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Why Madrasa Graduates Should Study Modern Science and Philosophy: Reflections on an Ongoing Debate on Madrasa Discourses in India


Madrasa Discourses students and faculty visiting India Gate. New Delhi, India

The public event that opened the Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive in July 2019 was intended to introduce the Muslim community in India to the Madrasa Discourses project. It was attended by a large number of senior clerics and madrasa graduates, and became the focus of attention for a segment of the Muslim community in India. One of the questions that emerged in the debates during and after the public event was why it was necessary for Madrasa graduates to study modern science and philosophy. Some present at the event argued that Madrasas are meant to preserve traditional religious learning, and therefore burdening madrasa students with such disciplines as philosophy is both unnecessary and undesirable. Others claimed that it is not the responsibility of Madrasa graduates to provide rational explanations for religious beliefs. One of the participants at the event went so far as to say that religion has nothing at all to say on human problems in this world. Rather, it is entirely oriented towards the other world. The implication of this claim was that there is no need for the religious scholars to study any disciplines pertaining to our physical and social world.

During the discussion session, participants seemed somewhat willing to engage with the questions of the physical sciences. However, most expressed the view that social sciences and philosophy were not to be taken seriously because of the belief that these disciplines are not as accurate as physical sciences, are more speculative, and are largely based in a “western context,” having nothing to do with other societies. This entire discussion felt overwhelmingly ahistorical and mistaken, however, because the Islamic tradition of which these scholars claim to be preservers is one which has been nothing if not deeply philosophical.

These issues, moreover, have practical implications for the everyday lives of Muslims. A glance at the lived experiences of Muslims in the modern world reveals that in their everyday lives, they are confronted with practice-based problems, such as where to invest their money so as to keep the investments both safe and halal, whether it is acceptable in Islam to buy products on EMI (Equated Monthly Installments) with interest, what kind of dress to wear, what kind of jobs to take, or how to study those aspects of physical and social sciences that contradict the age-old practices and beliefs deemed Islamic by Muslim societies and communities. Another kind of dilemma that Muslims encounter is one of an intellectual and philosophical nature. For example, a teacher of biology may teach evolution in the class and then be lectured by an imam during Friday khutbah on how modern scientific ideas such as evolution are contrary to the Qur’an.

Practice-based and philosophical dilemmas may seem very different, but they both hinge on how Muslims cope with a rapidly changing world and how effectively and promptly they translate their religious tradition across cosmologies so as to reconcile their lived experiences with their religion. Madrasa Discourses attempts to familiarize Madrasa graduates with some of the questions that modern philosophy and science have raised for the Islamic tradition as it has developed through the centuries.

No Intellectual Enquiry without a Robust Epistemology

Over the past two years in the Madrasa Discourses program, we have learned to think about philosophy as “thinking about thinking.” Practitioners of any intellectual discipline, be it physics or history, deal with questions concerning what counts as valid knowledge and what theories and methods are acceptable for producing new knowledge. As a result of reflection by practitioners of those disciplines, theories change and new theories and methods emerge. Such self-reflection provides a discipline with its epistemological grounding. In the absence of a deep understanding of epistemological problems and issues in one’s discipline, there can be no agreement on what constitutes valid knowledge. This makes it is easier for an opinion backed by power to reign as authoritative on the one hand, and on the other, for each individual to form their own views on each matter without a learned consensus of any kind between different members of an intellectual or faith community. Both these situations are counterproductive. Some of us feel the presence of both these problems in Indian higher education. The issue is particularly rife in departments of Islamic studies. These departments operate largely in isolation from other disciplines in both the physical and social sciences and in a complete epistemological vacuum. For Islamic studies to develop as an academic discipline worthy of the name, it has to seriously engage with the new picture of the world that is emerging as a result of more recent philosophical and scientific developments in other disciplines so that it may add to, contest, or problematise the conclusions reached in other disciplines on firm epistemological and methodological grounds.

Virtually absent in Islamic studies is any discussion of epistemology and methodology. Researchers can make unexamined claims about physical and social phenomena irrespective of actual status of knowledge and research about those phenomena in their concerned disciplines. For example, on page 92 in his 1992 book, Islam ka Nazariya-i-jins (The Idea of Gender in Islam)[1], a senior professor in the department of Sunni theology in Aligarh Muslim University, Sultan Ahmed Islahi, extensively quotes jurist ibn Qayyim (d. 1350) on male and female sexuality to defend polygamy, without any hint that modern scientific knowledge on sex and sexuality has changed beyond recognition since the time of ibn Qayyim.

Historical Relation between Philosophy and Religion

Talha Rehman engaging the afternoon panel session of Madrasa Discourses Program. Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. July 23, 2019.

Philosophy emerged in the ancient world amongst those few who tried to explain natural phenomena using rational explanations. The early philosophers indeed were a rare species because in an era when most people attributed the shining of the sun to the sun god, the falling of rain to the rain god, the thunder to the thunder god, and harvest to the harvest god or goddesses, it was the philosophers who thought that there ought to be rational explanations for what causes these natural phenomena. Philosophy, however, came to be the study of much more than just the natural world. Because philosophers discussed questions related to all areas of inquiry, philosophy gradually became the fountainhead of all human knowledge in the ancient world. Philosophers pondered human society, along with politics, and the ethical principles that ought to guide the organization of both. Most importantly, however, were their discussions of what constitutes valid knowledge in a given field of inquiry. Theories about the nature of reality and how to go about accumulating valid knowledge of it became foundational for all academic disciplines and continue to be important today.

One of the most interesting developments from the point of view of a student of Islamic Studies is that many important philosophers declared that belief in several gods, spirits, and/or genies was superstitious. Philosophers instead proclaimed the existence of one God. Although the God conceived of by Plato, Aristotle, and their successors was dissimilar to the God of monotheistic religious traditions, in many ways Greek philosophy prepared the ground for the later success of those traditions.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe in a personal God. Their God intervenes in human history and listens to the prayers of believers. The God of the philosophers, on the other hand, could only know universals, and did not directly intervene in history or create the world. Nonetheless, theologians of monotheistic traditions borrowed the dialectic method of the Greeks to provide rational justifications for the God revealed to them in their religious texts. Therefore, all scholars, whether the philosophers or those opposed to them, wrote in the shared language of the dialectic method, and used syllogistic forms of argument borrowed from the Greeks.

Resolving the Crisis through the Idea of Historical Contingency

In the Muslim circles, we often hear vehement rejection of tasawwuf (Islamic mysticism), Kalam (theology), and falsafa (philosophy) as what are often dubbed “decadent” parts of the Islamic tradition. A return to the primary sources—the Qur’an and Hadith, and according to some positions, only the Qur’an—unmediated by any kind of philosophy, is advocated with quite some vigour. The standard claim today that all the answers are available in the Qur’an seems to ignore the fact that one’s presumptions and biases often lead to divergent readings of the Qur’an. The response by some people when concerns about different interpretations are raised is to claim that their opponents are “misguided,” “biased,” or “distorting the meaning of the Qur’an.”

In cases where the pronouncements made by earlier authors seem contrary to what appears to be just, fair, or sensible to today’s scholars, it is often argued that they were simply misreading the Qur’an and that today’s Muslims have somehow reached the “right readings.” These claims are made by several actors, but are particularly visible in cases of authors who write on science and the Qur’an. Verses on scientific subjects are said to be unintelligible to the older generations of Muslims and somehow accessible to their present readers: “A reading of old commentaries on the Qur’an, however knowledgeable their authors may have been in their day, bears solemn witness to a total inability to grasp the depth of meaning in such verses” (Dr. Maurice Bucaille, The Quran and Modern Science). Claims such as these do not recognize the contingent nature of all readings of the Qur’an. For example, Tooba Fahad, in her article “Human Embryology, The Holy Quran and Modern Science,” published in 2018 in the Journal Islamic Research Annual, (pp 46-55) claims that the three (veils of) darkness mentioned in the Quran 39:6 “may refer to the anterior abdominal wall, the uterine wall, and the amniochorionic membrane.” She marvels at the accuracy of Quranic information about human embryology long before modern technology made it possible to observe them. That earlier generations of Muslims read and understood these verses differently is either ignored or explained away as their inability to understand the right meaning.

What are known as physical sciences today were studied in the medieval period as a part of philosophy. Therefore, some modern Muslims claim that earlier readers of the Qur’an were simply wrong in their understanding of religious texts because they studied too much philosophy. This impacted their reading of the Qur’an and led them to incorrect conclusions. However, as seen in the above examples, modern readers are reading modern scientific discoveries into the Qur’an, unmindful of the fact that scientific theories, and the philosophical claims that support them, change over time. Some Muslims today attempt to read modern scientific discoveries into the Qur’an to provide evidence of its divine origin, while criticizing earlier exegetes for doing the same. They also claim that they can, or have, overcome the problem of misreading the Qur’an by reading it directly without being influenced by the experiences, presumptions, or knowledge of their time. A sound understanding of philosophical principles involved will allow scholars to see the pitfalls that they constantly fall into.

One of the ideas that we have explored in Madrasa Discourses is contingency. The term refers to the situation of a human person within the intellectual horizon of their time. Our rejection of Aristotelian science and philosophy has become possible only in retrospect, in sync with our own intellectual horizon. All the arguments against Aristotelian philosophy and medieval science have become possible only when their inconsistencies have been made apparent by modern scientific and philosophical inquiry. Human understanding of the Qur’an is always influenced by the pervasive cosmology of a person’s time. Since we as humans have very limited intellectual horizons, any human understanding of the Qur’an is therefore at best contingent.

Another noteworthy aspect of contemporary Muslim thought generally is that even those who argue vehemently against Aristotelian philosophy and science continue to think more or less within its paradigms. This is particularly visible in case of Muslim discourse on sex and gender. Here, the ideas about the nature of male and female, including their temperament, psychology, and physiology remain deeply Aristotelian. Some scholars, such as Wahiduddin Khan, who make use of such modern terms as hormones, do so only superficially. They adjust modern terminology within an overall Aristotelian paradigm: “man and woman are born different from each other in nature” (176). This view takes man and women as two homogenous and opposite categories where the “nature” of each individual, their skills, talents, choices, likes, and dislikes, are all determined by their sex. The author describes a dubious experiment where injecting women with male hormones led them to develop male characteristics. This led him to the conclusion that male and female nature are different and that therefore their social roles are also different. Modern notions of sex and gender make a distinction between sex as biologically determined and gender as socially determined. Social roles of men and women, as the name suggests, are determined by the society and not by their biology. There is nothing in female or male biology that makes them incapable of performing social roles assigned to the opposite sex.

Afternoon Session of Madrasa Discourses Program. Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. July 23, 2019

Furthermore, while modern Muslims have blamed Aristotelian science and philosophy for harming the religious tradition and have remained skeptical of modern sciences, they have not framed a coherent worldview of their own apart from these two, but only randomly combined ideas from the two completely different worldviews. Primarily these combinations are motivated by a desire to justify certain pre-conceptions about persons and the world, as seen in the examples above. This has given rise to innumerable tenuous permutations and combinations based on individual preferences that do not have as their ground any agreed upon basic principles. The absence of a rigorous epistemology creates blind spots that are not easily seen by scholars who are making incoherent claims.

This incoherence is largely caused by the fact that the tradition that Muslims inherited has ceased to faithfully express the lived experiences of the community in modern times, leading to a situation resembling something akin to what Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has identified as a “crisis” in an intellectual tradition. Dr. M Maroof Shah describes the incoherence of the combined Muslim response to modern science when he writes, “[The] conflicting nature of various interpretations of some verses which have ‘Scientific allusions’ also problematizes Muslim rationalist position, e.g.; Bin Baz and Ahmad Raza Khan wrote books against motion of earth (apparently inspired by Quran according to them), Sir Syed sees it impossible to prove either earth’s motion or its stationary nature from the Quran and Zakir Naik proves motion of earth and celestial bodies from Quran” (722).

In response to the current intellectual crisis, Muslims have adopted many new positions with respect to the Islamic tradition and modern sciences. Yet due to weak philosophical and scientific perceptiveness, adherents and authors of most of these positions remain oblivious to the inconsistencies in their thought. There is a need to have a serious discussion on epistemology in order to rebuild the Islamic tradition in a new manner that is robust and coherent on the one hand, and on the other, is flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances that future generations are bound to encounter.

 

[1] Sultan Ahmad Islahi, Islam ka Nazariya-i-jins (Aligarh: Idara Ilm-o-Adab,1992)

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Talha Rehman
Talha Rehman is a PhD Candidate at the department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She is a participant in Madrasa Discourses curently in her third and final year in the course. Her academic interests involve Islam and gender justice, science, multiculturalism and religous pluralism.
Global Currents article

What is so Special about Kashmir’s Special Status?


Nigeen Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo by the author.

Kashmir has a special place in the South Asian imagination not only because of the famed beauty of its landscape but also because of its unique religious and cultural history. The idea of Kashmir as a “special place” is an old one. We encounter it in pre-modern Sanskrit religious and literary culture, Persian histories, political discourse in postcolonial South Asia, and in modern popular cultural forms such as Bollywood film. The historian Ronald Inden has made a compelling case that it is these imaginings of Kashmir as a special place that account for the intractability and intransigence of India and Pakistan on Kashmir.[1] What is, and remains, special about Kashmir is a unique vision of religious pluralism in its religious and cultural history that has not yet found political articulation.

The modern State of Jammu and Kashmir, which the Indian government has reorganized through an act of the Indian Parliament (Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019), was born as a feudatory, princely State of British India ruled by the Dogra dynasty of Jammu (1846–1947). It emerged at the end of the Anglo-Sikh war with military help from the British. The idea of Kashmir as a “special place” had already been in place when it was mobilized by Kashmiri Muslim nationalists from the 1920s to the 1940s to challenge the legitimacy of Dogra rule. But it was only in the 1930s, after the Dogra army massacred protesting Kashmiris, that the latter launched a popular movement for sovereignty that received support from prominent Indian nationalists agitating against the British colonial rule. Such nationalists included Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Maulana Azad. By the late 1930s, many Kashmiri Hindus had joined Kashmiri Muslims in this struggle for the idea that Kashmir belonged to Kashmiris. This movement was interrupted by the Partition of British India in 1947 and rapidly unfolding events in its aftermath (communal strife which spread from Punjab into the Jammu region, the revolt against the Dogra State in Poonch, and the arrival of the Indian Army in Kashmir on October 26, 1947 to ward off Muslim tribal irregulars from Western Pakistan backed by the Pakistan Army that had entered Kashmir, and the first India-Pakistan war of 1947–48). Even though the post-Partition sectarian strife receded, it morphed into a political dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

Louis Mountbatten discusses the partition plan with Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and other leaders in 1947. {{PD-India}}

In 1948, the State of Jammu and Kashmir was effectively divided by the first India-Pakistan war into a Pakistani-controlled territory and an Indian-controlled territory (most of the Kashmiri-speaking region, however, passed into Indian control). The Kashmiri nationalists had close relations with the leaders of the Indian freedom struggle (Mahatma Gandhi had visited Kashmir just before India’s Partition in the hopes of reconciling different views in Kashmir) and the idea of Kashmir as a “special place” with unique political aspirations was recognized in the form of the special provisions of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The terms of Kashmir’s membership in the Indian union were debated for five months among the Kashmiri and the Indian leadership in 1949, with the result that Jammu and Kashmir emerged as an autonomous State within the union of India. Yet the aspirations for full independence never died down in Kashmir (even as pro-Pakistan politics were increasingly suppressed within Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir ) and tensions emerged as early as 1953 when Kashmir’s nationalist leader, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, was jailed for allegedly seeking independence. The arrest of Kashmir’s most popular leader, Sheikh Abdullah, in 1953 also started the process of diluting Kashmir’s autonomy and slowly eroding Article 370. Such slow dilution was evident as early as 1963, when India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke of “the gradual erosion” of Article 370. These events, seen as a political betrayal by Kashmiris, were also the culmination of a strong protest movement by the Hindu nationalists in India who considered these special provisions to be nothing other than yet another shameful capitulation by the ruling Indian National Congress Party to Muslims.

It is this Hindu nationalist view which has triumphed in the Indian government’s recent decision to completely and unilaterally abrogate Article 370. Such a decision was made ostensibly to help better fight a decades-old anti-India insurgency in Kashmir (an insurgency which has for the most part been inconsequential, but has been significant enough to disrupt political processes and keep the Indian Army engaged in the region now for more than thirty years). It is far from clear if cancelling Kashmiri autonomy can boost India’s counterinsurgency efforts and produce a decisive victory, but it is possible that it could return Kashmir to being narrowly imagined as a site of sectarian Hindu-Muslim conflict. One might even wonder if a return to the original provisions of Article 370 that had been negotiated in 1949 and were demanded by Sheikh Abdullah’s son, Farooq Abdullah, on his return to power in 1996, could have stopped this insurgency in its tracks at a time when it was struggling militarily.

One ends up in Kashmir where one started off in the first place. The political claims of both India and Pakistan on Kashmir not only go back to the moment of the creation of the two States in 1947, but also pass through the history and memory of the sectarian conflict between the Hindus and Muslims of South Asia, stretching back even further in history (in the case of Kashmir, to the fourteenth century). The genesis of the Kashmir conflict, and its trajectory in the late twentieth century, is a complex subject. But what is clear enough is the symbolic centrality of both the religion and culture of Kashmir to India and Pakistan. Such culture includes shared sacred spaces such as astaans, Kashmiri Sufiyana music, folk forms such as Kashmiri folk theatre (band pather) and Kashmiri folk music (chhaker), Kashmiri poetry, and Kashmiri arts and crafts. These would be claimed by Pakistan as a distinctive Indo-Muslim culture and by India as an example of its secular and plural traditions. Religion and culture have been fundamental to shaping the idea of Kashmir as a “special place.” But even though the Hindu and Muslim religious cultures in India and Pakistan offer us fantasies of Kashmir as either a sacred Hindu space or a lost Muslim paradise, the actual Kashmiri Hindu and Muslim religious culture affirms Kashmir as a heterodox and plural spiritual space.

Dance of the Sufi Dervishes by Behzād, circa 1480/1490. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. {{PD-US}}

For most Kashmiris themselves, it is the vision of a Kashmiri spirituality expressed as a continuum of Saiva-bhakti-Sufi-tantric ideas in Kashmir’s literary culture—in particular, the mystical poetry of the Saiva saint-poet Lal Ded and the Muslim Sufi poet, Nund Rishi—that best articulates the idea of Kashmir as a place, even a “special place.” A close reading of these saint-poets reveals a deep commitment to religious tolerance, caste equality, and philosophical thought which gets taken up by generations of Kashmiri poets and historians, and informs Kashmiri ideas of the self. The Saiva, Lal Ded, uses Sufi metaphors and the Sufi, Nund Rishi, uses Saiva metaphors (Nund Rishi calls the Quran sahaja, the simple yet blissful path). This recognition, and the recognition of the political desires that flow from it, has become difficult to express in light of the rise in sectarian tensions in Kashmir and the rest of South Asia since the 1990s. It is likely to become even more difficult after the controversial end to Kashmir’s residual autonomy under an already eroded Article 370. One could dismiss this vision of Kashmiri religious pluralism as disguised nationalist rhetoric (as studies on “Kashmiriyat” or Kashmiriness as a nationalist, or subnationalist, ideology purportedly promoted by the Indian State often do), but these ideas about religion and culture are not only affirmed by many Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims. They also represent the possibility of a future that rejects sectarian understandings of Kashmir’s multiform past. But Kashmiri religious pluralism (philosophical thought of Lal Ded and Nund Rishi, in particular) also poses a challenge to official versions of Indian secularism that have not been able to ward off the threat of majoritarianism and offers a different way of thinking the secular (much like the thinking of Kabir and Gandhi) as an enabler of respect for and dialogue across religious traditions. The Saiva-Sufi milieu in Kashmir is one of the many distinctive moments of religious pluralism in South Asia. A deeper understanding of this religious pluralism can open up new pathways for thinking about democracy and freedom not just in Kashmir but also in the rest of South Asia. This idea of Kashmir is impossible to abrogate.

 

*Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the positions or policies of Ashoka University.

 

[1] See, for several essays which touch upon this theme, Aparna Rao and T N Madan, eds., The Valley of Kashmir: The Making and Unmaking of a Composite Culture? (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008). See especially the essay by Ronald Inden.

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Abir Bazaz
Abir Bazaz is Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University. His research interests include Religion and Literature, Comparative Indian Literatures and Cinema Studies. He is also a documentary filmmaker.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Holy in Hindsight: A Reply to the Readers


A flag waver on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson.

Revolution was far from my mind when I first began ruminating about martyrs, miracles, and wonderwork in Egypt. Doing fieldwork during Mubarak’s last decade felt like an exercise in hunting for the new in the old. I soon discovered myself and my research caught up in an exhilarating timeline of uprisings and overthrow, followed soon after by hellish rounds of arrests, torchings, and massacres. My ethnography similarly hints at vacillations between promise and despair, beginning with courageous protests for change and ending with fears of terrorism. Even as I write this, I am battling doubts that saints have anything to do with the things that “really” matter: soaring poverty, crushing protest bans, and a steely leader set on staying in power until 2030. Mega-cathedrals are being built by Sisi and martyrs are being given military funerals. The holy in hindsight looks like yet another sign of authoritarianism’s come-back with a vengeance.

In their generous reflections on my book, my three readers—Kathryn Lofton, Rachel Smith, and Anand Taneja—explore the holy without forfeiting the necessary critique of violence. Brimming with vivid glimmers of insight, they show how worlds of divine imagination exceed repression and bloodshed behind the scenes. More remarkable is how they manage to do this while holding in view the coercive realities of Egypt’s authoritarian present. What lies between the ecstatic thrill of miracles and the brute force of militarization? Whether it takes the form of generative excess or dialectical tension, the instability of the saint-state relation supplies some release from the overdetermining forces of counterrevolution. It is on the revolutionary subject of saint-state instability that I engage with my readers’ comments here.

Rachel Smith makes the wonderfully bold case that remembering the holy dead is wildly anachronistic. In a provocative reversal of my book’s last line, she argues for the possibility that anachronism is a “living, labile force of the present.” Herself a historian of hagiography, Smith is familiar with anachronism’s lowly, even mortally sinful, state in secular historiography. Martyrs and mystics in contemporary Egypt roam wildly, as do medieval Europe’s forgettable laywomen who lie outside the sciences of preservation. Smith upholds the strange potency of devotion and the unruly persistence of memory across periods and traditions of valuing the dead. I see her also speaking to a frequent gripe that I’ve encountered in the field: much to their disadvantage, Copts are too caught up in the ancient era of glorious martyrs and the bloody reproduction of violence. “Saints have nothing to do with what is going on now,” so the secularists say. Hence, the political charge against anachronism: traditions that austerely boast two millennia of the same old rituals risk losing sight of the ever-shifting present of revolution and counterrevolution.

The radical malleability of memory is a truly frightening force in times of tumultuous change. More than any other incident of violence against Copts, the Maspero Massacre of 2011 was powerful proof that the military was (and is) far from a steady, trustworthy ally for Copts and their future security. On October 9, 2011, demonstrations at the Maspero television tower ended with Egyptian army soldiers in APCs attacking protestors with live ammunition.  Only a few years later, in 2014, I was startled by several Copts who claimed that it was the Muslim Brotherhood who had stolen the tanks and trammeled over protestors in the guise of army soldiers. How do we assess the politics of such a wildly anachronistic account? How do we make sense of this complete 180 in the crucial game of political accountability, at one moment directed at the military state and at another, theatrically away from it?

For now, the answers seem to lie within Egypt’s timeline of shifting political tides: in 2012, Mohamed Morsi was elected to the presidency, and in 2013, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi booted him out. In the secular dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution, national contexts of authoritarian rule overdetermine the symbolic value of dead bodies. Combating this historicist genre of predeterminism, Smith’s essay revives the rebellious potential of anachronism. The out-of-time quality of saints is what makes their resignification feel plentiful and abundant in empty historical time. Martyr memorialization does not conform, weirdly and wildly, to the linear march of secular national history. Here is where I find Smith’s final provocative reversal to be revelatory. As she puts it toward the end of her response, “Secularism is more truly anachronistic insofar as it is not in sync with the vicissitudes of time.”

On the question of time, Anand Taneja has also journeyed to the edges of religious tradition where Delhi’s secular history is out of sync with miracles in its medieval ruins. Or, perhaps it is precisely the jarring capacity of miracles to sync up with postcolonial history that energizes his response. In his attentive reading of holy images from Egypt, Taneja picks up where I begin, with the iconic Virgin of the Apparition and its curiously overlooked origins in foreign Catholicism. Yes, there is Egypt’s authoritarian making of the Arab Virgin and post-1967 Christian-Muslim unity. The Virgin of Zaytun is solidly assimilated into national-sectarian history. Yet, Taneja daringly opens up an extrinsic, indeed “foreign,” angle on the whole enthusiastic affair of populism and mass politics. What about those genealogies of the French Virgin and the photographic Virgin that arrive “unbidden, out of the corner of one’s eye”? Experiments in political theology call for blurring genres of secular and religious imagination. Joining Taneja, I have also been thinking about the Paris protests in May 1968.

Tahrir Square in 2011. Photo Credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy.

Just last week, I was giving a talk on the Virgin of Zaytun, when a person in the audience declared after viewing the photos: “This looks like a protest!” Resonating with the spirit of revolution, her observation got us all thinking about the choreography of crowds and the assembly of people that “appear” to come out of nowhere. No one saw Tahrir coming. For all their laws of prediction, the sciences of social movements and state politics did not forecast the 18-day rush that brought the 30-year Mubarak regime down. In hindsight, it was not only the rush of energy but also the terrors of repression and the horrors of bloodshed under Mubarak’s long rule that brought holy images into historical consciousness.

Repression is the topic that Kathryn Lofton takes up to tackle secularism sideways. If Taneja is searching in the corner of your eye, Lofton is craning toward your sotto voce. The wonder-working underground—of dusty baraka and unassuming oils—is slow and quiet. If there is any political critique to be heard from beneath and beyond, it is one that emerges from far-flung mechanisms of silencing and hiding. Lofton submits her acute intuitions on repression: “The more the miraculous, oil-exuding religious is routed away from the public, the more the public starves for real religious feeling.” Irrepressible intimacy! Defying secularist impulses to divide and separate, feelings for the real broker relations not only between the I and Thou, but also between Christians and Muslims under sectarian rule. Here is where I hear Lofton’s appeal to radical discontent and its sociological powers to overcome repression on multiple registers. If you catch me on a more cynical day, I may even say outright that human desires for holy mystery and saintly masquerade only further reinforce and shore up systems of repressive rule.

Since wrapping up my fieldwork in 2015, Sisi’s brutal crackdown on dissent has solidly returned Egypt into the military’s hands. What this has meant is the military’s subsuming of martyr memory within its authoritarian annals of history, not to mention the systemic repression of social movements and mass mobilization. Like my fellow scholars of religion here, I am dissatisfied with reading religion as the mere fodder for manipulation and control.  The major challenge remains a deeper understanding of what religion and political theology can enact beyond the authoritarian state’s grip. I sign off from this reply now, a couple weeks after a rare round of September protests erupted across Egypt and only a few days before the eighth anniversary of the Maspero Massacre. Here’s to the impending possibility of contending modernities in real time.

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Angie Heo
Angie Heo is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. Previously, she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany and held a visiting position at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has conducted fieldwork research on Coptic Orthodoxy and Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt, and more recently on Evangelical Protestantism and Cold War history in South Korea.
Theorizing Modernities article

Wonderwork


Contemplating St. Mark’s life and death, Tomb of St. Mark the Martyr. Patriarchate Cathedral of St. Mark ‘Abbasiyya. Photo by Angie Heo. Used with permission from University of California Press.

Towards the end of The Political Lives of Saints, Angie Heo says an imperative notion in a very quiet way: “The repression of holiness is, in fact, what animates the social imaginary of the wonderworking underground” (213). The entirety of what precedes proves the political fact of this sotto voce assertion. Once you read it, you pause: right. That’s exactly right.

Freckling this volume are instances like these, poignant encapsulations of the theoretical frontier where Heo draws her readers. “Collective images of the self are necessary for communal self-transformation,” we read in one early chapter (38). “To the extent that Christians and Muslims have mixed sensibilities of what a saint or wonderworker does and looks like, they thus compose a shared religious public” (180). The data of this volume doesn’t ascend to a lengthy abstract disquisition about the anthropology of mediation. Instead, The Political Lives of Saints is an in-depth drop into the political work of boundary maintenance between Christianity and Islam in Egypt. “The sectarian divide is owed, not to essential, irreconcilable differences between Christianity and Islam but to common points of overlap between Christian and Muslim practices of visual mediation and saintly manifestation that enabled public disorder” (204). Holy power transacted in the common currency of saints is the integrant of communal difference. Through this book, Heo never wavers from her practical effort to convey the ecumenism of saints in the diversity of community.

Miracle of the Virgin, Church of St. Bishoi the Great, Port Said. Photo by Angie Heo. Used with permission from University of California Press.

I have run a bit too far ahead, perhaps. Angie Heo exposes here a particular situation in which the mediation between two religious groups (Christian and Muslim) composes the state in which they mediate (Egypt). Heo looks at a variety of specific material things—a hand exuding oil, a saint’s relic, or a film depicting a saint’s death—but doesn’t linger on that object’s physical particularity as much as she focuses on the “embodied skills and media technologies” that connect communities to those things. How are we able to kiss or press our face into one particular artifact? How do we know the meaning of a priest’s hand as we embrace it? It isn’t a stock image of holiness Heo examines, but the way baraka, holy power, becomes ours. Baraka channels through air, oil, and fragrance; also, too, it travels through “tactile sympathy and televisual extension” (77). And its travel is round-trip, sent back by me as something else after the smear becomes spirit. The oil or the hand aren’t the point, but the process. The mediating witness is the power of holy power.

Even though I’m tumbling into intimacy, Heo’s gaze isn’t so easily distracted. She takes us to a critical political epoch—post-1952 Egypt—and examines it through the 6-10 percent of its population that comprises Arab Middle East’s largest “religious minority,” the Copts. The Copts, in Heo’s retelling, are the minority metonym that articulates the mass. Located in the ellipsis between the Christian West and Arab Islam, Copts claim Egyptian origins and Egyptian dominion. Many sectarian groups define their sociological, ideological, and spiritual experience in opposition to centralized power. The Copts, however, have become the prime articulation of state power, a self-understanding that Heo exposes as incorporated into their every ecclesial decision, from deciding which of their church buildings are axiomatically national sites of worship, to restricting public access to miraculous incidents. Heo wants “to deprivilege the sensationalizing din of persecution politics and Islamophobia that currently overdetermines the global portrait of Copts” through an examination of Coptic hagiography and martyrology (5). Coptic secularists might try to sequester the Copt sensorium to mere spiritual consequence, but to no avail: orthodox adherents refuse to hide their reverence for bishops or felt connection to relics. No secularism can shunt their enfolding in holiness.

But that secularism can and will, as the inaugurating quotation suggests, elaborate, even encourage, that holiness. Canonization has mimetic political effects, as Heo wagers in her careful final comment on the communal legibility of ISIS’s beheading videos. Although the majority of Heo’s examples emerge from specific churches and specific everyday encounters, her focus at the end on the popularity of violent martyrdom in contemporary geopolitics suggests the force of this accrual isn’t about quiet holiness but holiness crying out from the fissures of a dissatisfying secular. Heo seems to be saying that the more the miraculous, oil-exuding religious is routed away from the public, the more the public starves for real religious feeling.

By the time the reader arrives at this archive of martyrs’ bodies, she has traveled through much more quotidian and churchly familiar climes with Heo. She has visited the Church of the Virgin in Zaytun, the Church of the Virgin in Musturud, the Cathedral of St. Mark in Azbakiyya, and the Church of St. Bishoi the Great in Port Said. She has, with Heo, taken night classes at the Clerical College in the Archdiocese of Qalyubiyya in Shubra al-Khayma, visiting graves of martyrs, and attended feast-day celebrations for St. Simon the Tanner. She has witnessed discussions of miraculous appearances and dissected techniques described in tracts for disproving claims of laser usage at apparition sites. She has met deaconesses and demon exorcists, students and priests, filmmakers and garbage handlers, construction workers and shopkeepers. She has met, in one exquisitely rendered passage, a convert named Khalid. Heo’s ethnography is a model effort to think theoretically through the gorgeous diffusion of the human particular. Yet her gentle turn from this hand-crafted ethnographic mélange to the mass-mediated violence of ISIS suggests that the purpose of her interest in the diffusion is the case it makes for wonderwork as a human need. Heo incorporates the best political critique of religion without forgetting the very human subjects that comprise her ethnographic and theoretical capacity to think, see, feel, or know. This is a work with which students of religion will be thinking for some time, learning from it anew what it is to classify holiness in empires of religion.

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Kathryn Lofton
Kathryn Lofton is professor of religious studies, American studies, history, and divinity at Yale University. A historian of religions, she is the author of two books, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011) and Consuming Religion (2017), and one co-edited (with Laurie Maffly-Kipp) collection, Women's Work. An Anthology of African-American Women's Historical Writings (2010).
Theorizing Modernities article

The Secret Life of Miracles


Angie Heo’s The Political Lives of Saints. Book Cover used with permission from University of California Press.

“While collective imaginings of sainthood have been subject to the space and time of modern nationalism, they also offer an inheritance that exceeds the Coptic Church’s institutional grip on miracles, in their secret lives and their sectarianizing fates” (4).  I find this sentence from Angie Heo’s introduction to The Political Life of Saints to be an apt summary of this remarkable book. Saints and miracles, while they index otherworldly irruptions into the domain of the mundane, have always been political. Heo’s book does a remarkable job of thinking through the complex ways in which relics, apparitions, and icons central to the Coptic Christian imaginary in contemporary Egypt are deeply intertwined with the political, and how the Coptic Church and the Egyptian state have sought to control and interpret the afterlives of martyrs, collective visions, and saints for explicitly political purposes. This is not the only story this book tells, however. In beautifully constructed dialectical tension, the second half of Heo’s book dwells on stories of how visions and miracles disrupt the carefully patrolled sectarian boundaries of Coptic and Muslim, dis-order the majoritarian “secularism” of the Egyptian state, and make possible a mystical counterpublic that abides “beneath and against the Christian-Muslim divide” and the Islamic domination of the public sphere in Egypt (213). In doing this, the book also gives us new ways of thinking about religion and public life: especially in the ways in which everyday life is full of remarkable encounters at, and experimentation with, the overlapping edges of religious traditions. It is images—whether encountered as dream, apparition, or street-side poster—that are central to these crossings and blurrings. This is very different from the role of increasing religious polarization and violence that “religious” images circulating in public life, such as “angry Hanuman” in India, or Jylland Posten’s deliberately offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, have played in recent times. Heo’s sensitive ethnography of the lives of miraculous images—both spectacular and everyday—helps us see the pervasiveness of images in public life in a way that is not just about iconoclash, to use Bruno Latour’s term. Rather, she shows us how living with a proliferation of images, as we all do in modernity, is also to live with knowledge and affects that breach the boundaries not just between religions, but between the domains of the religious and the secular.

On the cover of the book is an image of a street side poster of ‘adhra’ al zuhur, the Virgin of the Apparition, who, as Heo notes, is “a touchstone figure in the Coptic Orthodox imagination today” (1). Remarkably, this image, which is widespread throughout Egypt, is the same as the Roman Catholic imagery of the “Miraculous Mary” of 19th century France. The Virgin first appeared in Cairo in 1968. The first witness to the Virgin’s appearance was a Muslim mechanic. In Heo’s analysis, this is a significant, recurring pattern in the evidence marshalled by the Church to authenticate this, and subsequent, Marian apparitions. The Muslim witnesses make it possible for the apparition to be not only a Christian but also an Egyptian miracle. Heo analyzes how, manifesting in the aftermath of the territorial losses suffered by Egypt and other Arab nations in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, “The apparition, an image of blessing across nation-state borders, offered a material extension of Holy Land that was suddenly out of reach” (100) for both Arab Christians and Muslims. Both the Egyptian state, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the Coptic Church, under Pope Kyrillos, promoted an understanding of the apparition as a sign of Christian-Muslim and pan-Arab unity. And while Muslim witnesses remain important to the Coptic Church’s authentication of miracles, as inter-religious relations have deteriorated in Egypt, Marian apparitions like the 2009 appearance of the Virgin in Warraq, Cairo, have largely been greeted with skepticism by the Muslim majority.

Mass Aparitions. Photo by Angie Heo. Used with permission of University of California Press.

This skepticism, as Heo shows, is linked to “visual and sonic competition” between mosques and churches in mixed neighborhoods like Warraq. But Heo’s ethnographic openness also allows us to glimpse other stories and other potentialities, a miraculous inheritance that exceeds statist policing and identitarian boundaries. At the church in Warraq, one year after the apparitions, Ahmad, a Muslim construction worker approached her and told her the story of how he too had been a witness to the apparition of the Virgin—though the image that he saw contradicted official Church depictions. This vision prompted him to try and build a commemorative monument to honor the Virgin of Warraq. For instance, there is Mus‘ad, a Coptic shopkeeper on intimate terms with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who “learning from old pamphlets of the spiritual sciences, … prescribes the names of extremely obscure angels (and likely of Islamic origin) to a Muslim customer, and brings his love affair with a female jinn into the institutionally authoritative presence of Pope Kyrillos at the Patriarchate” (147).  Jinns, dreams-visitations, religious boundary crossing: this is a world remarkably similar to the one I explore in my book Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. In Delhi too, it is amongst a largely working-class population that “images that come unbidden” (to borrow a phrase from Naveeda Khan) prompt boundary crossings—for instance Hindus going to a Muslim shrine—and radical self-transformations, despite worsening sectarian tensions between Hindus and Muslims. To do justice to the world I was encountering, I had to rethink inherited notions of what constitutes a religious tradition rather than relegate the world I was encountering to the categories of heterodoxy and “syncretism.” Similarly, Heo also draws on a more “distributed and diffuse notion of tradition and authority” (147), and her work pushes the field of the anthropology of religion to think of how “crossovers between religious traditions also intersect with crossovers between institutionally separated disciplines of knowledge—namely that of ‘religion’ and ‘science’” (149). It is in the spirit of such crossovers, inspired by Heo’s work, that I offer my concluding reflections.

In Jinnealogy I ask, “What do we do with a tradition that is encountered not as authoritative discourse but, as it were, out of the corner of one’s eye, in dreams and waking visions, in stories told by neighbors and strangers, in snatches of song playing on the radio (85)?” Heo’s book is valuable because it thinks so deeply and provocatively about images—across the genres and media of apparitions, cinema, dreams, icons, relics, television—as part of the life of religious traditions. And images often do come at us unbidden, out of the corner of one’s eye, changing both the traditions, and its (often unintended) receivers, in unexpected ways. For images carry accreted with them deep histories that often evade the boundary-work of more discursive systems of knowledge (including religious knowledge) production. I am thinking here of the billboards advertising designer wedding wear for men and women in elite parts of South Delhi. The male models are almost all bearded now, and the designer wedding suits they wear are all sherwanis, long formal coats long associated with India’s Muslim elite. In the most exclusionary and Islamophobic parts of India’s capital, at a time when the names of Mughal Muslim rulers are being erased from Delhi’s roads, the larger-than-life models on South Delhi billboards are dressed in fashion that wouldn’t look out of place in a Mughal painting. Images of fashion carry a public secret. We hate the Mughals but we aspire to dress like them. How do we understand this? And how do we understand that the Virgin of the Apparition, made famous across the Arab world in May 1968, appeared not as a Byzantine icon, but as an image from 19th century France?

A few organizers of the protests of Tahrir Square, Egypt, visiting Occupy Wall Street. Photo Credit: Harrie van Even

In his recent book, The Mana of Mass Society, Willam Mazzarella proposes the idea of the mimetic archive—rather than “culture”—to better understand the ways in which the collective forces of the social resonate with us (or not). “By likening these collective forces to an archive, I want to invoke the sense of resources deposited and variably available for excavation and citation—for activation” (145). Mazarella’s idea of the mimetic archive also gets us away not just from the idea of culture, but of the binary of “religion” and “culture,” when it comes to thinking about transmission—whether of traditions or of collective social energies. As Heo’s work makes clear, despite the boundary policing of Coptic and Muslim communities, the images of saints and miracles—on street-corners, on television screens, in dreams and waking visions—are an archive of the shared histories, cosmologies, and proximities of Christians and Muslims in Egypt, and also point us to horizons beyond the boundaries of geography and religion. Heo encounters the story of a Coptic man in Australia cured of his blindness by the image of the relic of Saint Marina on his screen: the televisual transmission of baraka or blessing we could say. Is this less or more miraculous than the energies that spread out from Tahrir Square in 2011, through television and computer screens, and inspired Occupy Wall Street? This is only speculation, but perhaps the French-ness of the image of the Virgin of the apparition points us to an earlier moment when a “certain rush of energy” travelled across the globe, an archive of other potentials. For May 1968, when the Virgin of the Apparition appeared in blurry newspaper photographs across the Arab world, was also the month of the Paris protests, a moment when new solidarities were formed, old certitudes were broken, and the world was imagined anew. In looking at popular religion in rural North India, the anthropologist Bhrigupati Singh argues that deities are associated with forms of life and aspiration, and that the waxing and waning of gods and their popularity is linked to the waxing and waning of forms of life. “An ascendant deity has a particular rhythm, musical, moral and temporal… ,” Singh argues, “a deity must add something ‘new’ to an ongoing movement of life” (441). In May 1968, another world was possible, as the slogan goes. Could these “secular” energies dress in religious garb from the mimetic archive? Could this be the secret life of the Virgin’s miraculous apparition in French fashion, the inheritance that exceeded the Coptic Church’s institutional grip?

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Anand Taneja
Anand Vivek Taneja is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. He is currently working on a book on Indian Muslim ethics in the age of Hindu nationalism.
Theorizing Modernities article

Memory, Anachronism, and Belonging


Photographic icon of the Libya Martyrs. Photo by Angie Heo. Used with permission of University of California Press.

At the heart of Angie Heo’s remarkable book is her demonstration that “saints are not anachronisms” (253). In her ethnography of contemporary Christian and Islamic life in Egypt, the living and the dead mingle. The dead return through memorialization (pilgrimage, relics, icon veneration, hagiography, liturgy), and the living take up the intimacy of this renewed bonding. Perhaps, in fact, we might rather say that all this is wildly anachronistic from a modern historiographical point of view—in which the aim is to rigorously preserve the past as such [1]— showing anachronism to be politically and socially powerful in modern Egyptian life. As Heo’s book repeatedly demonstrates, devotion to the holy dead shapes the horizons of possibility for the living—and those dying in the present. The Epigraph to the book’s final chapter is taken from a liturgical commemoration of the “New Libya Martyrs,” who were 21 Christians beheaded on February 15, 2015 by ISIS, and whose deaths were recorded and disseminated through the internet [2]: “Martyrs of the new covenant/Their blood was renewed/And their remembrance became a feast day” (237). The blood of the victims is renewed—purified—by the red baptism of martyrdom. Their deaths also renew the blood of martyrs past, including Christ’s. Recall Tertullian’s famous second-century dictum: “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”[3]

What forms of belonging do the memorialization of martyrs, ancient and new, make possible in the present? What uses do the living make of the dead? As Heo notes, “The Coptic Church is reinstituted across each act of remembering scenes of holy suffering and violence” (38). But the mobilization of memory through historically situated narratives that frame their deaths leads to very different communal boundaries, calibrating and foreclosing “horizons of Christian-Muslim belonging” (242). Important here are the ways in which the Libya martyrs were deployed as part of Sisi’s war on terror, a strategy related to his domestic project of suppressing Islamist elements in Egypt, beginning with his crucial role as commander of the Egyptian Armed Forces in the coup that deposed Morsi, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. This use of the martyrs by Sisi produced ambivalent effects for Copts. Seeking to forge a collective Egyptian identity, the state placed the martyrs under the supra-confessional rubric of the nation. Deeming the cause of their deaths “terrorism” rather than “sectarian” violence, the murders were interpreted as “attacks on the nation” (244) and leveraged to justify the state’s “war on terror.” The state approved the construction of a church in honor of the martyrs in the village of ‘Aur, home of fifteen of the victims. Their bodies and the church that commemorates them function as an ambivalent “territorial sign of minoritarian identity and military protection” (241). The state’s authorization of Coptic inclusion has also led to the exacerbation of Christian-Muslim tension. State sponsorship of the martyr’s memories has inspired some backlash among Muslim neighbors, generating resentment and violence (247-48).

A crucial part of memorialization, Benedict Anderson notes in chapter 11 of Imagined Communities, is forgetting. If there is a surplus of memory in the case of the New Libya martyrs, other deaths are strategically silenced. One example will have to suffice. In the “Maspero massacre” of 2011, state forces killed 28 unarmed Copts of the Maspero Youth Union. The youth were peacefully walking to the national TV headquarters, trying to find ways to represent themselves independently from the institution of the Coptic Church. Their deaths do not count as acts of martyrdom. “Their omission from communal memory,” Heo writes, “indexes the vulnerabilities attached to those Copts searching for a sense of Christian-Muslim belonging unyoked to religious institutions” (245).

Candlelight vigil/march for victims of Maspero massacre. Photo credit: Joseph Hill.

What we see in the radically different response to Maspero and Libya is what Heo, following Judith Butler in Frames of War, calls the “differential grievability of lives” (243), a difference that is determined largely by what is allowed to count as worthy of memory and what is consigned to forgetting in the name of forging a certain kind of community. In the case of Maspero, the Coptic Church aligned itself with the state in its forgetting of victims, seeking consensus with ruling powers. The Church disavowed the memory of some victims in order to determine the territory and terms of a certain form of community.

Heo’s book repeatedly shows the way in which devotion to the saints cannot be understood simply as a privatized affection for the holy figure, but is a site where the power of imagination and narrative in crafting particular frames of the holy helps conquer territory, define political fortunes and communities, and establish the boundaries of piety. Her account of contemporary Egypt resonates with my own work on thirteenth-century sanctity in the Southern Low Countries. In this context, lay women previously not seen as viable candidates for memorialization as holy figures—forgettable women—were advanced as saints by clerics through the creation of hagiographical narratives and political advocacy. The hagiographical representations of these figures (who manifested profoundly embodied forms of sanctity) were enlisted by the church to counter Cathar claims that the divine was necessarily immaterial (excluding the physical sacraments and the Incarnation). These theological defenses were used to underwrite military aims: the Lives written by Thomas of Cantimpré and James of Vitry called for Crusading efforts against Cathars. The depiction of the saint became a means of determining who counts in an emergent definition of “Christianitas,” the social body of Christ. The saintly body is not here only a synecdoche for the communal body, but is also a site of devotion that organizes the affections of the devout and sculpts their desire and memory in ways determinative of material realities, including the war on “heresy.” Seeking the generativity of anachronism, late ancient models of sanctity were recapitulated and repurposed for a new context.

However, as Heo shows, the memory of the saints is radically malleable, their futures never predetermined by their pasts; attempts by the state to enlist support for the war on terror through the sponsorship of the new Libya martyrs generated many unanticipated effects as they continued to signify multiple meanings and arouse very different allegiances for different communities—Muslim, Coptic, Evangelical, and Catholic. For Thomas of Cantimpré, insofar as his hagiography are works of propaganda, they are attempts to control just such malleability. However, even in this midst of this political project, his works demonstrate that saints remain in excess of attempts to quell their polyvalent, often ambiguous, potential. They are excessive not only because of the shaping power of audience expectations and the changing contexts in which their memory is taken up, but also because of a theological principle, recognized by Thomas, that insofar as a saint’s perfection manifests a divine plenitude that exceeds human attempts to shape or contain it, the narrative that re-presences it will never succeed at such attempts at capture, thereby keeping open the multiplicity of the possible afterlives of the saints, their exemplarity functioning to inspire forms of belonging and life together in ways that Thomas himself might have found perverse or unimaginable.

Coptic Icon of 21 Holy Martyrs of Libya. Photo Credit: Fadi Mikhail.

Different ways of telling the same story delimit different possibilities of inclusion even as memorialization entails a symbolic circulation that cannot be entirely predetermined at the outset. Heo hopes for change in the Egyptian political situation through the transformative solicitation of memory: “activating the memory of saints and martyrs, their appeal to millennia-long traditions point…to a set of deeply engrained sensibilities and landscapes that can retool horizons of memory and action, and hope toward common flourishing” (252). In other words, Heo is suggesting that communities might coexist and belong together differently depending on how narratives about saints are used by them.

This capacity for devotion to the saints to structure and make possible different kinds of community is not a form of anachronism—a melancholic nostalgia seeking revenge upon time—but rather a living, labile force of the present. If Heo argues that saints are not anachronisms, she is thereby making a larger claim about the persistence of religious traditions and communities of devotion across time. In the broadest sense, what Heo challenges is the secular assumption that religion itself is anachronistic. In fact, that opposite might be truer, namely that secularism is more truly anachronistic insofar as it is not in sync with the vicissitudes of time.

Heo’s work articulates the powerful potential of the (non)anachronism of the saints. This does not mean that Heo’s work on Egypt should be used to generalize about all other contexts.  However, recourse to Heo’s work may help us to recognize the different forms of anachronism that compose many modernities that are of the time and above it, and thereby remember and tell stories that facilitate other kinds of belonging.

 

[1] For an account of the moral valence given to anachronism by historians, for whom it is a “mortal sin,” see Jacques Rancière, “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth,” The History of the Present 3.1, art. 3 (2015): 26.

[2] Heo shows how modern technology has, in this case, allowed sanctity to be demonstrated in a much more expeditious way than the labored means of hagiographical narratives, miracle accounts, and eye witness statements. ISIS recorded and disseminated video of the beheadings that show each of the victims speaking the name of Jesus. This video was used as proof of the martyr status of all 21 victims, and the typical 50-year period required by the Coptic Church before sainthood can be declared was not applied (240).

[3] Tertullian, Apologeticus, ch. 50. Quoted by Heo, 38.

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Rachel Smith
Rachel Smith is associate professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. Her publications include Excessive Saints: Gender, Narrative, and Theological Invention in Thomas of Cantimpré's Mystical Hagiographies  (2018) and the co-edited volume, Hagiography and Religious Truth: Case Studies in the Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions  (2016). She is currently working on a project on asceticism and imagination.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Book Symposium On The Political Lives of Saints


Angie Heo’s The Political Lives of Saints. Book Cover used with permission from University of California Press.

In her ethnographic account of Coptic life in the modern Egypt, The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt, anthropologist Angie Heo seeks to counter the belief that religion, the secular, and the nation-state act independently of one another, instead reimagining them as interconnected sites of authority and power. However, rather than solely pursuing a discursive analysis, Heo trains her attention on the embodied practices in which Copts engage when they take up saintly relics, apparitions, and icons. Through various vignettes that analyze how such practices of veneration intersect with the wider institutional and ideological forces, Heo shows how Copts configure themselves in relationship to the Muslim-majority in Egypt as well as to the authoritarian Egyptian government.

The three essays in this symposium focus on how Heo makes space for the religious outside of, and sometimes in contest with, the secular. The religious here is not “apolitical” escape from the nation-state, but instead a politics imagined otherwise than what has been proffered by the state. Rachel Smith focuses on the interruption of secular temporalities that engagement with manifestations of saints makes possible. Anand Taneja shows how the affective energies transmitted by saintly images exceed the grasp of the religion/secular binary. And Kathryn Lofton reflects on perceptions of saintly wonderwork, arguing that such wonderwork suggests that there are human needs unmet by secular political configurations. In her reply, Heo responds by reflecting on both the possibilities and limits of theorizing saintly images as challenges to the secular.

Heo’s book and the essays collected here generate new ways of theorizing religion and secularism in the modern world that the Contending Modernities initiative seeks to foster. By thinking outside the US and European context about how secular and religious forces interact in the modern world, Heo’s book reminds us of the theoretical richness that is gained from expanding our accounts of religion and secularism.

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

Religion and Peacebuilding: A Postcolonial Perspective


End Islamophobia, Silent Protest at Union Station, Washington DC. Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull.

A postcolonial approach to the study of religion and peacebuilding must begin with demystifying the dominant myths that impede productive discussion. Popularized by academics, pundits, and the media, these myths reflect Eurocentric and Euro-American biases that have deep connections to colonialism. Demystifying these myths will make it easier to engage in peacebuilding work across religious traditions.

The first myth is the “clash of civilizations” myth proposed by political scientist Samuel Huntington. Huntington suggests that future wars and conflicts will not be fought because of ideological differences, but because of clashes between religiously based civilizations. His hypothesis became popular because it asserted Western hegemony and provided an explanation of world politics in the post-Cold War era. However, his understanding of cultural and religious difference has deep roots in colonial discourse. In Orientalism, Edward Said pointed out how, in pursuit of colonization, the West created an image of the “Orient” as inferior, backward, and uncivilized for the purposes of control and domination. Huntington reactivated this threat and the fear of colonial difference by treating civilizations as homogeneous and bounded entities with no cross-civilizational interactions and crossovers.

Edward Said. A Mural on a San Francisco Street. Photo Credit: Rachid H.

The second myth is the myth of secularization, which regards religion as irrational and incompatible with modernity. The secularist myth sees religion as either irrelevant or a problem for social life in general. More particularly, it sees religion as an obstacle to conflict resolution. Proponents of secularism point to religious elites and religious institutions as the sources of social conflict. This secularist myth displays Eurocentric and colonialist biases when it takes the development of Western history since the Enlightenment as the normative measure of the trajectories of other societies. In Formations of the Secular, anthropologist Talal Asad gives an historical account of the concepts and political formations of the secular that have shaped secular attitudes in the modern West and Middle East. He argues that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion or be seen as more rational than religion. The secular has a multilayered history in different cultures. His study challenges a monolithic understanding of modernity that uses capitalist modernity as the model, and invites further inquiries into what scholars have called “global modernities.”

The third myth is dangerous and Islamophobic, for it proposes that some religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, are inherently peaceful, while Islam is militant and condones violence and Jihadism. This argument is dangerous because it can lead to false stereotyping and the scapegoating of whole populations. It is ahistorical because it overlooks the Crusades, Christianity’s complicity in genocide and colonialism, and the internal rivalries within both Christian and Buddhist traditions. The association of Islam with religious violence and the language of “religious insurgence” as threatening also shows again a strong Orientalist bias. It downplays the history of colonialism, marginalization, and displacement in the Muslim world. The acts of a tiny minority of Muslim extremists should not be taken as representative of Islam as a whole. There are many Muslim leaders and organizations working tirelessly for peace. In Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam, Mohammed Abu-Nimer shows that there are principles and values in Qur’an, Hadith, and other elements in the Islamic tradition that support peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

Postcolonial studies can help demystify these myths and also shed light on problems inherent in the study of religion. Postcolonial critics point out that “religion” is a problematic category and the study of religion in the modern West has often been linked to racism and the construction of the Other. When the academic study of religion developed in the mid-nineteenth century during the heyday of colonialism, Christianity was taken to be the reference when compared to the “mythic” religions of the East and the “primitive” religions of Africa. As religion emerged as a field of study in academia, there was a tendency to treat “religion” as sui generis and separate from other cultural, social, and political aspects. This reductionist and simplistic approach continues to be seen in introductory “World Religion” courses. Here, different religious traditions are reduced to certain belief systems, creeds, heroes, and a few key practices. In the name of religious literacy, a very truncated form of knowledge is introduced, which may heighten the differences of diverse traditions and reinforce biases students have already held. These kinds of introductory courses do not promote dialogue and peacebuilding because they reinforce colonial and Orientalist myths. Using insights from postcolonial and decolonial studies, Richard King, David Chidester, Santiago Slabodsky, and myself have pointed to new ways of conceptualizing the study of religion and theology drawing on our studies of Indian religions, African religions, Judaism, and Christianity respectively.

Postcolonial studies also offers constructive criticism for the emerging field of religion and peacebuilding, which focuses on the themes of interreligious dialogue, the retrieval of religious resources for peacebuilding in various traditions, and the instrumental role that religious actors and networks play in the dynamics of both conflict and peacebuilding. While studies in these areas have much to contribute, too often their focus has been on male academics, educated elites, and prominent religious leaders. More than thirty years ago, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading postcolonial theorist, asked, “Can the subaltern speak?” Her question raised issues concerning the politics of representation, the relation between power and knowledge, and the importance of creating infrastructures so that subaltern voices could be heard and understood. In the study of religion and peacebuilding, it is crucial to pay attention to subaltern religious consciousness and grassroots efforts in promoting peace.

Cathayan Nestorian Cross from the Nestorian Stele. {{PD-US}}

Women’s participation in peacebuilding also needs to be highlighted. Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding discusses the obstacles and opportunities women religious peacebuilders face because patriarchal practices have often prevented them from assuming authority in religious organizations and leadership in peace efforts. Some women seek to work through religious institutions or find other spaces to promote peace and exert their influences. The late Dekha Ibrahim of Kenya, a devout Muslim, served as a trustee of Coalition for Peace in Africa and received several international awards for her peacebuilding efforts. Buddhist nun Mae Chee Sansanee from Thailand led a peace walk and reached out to Muslim women when conflicts broke out between the Buddhists and Muslims in southern Thailand. She has also led interreligious dialogue in conflict zones around the world. Catholic sister Marie-Bernard Alima of Congo formed a network called the Coordination of Women for Democracy and Peace to educate and train women to provide leadership in human rights, political movements, and efforts to prevent sexual and gender-based violence.

Postcolonial critics regard cultures and histories as overlapping and mutually inscribed, and such recognition can aid in peacebuilding. It is helpful to use the lens of hybridity to investigate how different religions and cultures have encountered, learned, and borrowed from one another and changed as a result. For example, when Christianity came to China in the seventh century, it had to borrow Buddhist and Daoist concepts to translate Christian terminologies. The symbol of Nestorian Christianity was a cross resting on a lotus flower, the latter of which is a symbol from Buddhism. A hybridized understanding of religious traditions and religious identities will help overcome a binary construction of “us” versus “them” and recover the history of complex interactions among diverse religious traditions. It will also open avenues to imagine identity and difference as fluid and changing in our increasingly interconnected world.

1 Comment on Religion and Peacebuilding: A Postcolonial Perspective Array
Kwok Pui Lan
Dr. Kwok Pui Lan was Dean’s Professor of Systematic Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, and a past president of the American Academy of Religion. She has authored and edited numerous books on Asian and Asian American feminist theology, biblical interpretation, and postcolonial criticism. An internationally known theologian, she is the author of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective; Postcolonial Politics and Theology, and Globalization, Gender, and Peacebuilding. She is the co-editor of The Hong Kong Protests and Political Theology and the editor of Transpacific Political Theology (forthcoming). She received the Lanfranc Award for Education and Scholarship from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2021.
Global Currents article

The Future of Islamic Authority: New Recipes for Milk Shaykhs


Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. administers the oath of office a second time with Barack Obama in the Map Room of the White House on Wednesday, January 21, 2009. Photo Credit: Peter Souza.

When president Obama took the oath to office, he unintentionally uttered a couple of the words in the wrong order. Although the meaning of the oath did not change, sticklers wondered whether the oath was legitimate and if Obama was really president. Doubts like this can linger and spiral out of control into conspiracies. So the matter was corrected in a privately conducted do-over ceremony the very next day. The authority of the Constitution was paramount, and every letter mattered. Rituals are tricky business in any culture, and Islam is no exception. Should the prayer be repeated if the person praying wasn’t facing Mecca? Is lab-grown meat halal to eat? Is that financial transaction valid? Can women serve as Imams of mixed-gender congregations? Who gets to decide?

The Sharia is complex, and that complexity has bred authority to help resolve, mediate, and manage it. A class of jurist-scholars (sg: ʿālim; pl: ʿulamāʾ) emerged to claim the authority of interpreting God’s will in Islamic civilizations. Ulama were authorized within communities of learning and knowledge transmission. They legitimized rulers as valid if they regulated affairs according to the Sharia. Rulers in turn authorized ulama by employing them to administer law and dispense justice. This structure of authority has been in crisis since colonialism and the rise of nation states.

The displacement of traditional authority has been traumatizing for Muslim societies, and the ʿulamāʾ have reacted in diverse ways. One response has come to be labeled Islamism: the wholesale attempt to take control of state authority and institutions. Another response manifests in retrenchment: reflexive cultural criticism of anything new and unfamiliar from behind the walls of the madrasa or from the elevation of the pulpit. Between these extremes are alternatives that seek either new forms of alignment between state institutions and traditional scholars (accommodation) or new paradigms of knowledge and authority (reconstruction).

13th century illustration depicting Muslim scholars in a public library in Baghdad, from the Maqamat Hariri. Bibliotheque Nationale de France.{{PD-US}}

The temptation to simplify might lead the analyst to see clear distinctions between these camps. But this temptation must be resisted, since the lines between retrenchment, accommodation, and reconstruction are in fact blurred. A single person may be accommodation-dominant, while exhibiting tendencies of retrenchment here, reconstruction there. And what believer in the Sharia is not an Islamist in some sense? After all, are the laws of God not designed for the common good? Should not divine wisdom have at least some relevance to public policy? The crisis of traditional authority is one of interpretation; it is not a difference of opinion on the imperative to submit to God’s will.

God’s will in the world is related both to private and public matters. The Sharia regulates not only prayer and charity, but also crime and punishment. And since the debates concerning interpretation have a direct bearing on policy and legislation, the issue of religious authority is inextricably linked to the concerns of those who wield political power. Muslim majority societies—whether they are despotic or democratic, Sunni or Shiite—and Muslims living as minorities all over the world have found their own ways to balance competing interests in the wake of modern dislocations. The space is wide open for creativity, whether genius or absurd.

An example of the latter is a notorious fatwa (legal opinion) emanating from a scholar of the famed Azhar University to deal with the problem of mixed-gendered workplaces. According to classical Islamic law, breastfeeding creates bonds of consanguinity and maternity. Drawing on this example, argued the scholar, men who drink from the milk of their coworkers would no longer have to observe the strictures of segregation in the workplace, becoming, as it were, a kind of household. In fairness, the opinion was retracted after severe criticism from within the very scholarly guild that authorized the scholar who issued the fatwa. But the damage was done. As Khaled Abou El Fadl points out, “One would be tempted to ignore this fatwa as a gross aberration or outlier if it were not part of a trend in contemporary Islamic discourse” (47).

This kind of “Milk Shaykh,” as I jokingly referred to him once, elicits laughter and derision in the classroom. But the point is a serious one: the erroneous Azhar scholar was attempting to respond to a particular crisis using classical modes of thought. In this case, the attempt was patently absurd and rightfully dismissed by his own traditional colleagues. Other attempts can be more sophisticated, but in their sophistication only serve to mask underlying problems that are structural in nature: in many instances, the methodology used to derive legal rulings no longer yields acceptable or intelligible outcomes.

Participants in Contending Modernities’ Madrasa Discourses Program discuss contemporary issues in Islamic Studies.

Academic institutions, particularly in North America and Europe, are beginning to provide a counterweight to madrasa scholars who wield authority in the name of the classical tradition. In bringing the tools of higher criticism to bear on Islamic history, academic scholars argue that traditional scholars do not notice the way that their supposedly objective interpretations of scripture reveal their subjective biases. According to contemporary convention, there is no such thing as objective knowledge. Knowledge is perspectival, history is contingent, and religious thought merely reflects the spirit of the age. This is not to say that all knowledge is relative, that there is no objective reality, or that things are unknowable; rather, it is to say that all knowledge is conditioned by subjective experiences; nobody holds the keys to objective reality, and things are knowable only from certain perspectives.

Ayesha Chaudhry uses the term “idealized cosmology” to express how preconceived notions of reality, particularly when it comes to gender hierarchy, are brought to bear on religious texts. Chaudhry is influenced by scholars like Kecia Ali who argue that the laws of Islam, however brilliant and coherent, cannot simply be tweaked to serve our purposes for today. Muslims need to construct a new legal system from the ground up using egalitarianism rather than hierarchy as a founding principle. Rumee Ahmed reads the history of Islamic law as a series of “patches” and “hacks” in an ongoing effort by classical scholars to keep it relevant for the times in which they live. His work makes plain what the classical tradition obscures: the law is human and subjective, and any attempt to make it appear otherwise is disingenuous. Ahmed, in a creative move of his own, suggests that the law can in fact be purposefully hacked by an anonymous team of activists working in amorphous online networks to develop legal formulas for our time to get us where we want to go. In this forumulation, anyone can be a milk shaykh.

What do these kinds of criticisms mean for religious authority in Islamic societies going forward? Lines have been drawn. Traditional scholars are caught in the old world, ensnared between revolution, irrelevance, and the unwitting support of despotism (see here and here). The dust has yet to settle from, as Wael Hallaq puts it, “the epistemic havoc wrought by modernity” (542). But if history is our guide, then despair not, for traditions are animated by crises. In a fresh and refreshing take on Muslim theology in response to the present crisis, Martin Nguyen argues that crises are a normal feature of religious life. Was not the “fall” of Adam & Eve a crisis? Does not every prophet respond to some kind of crisis, while generating fresh ones of his own? Are we each not preparing for the ultimate crises of death, resurrection, and accountability in the hereafter? In Islamic history, consider the succession of Muhammad, the civil wars in the days of the Companions, the Umayyad and Abbasid revolutions, the challenge posed by freethinkers and philosophers, the inquisition of Ma’mun, the occultation of the twelfth Imam, the reduction of caliphs to figureheads, the Crusades, the Mongols…

Religions are made for crises, and each crisis presents unique challenges. The uniqueness of the present crisis stems from its potential to demystify the past and reset the foundations of our engagement with God’s revelation. “The feminist edge of Qur’anic interpretation,” argues Aysha Hidayatullah, “is the site of dynamic challenges to the boundaries of Islamic tradition” (3). At these edges lie the greatest potentials for creative renewal. The conversation on authority tends to retreat to simplistic either/or categories: either the accommodationist tradition or the new wave of academic criticism toward reconstruction. If the vitriol on social media between these two camps is any indicator, the future may in fact be charted through such exclusivist binaries. Exclusive camps have always been there, and they always will be. Things are most interesting, however, at edges, intersections, and boundaries. That is where complexity resides, and that is where the kind of enduring authority that will command the middle can best plant its flag.

Array
Mahan Mirza
Mahan Mirza was appointed teaching professor and executive director for the Keough School's Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion on July 1, 2019.

An Islamic studies scholar and expert on religious literacy, Mirza brings extensive pedagogical and administrative experience to his roles at Notre Dame, including serving as dean of faculty at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college. Prior to his appointment as Executive Director of the Ansari Institute, Mirza served as the lead faculty member for Notre Dame's  Madrasa Discourses project, which equips Islamic religious leaders in India and Pakistan with the tools to confidently engage with pluralism, modern science, and new philosophies. 

Mirza holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. from Hartford Seminary, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University. He has taught courses and lectured on Arabic-Islamic studies, western religions, and the history of science, along with foundational subjects in the liberal arts, including logic, rhetoric, astronomy, ethics, and politics. He has edited two special issues of 
The Muslim World and served as assistant editor for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (2018).

He is a fellow with the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the Keough School and continues to serve as an advisor for Madrasa Discourses.
 
Field Notes article

Without Literacy, There is No Wisdom: Reflections on Madrasa Discourses’ Summer Intensive in India


Madrasa Discourses faculty and students. New Delhi India, July 2019

At the end of its four-day long intensive program (July 23–26, 2019) conducted in New Delhi, India, Madrasa Discourses (MD) bid the first batch of its Indian participants farewell. After three years together, the very thought of a farewell was overwhelming for both the faculty and participants; overcome with strong emotions, some of them even choked up and struggled to deliver their closing comments. Nevertheless, most of them were able to express the significance of the program for the madrasa community of India. The following three points can be gleaned from their comments and impressions of the program: (1) the program taught them the value of learning and disseminating knowledge for the common good of society; (2) it trained them to interpret the Islamic tradition in the light of modern knowledge and changed circumstances—a requisite intellectual tool, indeed, to keep any tradition alive; and, (3) though the event marked their departure from the program, it did not mark the end of their intellectual journeys. The emotions and the aspirations of the participants illustrated that they had acquired a sense of responsibility towards their community, a community which is going through, in the eyes of many, an “intellectual crisis.” MD can be considered an initiative to redress this crisis.

This essay outlines the discussions among those ʿulamāʾ invited to the symposium held on the first day of the intensive program at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, on July 23, 2019. It raises concerns about some of the approaches taken by the scholars who attended and points to alternative ways of approaching Islamic thought in the modern world. It should be noted that these are the author’s personal reflections and should not be attributed to MD or any of its faculty.

Ebrahim Moosa speaking at morning session of public program. Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, India. July 23, 2019

This intensive was the sixth held by MD during the last three years, and held a significance unlike previous intensives. Until now, MD had not been officially introduced to the circles of traditional ʿulamāʾ and the Muslim intellectual community of India. The first day of the program was designed to facilitate an open discussion on challenges that Islamic thought and the madrasa community have encountered. Prominent ʿulamāʾ and scholars were invited from across the country to take part in the discussion. The objective was to address the contemporary intellectual challenges to Islamic thought, and to inform the attendees that MD, with the help of the madrasa community, is committed to answering some of these challenges. The program was divided into three sessions: the first was devoted to invited lectures, and the remaining two sessions were dedicated to a discussion of the tensions between modern science, speculative theology (‘ilm al-kalām), and questions of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).

In the first public session, Mawlana Khalid Saifullah Rahmani, an eminent Deobandi scholar and head of the Islamic Fiqh Academy of India, delivered the keynote address. While one might have expected him to express his views on the contemporary theological challenges Muslims faced, Rahmani instead highlighted the historical phases which necessitated the emergence and evolution of early Muslim theology (‘ilm al-kalām). His understanding of ‘ilm al-kalām is fashioned after the common position which holds that the discipline is an intellectual exercise meant to defend Islamic creeds. Rahmani drew upon the historical experiences of Muslim scholastics and theologians and emphasized the need for a new-‘ilm al-kalām, which should be more comprehensive and able to address the modern challenges posed by philosophical and scientific questions. However, he made it clear that the creeds explicitly mentioned in the text are beyond the scope of any intellectual debate. Rahmani also pointed out that the entire battle between science/reason vs. religion uniquely stemmed from Christendom’s experience which turned into a battle of science/reason against religion. It then developed into a revolt against the authority of the Catholic Church followed by the persecution of philosophers and scientists. He suggested that today modern philosophy and science are composed of anti-religious elements thanks to the early opposition to both by the Catholic Church. Islam, on the other hand, had always appreciated the use of reason and thus can constructively engage with modern scientific challenges.

Rahmani’s reference to the historical development of modern science and philosophy forges a story that seeks the culprit in someone else’s camp. It holds the Church as the arch-culprit for fostering enmity between science and religion. What the purpose of such an account was intended to serve was not entirely clear. Perhaps it was intended to defend Islam and Muslims in terms of their historical encounter with science. If this is the case, the opposition of religion to philosophical exercises is not an unparalleled historical experience only found in the medieval Christian world. There are numerous examples that one can cite of anathematization of great Muslim philosophers and mutakallimūn by Muslim clergy that in some instances was followed by their persecution in the medieval Islamic world. It would be better if Rahmani engaged with the historical tensions and complexities that existed between Islamic orthodoxy and philosophy and kalām. It also might have been helpful if Rahmani demonstrated how Islamic thought dealt with contemporary science and philosophy.

Interestingly, the participants in the closed sessions concurred with Rahmani that contemporary Muslims needed a new-‘ilm al-kalām. Mawlana Mahmood Ahmad Ghazi, acting as the moderator, began the second closed session by asking whether the Islamic creeds can neatly categorize Islamic creedal doctrines into categories of debatable and non-debatable. While addressing the question, Mawlana Zishan Ahmad Misbahi stated that there are certain creeds, like the oneness of God, that are mentioned in the Qur’an, and therefore need to be left untouched. However, Misbahi claimed, those which were debated in the early history of Islam can also be debated today. Misbahi’s classification of some aspects of the creeds as fundamental and others as peripheral were consonant with Rahmani’s views, which, I think, represent the general approach taken in traditional thinking. Had the discussion continued along the same line, it could have yielded more valuable insights. However, the conversation veered in the direction of an apologetic theology, one which seeks to offer Qur’anic justifications for existing scientific beliefs. Such an approach superficially eradicates any contradictions between science and theology, but really engages neither science nor theological reasoning on their own terms. One critique that could be leveled at scholars who utilize this approach is that they entirely avoid addressing the underlying philosophical complexities—the tensions between medieval and modern presumptions about religion and science—and hence cherry-pick from a variety of available theories. Furthermore, this method of resolving contradictions between science and religion frequently fails to use a methodological framework based on sound philosophical presumptions, and rather uses an apologetic style of scriptural reasoning.

For example, one of the participants in the discussion reiterated a famous argument that the domains of religion and science are different. According to this participant, religion focuses on generating values on the basis of revelation and is thus redemptive in nature, while science concentrates mainly on developing a lifestyle that is compatible with technological advancement. This participant claimed the latter thus has nothing to do with values. Though the argument seemed convincing to some in the audience, placing science and religion in two separate domains is problematic because human beings do not live their lives in ways that mirror such bifurcation. We live in a new world created by modern science and adapted to it. Treating religion as something unrelated to science is thus a grave mistake and causes contradictions in actions and beliefs.

Afternoon Session of Madrasa Discourses Program. Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. July 23, 2019

For most of the participants, the word “science” only referred to material science. An unidentified participant suggested that one should also consider the social sciences in a discussion of science. A professor of physics claimed that the social sciences were entirely based on ignorance, or jihālat. An observer was unsure if he was being sarcastic or serious. It is interesting to note that the term jihālat or jāhili connotes, especially for Islamists, a system—social, political, or knowledge—which is essentially anti or un-Islamic.

In the last afternoon session, the discussion turned to Islamic jurisprudence. I recall a scholar trained in religious education (‘ālim pl.ʿulamāʾ) arguing that Islam prohibited slavery a very long time ago. And those Muslims who practiced it, he claimed, were actually violating the rules of Islam. Additionally, he also explained the “wisdom” embodied in one of the most famous verses of the Qur’an 4:34, which appoints men to be in charge of women. The verse states that if a wife disobeys her husband, he is allowed to strike her. The verse has been a bone of contention among feminists, modernists, and traditionalists. The ‘ālim explained that the verse allows a husband to strike his wife only if she indulges in fornication. Instantly, he was asked should a wife be allowed to strike her husband if he does the same. He replied, without taking a pause, that it would be unnatural for her to do so. To me, the overall view of the ‘ālim sounded rather odd. For example, I later discovered that his view was not supported by Islamic law which reserves the right to administer punishment exclusively for the government—there is no permission for the husband to strike a wife who engages in fornication in Islamic law.

Such explanations assume that every good which can possibly exist has already been explained in the Qur’an. On this approach, where in Western thought human rights which ground prohibitions on slavery and give equality to women are a modern development, in Islam they are much older since they originated with the revelation of the Qur’an; Islam had allocated these rights using an alternative framework to human rights fourteen centuries ago. This type of reading of the Qur’an worries me because it imposes its own modern understanding of the world onto past periods in Islamic history while ignoring the  different contexts that shaped how Muslims understood and interpreted the Qur’an. For instance, the modern discourse of human rights entitles a person to certain rights, for example, freedom, equality, etc., on the basis of his/her being a human being. Hence, the word “right” in this context would be interpreted as entitlement. A violation of any human right by an individual or a state would be an affront to a human person. A comparison between the modern western conception of “right” with the medieval Islamic understanding of the word, ḥaqq (wrongly translated as a “right” like a human right) would reveal that the Muslim jurists conceived the word ḥaqq not as “entitlement” but as “duty” towards his/her fellow citizens and the state, which is contradictory to modern rights discourses (Moosa, 2000–2001). This example shows the problems that appear when one equates modern rights discourses with traditional Islamic thought. I could produce several more examples which prove a conceptual departure of Muslims from the medieval to the modern world, however, the scope of this essay does not allow it. The point is that Muslim scholars should accept this departure, show courage to shoulder the accountability of the history they inherit, and be ready to reinterpret parts of their tradition which are inconsistent with their modern experiences. Though it is easy to reject the past or confuse the modern with something already in the tradition, doing so intellectually paralyzes Islamic thought.

1 Comment on Without Literacy, There is No Wisdom: Reflections on Madrasa Discourses’ Summer Intensive in India Array
Mohammad Ali
Mohammad Ali is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India. He is also a graduate of the Madrasa Discourses program.