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Theorizing Modernities article

Evading Masculinized Modernity


Makhuwa women in Mozambique. Photo Credit: Steve Evans.

Devaka Premawardhana’s Faith in Flux is a beautifully written and conceptually rich work that successfully challenges central theoretical assumptions about Pentecostalism in Africa today: that it entails a rupture with the past, especially “traditional” ways of being, and that its spread and imaginal hold has been ubiquitous. Asked to reflect on how Premawardhana’s book resonates with my own, An Intimate Rebuke (2018), I wondered how my study of female genital power (FGP) in the indigenous traditions of West Africa could possibly relate to a work on Pentecostalism in northern Mozambique. Most consonant is a common claim that underlying matrifocal traditions endure and have the capacity to evade the encroachments of a masculinized modernity.

Both our works employ a “bottom up” approach, one that does not deny or minimize the “influence of global forces on local worlds” but reasserts the primacy of local ontologies. Premawardhana’s focus on the “easily overlooked registers” of lived practice (15) is akin to my efforts to make visible the subjugated knowledge of female power. My book strings together the beads of evidence of an ancient and widespread, but often overlooked, “local” ritual of anti-witchcraft, and shows it to embody a foundational African principal: Post-menopausal women, called the Mothers, wield an innate moral authority. Stripping and exposing their breasts and genitals as the seat of their power, they curse any who violate the moral mandates. Women deploy their “bottom power” as a spiritual weapon, but also mobilize and perform FGP to protest the state’s abuse of secular authority. So I argue that the Mothers’ embodied rebuke challenges the meta-narratives of modernity that assume that only a rupture with traditional ways can usher in greater liberation and empowerment. Likewise, Premawardhana reads the everyday occurrences of the Makhuwa people against the grain of well-worked theoretical assumptions about tradition’s inflexibility. Challenging the idea that African Pentecostalism is experienced as a radical break from local tradition, his “counternarrative” relates a more fluid account of conversion, presenting it as an oscillation between different ways of being (19). Living for a year among the Makhuwa, Premawardhana notices that their “pluralistic disposition” allows them to subscribe to multiple, conflicting religious doctrines, depending on context (104). This is not so much a matter of “syncretism” as an expression of their value of community and the “imperative of intersubjectivity” (105). It allows “conversion” to be sincere, even if fleeting or occasional.

The nomadic Makhuwa have a “long history of not just mobility, but mobility of the circular kind” that allows for return and renewal (64). Their “existential mobility” keeps their traditions vital; when faced with the external pressures of masculinizing modernity, the “matricentric” Makhuwa choose migration over confrontation and capitulation. Such flexibility contrasts sharply with the fixity of the state and its development policies that depend on firmly situating its peasantry within its borders. But Makhuwa mobility only challenges the impositions of the state obliquely. By contrast, in West Africa the Mothers’ public performance of the spectacular rite of FGP directly confronts the postcolonial state and condemns its cruel and brutal violence overtly.

An Intimate Rebuke makes “matrifocal morality” the principle underlying the various manifestations of FGP in ritual and politics, and also shows it to be the founding knowledge and binding power that lends cultural coherence to a plethora of traditions in the region. Premawardhana similarly reaches for an overarching vision, aiming to interpret Makhuwa Pentecostalism as a variation on “the theme of centripetal motherhood traced throughout this book” (165). However the book actually offers only two points of entry for understanding “the matricentric character of Makhuwa society” (25). Ironically, the first and main one is Premawardhana’s analysis of male initiation.

Interior of a Pentecostal church in Mozambique. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

Building on Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s classic analyses of the symbolic meaning and transformative power of movement through spatial planes, Premawardhana emphasizes the initiates’ multiple, literal processions to show that they foster “border consciousness” (90). His thesis is that the site of self-making is “full of discontinuous and non-contiguous domains” that instill “dispositions toward malleability” and make Makhuwa see rupture as “routine” (90–91). However, the most crucial moment of initiation is not about clean borders and discontinuities. It is a ritual genital modification that inscribes on the body a symbolic conflation of genders. Premawardhana calls it “circumcision,” although he acknowledges that the operation “does not entail the removal of foreskin, but rather a slit across the top of it” (86). Unlike circumcision that “purifies” men of gender ambiguity by removing excess flesh suggestive of the labia, the object is to draw blood. This “mimesis of menstruation” is clearly referenced by the boys’ ritual guardians who sing, “The vagina has opened!” They explicitly state, “you are imitating your mother,” and make the boys submit to the taboos of menstruating women (86–87). Significantly, Makhuwa neophytes are not permanently separated from the female domain but are returned to their mothers who readily identify and reclaim them. Consideration of penile subincision rites elsewhere would have revealed the procedure’s significance as a symbolic usurpation of female power and gender doubling. In a subsequent chapter we belatedly learn that the Makhuwa measure time by the phases of the moon, which are associated with the cyclical rhythm of women’s menses; that the full moon is the time of contact with the ancestral spirits; and that women exclusively act as healers who perform their work at night (124). Subincision and bleeding clearly allow men to capture ritually the natural cyclical movement and innate capacity for renewal as their own. Premawardhana suggests the boys temporarily “pass through womanhood” in order to become differentiated from women (89). But Makhuwa subincision actually seems to establish the permanent assimilation of men with women in order to acquire their innate sacrality.

Whether through initiation “gender boundaries are thus simultaneously constructed and traversed” (91) remains a question, rather than a conclusion, for although Premawardhana notes that Makhuwa girls’ initiation takes place at the same time as the boys’, we learn nothing more about it. The male ritual stands as the sole basis of Premawardhana’s theory. Premawardhana’s focus on the male ritual reinforces the stereotype of women’s natural profaneness and subordinates their biological capacities to male religious culture. However, Makhuwa tradition, stories, song-riddles, and even the etymology of the sacred mountain who is mother of humanity (“she who menstruates”),  combine to demonstrate that for the Makhuwa, God is not just “conceived of in feminine terms” but is female (124).

The second, more promising point of entry for understanding Makhuwa matricentricity is an exclusively female healing society. When Premawardhana finally turns attention to this traditional domain, he allows himself to be teased by men into intruding into the women’s sacred circle (124). He submits that he was authorized to “violate the gendered divide” by the healer’s husband who urges Premawardhana to observe it “up close,” and who accompanies him into the hut (124). As in the case of female initiation, however, we never learn any details. More might have been made of the woman’s ability to make bodies whole, or of the sinuous meanderings of the eyinlo, the dance ceremony performed “almost entirely by women” that Premawardhana mentions earlier and only in passing (138). As it stands Makhuwa matricentricity remains an abstraction, a shadow, known essentially through the “side-stepping” moves taken to avoid the fixity and permanence that conversion to Pentecostalism supposedly demands.

Chapter 5 in Part III alone attends to the subject of women directly, especially their status in Makhuwa society. It attempts to account for informants’ regular assertion that “Makhua women have no religion” (117). By “religion” they mean Christianity or Islam, and the comment refers to the fact that “girls follow the religion of their maternal uncles; wives follow the religion of their husbands” (117–18). Premawardhana reinterprets the statement, suggesting that it is not about the modern patriarchal constraints that make it impossible for women to choose their own affiliations voluntarily, but something “quite the opposite of internalized oppression” (129). His creative analysis regularly represents the current women’s situation, no matter how diminished or subjugated, as a defiant retention of traditional power, arguing that it is women’s exclusion from the processes of modernization that has enabled them to preserve matricentric Makhuwa ways (117).

Although he recognizes that women’s lack of access to education was “a travesty” that undermined their prospects in an increasingly cash-based economy, he proposes that this made women “the more accomplished evaders” of a masculinized modernity (131–32). By Premawardhana’s reasoning, it is “because of, not in spite of, the prestige they ‘lack’ today” that women have been able to retain social standing (131). He builds his case on the fact that “in the realm of domestic cults… it is not the wife who follows the ‘religion’ of the husband but exactly the opposite” (126). Even so, he questions whether the matrilineal “domestic ancestral cults” qualify as “religions” (126). With this clever move Premawardhana simultaneously makes the assertion that “women have no religion” appear liberating, and establishes an affinity between women’s indigenous traditions and the embodied, oral expressions characteristic of Pentecostal forms of worship which, he argues, similarly “barely register as religions” (129). Another supposed “collateral benefit” of women’s marginalization from “world religions” (a loaded term that Premawardhana unfortunately uses throughout unproblematically) is that women are able to “draw seamlessly from a variety of traditions, unburdened by the normative concerns of religious elites” (136). Such intellectual acrobatics also allow him to account for women’s disproportionate numbers in the otherwise flailing rural congregations and to deem it a sign of female agency. Women are supposedly attracted not because they enjoy “enhanced authority and autonomy” in that religion but “because it is not a religion” at all (129). Here it felt like truth was sacrificed to rhetoric.

Makhuwa women dancing in Pentecostal church. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

Premawardhana’s poetic prose pairs “conceptual antinomies,” like mobility and return or firmness and flexibility, and works them to persuasive effect (154). His arguments hinge on the generative connection that he draws between them. But, such conceptual brilliance should not blind us from hard facts that push back against otherwise seductive intellectual reconciliations. For example, Premawardhana argues on one hand that “Pentecostal and indigenous traditions are corporeally continuous in ways that defy Pentecostalism’s rhetoric of rupture” with the past (156, emphasis mine). On the other hand, he notes elsewhere that the male Pastor’s firm handshake and rigid upright posture intentionally contrast with women’s sinuous dances and therefore represents a conscious break with the fluid dispositions of the Makhuwa somatic habitus (141, emphasis mine).

The book concludes with an anecdote about a dull Pentecostal church meeting enlivened when the minister puts forth a riddle that invites men to consider whether they owe primary duty to their mother or wife. Presented in the style of an African dilemma tale and palaver, the circular discussion is recounted to illustrate the Makhuwa “skill of polyontological mobility” (169). This ability to dissolve dilemma by embracing seemingly opposing possibilities ostensibly keeps Makhuwa “faith in flux.” (169–70). Ironically, these men “on the move” seem not to notice or care that missing from their circle of church leadership are the very women they purport to revere. While the Makhuwa case may not conform to the scholarly trend that characterizes Pentecostalism as a radical break with tradition, neither does it convincingly portray a fluid retention or cyclical movement of return to the “’Mother’ religions” that Premawardhana suggests are the essence of local ontology.

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Laura S. Grillo
Laura S. Grillo earned her Ph.D. in History of Religions from The University of Chicago, and M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary. Her book,
An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa (Duke UP, 2018) was a finalist for the Raboteau Prize in Africana Studies. Laura is co-author of the innovative textbook,
Religions in Contemporary Africa (Routledge 2019) as well as author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, encyclopedia entries, and chapters in critical anthologies on African and African Diaspora religions and religious ethics. She has held Fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Chicago, and was awarded research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the West Africa Research Association and the American Academy of Religions (AAR). For six years Laura led the African Religions Group in the AAR; she is now on the steering committee of the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association (ASA). She has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and is currently an editor for Religion Compass Journal as well as the
Bloomsbury Book Series in “Religion, Gender, and Sexuality.”
Theorizing Modernities article

Inequality in Flux


A boat on the Ilha de Moçambique, an island off the coast of Mozambique. Credit: Flickr user F Mira

Devaka Premawardhana’s study of mobility among Makhuwa-speakers in Northern Mozambique comes with strenuous efforts to denounce analytical models based on the idea of hybridity in religious and social life. These efforts serve to distance his own position from the accusation which the targets of his primary critique could so easily hurl back at him. For Premawardhana is primarily concerned to denounce what he calls “the rupture paradigm” (163), an analytical position that has, particularly in the recent studies of Pentecostal Christianity in the Global South, sought to theorize radical change as a matter of moving from one exclusive system of meaning to another. If not hybridity, what then is Premawardhana’s alternative in this rather high-stakes theoretical argument?

One phrase Premawardhana uses to convey his position is “existential mobility,” which he feels “connotes human improvisation, experimentation, and opportunism” (42). Another phrase is “polyontological mobility,” with which he explores his finding that while Makhuwa-speakers have come to see religions as “nonoverlapping,” their “facility of transgression” enables them to engage those religions (and other seemingly incompatible practices) as “serially compatible” (100). Mobility is the key term here, not simply to record the important role played by spatial migration in the region both historically and at present, but also to draw attention to the frequent “oscillations” (76) that occur between different symbolic and practical spheres. Makhuwa idioms come to Premawardhana’s aid in conceptualizing the primacy of mobility. For instance, the Makhuwa word for veins is said to do the work that the word for roots does in English-language expressions of identity, with the important difference that where roots serve to locate, veins serve to mobilize through circulation (67). A “language of leaving and entering” also informs local idioms of religious conversion, as it does the everyday oscillations between village and bush (73).

Veins or roots? Credit: Flickr user Dace Kiršpile

Faith in Flux, the author’s own idiom for his overall project, conveys thus both “an inconstant faith” and “faith in the virtue of inconstancy” (20). As one instance of how this is an exemplary work in contemporary anthropology, local idiom and circumstance inspire thoughts on human lives beyond the local confines. “We do not have cultural identities but cultural repertoires,” Premawardhana puts it sagely (17). Yet it is not only the spectre of hybridity that Premawardhana has to worry about throughout the book. Recognized, albeit under-theorized, in his insights is the inequality among human subjects to appropriate cultural repertoires. Premawardhana warns against “unduly romanticizing mobility, fluidity, and flux,” and indicates awareness of border regimes (76). Hybridity aside, how far does his alternative position take us beyond certain other intellectual and political preoccupations of the 1980s and 1990s? It would seem to carry more than a hint of the optimism that then characterized discussions about agency, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.

Premawardhana’s study is subtle enough to consider examples of curtailed or aborted mobility. One example concerns a farmer whose crops had been destroyed by elephants (68–69). The man’s determination to plant again and his refusal to relocate startled Premawardhana, who came to realize that the Makhuwa word for patience was also the word for courage. He reports to have discovered courage, “perhaps even agency,” in the man’s apparent resignation to his fate. In a similar vein, he marvels at the “improvisational skill” among women who had been forced by their men to renounce some aspects of their religious repertoires (121). “The creative ways to respond” that he identifies furnish compelling evidence, but the analytical optimism, welcome as it is in these troubled times, begs more questions than it answers. If linguists’ work on code-switching, for example, provides one analogy for Premawardhana’s approach (100), why not follow their lead and address inequality as well as improvisation and agency in such processes? What are the conditions and constraints of multiplicity that is not simultaneous but serial, the stuff of the above-mentioned “facility of transgression”?

Perhaps the difficulty here is the imagery of “serially compatible” orientations and practices. It does not dispense with the imagery of discrete or mutually exclusive domains that Premawardhana has found so objectionable in the “rupture paradigm.” To dispense fully with such imagery, not least in the interest of examining inequality, takes us to a period before the optimism of the 1990s to applications of field thinking in mid-century social anthropology. Max Gluckman, whom Premawardhana identifies in a footnote as an “antecedent” for changes in anthropology through the 1980s and 1990s (176), developed with his colleagues a set of methods and concepts to address issues such as urbanization and race relations in Central Africa. Characteristic of their work was to combine fine-grained case studies of negotiated and situational meanings with the analysis of social fields. As I have put it elsewhere, “even the most fleeting, small-scale social interactions had to be understood within a field of relationships of another order, structured and yet not determined by political, economic and ideological forces not immediately apparent to the participant observer” (Englund 2018, 130).

Would field thinking, in other words, complement Premawardhana’s principled commitment to phenomenology? The dilemma is, of course, at least as old as the division between phenomenological and structural approaches to the study of social life. Nor are the exemplary qualities of Premawardhana’s work diminished by historical myopia. “Slavery and warfare,” he writes, “infuse the historical consciousness of those among whom I lived” (44). Yet his principled effort to go “against all forms of abstraction” (15) represents little progress from the positions he seeks to overcome. The alternative to rupture and hybridity begins to look like opportunism in which the questions of inequality get sidelined. The challenge, for which methodological remedies were proposed by Gluckman and his colleagues, is to regard apparently disparate social practices in antagonistic integration within a social field. It is, to evoke Premawardhana’s terms, more oscillation than optimism that one would hope to see in the alternative he proposes—oscillation between phenomenology and field thinking.

References

Englund, Harri (2018). “From the Extended-Case Method to Multi-Sited Ethnography (and Back).” In M. Candea (ed.) Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory, 121–33. London and New York: Routledge.

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Harri Englund
Theorizing Modernities article

The Art of Not Being Converted


Two Makhuwa women walking to perform a ritual at sunset. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

Whence comes conversion? What happens when a social agent makes the all-important decision to, no pun intended, take a leap of faith and embrace a religious formation and spiritual pragmatics different from those to which they’ve been accustomed? Is conversion rupture, a process, or both? These questions have long puzzled anthropologists and historians of religion, yielding a scholarship known more for its disputations than agreements. In this sense alone, Faith in Flux could not have chosen a more muddied stream to step into; yet, the dilemma it leads with could hardly be more clarifying – how to make sense of conversion among a people, not only “predisposed to convert,” but “having done so once… feel little need to stop” (25). The people in question are the Makhuwa (also Makua) of northern Mozambique, a people, as Devaka Premawardhana narrates, not exactly strangers to “flight”—willful or enforced—and of an almost incurably pluralistic disposition.

Premawardhana takes aim at two intellectual sacred cows simultaneously: on the one hand, the presumed antithesis between mobility and contextual analysis; on the other, the prevalent characterization of Pentecostalism as an inexorable force, sometimes completely erasing, sometimes radically modifying, but at all times profoundly affecting every culture it touches. Premawardhana insists, first, that contextual and cultural analysis and existential anthropology are, all things considered, fraternal twins; and second, that in the sheer inconstancy and fluidity of Makhuwa culture, the Pentecostal inexorable has met its immovable.

If the argument in Faith in Flux seems, on the whole, persuasive and sound, it is because Premawardhana is such a brilliant and engaging writer. He not only writes affectionately and respectfully about a people among whom he spent an extended period of time, he also shows how the everyday lives of ostensible spatial outliers can yield instructive moments that deepen our understanding of social change in an era of globalization. Premawardhana’s sensitivity to the cultural integrity of the Makhuwa is matched by his knowledge of the literature by whose lights he admirably refracts their lives. He has chewed over the bones of contention in the literature, and is at his most penetrating when juxtaposing the presuppositions of contending anthropological and theoretical traditions. Still, not once does he apprentice Makhuwa lives to the presumed wisdom of the literature; on the contrary, he insists on close attention to their apparently unruly spiritualities as a way of coming to terms with modes of existence that unsettle those glib distinctions that constitute the very apparatus with which scholars aspire to get a handle on reality. Rural Mozambique (rural anywhere?), we learn, is not some hapless backwater, a homogenous “periphery” prostrate before the advance of global forces, but a space of ceaseless crossings and unsuspected vitality.

In two key areas, Premawardhana mobilizes data and advances arguments that give a new turn to the scholarly debate. The first is in our understanding of mobility, an idea rapidly acquiring the status of a curse word as the North, broadly speaking, angles to batten down against the South. Contra such mobility talk and the angst that always seems to follow in its wake, Premawardhana privileges instead “polyontological mobility,” a cultural constant, at least as observed in the Makhuwa, that gives rise to waves of traversals and reversals. He asks: “Is it possible that there are people for whom movement across borders [you can be sure he doesn’t mean physical borders alone], engagement with alterity, and exposure to the new are, despite their dangers, preconditions for well-being?” (161). Second, and in a direct challenge to the somewhat settled understanding of conversion as a foundational phenomenon, one that prompts new forms of embodiment and emotional resolve, Premawardhana, summoning anthropologist Edmund Leach, wants us to reflect instead on the banality of conversion, i.e. the possibility that “what appear to outsiders as momentous shifts may be experienced by insiders as unexceptional” (161). Far from denying the reality of both mobility and conversion, Premawardhana is in fact reminding us that both are often imbued with a “circular and situational character” (14). Premawardhana’s point about mobility is taken, but his argument in regard to conversion leaves me slightly flustered. Is he not, pace a not insignificant section of the relevant literature, also assuming the fixity or permanence of what is being converted from? Shouldn’t the knife of fluidity (flux) cut both ways? If conversion is really the banal phenomenon that Premawardhana urges us to accept it as, why is it that it often signals new behavioral, moral, and relational protocols on the part of the convert? Among Nigerian Pentecostals, a premium is placed on being “Born Again,” quite literally a convert’s breakup with their former subjectivity.

Exterior of Pentecostal church in northern Mozambique. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

Faith in Flux is a compact but theoretically ambitious work. Although it immediately grapples with religious encounter and social fluidity in a “remote” corner of Africa, the author’s core theoretical concern is to vindicate those (the radical empiricist Michael Jackson is an obvious influence) who endeavor to use existential-phenomenological anthropology as a way of apprehending life “in all its aspects, its contingencies no less than its norms, its shadows no less than its centers” (17). In the joyous freedom with which it weaves the scattered minutiae of Makhuwa lives—from circumcision to dissolution—Faith in Flux is a paragon of this modality.

Some of the book’s claims strike me as not quite plausible or at least in need of urgent reevaluation. For instance, say we set aside conversion: Isn’t the presence of a Pentecostal church in the farthest reaches of Mozambique the very confirmation of the “explosion” that Premawardhana denies? Obviously taken with Makhuwa existential nomadism, Premawardhana appears to speak derisively of “a bourgeois tendency to locate well-being in secure and stable identities, in tethering ourselves to something firm: brick homes, political structures, religious cultures” (161). I ask: What’s wrong with being bourgeois? What’s wrong with that bourgeois tendency? Also, suggesting that “Western intellectual tradition has had a hard time dealing with change” seems an uncharacteristically slack thing to say given Premawardhana’s singular abhorrence of reification.

These quibbles, for that’s what they are, are not meant as an indictment of Premawardhana’s theses in the book, but conversely to prod him toward greater clarity and call his attention to untoward wrinkles on an otherwise splendidly woven fabric.

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Ebenezer Obadare
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington, D.C.; a fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute of Theology, and contributing editor of Current History. Author and editor of numerous books on religion and politics and state and civil society in Africa, Obadare’s most recent work is Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender and Sexuality in Nigeria (Notre Dame Press, 2022). He is editor of Journal of Modern African Studies, published by Cambridge University Press.  
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Faith in Flux


Devaka Premawardhana’s Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique is an ethnographic study of how the Makhuwa, a rural people from northern Mozambique, have experienced conversion from their traditional Makhuwa religion to Pentecostalism. Perhaps counterintuitively to western-educated scholars of religion and anthropology, it is also a study of how such conversion does not necessitate ceasing to engage in traditional Makhuwa religious practices, or preclude returning to them. This is counterintuitive to many scholars because anthropological studies of Pentecostalism have tended to treat conversion to Pentecostalism as an indication that one has made a decisive and irreversible break with the past. This account fails, however, to account for the virtue of mobility that is cultivated through Makhuwa practices. In attending to how Makhuwa organize space, tell their creation narratives, engage in rituals, and relate to the modern nation-state, Premawardhana is able to demonstrate that the Makhuwa are a traditionally mobile people. In other words, the Makhuwa are mobile not because they seek to evade the constraints of tradition, but precisely the opposite, because they are working within them. The arrival of Pentecostalism has certainly set Makhuwa faith in flux, but the potential disruption of this arrival is offset by Makhuwa faith in flux (a virtue that is also prized in Pentecostal practices, if not in the claims of its elite representatives). Conversion to Pentecostalism therefore need not be the beginning nor the end of a story for a Makhuwa person, but simply another chapter.

Premawardhana is able to see this aspect of Makhuwa tradition because he engages in an existential anthropological approach to the lived experiences of the Makhuwa themselves. What he finds through attending to such lived experiences is that the Makhuwa people with whom he lives and studies see the world through the lens of mobility; mobility is existential, or life-defining, for the Makhuwa (17). And it is this existential mobility that allows for the Makhuwa to move in and out of different traditions without anxiety. In seeking a one-time conversion event, Premawardhana suggests, anthropologists have betrayed a particular Christian understanding of conversion, one that indicates a desire on the part of the theorist to find something like Saint Augustine’s sudden conversion to orthodox Christianity from which he never looked back. While this trope has been secularized in modern anthropological work, its theological potency has remained. Through his existential approach, Premawardhana is able to bring to light a non-Christian theory of change and to push anthropologists to think more expansively about the categories they employ in their work.

The essays collected in this symposium reflect critically on the methodology and conclusions Premawardhana reaches in Faith in Flux. Ebenezer Obadare lauds Premawardhana’s argument in the book, but questions whether or not Premawardhana goes too far in privileging indigenous Makhuwa religion as a stabilizing tradition, even if that tradition is one that countenances change. Harri Englund questions whether or not Premawardhana’s focus on phenomenology to the exclusion of larger ideological structures risks obscuring inequalities that might be present among the Makhuwa. Laura Grillo pushes Premawardhana to reflect more on the gendered dynamics among the Makhuwa, as well as the gendered dynamics that shape Premawardhana’s own analysis. And finally, Robert Baum suggests that Premawardhana’s theory of conversion is one that improves upon an earlier theory of “reconversion” he put forward, and suggests that he will draw on Premawardhana’s insights in his future work on women prophets in post-colonial Senegal. In his response, Premawardhana reflects on the contributions that each of these scholars have made to his own thinking and engages with each of their critiques.

Through its focus on how the Makhuwa uniquely navigate religious, political, and social forces in modern Mozambique, Premawardhana’s book speaks to the ongoing need to balance thick descriptions of communities with reflection on the theoretical tools—which often contain particular Christian theological assumptions—scholars employ to understand them. This ongoing exchange between theory and ethnographic description is key to the Contending Modernities initiative (CM) to improve our understandings of secularism and religion in modernity. These terms, as Premawardhana reminds us, are not static, but must be understood as temporally, geographically, and socially contingent. CM, by focusing on geographical and social settings outside the Euro-American context, seeks to de-provincialize our discussions of religion, secularism, and modernity, and in doing so aid in efforts to decolonize the academic study of all three.

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

Madrasa Discourses Goes to Bangladesh


Dr. Ebrahim Moosa presents his talk, “Reconsidering the Ethical in Contemporary Islamic Thought” on January 1, 2020

After a successful winter intensive with our most recent batch of first year students, Contending Modernities co-director and Primary Investigator for the Madrasa Discourses program, Dr. Ebrahim Moosa, and I travelled to Dhaka, Bangladesh to lead a two-day workshop introducing local ulama (religious scholars) to the Madrasa Discourses program (MD). There, Professor Moosa also delivered a public lecture, “Rethinking the Ethical in Contemporary Islamic Thought,” as a part of BRAC University and Georgetown University’s co-sponsored lecture series on faith and development. Moosa’s lecture on January 1, 2020 drew a large crowd, many of whom stuck around after the presentation to continue the conversation over tea. In his talk, Professor Moosa argued that contemporary Islamic ethics too often focuses on law at the expense of spheres of life that influence ethics such as philosophy, science, and art. He suggested that a renewed approach to Islamic ethics would expand its horizons beyond law to consider how these areas of thought could also aid Muslims in deliberating over ethical matters.

The two-day workshop kicked off the following morning with introductions from Dr. Katherine Marshall (Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center) and from Dr. Samia Huq (Associate Professor as the Department of Economics and Social Science, BRAC University) who organized the public lecture and workshop. Following these introductions, I presented to workshop attendees on the history of science and religion. The lecture and discussion focused on a few chapters from Peter Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion. In the ancient world, I argued, science and philosophy were less concerned with justifying a set of doctrinal beliefs (as they seem often to be now), and more concerned with the formation of the self. Science and religion, in other words, were focused on instilling virtue rather than establishing objective truths about the world. Participants responded by reflecting on the role of personal formation in the Islamic tradition, and questioning whether the relationship between religion and science in the Euro-American context was the same as in the Islamic context of South Asia and the wider Muslim world. In the afternoon, Dr. Rana Dajani (Hashemite University, Jordan) picked up the discussion, introducing students to the theory of evolution and the modern scientific method. The students responded to her presentations with questions that displayed a keen interest in understanding the nuances of the theory of evolution. Throughout the day Professor Moosa tied together the presentations by describing the history and goals of the Madrasa Discourses program and how these related to the curriculum that attendees were sampling in the lectures.

Dr. Ebrahim Moosa discusses the concept of human dignity during the two-day workshop

The day’s activities were followed by dinner with local ulama and educational leaders in Bangladesh. The discussion focused on the desire of leaders in the Islamic community to refine and update their educational system. Several attendees expressed a desire to create an integrated system of education, where both secular and religious topics would be taught together. Yet, concerns were also raised that madrasas and other educational organizations lacked the institutional support necessary to make such changes. Professor Moosa responded to these comments by suggesting that it was the ulama’s responsibility to press for such changes, and that while Madrasa Discourses was not a place where society-wide educational reform could be accomplished, it was a place where experimental approaches to different forms of education that engage the relationship between Islamic thought and modern science/philosophy could be taken up. One question Professor Moosa posed to the madrasa and ulama leadership around the dinner table was whether they would be open to exploring an integrated knowledge tradition, one that took seriously the developments in the humanities, the social sciences, and science, in conversation with the historical Muslim disciplines of learning. There was some ambiguity in the reply, if not reluctance, to engage with modern knowledge given its Western provenance. Some around the table mentioned that they found the ideas of Sigmund Freud unacceptable. Professor Moosa explained that while Freud is an important thinker, he does not exhaust the Western canon and that the matter required further discussion and deliberation.

The next morning Professor Moosa introduced to workshop attendees in greater detail the historical approach to engaging the Muslim knowledge tradition that MD had pioneered. He developed some the threads of his public lecture and highlighted some of the challenges involved in “rethinking Islamic ethics.”  Here he focused on what scholars of Islam could gain by reading with fresh eyes the writings of important thinkers in Islamic history, such as Al-Ghazali and others. He noted that returning to these thinkers could especially help when it comes to addressing ethical matters such as the dignity of the human person, human rights, the importance of tradition, and practices of interpretation. Following Professor Moosa’s lecture, students broke up into small groups to further discuss ethical issues in contemporary Bangladesh. Topics included the use of milk banks, the Rohingya refugee crisis, the applicability of the humanities and social science for guiding Muslims in everyday moral deliberation, curfews at universities, and divorce.

At the end of the workshop, it was clear that there was enthusiastic interest in both the topics and approach adopted by Madrasa Discourses, the latter of which involves raising questions and asking participants to explore possible solutions to those questions. It was also clear that there were unique challenges as well as possibilities that might come with expanding the existing program to include Bangladesh, most notably in the complex issues facing educational reform in the country. Nonetheless, MD looks forward to the possibility of welcoming a few select students from Bangladesh to its Summer Intensive Program that will be held in Kathmandu in July 2020.

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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.
Global Currents article

The Hindu Rashtra Comes of Age


The Khanqah-e-Moulla, or Shah-e Hamdan Shrine, in the Old City of Srinagar, is one of the oldest examples of Kashmiri wooden architecture. Photo Credit: Mike Prince.

India consistently pushes the narrative that removing the special status of Indian-administered Kashmir addresses development, curbs nepotism, and fights “terrorism” – all supposedly towards good governance. Scholars, writers, and activists, including myself, have countered the arguments provided in support of the removal as “strawmen.” The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) across India primarily runs on an anti-Muslim and anti-minority agenda. The erasure of Kashmir’s autonomy and dilution of its Muslim majority by settler colonialism have been part of the BJP’s rallying cries since 1947. It must be kept in mind that all Indian governments from the outset have engineered a steady erosion of Kashmir’s autonomy with the aim of absorbing the region irrespective of the Kashmiri demand for a plebiscite and independence from India. The BJP’s “Kashmir solution” has brazen hyper-religious and nationalistic roots entrenched in Hindu supremacy and ethnonationalism (or Hindutva) [1]. This enterprise is fully fueled by the neoliberal order that aims to sustain India as a modern neocolonial force. Currently in India the ideology of Hindu indigeneity, which casts Muslims living in India as invaders and foreigners, has taken hold. In that equation, Kashmiri Muslims are doubly marked as the demonized other: first as Muslims, and second as Kashmiris who are longstanding dissidents committed to the fight for a UN-mandated plebiscite, democratic sovereignty, and freedom from India (Zia 2018: Chapter 3, 103–28). This ideology has taken shape with India passing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) recently. The CAA, along with the planned National Register of Citizens (NRC), are a set of laws that will prove discriminatory primarily to Muslims.

Rising international voices have criticized the brutal crackdown by the government of India on the Kashmiris since the revocation of Article 370 was announced on August 5, 2019. Nonetheless, it seems that the wider neoliberal world has bought into arguments in favor of this removal of autonomy, perhaps because of India’s billion-strong market. Since this announcement, life in Kashmir has remained under siege. The region is reeling under a humanitarian crisis, and no international actors have intervened. Basic civil rights including healthcare, education, economy, and expression are all suspended. Curfews have been the order of the day and the internet is shut down. Only landlines and some cellphones have been operational for the past month or so. Since August, Kashmir has been in a communication black hole with little news trickling out. While India touts the removal as serving the interest of development, the economic loss inflicted by the lockdown has cost Kashmiris $2.4 billion [2].

Kashmiris restricted from open dissent have countered with a civil boycott, or hartal. This means that on top of government restrictions, people have voluntarily ceased their daily activities and are staying indoors. This civilian boycott manifests the excruciating haplessness of the Kashmiri resistance. In order to register some form of protest, people are forced to adopt a politics of self-injury. Only small stores, produce vendors, and automobiles operate for short durations to keep essential supplies circulating. Otherwise, as a Kashmiri friend puts it, “soruy chu thapp” (everything is under a halt.)

When India and Pakistan were birthed in 1947, Kashmir was an independent princely kingdom that wanted to retain its sovereignty. The British gave this swath of a region territorial shape and sold it to a Hindu warlord from the Dogra dynasty in 1846. Called the Amritsar Treaty, this transaction is known as one of the most damaging real estate sales in the history of humanity. The British not only sold the land, but also the people of Kashmir en masse, to the warlord. The Dogra kings in turn brutally extracted maximum profit from their investment. They oversaw an autocratic regime of back-breaking taxes and extreme discrimination against the Muslim populations who formed the majority. The other religious traditions in the region included the Pandits, the name for Kashmiri Shaivite Brahmins given by a Mughal king, and small populations of Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians.

Two of these communities, the Pandits and Muslims, share ethnic and cultural ties. They began breaking into various sects in the 11th century as casteism, ritualism, and schisms began springing up in the ethno-religious life of Kashmiris. The renowned Kashmiri historian Professor Isaaq Khan described the medieval Kashmiri society “undergoing a crisis of what may be described as ‘human sociality’ versus Brahmanic particularism” (8).

Over centuries, the majority of Kashmiris converted to Islam, encouraged by the egalitarian potential of the religion in comparison to previous practices. The Brahmanical community was treated varyingly by successive dynasties and over time they largely adapted well to changing rulers. By the end of 18th century, they were a dominant, educated, and landowning political elite. A small number of Muslim clergy and landowners also enjoyed the privileges of titles and estates under different rulers. But the majority of Muslims lived in penury, illiteracy, and landless peasantry. Indentured/forced labor—called “begaar”—was rampant. Prostitution and human trafficking, which included children, was legal and taxed. The weavers of the world-famous Kashmiri shawl, brutalized by heavy taxes, began the Shawlbaaf Tehreek (shawl-weavers’ movement), an early and pioneering labor movement. This movement was brutally repressed when on April 29, 1865, the Dogra government killed 28 activists, many of whom were detained and died in jails.

Sheikh Abdullah with other leaders of 1931 agitation. Translation: Sitting R to L: Sardar Gohar Rehman, Mistri Yaqoob Ali, Sheikh Abdullah, Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas. Standing: R: Molvi AbdurRahim, L: Ghulam Nabi Gilkar. [Source: Aatish-e-Chinar, Authors: Sheikh Abdullah, M.Y.Taing]
In 1931, the majority of Kashmiri Muslims rose against Hari Singh, the last in the line of Dogra rulers, fortifying a long-simmering revolt against him. While India sustained its “Quit India” movement against the British crown, the Kashmiri struggle was congealing as a “Quit Kashmir” movement against the autocratic ruler. Those involved in the struggle envisioned a sovereign independent democratic state. Thus, the Kashmiri movement for sovereignty and independence is older than India and Pakistan.

In 1947, British India and the princely states were an amalgam of different territorial entities and hundreds of kingdoms. They were consolidated under the single dominion of the imperial crown. The partition that followed the end of British rule was predicated on religion: Muslims would join Pakistan and Hindus would join India. In the early parleys of state-making, the Indian government deployed all forms of political, diplomatic, and military tools to annex the Kashmir region. The term deployed to describe this process was “integration.” It was accompanied by supposed consensus-building exercises, but was primarily achieved by military annexation. Soon after the two nations of India and Pakistan came into being, they started a war over the territory of Kashmir. Even though the Dogra king had a standstill agreement with Pakistan, which was seen as a prelude to acceding to that country, he hastily signed off the entire territory, and effectively its people, to India: a modern version of the Amritsar treaty. After the United Nations intervened, Kashmir was bifurcated into two parts: the Indian- and Pakistan-administered territories separated by an UN-arbitrated ceasefire line (now called Line of Control, or the LoC).

Kashmiris strongly contest the accession for which they were not consulted. The fleeing king pledged to join India on the precondition that the final settlement would take place through the UN-mandated plebiscite. The King’s decision to accede to India was also influenced by M. S. Golwalkar, the leader of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization. The de-facto coup against Hari Singh was supported by key Kashmiris who were leaders in their own right, but who fell short as visionaries in ensuring a just future for the region. From the get-go, they wittingly or unwittingly served as India’s client politicians, ironically falling prey to the patina of secularism offered by India. The resource-rich Kashmir region was emotively fashioned by Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India and a Pandit by descent, as crucial for maintaining the secular nature of the dominantly Hindu Indian state. During the violence of Indo-Pak partition, Mahatma Gandhi called the region a ray of hope because of the absence of violence between Muslims and Pandit Kashmiris in the Kashmir Valley. However, in November of 1947, in the other province of the kingdom named Jammu, 200,000 Muslims were massacred in a pogrom. The Dogra king himself distributed weapons to the responsible militia, and the RSS were party to it. The militia helped the Indian army during the war. The BJP, which is ruling India today, is the political arm of the RSS.

Barring a small number, most Kashmiri Pandits have always favored Indian rule. While the majority of Kashmiri Muslims seek independence, a strong section wants to accede to Pakistan. Most Kashmiri Muslims continue to share a deeply affective relation with Pakistan based on religious, spiritual, cultural, and trade ties that predate the partition. The breadth of this relationship is reflected in arguments the Dogra king made when the Indian leaders were influencing him to join their union in 1947. He argued that Kashmir was fully dependent on Pakistan and geographically contiguous as well. Kashmiris across the LoC continue to bear the brunt of the brutal partition of their homeland that separates families and valuable resources.

Article 370, which was drafted to ensure Indian-administered Kashmir’s special status, was in fact a Trojan horse. Nehru and his ilk saw it as a tunnel through which Indian laws and statues could be slyly passed to Kashmir. India steadily implemented laws to criminalize dissent. The laws effectively subsumed the UN resolution for a plebiscite and gradually criminalized the movement for self-determination. Recently, a minister from Indian National Congress—an old party with roots in British politics—publicly boasted that they had diluted Article 370 twelve times without any controversy. Indeed they had done it by discreetly deploying puppet regimes, coercion, rigged elections, and detention. The most important pivot point in the text of Article 370 was Article 35-A, which protected the territorial sovereignty of Kashmir. Native Kashmiris were recognized as “permanent residents” who had the exclusive right to property and franchise, just like any sovereign country.

At the very inception of when Kashmir got its special status, the RSS raised objections and demanded its erasure. This has continued to be one of the main objectives of the RSS. Kashmir’s special autonomous status was seen as an appeasement of Muslims and a threat to Indian unity. It is also important to remember that Mahatma Gandhi was killed by an RSS member because of his belief in the accommodation of Muslims.

A soldier guards the roadside checkpoint outside Srinagar International Airport (SXR) in Jammu and Kashmir, India. (January 2009) License: CC BY-SA 3.0

While the government of India has provided all shades of explanation for the removal of Kashmir’s autonomy, the logic of making India a Hindu Rashtra has not surfaced much. The dominant Muslimness of Kashmir in the context of an India which is simmering in anti-Muslim and anti-minority hate must be accounted for. The lenses of xenophobia and Islamophobia are key to understanding the brutal crackdown on Kashmiris, which run on Hindu supremacy and ethnonationalism, and which are a part of India’s growth as a modern neocolonial power. The day the removal was announced, Hindu nationalists celebrated the event as a “historic step toward establishing the Hindu Rashtra” [Hindu nation]. Indians took to social media taunting Kashmiris about buying land and property in Kashmir. A politician announced that the government was conducting a survey to reopen 50,000 temples which the local Kashmiri pandit leaders countered by noting that Kashmir never had this many temples. Indian politicians and entertainers publicly gave calls to kidnap or marry “fair-skinned Kashmiri girls.” This ethno-nationalistic outpouring in India was the colonial gaze manifest, one which fetishizes an occupied land and its people, and perceives them as spoils of war.

The dilution of the Muslim-majority demography of Kashmir is key to understanding the erasure of Kashmir’s autonomy. With Kashmir’s autonomous status gone, all Indian laws are automatically applicable to the region, hence the CAA & the NRC are stoking further fear in Kashmir. There are protests across India challenging this legislation, which some have compared to Nuremberg laws that laid the foundation of the Jewish Holocaust. In context of rising institutionalization of discrimination against Muslims, Kashmiris fear that Indian settler colonialism and dispossession are becoming increasingly real inside the valley. The question now is: will the world keep silent?

 

[1] See also here and here.

[2] See also Anirudh Kala, Brinelle D’Souza, Revati Laul & Shabnam Hashmi, Kashmir Civil Disobedience: A Citizen’s Report.

 

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Ather Zia
Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Northern Colorado. She is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir; founder-editor of Kashmir Lit ; and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also a co-editor of Cultural Anthropology. Instagram: aziakashmir, Website: atherzia.com
Field Notes article

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).