collapse into a call for minimal transformation, preserving the position of the scholar as expert, and doing away with the ideas/imperatives of abolition and reparations. At most, these are forms of decoloniality-lite that facilitate a certain commodification of the decolonial in liberal settings. This commodification is at work in calls to decolonize the humanities, when this call serves to recentralize the humanities rather than to consider the potential need for its abolition, and the abolition of the knowledge apparatus that makes the humanities, as an area within the liberal arts and sciences, possible. The humanities are often glorified, conceived as an effective antidote against the prevalence of technocratic and neoliberal imperatives in industrial and post-industrial societies. However, they remain part of what Sadri Khiari and Houria Boutledja have referred to as the immune system of Whiteness, and particularly so, of the White academic field. This means that the space of the humanities invites oppositions to neoliberalism as much as it also foments oppositions to decoloniality and abolition. The humanities open small spaces for scholars of color, but they truly are, first and foremost, a refuge for liberal Whiteness, which is why the humanities often militate against decolonial knowledge formations that resist accommodation within the established 19th century epistemology that dominates in the globalized modern/colonial university. That is why I believe that the time has come to explicitly engage in the effort to abolish them and, through that effort, engage in the process of supporting other ways of conceiving of education and of knowledge creation. We need not despair. The humanities were invented, and so we can invent something else building from everything at our disposal, including the critical analysis and strategic use of concepts and methods fostered in the humanities and the sciences, and recognizing the many spaces that have always already existed beyond the scope of the liberal arts and the humanities. Of these, of particular relevance are those that have participated and/or participate in the struggle against coloniality and for the restoration of the intersubjective bonds that have been severely undermined under the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality. At the core of this activity might be the cultivation of combative decolonial attitudes (rather than liberal and modern/colonial attitudes) that seek to prepare subjects and communities to engage in decolonial and abolitionist struggle. This struggle involves fostering a pluriverse of decolonizing practices and ideas grounded in those practices, with particular attention to those found in decolonial, abolitionist, and similar combative collectives, and facilitate their interaction and mutual enrichment, always respecting and following the lead of the practitioners/thinkers themselves. At stake is the possibility for the damné to emerge as a co-combatant, and not merely as a professional, presumed expert, or scholar. As Sylvia Wynter has warned us, though, humanities scholars would tend to resist this impulse as much or more as scholars of Scholasticism rejected the humanities when they first emerged. The humanities were born in a particular time, institutionalized during a particular time, and grounded on specific philosophies the premises of which have been challenged or changed since then.
AO: We can think specifically about Kant or…
NMT: Yes, we can think of Enlightenment thinkers and figures like Immanuel Kant who served as reference and as inspiration for how to conceive the modern research university. We also need to consider how in the last two centuries other things have happened in the university that were not anticipated for most of its history. For me one of the most important things that has happened is the emergence of Black studies and ethnic studies fields, all of which defy the division of knowledge in terms of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences. However, since these forms of “studies” are expected to be incorporated within the established horizon of the liberal arts and sciences—because no other horizon is considered to be possible—they are forced to exist in a context that constantly militates against their decolonial dimensions and that seeks to make them work in the mode of pursuing incessant struggles for recognition and accommodation. At best, the humanities and the social sciences open relative spaces for these areas, while keeping their most combative decolonial dimensions, grounded on movement-based epistemic and aesthetic formations, in check.
AO: But you are not against studying literature?
NMT: Exactly. I’m referring to the humanities as a general framework within which different activities that are sometimes labeled as humanities activities are accommodated. My point is that they are better identified, they are better-affirmed—these activities like thinking, writing, interpretation—when conceived in a different kind of paradigm, not the paradigm of the humanities and social sciences, but a much more plural and dynamic paradigm that is deeply and intrinsically linked with anti-racism and decoloniality.
For me one of the most important things that has happened is the emergence of Black studies and ethnic studies fields, all of which defy the division of knowledge in terms of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences.
The humanities have become—and this is the other reason why I think that it is time to firmly proceed with their abolition—not only some stumbling block for other forms of knowledge, but also a refuge for liberal Whiteness, as I already mentioned. They have served as a refuge for liberal Whiteness—focused on the abstract principles of liberty, equality, tolerance, free speech, and more recently diversity and inclusion—in its opposition to conservative Whiteness—focused on the perceived integrity of the nation, based on what is understood as its core—, and neoliberal Whiteness—focused on perceived efficiency in the service of unending growth. In the academy, now more than 50 years after the formation of the first ethnic study programs, it is time for us to demand further transformations and to take away these refuges that liberal Whiteness has created for itself.
Joshua Lupo (JSL): To get back to your discussion of justice during your talk, there you were saying that when the right wing proposes something outrageous that they’re going to do, President Biden responds by saying, “we’re going to stand for justice.” It sounds like there’s a similar idea you are exploring here in the sense that Governor Ron DeSantis says that Florida is going to get rid of African American studies—or even African American history—and only do “American history,” to which the liberal humanist replies, “No, no, no. We need these things.” Then the question is: What exactly are we protecting when we respond to right–wing talking points in this way? What do we want the alternative to be? Is it just that we’re studying Shakespeare for our own personal edification, or is it something more? Do you see those two as linked?
NMT: Yes, certainly. While conservatives embrace the rhetoric of “law and order,” liberals respond with the accent on justice, by which they mean justice as conceived by the modern/colonial liberal nation-state. Similarly, in the context of the struggle for education in the university, you find some sectors that call for justice. They will say that we need to stand up for justice as a topic, as a thematic, in academia. But as I pointed out, the concept of justice has already been mobilized to undermine the claims of anti-racist knowledge formations in the university, so justice-talk has also been compromised and it has always had its limits. Liberals come closer to an actual defense of Black, Indigenous, and ethnic studies when they question the conservative attack on Critical Race Theory, which has become the label to refer to all of these knowledges.
AO: They don’t know what it means.
NMT: Exactly. They don’t know what it means. The Republicans don’t know what it means and they criticize it. And the liberals don’t have any other way to define it, whatever it is. But I think that ultimately, they mean something like diversity and inclusion.
AO: Yeah. I mean, we see it here, too.
JSL: We don’t know what to do, but we need to do something for the public.
NMT: Yes, exactly, the little that exists of CRT has been gained through struggle and pushes so that the liberal system has had to make concessions. But when the liberal system makes concessions, it also doesn’t do so passively; it takes these concepts over and recodifies them, right? So, it opens, appropriates, and then turns what it incorporates into a subset of something else that it controls.
AO: It multiplies and you see it over and over again.
NMT: Exactly. That’s the cycle. And so, ideas like justice, the humanities—I mean we should all be tired of seeing the same project every now and again in the name of justice, the humanities, the humans, and so forth. Ultimately, using those as tools to say, on the one hand that “we are so progressive,” and, on the other, that “everyone should be grateful to us that we are so progressive, benevolent, and you know.” But then what you are really doing is stopping the possibility of further, more radical, anti-racist and decolonial forms of thinking and action. And then you are providing refuge for liberal Whites to counter the other forms of Whiteness, that of conservatives and agents of neo-liberalism, but also counter the pressure that comes from the movements from below. So, the liberal engages in at least two forms of countering at once while appearing benevolent, progressive, and rational. It’s quite a rhetorical trick, and that’s why I think that we should resist confronting right-wing attacks by celebration or endorsements of liberal projects and visions such as what typically takes place in calls to defend the humanities. Because already, time has gone by and we know that we’re going to be singing the same song for the next 100 years. We need to somehow at least tell White liberals: “we know what you are doing and we’re not going to play your game,” right? And we need to enter into the space and reconceptualize the questions. You can enter there and begin to change the pieces, but the liberals don’t want you to change the grammar. They will say: “You need to defend justice and you need to defend the humanities.”
AO: And you need to use the existing grammar.
NMT: Exactly. Ultimately, at the end of the day, this ties to settler colonialism because all of this is a function of baptizing as legitimate the order that has emerged and been built on this land and so on. So, all of that will go without question. You don’t question possession of the land. You don’t question anything else. You take an entire array of matters as presuppositions: calling for the constant defense of the humanities while simultaneously naturalizing a colonial order of things and suppressing decolonial knowledge formations that cannot be possibly encapsulated within the province of the humanities or the liberal arts and sciences.
AO: This is where it also ties to the reparations, because that approach is so myopic and suffers from profound amnesia, right? It doesn’t want to interrogate and engage and own up to its history.
NMT: It is the humanities, and so it is compatible with the individualism that doesn’t recognize the weight of historical responsibility.
AO: Yeah, yeah. Responsibility, which is at the heart of reparation.
NMT: Exactly, yeah because “I was not my grandfather,” “I did not own any slaves,” right? “So why do I need to—”
AO: Right. Right.
NMT: I think it’s not only you, so to speak. It’s a government which you picked that is the one that is responsible to change the entire social setting for you and everyone. But that is something else.
AO: And perhaps at this point, maybe we can turn to a final question. In your work, you interrogate and you are also partly grounded in the critical study of religion. You engage with how the construction of the secular relates to the story of modernity, coloniality, the history of modern coloniality; and you use them and you engage with theological categories and questions of ontology and epistemology. Do you see a role for theology in the vision and the praxis of decoloniality, decolonization? Especially since theology (and specifically Christian theology) was so complicit in modernity, coloniality; what’s its role in abolishing it?
NMT: Well for me, since I was much younger, I resisted the separation between the secular and the religious. For me it was clear that they were mutually implicated, that that line was artificial in multiple ways, that it was a problematic line, and it was foundational in the assertion of philosophy as a secular enterprise. As a young person being introduced to philosophy, I was educated to presuppose the demarcation between the philosophical and the religious, and I should leave everything that was based on “faith” outside. But then when I was reading philosophers and so on, it was clear that they were drawing from some of these categories that came from particular religious traditions. So that was dubious. Also, there were questions—let’s say, metaphysical questions—that go beyond the limits of logical positivism and certain forms of investigation that I think invite the kind of speculation and reflection that sometimes is found in something like theology. And while it is true that theology and religious ideas, Christian and otherwise, have been used to dominate and colonize peoples, they have also been instrumental in resisting colonization, in defying slavery and other forms of domination, right? And, for me in particular, I come from a context where liberation theology had already existed and I was acquainted with it, so I knew that there was more to theology and to religious ideas than their connection with empire, with the nation-state, with powerful institutions.
While it is true that theology and religious ideas, Christian and otherwise, have been used to dominate and colonize peoples, they have also been instrumental in resisting colonization, in defying slavery and other forms of domination.
So I knew that there is not one Christianity, that there are multiple Christianities—and the same thing is true with Islam with other so-called religions. So, I was well prepared to traffic in the exchange between, across, and beyond the secular and the religious, but of course when looking at those so-called theological and religious ideas, particularly paying important attention to the ones that seem to play a role in the struggle for emancipation and liberation. From there, those struggles provided the hermeneutical key, if you wish, about how to then interpret other categories like prayer, for example, and like the gift, or love, which I explore in my writings.
AO: Maybe you can talk about prayer and love. That would be really helpful.
NMT: I began to take love particularly seriously when reading Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed shortly after it was published. In this text, she introduces and develops the concept of decolonial love, which is central in accounting for the richness and complexity of the methodology of the oppressed. At that time, I was also reading Fanon and Levinas very intensely. All of these thinkers combined, persuaded me that there was something to think about with regard to love. And then, in Against War, I presented an interpretation of Fanon as a philosopher of love in that vein, as well as a postsecular philosopher, if you will. Love, in Fanon, has to do with connection and relation. Love makes possible what is impossible from a strictly logical point of view: it accounts for the possibility of building communities of deeply wounded and vulnerable subjects who have been dehumanized. Love is the answer to the question, what is it in the human being that can allow for the possibility of connecting with someone else, particularly with someone else that you have been taught not to value? How does one become an agent of connection and not assimilation, subordination, and self-hate. That is, since many of us have been taught not to value ourselves and not to value people in our communities, how do we overcome that? I think the Fanonian answer is that there is something, that which we call love, some kind of dimension of the human, that would make it possible for us to go beyond that condition of separation and division and get there. And this love can be so powerful that it can bring people together and lead to a process of self- and collective healing. Love can turn destructive and problematic in so many ways, but this does not mean that, in its most basic forms, it seems to be, as Sandoval suggests, something like a force and the very possibility of deep connection. For lack of a better word, decolonial love is about the possibility of connection (and relation) when connection seems completely impossible, because you are supposed to eliminate yourself and you’re supposed to not care about another person. So, when you reach out to another slave and connect, that’s where love appears, or rather, this connection is made possible by virtue of love. Love is the very condition of possibility for this connection to take place. But, you know, this idea of subjects in isolation, in this self-annihilative mood, to reach out to another when the other is not there because the other has also been educated not to look out for you (you don’t know if they are there), that’s where prayer comes in because it’s the attempt at a connection even when the other is not immediately present.
AO: And this is a prayer and also an ethics, the underside of modernity, right?
NMT: Yes. Prayer is about connection, and ethics is a discourse and logic of connection. Both acquire particularly important dimensions in contexts that are premised on separations that sustain dehumanizing hierarchies.
AO: Maybe if you can clarify, what’s the distinction between colonial love and decolonial love?
NMT: What is colonial love? Love that kills us.
AO: Or consumes.
NMT: I mean I think that there can be so many multiple forms of love.
JSL: Or is colonial love, love. Or is it distorted?
AO: Think of missionaries.
NMT: It is paternalism, a very supreme paternalistic love, self-serving love. Paternalistic, but all of that is—
AO: “Saving you! Because God loves you! You know, my God loves you!”
NMT: Yes, exactly. Love as a tool to impose civilization, “because I love you so much that I want you to be civilized.” This is “love” in the service of civilization, of colonization; “love” as a form of imposition. This utterly self-centered “love” also finds expression in the delegitimization of combative movements: it is “love” as a call for an apparent peace that preserves multiple forms of structural violence. But in these cases what we call love is not really love, as Joshua was suggesting, and certainly not decolonial love. Love is about connection, a connection that maintains, respects, and celebrates singularity while calling for the exercise of respons(e)ability. Romantic love, when it is really love, affirms these two dimensions, and so forth with other forms of love. Decolonial love, in particular, takes place when the impulse for connection/relation and respons(e)ability finds expression within and against the hierarchies that sustain dehumanizing hierarchies and differences. Decolonial love accounts principally for the movements from dehumanized selves to dehumanized others, leading to the formation of collectives of the condemned which seek to end the world as we know it. Along with rage, decolonial love inspires opposition to the structures, values, principles, and ideas that sustain coloniality. Decolonial love also allows for the possibility of substantive (as opposed to superficial) coalition building and for the generation and enrichment of relations of conviviality that supersede the social contract of the modern/colonial state.
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.
Anti-colonialist queer feminists demonstration on March 8, 2024 in Paris, France. Photo credit: Jeanne Menjoulet. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
The Muslim community and LGBT community are not separate; we mourn together. I am Muslim, I am queer and I exist.
–Sonj Basha, speaker at a vigil in Seattle following the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016
This [queer Palestinian protest in Haifa in 2019] is the first-ever protest of the queer Palestinian movement, based on the principles of an intersectional struggle between queer-Palestinian struggles and struggles against the occupation… The protest represents a voice calling for liberation without restraints—not of the occupiers, and not of the patriarchy. It’s important to show support for all LGBT Palestinians.
–Rula Khalaileh, organizer with the Palestinian “Women Against Violence” organization
We were a part of the mainstream society before the British criminalised our existence through laws such as the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Transphobia is a colonial legacy… We will continue our struggle. We aim to raise our voice for our rights so loudly that it reaches those in power and echoes in the chambers of the parliament.
–Hina Baloch, political convener and organizer of the Sindh Moorat march in Pakistan in 2022
There’s nothing new about being trans. Only, we didn’t have the language for it back then… Even here in Kenya, in previous generations they had gay men. They introduced those laws against homosexuality which indicates that it happened, because you can’t put laws on something that’s not existing or unknown… God knows where it comes from. So, whenever I’m preaching the gospel in our community, I tell them to look up to the Lord; he knows why you were created that way; when you get to know yourself, you will get peace.
–Keeya, gay Christian pastor and Ugandan refugee interviewed in 2019 for Adriaan van Klinken and Johanna Stiebert’s Sacred Queer Stories
Dominant discourses globally assert that queerness and transness are White/western impositions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They tell us that queer Muslim and Palestinian positionalities are impossible. The stories shared by the activists and ministers quoted above—along with scholarship from queer of color critique and decolonial and postcolonial studies—show these discourses to be a lie. They also challenge the notion that queerness and transness are White/western impositions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These stories participate in traditions of critical queer, decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist thought that examine questions of gender and sexuality by considering the relationship among racialization, coloniality, and heteronormativity.
Heteronormativity involves the idealizing and societal privileging of a strict gender binary, “opposite sex” romantic and sexual desires, heterosexual marriages, and the raising of children in nuclear families. It results in cisgender-heterosexual existence occupying default representational and socio-politico-economic spaces in many contexts, and in doing so, upholds compulsory heterosexuality. The term “compulsory heterosexuality” first appeared in lesbian feminist theorist Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” where it was used to critique the societal forces that push women into heterosexual marriages and constrain them from imagining or pursuing life paths centered around relationships (romantic/sexual or otherwise) with other women.
Expanding upon this foundational work, queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes that compulsory heterosexuality—which she (re)defines as the societal assumption and enforcement of heterosexuality which is “the accumulative effect of the repetition of the narrative of heterosexuality as an ideal coupling” (423)—shapes the ways that bodies orient themselves in space. Repetitions of the heterosexual couple form through music, advertising, wedding traditions, and other cultural productions cause a “heterosexualization” of public spaces. This heterosexualization naturalizes and idealizes heteronormative existence, framing men and women as “opposites” and reinforcing “opposite sex”-oriented desires and life paths. Heteronormativity, then, is sustained through the visible repetition and intergenerational transmission of norms and ways of living that are marked as legitimate. Heteronormative standards of legitimacy reinforce compulsory heterosexuality by associating heterosexual couplings with life, culture, civilization, and the reproduction of familial lineage while marking queerness (divergence from these prescribed pathways involving binary gender norms, desire for one’s “opposite sex,” and participation in familial reproduction) as a failure. While many heterosexual subjects experience comfort and ease “in line” with the desires promoted by a heteronormative society, subjects who fail to “orient” themselves towards idealized sexual objects and accepted life paths are read as queer threats to the social order.
Decolonial feminist scholar María Lugones argues that the heterosexualist patriarchy and the binary, hierarchical, and heteronormative conception of gender upon which it rests are rooted in colonialism. Lugones’s framework draws heavily from decolonial theorist Aníbal Quijano’s understanding of the coloniality of power, which accounts for “modernity” by focusing on the new modes of social classification and domination that emerged as European colonialism expanded and Eurocentered global capitalism developed. Quijano uses the term modernity/ coloniality to emphasize that modernity cannot be thought apart from coloniality or from the hierarchical categories of “race” and notions of “rationality/irrationality” that have provided its structure. By focusing on issues of gender and sexuality, Lugones builds upon Quijano’s work regarding colonialism, capitalism, and racialization and critiques what she calls the colonial/modern gender system. Under this system, White bourgeois men and women have been ordered through biological dimorphism (the idea of “biological sex” as stable, binary, and innate), heterosexualism, and patriarchy, while persons on “the dark side” of the colonial divide have suffered labor exploitation, sexual violence, and dehumanization. Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter similarly emphasizes this colonial divide in her decolonial analysis of western colonialism, racialization, and gender categorization: “At the beginning of the modern world, the only women were white and Western. … you had true women on one side, the women of the settler population [in the Caribbean and the Americas], and on the other you had Indianwomen and Negrowomen.” Wynter argues that “from the very origin of the modern world, of the western world system, there were never simply ‘men’ and ‘women’” (174) but that western colonial expansion resulted in the intertwined production of hierarchical categories of race and gender with European Christian/post-Christian “Man” in a position of dominance and superiority.
The colonial/modern gender system presents its ordering of human relations as natural and immutable, and one must go outside of it in order to examine that which it has rendered invisible and unimaginable. Turning to the decolonial scholarship of Oyéronké Oyewumí and Paula Gunn Allen, Lugones writes that many societies recognized intersex and third gender individuals before colonization, that binary/hierarchical gender was used as a western tool of domination over Yoruba societies, and that colonizers attacked gynocracies that had existed within certain Indigenous North American societies. Gender itself is a colonial imposition, she argues, but one might develop decolonial feminism by attending to those “who resist the coloniality of gender from the ‘colonial difference’” (746). In other words, just as “modernity” cannot be thought apart from “coloniality,” “coloniality” cannot be thought apart from the hierarchical categories of “race” and “gender” that developed to justify and maintain structures of Eurocentered power. As writers, artists, and activists examining the intertwined histories of colonialism and heteronormativity have emphasized, however, attention to historical and ongoing modes of thinking about gender and sex which resist and/or go beyond the constraints of the colonial/modern gender system can provide a means of honoring Indigenous knowledges, finding a present-day sense of belonging, and healing from traumas rooted in colonial oppression.
When analyzing and challenging the colonial/modern gender system, however, it is important to avoid reductively aligning heteronormative identities with coloniality and LGBTQ+ identities with decoloniality or anti-oppressive politics. For instance, in her scholarship on homonationalism and pinkwashing, queer theorist Jasbir Puar has discussed the ways that nationalistic liberal politics tenuously incorporate certain queer subjects while constructing Orientalized terrorist others. That is, nations such as the United States have advanced imperialistic agendas and justified international military aggression by contrasting their presumably exceptional inclusion of LGBTQ+ subjects against “Muslim homophobia.” Additionally, Cathy J. Cohen’s work of queer of color critique has challenged both assimilationist LGBTQ+ politics that seek incorporation into dominant societal structures and radical queer politics that assume an overly-simplistic heterosexual/queer binary. By attending intersectionally to race, gender, and class, Cohen writes that not all “heterosexual” subjects benefit equally from heteronormativity (for instance, she notes that women of color who are on welfare “fit into the category of heterosexual but [their] sexual choices are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy of state support” [26]) and calls for more nuanced and expansive forms of queer analysis that can challenge structures of marginalization and domination.
This educational module attends to questions of coloniality and decoloniality in its exploration of how queerness and gender are navigated across religious, political, and geographic contexts. The essays gathered for this module offer an array of perspectives from Contending Modernities authors and have been grouped into three overarching themes: (1) gender, religion, and politics; (2) heteronormativity, religion, and politics; and (3) decolonial perspectives on gender, sexuality, and religion. These essays analyze the ways that various forms of nationalistic and religious discourses have promoted and reinforced particular norms for gender and sexuality, as well as the ways that non-normative configurations of gender and sexuality have offered means of resisting nationalism and coloniality. The essays provide intersectional approaches that affirm the existence and validity of worlds that resist the colonial/modern gender system’s dictates around gender and sexuality.
Theme 1: Gender, Religion, and Politics
The essays gathered under this theme address the constructed-ness of gender and highlight the ways that women from various religious and political contexts have mobilized to critique religious nationalism, patriarchy, colonialist stereotypes, and state violence. Julia Kowalski’s essay discusses how Muslim women protestors have invoked the language of family and home to counter patriarchal Hindu nationalism in India. Saadia Yacoob’s piece reflects critically and constructively on the role of gender in the classical Islamic ethical tradition and makes proposals for Muslim feminist ethics. Brenna Moore’s post critiques the antifeminist and antigay activism of the global Roman Catholic right and turns to the example of twentieth-century Catholic theologians who resist the right’s theology as a resource for combatting oppression in the present. Lastly, Laura S. Grillo’s post discusses expressions of “female genital power” in West African traditions that push back against “masculinized modernity” and confront the violence of postcolonial nation-states. Together, these essays offer perspectives grounded in a variety of religious traditions, political issues, and geographies. They reveal the constructedness of gender by showing how ideas about gender (and womanhood, in particular) are advanced differently across contexts, as well as the diverse ways that possibilities for resistance and contestation take shape.
Wooden model of a house explaining the Constitution created by activists in Ahmedabad, India. Photo courtesy of RAJEEV KHANNA/TheCitizen.in. Used with permission.
Julia Kowalski argues that the protests that have taken place in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood of Delhi are not only displays of resistance against the combined effects of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), but also acts of subversion that challenge stereotypes held by the ruling party in India about Islam, gender, and the family. (For more information about the CAA and NRC, see this post by Susan Ostermann.) As Kowalski notes, many protesters were middle-class, middle-aged-or-older “housewives” who wore hijab. She argues that the protests “are innovative not because of the gendered identity of the protesters, but because of how protesters have mobilized that identity to contest powerful scripts of citizenship, religion, family, and nation.” Muslim women protesters deploy representations of female kinship and home in order to promote a secular, inclusive democracy and to invoke a new language of national belonging—one that does not rely upon “documentary evidence of property ownership and descent from male kin.” In doing so, these women subvert narratives of Muslim women’s oppression by Muslim men (an Islamophobic discourse that has justified British “civilizing” missions in India and continues to justify western imperialism) and narratives of Muslim non-belonging in a presumably “Hindu” nation.
Kowalski’s focus on Muslim women protesters illuminates the ways that invocations of female kinship have provided a means of contesting religious nationalism and patriarchy—specifically, right-wing Hindu nationalism—in India. As deployed by these protesters, the language of family and home troubles the boundaries of public and private/domestic while subverting sexist and Islamophobic representations of Muslim women.
This illustration depicts the ruler Tumanba Khan, an ancestor of Genghis Khan, with his wife and nine sons, interwoven with the texts of Chingiznama, which records this account. Photo Credit: The Met Museum.
This post by Saadia Yacoob is part of a book symposium on Zahra Ayubi’s Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, which critically engages texts from the classical Islamic ethical tradition and offers constructive proposals for the building of a feminist Islamic ethics. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) Considering the applicability of Islamic ethical discourses to women, Yacoob notes that gendered divisions of household labor (which impact both Muslim and non-Muslim women) hinder Muslim women from being able to dedicate time to ritual worship and the acquisition of religious knowledge. Responses by religious scholars that assure women that childcare is itself an act of worship—while perhaps well-intentioned—are not adequate for addressing the exclusion of women (especially mothers) from Islamic ideals of virtuous and ethical living.
Yacoob discusses a tension charted by Ayubi in her examination of texts from the classical Islamic ethical tradition: there is an egalitarian understanding of human creation and the androgynous nafs (soul) that each person possesses, but also an emphasis on “rational capacity in ethical refinement” which “not only gendered the nafs male but also authorized an intellectual hierarchy in which only elite men possessed full rational capacity.” In her response to Ayubi’s work, Yacoob highlights the emphasis on social relationships and interdependence in classical Islamic ethics and suggests that, although one must critique the hierarchical positioning of elite men above women and non-elite men, one might carry the understanding of human interconnectedness forward in feminist ways that promote equality and flourishing. Importantly, both Ayubi and Yacoob critique patriarchal interpretations from classical Islamic ethical discourse while avoiding rejecting the tradition entirely; rather, both scholars imagine possibilities of critically “thinking with this discourse to develop a Muslim feminist ethic that centers the flourishing of all humans.”
Mural at the Hippie Kitchen is based on woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg. Photo credit: Flickr user Laurie Avocado. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
In this post, Brenna Moore discusses the role of Roman Catholicism in right-wing populist movements around the world and points to resources from the Catholic theological tradition that might aid in the development of a resistant, compassionate, leftist social politics. First, Moore writes that although right-wing populism might appear to draw upon a Christian logic of inversion (in which God chooses those who are lowly and reviled, not those in established positions of worldly power), figures who appeal to right-wing populist Catholics—such as Trump—violate this logic of inversion by using an “antiestablishment mockery of the elites” to in fact “[mock] the vulnerable,” including disabled people, Muslims, and women. Turning to an example from another context, Moore notes that right-wing Catholic populists in France tend to protest against gay marriage and liberal gender norms by framing them as an American invasion: “This keeps the antifeminist and antigay activism still seemingly tethered to a respectable anti-elitism and anti-hegemony.”
In response to these false logics of inversion, Moore offers several examples of resistant Catholic theologians of twentieth-century France to show how the insights they’ve contributed might act as resources in undoing the “repulsion that so many white Catholics feel toward Muslim refugees, gay families, the poor, African Americans, and women who control their reproductive lives” and advancing concrete goals such as childcare, access to contraception, combating poverty, and protecting those who are marginalized. Moore demonstrates that the antifeminist and antigay activism of the Catholic right, which draws upon heteronormative notions of gender and sexuality, can be countered by connecting with liberative theological resources from the Catholic tradition.
Makhuwa women in Mozambique. Photo Credit: Steve Evans. CC By 2.0.
This post by Laura S. Grillo is part of a book symposium on Faith in Flux, in which Devaka Premawardhana examines practices of religious conversion among the rural Makhuwa people of northern Mozambique. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) In this post, Grillo compares the matricentric mobility, flexibility, and pluralistic disposition of the Makhuwa with her own work on the performance of female genital power in West African traditions. Grillo argues that, although valuable, Faith in Flux does not sufficiently consider Makhuwa matricentricity; therefore, the book fails to “convincingly portray a fluid retention or cyclical movement of return to the “‘Mother’ religions’ that Premawardhana suggests are the essence of local ontology.” Through her critiques, Grillo pushes Premawardhana to question the gendered assumptions of the conceptual apparatus he employs to theorize Makhuwa practices, which seem to centralize male religious culture and “reinforce[] the stereotype of women’s natural profaneness.” Grillo proposes a focus on the ways that various Indigenous African rituals, performances, and matricentric conceptions of gender offer means of resisting postcolonial state violence and policies that reinforce the “external pressures of masculinizing modernity.”
Theme 2: Heteronormativity, Religion, and Politics
The posts included within this theme focus on the salience of heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia in contemporary politics and explore the ways that religious notions of gender and sexuality shape such politics. Jason Springs’s essay examines the conservative sexual politics of White evangelical ethnoreligious nationalists in the United States and discusses the interconnected histories of twentieth-century anti-miscegenation laws and present-day heteronormative ideologies. Michael Vicente Pérez’s essay considers the roles of homophobia and Islamophobia in societal responses to the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre and critiques homonationalist framings of the United States that construct Muslims as especially homophobic threats. The essay by Halah Abdelhadi focuses on the growing movement for LGBTQ+ rights in Palestine and argues that there is a need for “a mediating lexicon” that engages religious discourses to combat homophobic violence and the exclusion of queer Palestinians from religious modes of belonging. Ali Altaf Mian’s essay reveals the ways that heteronormative ideologies—particularly the assumption of a gender binary between men and women—reinforce transphobia and have hindered efforts by Muslim leaders to combat discrimination against transgender people in Pakistan. Together, these essays point to the ways that heteronormative ideologies shape religious nationalism and reinforce homophobic and transphobic violence. The essays also advance possibilities for solidarity, allyship, and religious engagement that push back against heteronormativity and its varied interconnections with racism, militarism, and Islamophobia.
Rainbow colors on the White House celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriages in every state of the Union. White House photo. Photo Credit: GPA Photo Archive. Via Flickr.
In the blog series “Zombie Nationalism: Apocalypse, Race, and the Sexual Politics of White Evangelical Christian Nationalism,” Jason Springs introduces the concept of “zombie nationalism” in his analysis of White evangelical political and religious ideology in the United States. This concept describes a persistently recurring and reanimating dynamic, pattern, and logic that explains “the socio-political processes by which White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism has asserted and reasserted itself across recent decades.” Springs contends that this phenomenon is driven not only by religion (modern evangelical theology) and race (as manifested through White ethno-religious nationalism) but also by conservative sexual politics. Springs clarifies that “sexual politics” refers to “the ways that gender norms, operations of power related to sexual identities, and policing of sexuality all function to legitimate and perpetuate ideologies, and are used to advance political agendas.” He argues that it is crucial to attend to the ways that heteronormative ideologies of gender and sexuality both motivate and are reinforced by White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism.
In this post from the series, Jason Springs contends that White Christian evangelicals’ current justification of their opposition to same-sex marriage relies on an extension of the same logic that they had once used to support anti-miscegenation laws. Thus, White evangelical support for Trump is not an isolated reaction against marriage equality, but participates in a longer history of White evangelical sexual politics centered around the so-called “sanctity of marriage.” Here, White Christian nationalism relies upon the upholding of a rigid, heteronormative gender binary in ways rooted in particular notions of Whiteness, Christian theology, and western civilization.
Vigil in support of the victims of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, Toronto, Canada. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Michael Vicente Pérez’s essay discusses Islamophobia, homophobia, and the cultural politics of fear in the wake of the 2016 mass killing at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Drawing from work by Sara Ahmed and Jasbir Puar, Pérez analyzes the mobilization of an affective politics of fear-as-threat (that is, fear as “an affective link experienced as threats to some group from some group”) in the production of the Muslim as threatening Other following the Orlando massacre. This politics of fear serves to construct LGBTQ+ inclusion as an essential part of American identity—despite the persistence of anti-LGBTQ+ violence in America—and produce Muslim difference in terms of terrorism and hatred. As Pérez further explains, “the narrative incorporation of Orlando’s victims [into the American national body] resignified the murder as an act of terrorism in which the violence of Muslim sexual intolerance not only underscored the moral superiority of America but also proved the necessity of American empire.” In contrast, turning to Sonj Basha’s affirmation of (her own and others’) queer Muslim existence in her speech at a widely attended Seattle vigil following the massacre, Pérez writes that shared grief and mourning can momentarily disrupt the affective unities/divisions created by fear and gesture to “the possibility of a ‘we’ that refuses the politics of fear.”
Whereas Jason Springs’s essay focused on the ways that White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism reinforces and is dependent upon a heteronormative notion of the “sanctity of marriage,” Pérez’s essay alternatively examines the ways that homonationalist framings of the United States as an exceptionally inclusive haven for LGBTQ+ people serve to uphold U.S. militarism and imperialism and reductive, Islamophobic constructions of Muslim people. Thus, while sexual politics in the United States frequently draw upon notions of a gender binary and idealize heteronormative relationships between men and women, Jasbir Puar’s theorization of homonationalism shows that ideas of LGBTQ+ inclusion have also been mobilized towards ethno-religious nationalist ends.
Palestinian flag at Brighton, England Pride celebration. Photo Credit: Flickr User Daniel Hadley. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED.
This piece by Halah Abdelhadi reflects on the movement for LGBTQ+ rights in Palestine. Abdelhadi contextualizes the increased visibility of LGBTQ+ issues among Palestinian citizens of Israel—which have become one of the most controversial political topics in Palestinian society—by discussing the first queer Palestinian protest that occurred in 2019 in response to an act of homophobic violence. She contends that there are three primary positions on LGBTQ+ rights in Palestinian society: pro-queer (held mainly by activists), neutral (held by self-identified “secular progressives”), and antagonistic (the position of those who weaponize religion to justify homophobic violence). Overcoming the homophobia of the antagonistic position, she claims, requires novel interpretations of religious meaning. Given the increased visibility of the queer Palestinian community, Abdelhadi identifies a need for inclusion, the use of precise (rather than vague or neutral) language to denounce homophobic violence, and the building of “a mediating lexicon” that allows for conversations with spiritual and religious leaders to challenge the ways that queer Palestinians have been “alienated from their national and religious modes of belonging to Palestinian society.”
A Pakistani hijra at a protest between two hijra groups from Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In this piece, Ali Altaf Mian discusses a 2016 endorsement of a fatwa on transgender marriage which takes important steps towards combating discrimination against transgender people in Pakistan, yet nonetheless operates based on heteronormative assumptions. The fatwa, which was endorsed in a statement crafted by the Pakistani clerics of Tanzim-I Ittihad-i Ummat and signed by about fifty other local Muslim jurists and theologians, argued that Islamic law should be interpreted as extending marriage and other rights to transgender people. Importantly, Mian writes, this fatwa and its endorsement condemned discrimination in places of “the home, the street, the graveyard, and the brothel—where members of the hijra [transgender] community viscerally experience the brunt of a hyper-masculinist and heteronormative social order.”
At the same time, the logic of heteronormativity that supports transphobia still underlies this fatwa, which employs language such as “unambiguous signs of a single-sex” and “bodily signs of both sexes” when describing the bodies for whom certain rights do or do not apply. As Mian reveals, the fatwa continues to impose a gender binary even when acknowledging transgender bodies, and it accords social recognition to trans people in ways dependent on their bodies’ presumed approximation to this gender binary. To truly act as allies in fighting transphobia, he argues, Muslim jurists and theologians should question the ways that culturally constructed notions of maleness and femaleness shape ideas about biology, law, and ethics; study the complexity of human bodies by “cultivating a flexible and creative mode of engagement with local knowledge traditions where [they] will encounter both reifications and disruptions of the gender binary”; and from those encounters, discern when to retain, reconfigure, or renounce traditions “in order to make sense of and to appreciate shifting embodiments of sex, gender, and sexuality in the contemporary world.”
Theme 3: Decolonial Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality, and Religion
This final theme focuses explicitly on the role of colonialism in shaping gender and sexual norms and on efforts to decolonize discourses around gender, sexuality, and religion. The essay by Sa’ed Atshan engages with Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer and scholarship on other contexts shaped by colonial legacies in order to advance proposals for decolonizing queer studies and addressing Christianity’s relationship to colonialism and sexuality. Ebenezer Obadare also engages van Klinken’s text but emphasizes that the existence of homophobia in Africa cannot be reduced to a colonial or Christian product and argues that van Klinken’s perception of the condition of being queer in Africa is overly optimistic. Ludovic Lado’s essay turns to the construction of gender employed by the state in Côte d’Ivoire in its efforts to combat gender-based inequality and discrimination and shows that the state’s assumption of a male/female binary hinders it from recognizing and addressing violence against the LGBTQ community. Nisa Goksel focuses on resistant movements of Kurdish women in Türkiye and Syria, who—in ways that depart from stereotypical representations of Middle Eastern women—seek a non-colonial modernity. Lastly, Jacqueline Hidalgo discusses the name change of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán, a U.S. Latine student-led organization) which removed the terms “Chicanx” and “Aztlán,” noting the long histories of contestation within the Chicano movement, particularly around issues of gender, sexuality, race and indigeneity, and decoloniality. Together, these essays provide an explicit engagement with the interconnections among colonialism, religion, gender, and sexuality and offer examples of decolonial theories and movements that have contended with these interconnections across contexts.
Raised fist with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.
This essay is a part of a book symposium on Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa, which engages works of art and activism to explore the ways that various LGBTQ+ Christians in Kenya reimagine their identities, faith, and lives. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) In his essay, Sa’ed Atshan draws on van Klinken’s monograph to think more broadly about what it means to decolonize queer studies. He does so by first comparing and contrasting van Klinken’s work with George Paul Meiu’s recent work on Kenyan sex workers in Ethno-erotic Economies. Both authors address connections between colonialism and religion in Kenya, and both engage the connections between colonialism and sexuality—with van Klinken’s work registering the cognizance “of British colonial homophobia that significantly departed from indigenous Kenyan queer tolerant attitudes.” Whereas van Klinken primarily focuses on queer-identified, middle-class, urban subjects who “can forge solidarity with their queer counterparts in the west,” however, Meiu offers a more in-depth analysis of ethnic categorization and class, as well as a broader conceptualization of queerness that explores the ways that rural, poorer, heterosexual subjects “are mired in racialized/otherized/fetishized relationships with western tourists.”
Next, Atshan reflects on his own work on queerness in Palestine, drawing attention to the importance of engaging multiple colonial and postcolonial venues. He proposes that the decolonization of queer studies be advanced through attention to South-South epistemologies and solidarities. For instance, analytical vantage points from Kenyan contexts might be brought into dialogue with the contexts of other places formerly colonized by the British Empire, such as Palestine, India, and Pakistan. Atshan notes that queer Palestinian Christians, like queer Christians in Kenya, face legacies of British colonial homophobia, and can experience Christianity as both a source of imperial violence and anti-imperial empowerment.
Praying hands with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.
This piece is also part of a book symposium on Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer. Ebenezer Obadare writes that van Klinken challenges simplistic narratives of “African homophobia” and of the African continent “lagging behind” the rest of the world (especially the United States) in matters related to gender and sexuality. On the other hand, Obadare emphasizes that Africa should not be imagined as having had complete sexual tolerance prior to European colonization and the influence of American conservative Christianity; rather, homophobia in the continent is “propelled by a wide range of local and external cultural, social, and political forces.”
Obadare highlights the novelty of van Klinken’s emphasis on the positive role of Christianity in the lives of Kenyan queer people; however, he notes that he does not fully share van Klinken’s optimism about the condition of being queer in Africa. He links this skepticism in part to his experience as a Nigerian who has witnessed the homophobia that exists in his own country. He also critiques van Klinken for not focusing enough attention on the Kenyan state. Overall, Obadare commends van Klinken’s groundbreaking approach to queer life in Kenya, but provides an important reminder that colonialism and Christianity are not the only forces that have operated to reinforce homophobia in Africa.
Photo Credit: Global Partnership for Education. 5th grader in class in Mamakoffikro, Côte d’Ivoire, December 2015.
In this essay, Ludovic Lado discusses the uses and limitations of the state construction of gender in Côte d’Ivoire. Lado points to the argument that “in pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Africa, gender differentiation and hierarchies were less rigid and therefore more flexible than those inherited from Islam, Christianity, and colonial legal systems that current gender reforms seek to correct.” He writes that while Africa still has much work to do in combating gender-based injustices, inequalities, and discrimination, many African countries are closing the gender gap faster than western countries.
He writes that although steps have been made to increase women’s literacy rates and empower women economically in Côte d’Ivoire, the framework taken up by Ivorian state gender policy seeks women’s equality with men while failing to consider the LGBTQ community. According to Lado, “heterosexuality remains the norm both institutionally and in collective representation” in Côte d’Ivoire and other African contexts. Regardless of whether or not homosexuality existed (and was met with acceptance) in pre-colonial Africa—a topic that Lado writes is highly debated—LGBTQ Ivorians are marginalized and subjected to violence in the present. In response, Lado suggests that movement away from a male/female binary opposition will allow the Ivorian state construction of gender to acknowledge the specificity of LGBTQ people and address discrimination.
Photo Credit: Nisa Goksel. The Peace Mothers at the 8th of March 2014 (International Women’s Day) demonstration in Diyarbakır.
This piece by Nisa Goksel contributes to studies of women and gender in the Middle East by exploring the resistance movements of Kurdish women. Informed by an awareness of the interrelatedness of modernity and colonialism, Goksel’s framework for the topic challenges monolithic representations of women in the Middle East which assume these women to be the “victims of ‘oppressive’ Middle Eastern men; of colonialism; and/or of religious, traditional, and national powers.” Goksel also challenges the perception of Islam as the key determining factor in Middle Eastern women’s lives, particularly the idea that Islam traps these women in a “yet-to-be-modern” patriarchal existence. Adding the role of recent wars in the Middle East to her analysis, Goksel argues that these wars reveal the connections between modernity and colonialism and have been “crucial to the formation of alternative women’s movements and groups as well as to the alternative imaginations of modernity.”
Next, Goksel elaborates on two examples of alternative Kurdish women’s movements: Peace Mothers pursuing an end to the war between the Turkish state and PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas, and Kurdish women resistance fighters in Syria who seek decolonization and a women’s revolution. Goksel argues that while these alternative women’s movements may appear as opposites within a colonialist gaze (one peaceful, and one that uses weapons), they both have the goal of creating a non-colonial modernity that is truly democratic and peaceful. Thus, both movements challenge particular Orientalized, Islamophobic, and sexist representations of women—as did the Muslim women protestors in India discussed by Julia Kowalski—while also resisting colonialism and its legacies.
Art Heals mural in Los Angeles, California. Photo Credit: Author.
This essay by Jacqueline Hidalgo discusses the 2019 decision of student leaders from MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán) U.S. Latin/o/a/x organizations across the country to remove the terms “Chicanx” and “Aztlán” from the organization’s name, arguing that such a move does not erase history, but rather participates in a long history of contestation over those terms. Hidalgo traces the history of MEChA and writes that in the 1960s when students mobilized to resist dominant modern European thought, terms such as “Chicano” and “Aztlán” allowed ethnically Mexican activists to counter the derogatory names that had been forced upon them, claim an ancestral connection to lands that are now considered part of the United States, and “[invoke] both a pre-Columbian past and a future where colonial sufferings have ended.”
Hidalgo notes that not all ethnically Mexican activists had been in agreement about the use of the terms, however, and identifies several lines of contestation that arose. For instance, the use of “Chicano” and “Aztlán” as decolonial terms is complicated by an awareness that the Aztecs and Indigenous Mexica peoples colonized and oppressed a variety of other Indigenous peoples prior to Spanish colonization, and that 1920s Mexican nationalist appeals to mestizaje (from which these terms emerged) valued “mixture” while “oppos[ing] indigenous rights and eras[ing] Mexicans of Asian and African descent.” Additionally, the 1970s Chicano movement frequently centered cisgender heterosexual mestizo men and patriarchal familial language, creating a need for Chicana feminists to create their own organizations and for LGBTQ activists to construct their own visions of queer Chicano/x/a familia in resistance to machismo.
In 2019, student leaders considered the new acronym MEPA (Movimiento Estudiantil Progressive Action) but ultimately decided to adopt the name Mecha (meaning “fuse”) for the organization rather than continue with an acronym-based approach. They also revised the constitution to intentionally center “Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, Non-binary, and Femme people.” Hidalgo writes that students’ contemporary efforts to change the name of their collective echo the drive towards self-determination that motivated MEChA’s founders and create space for the movement to continue and transform with future generations.
Conclusion and Discussion Questions
This educational module has assembled works by Contending Modernities contributors and theorists who analyze gender, sexuality, and politics with attention to religion, race, and modernity/coloniality. The three themes have focused on social constructions of gender and womanhood, heteronormativity and sexual politics, and decolonial approaches to gender, sexuality, and religion. The questions below are designed to provoke continued discussions regarding the relationship of religious discourses, nationalism, and colonialism to gender and sexuality and to invite constructive decolonial responses to the colonial/modern gender system.
Intersections of Religion, Gender, and Sexuality
How does religion impact the negotiation of gender and queerness? How does the interrelationship among religion, gender, and sexuality vary across contexts? What possibilities exist within different religious discourses (e.g., Catholic, evangelical Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and/or African traditional religious discourses) for heteronormative and non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality to be represented, affirmed, naturalized, or reinforced?
Nationalism and Queerness
In what ways might nationalism relate to sexual politics? How can nationalism affect questions of gender and sexuality, either by prescribing and reinforcing particular gender and sexual norms or by tenuously incorporating other gender and sexual identities (as in homonationalism)? Alternatively, how might the presence of non-normative configurations of gender and queerness resist or disrupt nationalism?
Gender, Colonialism, and the Nation
How might religious nationalism, in particular, draw upon certain configurations of gender and sexuality while disavowing others? How do religious discourses influence the shape that nationalism takes within a particular context, and the ways that particular notions of gender and sexuality are deployed in support of nationalism? How have the histories and ongoing legacies of colonialism—and the impact of colonialism on gender and sexuality—influenced various formations of religious nationalism?
Beyond The Module
What concrete examples—from or beyond the posts assembled for this educational module—could illustrate the impact of colonialism and its legacies on discussions around gender and sexuality? How might a decolonized approach to gender, sexuality, and queerness be constructed?
Trauma and Collective Healing
Trauma is defined as a physiological and emotional response to an imminently dangerous event. Collective trauma “refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affect an entire society … collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events, and is remembered by group members that may be far removed from the traumatic events in time and space.” How could a decolonized approach to gender, sexuality, and queerness be a catalyst for collective trauma healing?
Bibliography and Further Reading
Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Feelings.” In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, 422-441. Edited by Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986/1992.
Baloch, Shah Meer. “‘We Deserve to Be Treated Equally’: Pakistan’s Trans Community Steps Out of the Shadows.” The Guardian, November 20, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/20/pakistan-trans-community-steps-out-of-shadows.
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 437-465.
Elnaiem, Mohammed. “The ‘Deviant’ African Genders That Colonialism Condemned.” JSTOR Daily. April 29, 2021. https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/.
Escobar, Trinidad. “Decolonizing Queerness in the Philippines.” The Nib. November 15, 2019. https://thenib.com/decolonizing-queerness-in-the-philippines/
Hirschberger, Gilad. “Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (August 2018). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01441.
Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 186-209.
Ngu, Kai. “In Search of Queer Ancestors: Pauline Park, Myles Markham, and Xoài Pham on the Queer Historical Figures across Asia That Have Inspired in Them a Sense of Belonging.” The Margins. Asian American Writers’ Workshop. December 4, 2019. https://aaww.org/queer-ancestors-sarah-ngu/.
Puar, Jasbir K. “Rethinking Homonationalism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (May 2013): 336-339.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Van Klinken, Adriaan, and Johanna Stiebert, with Brian Sebyala and Fredrick Hudson. Sacred Queer Stories: Ugandan LGBTQ+ Refugee Lives and the Bible. Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
Wynter, Sylvia. “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” By David Scott. Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 119-207. ISSN 0799-0537.
Ziv, Oren. “Queer Palestinian Community Holds ‘Historic’ Protest against LGBT Violence.” +972 Magazine, August 2, 2019. https://www.972mag.com/queer-palestinian-protest-lgbt-violence/.
Victoria Basug Slabinski is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, with a graduate certificate in American studies. Her work draws Christian theology into conversation with decolonial thought and explores constructive Filipino American theologies, focusing especially on questions of memory, ancestrality, narrative, and aesthetics. Her research interests include decolonial and postcolonial thought, Christian liberation theologies and eschatology, gender and sexuality studies, and constructive readings of literature and the arts.
Nicola is a graduate of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, with a degree in Governance and Policy, and a Minor in peace studies. Nicola’s focus in the program was on human rights, trauma informed conflict resolution, and peace-tech. Professionally, Nicola has over 8 years of experience working in development and emergency settings, specifically on social and human protection, development, and diversity and inclusion work. Nicola have actively contributed to humanitarian efforts addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, collaborating with multiple humanitarian organizations in the SWANA region. Nicola’s expertise encompasses gender equity, social inclusion, child and youth development, human rights, livelihood programming, and mental health support. Nicola's work focuses on shaping inclusive and equitable global mental health and diversity and inclusion policies and programs.
Palestinians march among the ruins of buildings in October 2023 following the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Positionality
I have served as Imam of Claremont Main Road Mosque, located in Cape Town, South Africa, for close to four decades. In this capacity, I have and continue to play a leading role in the vibrant interfaith solidarity movement against apartheid. In the wake of the assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, we established a South African Interfaith Forum for Palestinian Solidarity, which is made up of anti-apartheid Christian leaders, South African Jews for a Free Palestine, Muslims, Hindus, people of other faiths, and people who are not religious. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, this interfaith group has been playing a leading role in the grassroots Palestinian solidarity protests that these events elicited. One of the inspirational interfaith solidarity events is a weekly Friday evening Shabbos for Gaza services which is convened by the South African Jews for a Free Palestine. On Friday December 8, 2023, the Claremont Main Road Mosque hosted one of these Shabbat services, which also coincided with the second of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. The strong interfaith dimension of the South African Palestine Solidarity movement counters the false narrative that seeks to frame the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinians into a “religious conflict” between Muslims and Jews. Moreover, it is my considered view that the bold move by the South African government to charge Israel with the crime of Genocide in its war on Gaza at the International Court of Justice was not prompted by a cabinet decision on its own, but rather came in response to the unprecedented South African Palestine Solidarity movement that has emerged at the grassroots and civil society level. These reflections on Ramadan and Eid in Gaza arise amidst this background of grassroots organizing and solidarity with Palestinians facing daily and relentless violence.
Ramadan Amidst Famine
The gruesome consequences of what the International Criminal Court of Justice, on January 26, 2024, described as a plausible case of Genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip are defiling the devotion, compassion, and serenity that are the hallmarks of the sacred month of Ramadan. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar and holds great religious significance and spiritual benefits for Muslims worldwide. It is a time of fasting—i.e., abstaining from food, drink, and sexual intimacy—from dawn to sunset. Fasting during daylight hours is accompanied by intensified prayer, alms giving, and self-reflection. One of the purposes of the Muslim fast is to experience how it feels to be hungry and thirsty, and thus gain an appreciation for the needs of the poor.
Observing these sublime virtues of Ramadan in 2024 has been challenging for the war-ravaged Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the taking of over 200 Israeli hostages, the Israeli army has been relentlessly bombing the Gaza Strip. The result of its campaign has been, at the time of this writing. the killing of over 32,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and the injuring of over 70,000 others. The dire plight of the people of Gaza is ironically being mercilessly exacerbated during Ramadan (aka the month of rahma i.e., mercy) by more than five months of severe restrictions on the free flow of humanitarian aid to the area by Israel’s military. The Israeli blockade has led to serious shortages of food, medical, and other essential supplies. As a result, many families in Gaza are currently struggling to access an adequate and nutritious diet, leading to severe malnutrition and food insecurity.
The dire plight of the people of Gaza is ironically being mercilessly exacerbated during Ramadan (aka the month of rahma, i.e., mercy) by more than five months of severe restrictions on the free flow of humanitarian aid to the area by Israel’s military.
A few days before Ramadan began, at sunset on Sunday March 10, 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Health estimated that thus far more than 20 people, mostly children and elderly persons, have died of malnutrition and dehydration in Gaza. A United Nations agency for children (UNICEF) report, also released at the onset of Ramadan in early March 2024, found that famine is reaching devasting levels in the Gaza Strip due to the wide-reaching impacts of the five-month-old war. Nutrition screenings conducted by UNICEF have found that 28 percent of children under 2 years old living in shelters and refugee camps in Khan Younis suffer from acute malnutrition, and more than 10 percent have severe wasting.
Ironically, even Israel’s closest ally, the United States of America, acknowledged prior to Ramadan that the humanitarian situation faced by the people of Gaza was catastrophic. As a result of its feeble attempts to persuade the Israeli regime to conform to international humanitarian Law, just days before Ramadan the US joined a few other countries in resorting to air dropping aid over the sky of Gaza. Tragically a US humanitarian aid airdrop killed 5 people in Gaza after a parachute failed to open up. Further, the food drops do not change the fact that bombs sold by the US to Israel are also falling down from the sky.
As famine continues to stalk the Gaza Strip, the US is now planning to deliver humanitarian aid via a sea route by constructing a temporary pier on the shores of northern Gaza. Aid groups, however, argue that the airdrops and sea shipments are far less efficient than trucks in delivering the massive amounts of food and essentials desperately needed by the suffering people of Gaza.
A report released by Forensic Architecture revealed that the Israeli military has repeatedly abused the humanitarian measures of evacuation orders, “safe routes,” and “safe zones,” and failed to comply with the laws governing their application within a wartime context. According to the report “these patterns of systematic violence and destruction have forced Palestinian civilians from one unsafe area to the next, confirming the conclusion echoed across civiliantestimonies, media reports, and assessments by theUN and other humanitarian aid organizations, that ‘there is no safe place in Gaza.’”
Notwithstanding their precarious reality, Gazans are finding some solace, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in observing Ramadan as best they can under the circumstances. Media reports reveal that many Gazans are commencing and completing their daylight hour fasts with lemon soup, canned foods, and some are even forced to break their fast with grass. After breaking their fast at sunset, every evening, despite almost all mosques having been destroyed by Israeli bombing, many Gazans continue to perform special Ramadan prayers known as tarawih, the prayer of rests, in open air congregations. One of these open-air congregational prayers is taking place outside the ruins of a mosque in Rafah that has been bombed. This nightly congregational prayer meeting has encouraged a great sense of solidarity amongst the suffering Gazans.
Layla al-Qadr and the Final 10 Days of Ramadan
During the last ten days of Ramadan, Muslims are encouraged to dedicate themselves completely to God. Throughout these most sacred days, conscientious believers increase their spiritual devotions in anticipation of layla al-qadr, i.e., the most important night of the year. On this night Muslims believe that their sacred scripture, the Qur’an, was revealed. Some may even choose to go into a spiritual retreat (i’tikaf), where they will emulate the example of prophet Muhammad, who dedicated the last third of Ramadan to spending all of his days fasting and his nights in seclusion performing prayers and supplications. In addition to these intensified dedications, Palestinians have also added a special religio-cultural tradition of praying the final jumu`ah congregational service and bidding farewell to Ramadan in al-Masjid al-Aqsa, the third holiest place of worship in Islam. This year the final jumu`ah service occurs on Friday April 5, 2024.
Notwithstanding their precarious reality, Gazans are finding some solace, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in observing Ramadan as best they can under the circumstances
Because of the increased number of Muslim devotions at the al-Aqsa mosque during the last 10 days of Ramadan it has been a long-standing policy to restrict Jewish visitation to the holy site during these days due to “security concerns.” This Ramadan, however, because of the ongoing war on Gaza, the situation at al-Masjid al-Aqsa is going to be particularly tense. We have already heard calls from Jewish extremists groups, led by the Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, urging Jews to visit the holy site during the last 10 days of Ramadan. Such a scenario will inflame the already volatile situation in Jerusalem and the West Bank and will no doubt negatively impact the festival of the ending of the fasting month of Ramadan known as Eid al-Fitr.
Eid al-Fitr Amidst Famine
All predictions are that the 2024 Eid al-Fitr festival in the Gaza Strip, which is anticipated to occur on Wednesday April 10, will be a scaled down event compared to that of previous years. Eid al-Fitr in Gaza, this year, will be taking place under the shadow of daily Israeli bombing and slow death caused by famine and starvation. It will be difficult if not impossible for many Gazans to discharge the end of Ramadan alms given their dire plight. They will without a doubt share whatever meagre belongings they do have with each other to mark the blessed occasion of Eid al-Fitr. Even if a ceasefire agreement is reached before the end of Ramadan the lasting effects of the war and the blocking of humanitarian aid will be felt for a long time to come. Despite the challenges posed by Gaza’s precarious situation, the people of Gaza will come together to celebrate Eid al-Fitr with resilience and solidarity. They will exchange Eid greetings and find much needed joy and comfort in their shared traditions and faith commitment, albeit in a more subdued manner.
A. Rashied Omar earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an M.A. in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he is now a core faculty member. Omar’s research and teaching focus on the roots of religious violence and the potential of religion for constructive social engagement and interreligious peacebuilding. He is co-author with David Chidester et al. of Religion in Public Education: Options for a New South Africa (UCT Press, 1994), a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015), and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (Macmillan Reference USA, 2016). In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as Imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and an advisory board member for Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa.
Hunger cloth from the Misereor humanitarian aid community in Wernberg Monastery, Villach Land district, Carinthia, Austria, EU. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I never met Enrique Dussel. Although he shared many spaces with my godmother and father, both Mexican academics themselves, I have no memory of ever meeting him as a child. I once heard him give a public lecture, and, like most Mexican citizens, I followed his activities in national leftist politics from a distance. Moreover, as a thinker and theologian, I am removed from the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers, who were the teachers of my teachers, and I am a student of their students. Despite this proximal distance, I do not think I speak in hyperbole when I say that the death of Dussel, an important figure in this first generation, represents a major moment for students of Latin American thought. His death marks the end of one era, although the next has already long begun. In this post, I reflect on how the continual reception of his work is shaping and will shape Latin American liberation theologies (LATL) in light of the decolonial turn.
In some ways, el giro decolonial (the decolonial turn) as later articulated by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, was an inevitability for LATL scholars writing in the middle of the last century. From its very inception, the thinkers, activists, and ecclesial and civic agents who shaped LATL worked to shift the epistemological centers of theology. In naming “the poor” as privileged subjects and emphasizing anew the practical dimensions of Christian theology, the very method of doing theology began to be transformed. The so-called “eruption of the poor” also led to prototypical theories on the history of coloniality/modernity. Early critiques of structures that created a dependency of impoverished countries on wealthier countries, often but not always vis-à-vis Marx, positioned them to critique globalizing economic structures.
However, if el giro decolonial does indeed consist of changing directions, not all liberation theologians followed their turn signals. While some have argued that LATL have formed integral parts of decolonial thought, still other Latin American (especially feminist) theologians and thinkers have critiqued earlier liberation theologies for their inability or unwillingness to problematize Eurocentrism in meaningful ways. These intricate (and, I will mention, necessary) debates among followers or inheritors of decolonial thought and LATL notwithstanding, Dussel’s legacy and influence in LATL can be seen most clearly in those that generally follow the “decolonial turn.” In the following two sections, I will focus on two ways that the methods and epistemologies of LATL scholars and activists both have and will continue to benefit from engagement with Dussel’s work. These are necessarily reductive, both together and individually. The first focus is on the importance of history in the context of praxis and the second is on how Dussel’s conception of the “Other” opens LALT to further epistemic frameworks.
The Turn to History
At a talk given at the Boston University School of Theology in 2019, Dussel, speaking in English, said that the claim that America was “discovered” is an “ethical mistake.” He followed up with “I will not say historical, I will say ethical.” Dussel’s transdisciplinary thinking was on full display here as he weaved together historical analysis and philosophical thought. Speaking to a group of students and faculty of theology, Dussel made the further claim that Eurocentric thinking has skewed our view of Christianity itself. The Christianity of the colonists, Dussel argued, was a double inversion of an original messianic Christianity (an argument he writes out fully in an article in Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives). In Dussel, theologians find a voice that insists that we inspect unquestioned historical analyses not only as a matter of exactitude but of ethics. He provides us with tools to problematize Eurocentric accounts of religion/secularism broadly, Christianity more specifically, and most fundamentally, the entire discipline of theology. He wrote, “it will be necessary to redo theology as a whole” (42).
The “redoing of theology” started in LATL early on when its practitioners began situating praxis—that is, practice that is enacted because of theory or theology—within history. Ignacio Ellacuría, a Salvadoran liberation theologian, elaborated on what he referred to as “historical reality,” where history marked the fundamental possibility of salvation. Ellacuría sought to undo stubborn dichotomies, such as nature vs. grace, and bring the Kingdom of God back into theology as a central part of eschatology. Praxis took place in this historical reality, as each person chose to either bring about or work against the Reign of God (80). Dussel, who is sometimes referred to as the “Hegel of Coyoacán” because of his impossibly large thinking, explored multiple disciplines in this search for an understanding of “historical reality,” although he kept, for the most part, the divisions of labor separate.
In Dussel, theologians find a voice that insists that we inspect unquestioned historical analyses not only as a matter of exactitude but of ethics.
Theologian Peter C. Phan argues that it is this ability to extend beyond theology to understand the reality of the world that united liberation theologies in carrying out the critical reflection of historical praxis. The move to transdisciplinary studies has not gone uncontested within theology broadly speaking, but it has largely been defended by LATL thinkers who see in the social sciences tools for rethinking Christian theological concepts. In other words, their aim was not to just say new things about such concepts but to reformulate the dialogue around them (i.e., sin, salvation, divine transcendence).
In a volume entitled Decolonizing Liberation Theology, Nicolás Panotto explains, “The theme of history is fundamental within LALT, especially as a scenario for rethinking divine revelation and the liberating dimension of faith.” He argues for a historicism that moves from a hallowed out, homogenizing history towards a fuller history of marginality and heterogeneity. He continues:
… the divine as a universality that traverses and comes from history implies a questioning of any idolatrous practice that attempts to absolutize a particular image of the theological, even in the name of a particular model or form of liberation and emancipation. This is not achieved through a singular form, but through the deconstruction of the epistemic boundaries that enable the mobility of every practice, body, knowledge, and politics. (231)
Salvation found in this history of alterity, rather than homogeneity, unsettles normative claims of theology. It pushes against the European epistemic hegemony that is pervasive in theological thinking. To rethink history is to reconsider where it is that God communicates Godself, reconsider where the Divine has communicated to human beings. That is, to rethink history may indeed be to reconsider theology altogether.
Dussel’s modeling of historical recovery as a means of theological discovery does just that: it does theology anew by doing history anew. Decolonizing history means uncovering marginality throughout history. Doing so is an act of recovering traditions within Tradition and is an exposing of the paradox of pluriverses with a universal God. To understand how it is that praxis takes place in history in a decolonial key, therefore, LATL can begin to ask “What history, and who is telling it?” Following Dussel’s lead, we recognize that this is not only a historical question, but also an ethical one. The ethical concern of incorporating the pushing of epistemic boundaries leads us to the next section, which focuses on the openness to epistemological frameworks by the category of “Other.”
The “Other” and the Expansion of Epistemological Frameworks in Theology
Despite claims to the contrary, decolonial theologians are not shy or insistent against using European thinkers. This is a sentiment that underestimates the constructive nature of decolonial thought and one that risks further diminishing the creative and fruitful work of many thinkers and activists who found camaraderie in the projects of those for whom Europe (as the center of power, rather than merely geographical region) was a hostile home. Dussel’s use of French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish descent Emmanuel Levinas, who was “a victim of the Jewish holocaust in the heart of Modernity” (125) is one such example. Dussel wrote a lot about his encounter with Levinas, both about Levinas’s writings and personal interactions. When Dussel asked Levinas during a gathering at Louvain about the Indigenous people slaughtered in the Americas, “Aren’t they the other you’re speaking about?” Levinas answered, “That’s something for you to think about.”
Dussel’s subsequent appropriation of Levinas was fundamental to his theorizing on the construction of modernity. For LATL, one vital result of this encounter between Dussel and Levinas was the idea of the Other as epiphany of an incomprehensible exteriority (123). Dussel used Levinas’s understanding of the “asymmetrical problem” of the encounter between colonizer and colonized to go beyond colonial logic. Instead of the savage Other of the colonial imagination, the face of the Other in Levinas and Dussel becomes the face of an ethical revelation, thus the epiphany. In order for this to be the case, the Other has to be truly other. Dussel points out that the face-to-face exposure can happen between multiple levels of relationship, but the ethical demand happens at its strongest in the case where the Other is truly outside of myself, unable to be placed within an “us” (145). The widow is beyond the wife, the orphan beyond the child, the foreigner beyond the known, the poor beyond equality. Dussel argues therefore for an unwavering politicization of Other, which comes from this infinite exterritoriality by means of being truly other, outside of us. To love, be benevolent towards, be in relationship with Other in their totality is to love, be benevolent towards, and be in relationship with their alterity. This is why Dussel refers to this as the logic of alterity (la lógica de la alteridad).
While “the poor” represented one such politicized Other in the LATL vocabulary, the Dusselian category of the “Other” is a category of colonial alterity much better equipped to leave behind economic determinism. Dussel’s articulation of the Other aids LATL in moving forward with an open disposition towards a variety of epistemological frameworks because it opens it up to an alterity that refuses rigidity in the categories of analysis it deploys. In a different book chapter than the one cited above that, in part, responds to a focus essay written by Dussel himself, Panotto argues for “an internal critique of [LATL’s] own methodological axes” to be able to accommodate the “inclusion of alternative worldviews, and in deep deconstruction of the notion of God from the locus of divine otherness that makes visible the historical fissures inscribed within its diversity” (232).
While “the poor” represented one such politicized Other in the LATL vocabulary, the Dusselian category of the “Other” is a category of colonial alterity much better equipped to leave behind economic determinism.
In Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz and the mujerista theology she founded, we begin to see the pay-offs of an extended category of “Other.” She wrote in one of her final published works before her premature death, “If we claim to be about unveiling and enabling subjugated knowledges, definitely a liberation and decolonial move, then we have to enter into the world where that knowledge is produced, for there is no knowledge without ‘encountering’ the reality we claim to know” (55). These “subjugated knowledges” are unleashed through the logic of alterity that Dussel proposed, face-to-face with the Other, whose exteriority is wholly transcendent and whose reality places ethical demands on my reality. There is a constant need, then, to expand the epistemological horizons of LATL to configure a robust epistemological shift. More than new content, LATL provides new ways of thinking beyond colonial matrices—“an Otherwise-knowledge,”as Panotto refers to it (219).
Dussel, as an early contributor to LATL and liberation philosophies, will have a long and extensive reception. His work gives those of us living and thinking in the light of the earliest communities of ecclesial, civil, and academic agents of LATL tools to extend our thoughts through to the decolonial turn. His category of Other and his transdisciplinary understanding of what it means to practice theology allow us to further complexify and enrich our theological method.
Amirah Orozco is a PhD student in the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame with a subdiscipline of Systematic Theology and a minor in Gender Studies. She is originally from the Border between El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Chihuahua. She comes to academic theology through questions of liberation and emancipation of the poor and marginalized. She is most interested in feminist as well as decolonial theologies. Her doctoral research at Notre Dame will focus on feminist movements in the Catholic Church and how they relate to other social movements.
“King Billy’s on the Wall” mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo Credit: Flickr User aa440. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland—more commonly known as the Orange Order—describes itself as “a membership organisation…committed to the protection of the principles of the Protestant Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which enshrined civil and religious liberty for all.” Yet, the history of the Order raises questions about such commitments as it was, at various times, seen to advocate a political union with Britain that denied Irish Catholics civil, religious, and political liberties. The Orange Order has historically struggled to align its stated “liberal” values with its desire to protect the idea of a “Protestant Britain.”
These contradictions are not often acknowledged by members of the Order who continue to view the organization in an almost entirely positive light and as representing a truer form of liberty that it believes stands in stark contrast to the “sectarian” politics of their Other—the Catholic, nationalist population. The development of the peace process in Northern Ireland, however, has served to once again shine a light on the Order and generated an internal debate as to how it should respond to growing criticisms from both within and without. Some within the institution, pointing to a declining membership amid controversies associated with parading disputes, have subsequently called for a new direction that better reflects wider social and political realities. Although efforts have been made to this effect, progress has been minimal due to a failure to overcome fears and suspicions of the Other; a failure largely explained by the fact that the narratives and traditions of the Institution continue to emphasize the perceived threat posed by the Catholic/nationalist population.
As such, the Orange Order is a useful case study for understanding how groups struggle to overcome long established processes of othering that reinforce the divisions from a turbulent past at a time when new and alternative futures are being sought.
“Othering” through “Constructed Perceptions of Reality”
In the words of Anthony J. Marsella, culture “influences and impacts conflicts and their resolution” (652). At the heart of his argument is the need to better understand “the power of culture” in constructing what he describes as an in-group’s “perceptions of reality” which “shape and construct our realities (i.e., they contribute to our world views, perceptions, orientations) and with this ideas, morals, and preferences” (657).
Two key outcomes of this process are crucial: (1) the constructed “perception of self as self-righteous, moral, justified, and ‘good’ by virtue of religion, history, identity”; (2) the perception of the Other as being “evil, dangerous, threatening” and therefore a “danger to national or group survival, identity [and] well-being” (653). Furthermore, these constructed realities provide an in-group with a degree of certainty about themselves and, as such, there will be a “reluctance” to “tolerate challenges to these realities” (653).
The Orange Order and Othering
The processes described above are evident across the history and evolution of the Orange Order which was founded in 1795 amid the increased sectarian tensions brought about by growing demands for social and political reform in Ireland, and a broader international crisis stemming from the upheaval of the French Revolution.
That international crisis had convinced many in the British political establishment that there was a pragmatic need to placate Irish Catholics as a means of preventing potential alliances with revolutionary France. The reforms being sought, however, were anathema for many in the Irish Protestant community who believed they went against everything that the Reformation stood for. In the short term the British (Protestant) state would be providing funds to support the education of Irish Catholic clergy via a newly established seminary at Maynooth, but more symbolically the state would essentially be providing a degree of legitimacy to Catholicism. Consequently, many Irish Protestants believed the proposed measures would threaten the social, political, and economic order they had fought hard to establish over the previous two centuries. Religion and politics in Ireland could not be separated.
King William III mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo Credit: Flickr user Jay Galvin. CC BY 2.0. DEED
Within the Protestant community the linkage between religion and politics was fed by negative popular representations of what the Catholic Church sought to achieve. In his history of the Order, Richard Niven (a member of the Orange) writing in the late nineteenth century, described the belief of members that “ever since the Reformation Protestants have been the subjects of persecution, and more particularly in our own land have been held up to every species of contempt” by “their bitter foe,” Catholicism, which sought a political “ascendancy.” The Orange Order, however, stood firm against this and was “the only organisation that has ever been able to cope successfully with Popery; not by secret conspiracy, but by open opposition and telling arguments” (3).
Popular written histories of the Institution, such as that by Niven and that by Michael Dewar, John Brown and Samuel Long, present long and detailed chronologies of persecution by their Catholic Other. Particular moments of Irish history are put forward as evidence of the constant threat Protestants have faced and continue to live with—from the rebellion and massacres of 1641 to the Williamite Wars of 1689-91; and from the 1798 rebellion, through the Easter Rising of 1916 down to the most recent conflict in Northern Ireland.
This selective use of the past entirely ignores historical complexities, and the narrative of the Orange becomes confined to a simplistic “Good vs Bad” form. Members of the Order are socialized in the history through a popularized retelling that is not confined to books and pamphlets that many members may never read, but which is depicted visually on the banners that adorn their gathering halls and are carried on parades. Similarly, these key moments are memorialized in songs that are central to important social events such as the traditional July 12th celebrations. Through such mechanisms members of the Order construct a reality about both the righteousness of the in-group and the ever-present threat posed by the Other.
“Othering” and Conflict Transformation
Perhaps unsurprisingly these processes of othering have raised questions about the Orange Order within the context of Northern Ireland’s peace process, which has sought a reconciliation between the communities in conflict. Critics of the Order argue that it is, by its very nature, a sectarian organization incapable of change or of playing a positive role in the search for stability. But is this necessarily the case? Is it possible for the Orange to reimagine itself in a manner that allows it to protect its core principles but at the same time become a force for political, cultural, and religious reconciliation?
Members of the Order tend to believe that it has never been a block to progressing peace but rather that it is merely misunderstood by wider society. To this end, the Orange has prioritized efforts to reach out across the political divide to form better understandings of what they claim the Institution is and stands for. This has, in the main, focused on educational initiatives with members of the Order often visiting Catholic schools to give presentations and engage with students.
The Portadown District Loyal Orange Lodge return from the “Demonstration Field” along the Hamiltonsbawn Road in Armagh during the County Armagh the July 12th parades in 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Yet, some members (and former members) of the Order have argued that these efforts are insufficient and that more needs to be done to confront the realities of a rising sectarianism within. The Rev. Brian Kennaway, in particular, has argued that the core values of the Order have been betrayed by elements of its own rank and file and that this has led to a decline in membership and public standing across the wider Protestant community. He maintains that the Orange needs to acknowledge a growing gulf between what the Institution claims to be and the practice of its members, with a particular requirement for the rank and file to better reflect the “Qualifications” for membership they signed up to. Kennaway, in his book on the subject, maintains that “far from being a sectarian, controversial and divisive body, the Order, properly reformed, could be a force for good and reconciliation in Northern Ireland’s deeply divided society” (xiii). He argues that the “Qualifications of an Orangeman,” which state that members “should strenuously oppose the fatal errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome” (4–5), should not be “judged to be any more ‘anti-Catholic’ than the doctrinal standards of the three main Protestant Churches in Ireland” (5), and points to the fact that the “Basis of the Loyal Orange Institution of Ireland” stresses that it should not “admit into its brotherhood persons whom an intolerant spirit leads to persecute, injure, or upbraid any man on account of his religious beliefs” (6). Kennaway maintains that the Order has become detached from such principles and that this has been to the detriment of the Institution. He argues that if the Orange is to have a future it needs better leadership capable of upholding what he has described as the “traditional and authentic values of Orangeism” (264).
Although this points to the possibility for reform by simply adhering to its own established principles, it must also be questioned as to the extent to which the Order has ever successfully lived up to these values as is stated by Kennaway. The fears of the Catholic Other have historically ensured that such values have, in the main, remained aspirational rather than practical. This leads to the further question: Has the peace process created an opening for the Orange to become the organization it claims to be?
One thing is increasingly clear, the fears generated by the processes of othering will not be overcome if the latter remains embedded in the traditions and the historical narratives people live by. For meaningful reconciliation in a post-conflict society, there is a need to engage more critically with history and the representation of that history—to acknowledge that our own roles in that story have not always been “glorious.” There is a need to better understand different interpretations and explore how conflicting narratives might be better reconciled or understood. If, however, groups such as the Orange continue to simply do what has always been done, how can alternative futures unfold?
Cathal McManus is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work (SSESW) and Queen’s University Belfast and a Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He is interested in processes of Othering and how these contribute to the development and maintenance of social divisions and conflict. Related to this he is interested in identity formation and nationalism. His work has been published in journals such as Nations and Nationalism, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Ethnopolitics.
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