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Global Currents article

Turkey, White Supremacy, and the Clash of Civilizations


Civilization board game. Photo Credit: Syvanen

“Teddy, how can one obtain a fair maiden?” asks a white supremacist playfully to a toy teddy bear in a YouTube video. He then reports the teddy bear’s answer to his viewers: “in order to truly understand the nature of women, one must first retake Constantinople from the Ottoman Empire.” The connection between the sexism expressed in “obtaining” a “fair maiden” and the vanquishing of a “civilizational” enemy is a recurrent theme in contemporary white supremacy that flourishes online. This quest for civilizational/racial purity combines an interest in white women’s reproductive and sexual availability with concerns about demographic “replacement.” Consider one of Republican Rep. Steve King’s many controversial tweets: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Consider the anger the Tree of Life synagogue terrorist felt towards the Jewish congregation, not simply because they were Jews, but also because they were progressive Jews, helping refugees to safety in the United States. Consider the title of the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto: “The Great Replacement.” In the contemporary United States, such statements, openly identified as extremist, operate alongside state-sanctioned racial policies with similar demographic targets, including attacks on women’s reproductive rights, endless wars on terror, the racialized criminal justice system, and immigration policing, all of which are all taken to be politics as usual.[1]

Building on the presentations and discussions that took place during the April 16 flash panel organized by Atalia Omer, “Interrogating the Christchurch Shootings,” this blog post connects the gendered/sexualized nature of white supremacist theorizing to its mobilization of civilizational discourses. I argue that at this intersection of civilization talk and obsession with reproductive purity, one finds a toxic passion for an imagined Medieval past and an obsession with the Ottoman Empire/Turkey that echoes the “Clash of Civilizations” rhetoric promoted by earlier civilizational theorists such as political scientist Samuel Huntington. This conjunction raises important questions about how respectable forms of scholarship and white supremacist ideologies may bolster each other. In fact, this discursive continuum parallels the continuum operating between racist state policies and “lonewolf” racist violence considered beyond the pale of the law and requires inquiry alongside it.

 

The Will to Clash of Civilizations

In one of the (generally positive) reader responses to my book manuscript, an anonymous reader noted I had made rather too much of an outdated concept that had already been criticized to bits:

“I do think discussing Huntington is fine (though it is a bit well-worn), though I was surprised when I came across phrases such as ‘the current popularity of Huntington’s thesis,’ which felt a bit dated.”

The reader was referencing my conclusion, where I emphasized how Turkey’s history of transculturation and prevailing debates about “westernization” in the country defied  Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, which claimed that the world consisted of “seven or eight major civilizations” whose culture-driven conflicts could be traced throughout history and would determine post-Cold War era politics. Huntington’s broad “cultural” categories mimicked prevailing ideas of race and, where they differed, were reducible to religion. In revising for publication, I changed the conclusion to acknowledge that academia had both thrown the book at, and closed the book on, Huntington. I noted that almost immediately after his thesis appeared, experts rallied to demonstrate how Huntington had underplayed “intracivilizational” conflicts as well as cultural hybridity, and had done so at a time considered the high age of globalization. Countering Huntington’s thesis with data was indeed low-hanging fruit for anyone who had studied any “civilization” in any depth. Moreover, scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani had come to question whether “culture” could ever be an explanatory factor for political conflicts. In revising, I acknowledged the strength of these critiques, but hinted that the scholarly reports of the death of “Clash of Civilizations” may have been premature:

“The sharp divide between the West and the rest distorts reality, but rhetorical attempts to locate such a divide are real enough. Culture Talk influences politics.”[2]

The afterlives of Clash of Civilizations have indeed been robust, with extremism, the security state, the military industrial complex, and knowledge-production boosting each other at a dizzying rate. Polemics around the civilizational status of Turkey vis-à-vis Europe have transitioned well into the new century, flourishing in peer-reviewed scholarship as well as in white-supremacist YouTube comments.

 

Istanbul, not Constantinople?

Turkey appears as a recurrent headache in Huntington’s work. In his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, Huntington called Turkey of the 1990s—a laicist, Muslim-majority NATO ally and a candidate for European Union membership—“the most obvious and prototypical torn country,” which could not decide whether it belonged within “Islamic” or “Western” civilization. Despite claims to objectivity and descriptiveness, his 1996 book turned prescriptive when it suggested that Turkish leaders might soon be ready to stop their “frustrating and humiliating” attempts to join “Western civilization.” Instead of acting like “beggars,” he predicted, the country would do well to “resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West” (178). This piece of unsolicited advice did make Huntington some strong “civilizational” enemies in Turkey, although perhaps not of the kind that he had imagined. Instead, Huntington’s words got incorporated into Kemalist and leftist conspiracy theories, which claimed that the United States was overseeing a plot to “Islamicize” Turkey through the leadership of the “moderate” Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in order to weaken the country.[3]

And voila, Turkey was Islamicized and became more antagonistic towards the West, right? Although the current AKP regime might have pleased Huntington in many ways with its “neo-Ottomanist” policies, it does not fulfill his thesis either. After all, it was under AKP’s early rule that major human rights packages were passed in order to make Turkish law comply with the Copenhagen criteria for membership in the European Union. Similarly, the regime takes as many pages out of the Western playbook—referencing the U.S. presidential system to justify the latest turn to an executive presidency, for example—as it does from age-old Ottoman legends. Moreover, the vision of the Ottoman Empire as somehow the antithesis of Western civilization itself would be contested by any serious historian who has passing familiarity with the cultural exchange and military alliances forged between European countries and the final Muslim Caliphate.

Yet, in Huntington’s suggestion that Turkey give up its “westernization” policies lies a reality more powerful than all our footnotes and primary documents can suppress: over the course of the twentieth century, “Western civilization” has become both a substitute and an alibi for “whiteness” and “Christianity” and Turkey constitutes a problem for all of these categories.

Hagia Sophia at Night. Photo Credit: Simon Q

“UNTIL THE HAGIA SOPHIA IS FREE OF THE MINARETS, THE MEN OF EUROPE ARE MEN IN NAME ONLY,” wrote the Christchurch terrorist in all caps in his manifesto, referencing a Byzantine cathedral that had been converted to a mosque under the Ottoman Empire and is now a museum. The phallus, the cross, and the sword: A mythic civilizational formula based on an an intersection of racism, sexism, and Islamophobia and, like the vision of a pure white Europe of the past, exists more in the minds of white supremacists than in historical reality.

In fact, the terrorist’s manifesto contains an entire section titled “To Turks.” Here the terrorist orders all Turks currently living in Istanbul (my city of birth and where my close relatives live) to retreat to the Asian side of the city, or face violence: “FLEE TO YOUR OWN LANDS, WHILE YOU STILL HAVE THE CHANCE.” He calls Erdoğan “the leader of one of the oldest enemies of our people, and the leader of the largest Islamic group within Europe,” in language recalling Huntington’s insult/praise for the Ottoman Empire as “the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.” References to Turks (and to massacred Bosniaks, whom he considered Turks) also decorated his assault weapon.

Why would an Australian terrorist living in New Zealand, a world away, be so obsessed with enforcing the boundaries between “Europe” and the Republic of Turkey? Because in our contemporary era, “Western civilization” operates as a code for whiteness and Christianity articulated in geographic and world-historic terms. As Alastair Bonnett notes in The Idea of the West, the concept of Western civilization has particular purchase in white supremacist theories about racial replacement because, in pointing to great achievements, it offers a fig leaf of loftiness to the insipid category of whiteness.[4] Thus, a simplified history of Ottoman clashes with nations mythologized as European ex post facto, with symbolic focus on Vienna and Istanbul, has gained new charge. In this construction, Turkey’s ambivalent status vis-à-vis the geographic subcontinent of Europe appears as an irritant.

In contemporary white supremacist theorizing, what does not belong in “Europe” must be excised at the altar of this construction that was never pure but must somehow be made pure. What Huntington once called “the bloody borders of Islam” turn out to be non-existent borders to be drawn in Muslims’ blood.

This is not to defend the now-excised phrase about “the current popularity of Huntington’s thesis” in that earlier draft of my book. The reader was right at the time. However, the so-called “Trump era” has clarified more than ever just how popular (in all senses of the term) calls to man the barricades of Western civilization have become in the present. In the age of social media, Huntington’s argument, itself a rehashing of older civilization talk, has found its viral legs and assault weapons.

Why did the solid scholarship that closed the book on Huntington’s thesis not work for so many? Is it because globalization turned out not to be the panacea it was promised to be? Or because our white supremacist political and socioeconomic structures necessitate the continuous redesigning and dissemination of white supremacist discourse? If historical and geographic reality are not enough to crush the Clash of Civilizations thesis, what is?

New Zealand has banned the circulation of the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto, and Erdoğan has rightly been criticized for showing video footage of the massacre at campaign events to whip his supporters into a nationalist fervor. Yet censorship is not a safe option either. These texts travel, and so do their proponents. The Christchurch terrorist himself traveled around Europe and visited Istanbul several times. Whereas I see a complex racial and civilizational merging that can never be reversed in my city of birth, he saw a mistake to be turned into a battle cry. How do we deal with the convergence between Huntington’s subtle advice to Turkey and this terrorist’s threat “to Turks”?

 

Make Istanbul White Again

Figure 1. “Wait for us Istanbul.” Viral pro-CHP meme from early April 2019, comparing the appearance of the two mayoral candidates and their wives.

I end with a couple of memes and on a note of irony, as befits our terrifying hyperreal era: the racial/civilizational language that animated the Christchurch terrorist flourishes among Turks as well. In the lead-up to the recent municipal elections that led to AKP losing its hold over Istanbul for the first time in the party’s history, supporters of the opposition party CHP began circulating memes that praised the new mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, and his family for the way they look.

One meme contrasted a daytime image of Imamoğlu and his slim, youthful, blonde wife with a nighttime photo of the stout, mustachioed AKP candidate and his headscarf-wearing wife. “The candidates for Istanbul mayor and their partners,” it read, “On the one side, light; on the other side, darkness” (Figure 1). The light/dark metaphors did multiple duty here much in the same way they do in Western politics, referring to the timing of the two photos, mobilizing connections to modernity and backwardness, and dogwhistling colorism.

Figure 2. Viral Turkish meme from early April 2019, celebrating the new mayor of Istanbul and his family for looking like Northern Europeans.

A post-election meme celebrating Imamoğlu’s victory depicted his fair-skinned and light-haired family wearing “modern” clothing and exclaimed, “Bro, look at the family! In one instance, we progressed 100 years. We became like Finland, Sweden and Norway!” (Figure 2).

Expressing a half-earnest yearning to be finally become “like Finland, Sweden, and Norway,” such texts of digital folklore demonstrate that Turks themselves will not be left behind when it comes pushing back against Turkey’s well-earned racial and civilizational ambiguity.[5] However, while Western white supremacists insist Turks can never belong within whiteness and must be pushed out of Europe, Turkish white-supremacists see uncontested whiteness as within grasp, pending the election of political representatives with the right/white look. In both cases, women’s bodies are made to bear the burden of racial/civilizational proof.

[1] Scholarship investigating this continuum with regards to the War on Terror includes Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review 49, no. 5 (2002): 1575-600, Michael Welch, Scapegoats of September 11th : Hate Crimes and State Crimes in the War on Terror (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), and Inderpal Grewal, Saving the Security State : Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-first-century America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).

[2] Gürel, The Limits of Westernization, 188. See Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (Florence, Ky.: Routledge, 2013).

[3] Gürel, The Limits of Westernization, 136. See also Emre Kongar, ABD’nin Siyasal Islam’la Dansı (Istanbul: Remzi, 2012), 28-34.

[4] Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 26-8.

[5] For an excellent historical discussion of the Turkish will to whiteness, see “Is the Turk a White Man?”: Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity by Murat Ergin (Brill, 2016)

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Perin Gürel
Perin E. Gürel is associate professor of American Studies and concurrent assistant professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017), explores how Turkish debates over “westernization” have intersected with U.S.-Turkish relations in the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Turkish Literature, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a second book project on the impact of U.S. political discourses on Turkey-Iran relations from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Gürel is also faculty fellow for the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame. 
Global Currents article

De/Provincializing Europe


One of the most curious aspects of the Christchurch mosque shootings is that Brenton Tarrant, the twenty-nine-year-old accused of murdering fifty-one worshippers, was so obsessed with medieval Crusades, as well as early modern clashes between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Yet Tarrant’s infatuation with these histories, coupled with his unstinting allegiance to far-right extremism, is by no stretch unique. Indeed, Tarrant’s embrace of “ethno-nationalism” echoes the re-emergence in the 1910s of the U.S.-based Ku Klux Klan, which modeled its uniform on the confraternity robes worn by members of Christian religious orders hundreds of years earlier. White supremacists reasserted this dubious connection to the Catholic Church in the 1960s when the murderous White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan named its Mississippi chapter after religious military orders such as the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitallers.

Pieter van Laer, The Flagellants (c. 1635), Munich, Alte Pinakothek

Despite Tarrant’s seeming awareness of these and other futile attempts to rationalize racial violence via Christianity, his overall comprehension of the particulars and nuances of European social history is utterly lacking. A telling excerpt suggesting as much from Tarrant’s seventy-four-page manifesto posted online prior to the Christchurch massacre stated: “The origins of my language is European, my culture is European, my political beliefs are European, my philosophical beliefs are European, my identity is European and, most importantly, my blood is European.” As these distorted ascriptions illustrate, Tarrant’s identification with the continent posits that the essence of European heritage is effectively synonymous with his own mythic “whiteness.”

This worldview, and its intersections with a global uptick in racial terrorism, underscores how deadly the resurgence of white supremacy and separatism in recent years has become. And in the case of Europe, various manifestations of these patterns suggest the risk of failing to acknowledge the continent’s history of social, cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity.

Despite marked progress since the 1960s in dismantling colonial frameworks as the predominant mode for interpreting European history—including Europe in the world—“clashes” rather than pluralism remains a standard trope across popular discourse. Referring to the “early success of multiculturalism in Britain,” and that nation’s attempt to “integrate, not separate” in a 2006 essay published by the Financial Times, Harvard University economist Amartya Sen lamented the abandonment of what he summarized as greater Europe’s “championing of every form of cultural inheritance.” Sen also warned: “The current focus on separatism is not a contribution to multicultural freedoms, but just the opposite.”

Fifteen years later, on the eve of Britain’s disorganized separation from the E.U., transmitting Europe’s complex, deeply interconnected multiracial heritage has never been more pressing. Because a small but growing cohort of scholars are already doing this work, there are several groundbreaking, positive, and multi-faceted studies from which to draw in pushing back against the spread of xenophobia. Moreover, despite a vague undercurrent of cynicism in the academy—e.g. political scientist John T. Scott’s review of historian Catherine Fletcher’s masterful study, The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici—recovering and amplifying non-white voices, experiences, and representations in European Studies remains popular both in and well beyond the ivory tower.

Although Fletcher’s study—of the first black head of state in the modern Western World—does not make this connection, Alessandro de’ Medici’s African mother, Simonetta da Collevecchio, was likely named after Simonetta Vespucci (1453–1476), the Florentine model who was famously the muse of Giuliano de’ Medici. By the end of the fifteenth century, as the flourishing of black artistic representations of St. Maurice (like the two handsome images below), and an array of other cultural ephemera indicate, “whiteness” was far from the only standard of beauty in Europe on the eve of the so-called “High Renaissance” (1500–1530).

St. Mauritius (Inside) and St. Sebastian (Outside). From the former Marienaltar from St Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg (c. 1498), Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere
St. Maurice. Statue from a niche in the central panel, Altarpiece of the High Altar (c. late XV – early XVI century), Halle (Saale), Church of St. Maurice

While the Renaissance was indeed more racially pluralist and sophisticated than is commonly assumed, the cosmopolitan habits and perspectives associated with this period were not new. In fact, both the medieval and early modern periods are especially powerful time periods through which to understand Europe’s heterogeneity—not least due to the continent’s burgeoning fascination with African wealth, characteristics, and civilization from the late thirteenth century onward. Centuries before the ascendance of scientifically-based racism that followed the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, blacks were welcomed, if not cherished, at royal courts throughout Europe. And as the story of Alessandro de’ Medici’s marriage to Margaret of Austria (1522–1586), the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V affirms, “blackness” was clearly compatible with divine rule and princely virtue across greater Europe.

As Ivana Čapeta Rakić, Yona Pinson, and other scholars have pointed out, the Roman Catholic Church encouraged the positive incorporation of Africans and especially those who were Muslim—arguably the best evidence researchers have of uneven commitments to this ideal is iconography from the late medieval and early modern periods. Not only did a wide range of these artifacts mythologize the epic reach of the Catholic order, their promotions of a religious imaginary often stretched across three continents (e.g. the Biblical Magi, or Three Wise Men or Kings featured in the image below). However imperfect these gestures were, they symbolized the potential power of a global, egalitarian Catholic future, and a broader European interest in commemorating people of African descent that deserves more attention.

Detail Master of the Gereon Altar [Mary’s altar with Saints from St. Gereon at Cologne] detail (ca. 1420-1430), Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
Such initiatives were not extrinsic to the European Renaissance that Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt famously rediscovered in the nineteenth century. As Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Alessandro de’ Medici’s uncle, Pope Clement VII were certainly aware, evidence of steadfast, interethnic bonds stretched back to Greco-Roman civilization. Yet even more so than the early modern period, twenty-first century misconceptions that these ancient civilizations were both “white” and “European” are even stronger. Modern societies need more scholars, educators and popular commentators challenging this outmoded paradigm. When the Roman Empire comes up in my undergraduate courses, the overwhelming majority of my students have never been taught that the post-Roman Republic stretched well into Africa. (Here too it is worth remembering that Alessandro de’ Medici was the second head of state in Italy with African heritage—Roman Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus [145–211 AD] was the first.) I also make it a point to explain that, one thousand years later, the Ottomans saw themselves as the inheritors of the Roman emperors, and perceived the Hapsburg Empire as infringing on this claim, especially after the seizure of Constantinople in 1453. Moreover, I qualify that in border communities, cultural practices between the Ottoman and Christian empires were rarely as divergent as dramatized histories of their geopolitical skirmishes in films and other forms of popular culture suggest.

Given the tendency of scholars and commentators alike to emphasize the enslavement, oppression, and defeat of people of color by—“white”—Europeans, it is easy to see how Tarrant fell for the overwrought cliché of the totemic clash between the Ottoman Empire and Europe. We can safely assume that Tarrant remains completely unaware that the Dutch Republic—led by the highly-commercialized County of Zeeland, which New Zealand is named after—began trading directly with Asia in the seventeenth century to ensure its own religious freedom.

In addition to the internally displaced Dutch populations who escaped religious persecution by moving from the southern to northern Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century, Jewish communities expelled from the Iberian Peninsula were also beneficiaries of this haven. And the sheer abundance of this nation’s striking late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century paintings of black Africans and other populations of color suggests that appreciating cultural pluralism was a standard rather than an exception in the early Dutch Republic.

Jan van Kessel the Elder, The Continent of Africa, detail (c. 1664-66), Munich, Alte Pinakothek

Recalling these progressive intentions is not an apologia for the ineffable destruction Europeans caused in the early modern period. While Portugal’s seizure of major centers of the Asian spice trade between 1507 and 1515—most notably in the Malaysian city of Malacca, the Iranian island Hormuz, and the Indian city of “Old Goa”—was devastating, Dutch rule was even more brutal. And the commercial trade in black bodies beginning in the fifteenth century is a chilling reminder of why visual culture could never challenge large-scale human degradation.

Inspiring and downright horrific legacies of the first era of globalization should not be presented in zero-sum terms—especially given how interconnected civics, economics, politics, religion, and culture were in this period. More so than any other purpose, the brief reflections above suggesting a roadmap for “deprovincializing” early modern social and cultural history are driven by my own commitments not to echo a standard trope: that the history of Europe is synonymous with a history of “whiteness.” Not only has this tenacious, yet incorrect, understanding skewed the public’s intellectual development, it continues to support exclusionary social norms that neglect the histories, presence, representations, and experiences of non-white persons altogether.

 

Suggested Further Reading:

F. Earle, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Reissue edition (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Catherine Fletcher, The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici (Oxford University Press, 2016).

David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, Eds. Ben Vinson III, Joaneath Spicer, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Kate Lowe (Walters Art Gallery, 2012).

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Korey Garibaldi
Korey Garibaldi is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently working on a book project, tentatively entitled, Before Black Power: The Rise and Fall of Interracial Literary Culture, 1908–1968. The study traces six decades of fitful yet dynamic cross-racial literary collaborations, with a particular focus on projects authored and produced by black and white Americans. Most recently, Korey has co-authored an op-ed on access to Level-1 trauma care published by  The Chicago Tribune, and an article reconnecting Henry James and Gertrude Stein in the Fall 2018 issue of The Henry James Review. His book chapter, “Sketching in an Age of Anxiety: Henry James’s Morganatic Baroness in The Europeans” in Reading Henry James in the 21st Century: Heritage and Transmission  (Cambridge, 2019) will appear in July.
Global Currents article

Islamophobia Beyond Christchurch: Muslims as Tamed Others


Ruined building converted into a modern market (Bali). Photo Credit: Siegrid Saldaña

As Islamophobic tragedies grow more and more frequent and “normalized” in our day-to-day life, it has become easy for us to set aside “smaller” Islamophobic incidents while our attention is diverted to large-scale tragedies such as Christchurch. The New Zealand attack was easy for the media to digest, for it featured a white nationalist shooter who killed many Muslims while deliberately presenting a clear Islamophobic and racial motive. However, we also know that structural violence like Islamophobia does not only come up when a white racist opens fire in two packed mosques in the midst of Friday Prayers. Rather, Islamophobia is intertwined with state-sponsored violence and securitization, narratives of nationalism, and the flows of the global market and commodification. Drawing from my reflections at an April 16 panel on the Christchurch shooting, this essay will discuss how state securitization and market commodification perpetuate Islamophobia.

Today’s Islamophobia is more than just a specific form of racism. The scholar-activist Arun Kundnani and scholar of Islamophobia Tania Saeed argue that we should expand our understanding of racialization within hegemonic Islamophobic societies. Kundnani is concerned with the “racialization of socio-political, religious, and cultural contexts” that expands the exclusionary boundaries of Islamophobia. In this case, the definitions of “Islam” and “Muslim” are being re-drawn based on what is to be protected, and no longer on what is to be excluded. This means that we can no longer attend to one generic Islamophobic exclusionary line around “Muslim minorities in a White-Christian majority country,” but rather we must attend to multiple specific exclusionary lines that are drawn based on different threat perceptions in Islamophobic societies. In addition, this also means that “Islam” and “Muslim” have multiple meanings and signifiers (skin colors, attire, languages, customs and traditions, etc.) that are perceived as objective threats against the said Islamophobic society.

Looking into those contextualized boundary-drawings, Tania Saeed uses the term “degrees of alterity” in order to show the different limits of accommodation—or should we say “tolerance”?—that an Islamophobic society would express when dealing with those who deviate from the dominant normative order. In this context, the benchmark of acceptance would be the White Male Universal Self against whom the Others must be judged based on their “likeability”/ “acceptability.”

Seeing “alterity” on a spectrum, rather than in absolute binaries, allows us to probe the grey areas where Islamophobia is not readily apparent due to its intermingling with other forms of structural violence, such as those sponsored by both modern nation-states and the global market. This is the case because the spectrum of alterity takes into account the superficiality of “tolerance” and “diversity” that rarely genuinely embraces the presence of the Others, but rather commodifies it within the context of the Global Cultural Bazaar. This bazaar is understood as the global marketplace where global images and global dreams are disseminated and consumed through films, television, music, fashion merchandise, and other products. Furthermore, the spectrum of alterity is also useful in understanding a form of Islamophobia that comes into being within the framework of state-sponsored violence and securitization, which I will elaborate on later in the essay.

The Global Cultural Bazaar also can be seen as a globalized context in which articles and expressions of “cultures” and “religions” of the marginalized Others are sold and consumed by the privileged Self (Mohanty, 2017). The Global Cultural Bazaar is a perfect, abstracted context in which we can see how the “tamed alterities” of Muslims are commodified as products to be consumed. From Rumi’s poetry to designer-labelled sarongs, “Muslimness” can be tolerated (or even embraced) in so far as it is presented in neat consumer goods that serve to remind consumers of their positions as the Subject, that is, as owners of capital who are allowed to objectify those goods. In other words, reproducing the violent binary of “good Muslims, bad Muslims”, the Global Cultural Bazaar uses Islamophobia as a filter to distinguish tolerable alterities from intolerable ones.

In my field research among Indonesian female migrant workers (FMWs) in Singapore, I found that the expansion of Islamophobic commodification into the field of unskilled labor has turned even the Muslim FMWs’ religious praxis into yet another factor that reduces their “marketability” in the global market. Women I spoke with shared how Muslim FMWs are prohibited by their agencies or employers to wear their hijabs inside the employer’s house (their workplace as caregivers) in order to exude a “friendlier” face in their non-Muslim workspace. Other workers are tricked into and/or forced to eat pork in order to accommodate employers who find their unwillingness to consume a specific kind of meat to be somehow threatening. As the process of commodification can practically turn almost everything into products to consume, these FMWs are obliged, due to their positions as laborers in the global market, to increase their “market value” by taming some of their Muslim alterities.

“Say No to Burkas” Mural in Newtown Australia. Photo Credit: Newtown Grafitti

The oxymoronic tension between the voyeuristic preservation of Others in the Global Cultural Bazaar and the taming of absolute alterities is brilliantly encapsulated in Sara Ahmed’s term “stranger fetishism.” This specific way of relating to Others (or “aliens” in Ahmed’s language) allows for the Human Self to perceive the threats posed by the presence of the “aliens,” yet it also enables him, from a comfortable position, to admire the “non-human” qualities that the Others espouse. Not unlike a museum specimen, the Others in this context are to be seen, touched, discussed, and pondered, but never to be engaged with in human conversation.

When a Muslim Other does not live up to the benchmark of “likeability” (i.e., when a Muslim is a “bad Muslim” according to white, neo-liberal societies), her/his presence would fall under the securitization narrative that identifies him/her as the embodiment of everything that is “beyond human.” This means that the very embodiment of “Muslimness” is the ultimate signifier of everything that is foreign and hostile. It is also important to note that the identification of a Muslim as the ultimate other is gendered, both in its framings and in its implications.

The recent accusations of anti-Semitism against Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar illustrate this final point well. Vanessa Taylor, in her analysis for The Intercept, argues that the singling out of Ilhan Omar in this case cannot be separated from the reproduction of imageries of an “angry black woman” with an anti-Black Islamophobia that associates Black Muslims with anti-Semitic tendencies. Furthermore, as a hijabi woman of color who was also a refugee, Rep. Omar could only be two things in an Islamophobic lens. She is either an oppressed Muslim woman of color whose “freedom” is curtailed by her innately patriarchal faith, or she is a “double-agent” whose hijab is the very reflection of her disloyalty to the cause of the modern nation-state.

Securitization of “Muslimness” (understood widely here as any sociopolitical, religious, and racial signifier that makes a person “Muslim” regardless of her/his real religious belongings or lack thereof) is a mechanism that nation-states employ in order to keep these ultimate Others in check, or worse, to completely eliminate them from within their borders. From body surveillance to ethnocide and genocide (think about the Chinese Uighur Muslims and the Myanmar Rohingya Muslims), many nation-states are committed to constructing “Muslimness” as one of the biggest “threats” to their existence, in spite of the many Muslims doing their best to showcase their national loyalties. From this perspective, the point is not whether or not Muslims are patriotic, but rather that their “Muslimness” renders them to be repositories of all that is alien. The Muslim Others will never be “Us.”

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Lailatul Fitriyah
Lailatul Fitriyah is a Ph.D candidate and Presidential Fellow at the World Religions and World Church Program, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She holds a MA in International Peace Studies from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her current research is focused on the construction of feminist theologies of resistance in post-colonial Southeast Asia, feminist theologies of migration, and feminist interreligious dialogue.
Global Currents article

Beyond the Performance of Interfaith Solidarity


“Jews in solidarity with Muslims (and Mexicans, LGBT, womens’ rights…)”—placard on the anti-Trump Muslim ban march in London. Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson

Religious communities, places of worship, cemeteries, wedding celebrations, and other sacred events and places have become targets for spectacular terrorist violence. It is hardly shocking news anymore. Most likely people will ask in the aftermath of a news story about killing in places of worship “how many?” rather than “why?” Such incidents are so routine that we no longer seek to understand them.  Sacred spaces, times, and rituals (such as parades) have long been sites and occasions for communal violence and for generating exclusionary nationalist narratives and a broad spectrum of political violence. Stanley Tambiah, Michael Sells, and many other students of religion and violent nationalist discourses have noted the complex intersection of selective retrieval of religious traditions and the production and reproduction of chauvinistic accounts of peoplehood. Such retrievals have provided rationales for exclusion and xenophobia, as well as the delegitimization of the citizenship rights of supposedly non-normative citizens. Hence, for example, Hindutva nationalist discourse renders Muslims not really Indians. As Olivier Roy laments in a recent volume, the same pattern can be found in case after case where appeals to exclusionary citizenship build upon racialized and/or ethnicized interpretations of religion as belonging.

While targeting religious communities in moments of vulnerability and communal engagement raises profound questions pertaining to the relation between religion and violence, it should also force us to interrogate the responses of religious actors and communities to such violence. It has become almost as routine as the terrorist acts themselves for visible religious leadership to offer condemnation of such seemingly senseless acts of violence and declare that any invocation of religiosity in authorizing murderous acts of terrorism, in effect, represents a departure and perversion of authentic religious traditions. As historian Anthony Marx noted, the language of authenticity undergirded the political projects of modernity, which included the nation-state’s instrumentalization of cultural others for the purpose of consolidating and reproducing national coherence. It precludes openness for internal pluralities and reifies traditions by employing colonial taxonomies, standardization, and complex institutional reproductions of religions as features of “culture” and “national heritage” with fixed boundaries that must be policed. The latter coalesces with biologized and racialized conceptions of national or ethnic reproduction. Authenticity and (blood) purity constitute pivotal dimensions of modernity.

The performativity of interfaith vigils to express solidarity with the victims of terrorist actions that clearly target people gathered in their religious and communal spaces offers a profound expression of interfaith solidarity only if it disrupts the deep legacy of the construction of “faith” as an instrument of empire. The fact that, in addition to the Sri Lankan churches targeted on Easter Sunday 2019, luxury hotels designed to entertain foreigners were likewise targeted is telling of the symbolic association of Christianity with colonial violence and neoliberalism. Even if the churches in the previously colonized world have become indigenous over the centuries, the discourse of authenticity that indeed afflicts those who interpret their actions as anti-colonial renders such churches symbols of the colonial past and its presences. These colonial presences also manifest in the global neoliberal exploitative order. By fixing the meaning of Christianity as “foreign” and “violent” the discourse of authenticity renders Christianity, just as much as the sites of luxury hotels in the midst of poverty and marginalization, a symbol of colonization. Indeed, the modernist discourse of authenticity that has characterized the colonial enterprise and its fluctuating foci on classifying people, defining their boundaries, and identifying their “religions” or lack thereof, facilitated the process of converting, controlling, enslaving, and eliminating them since the fifteenth century. Now, in the neoliberal stage, integrating the global South and the previously colonized into the global economy through ensuring hospitable institutions and political leaderships also engenders simplistic and vague resistance through the targeting of Christian and neoliberal symbols.

The conflation of these symbols foregrounds the requirement to interrogate the roots of the contemporary violence in the enduring legacies of coloniality, nationalism, and the role of religion therein. This concept, which originated with Aníbal Quijano, recognizes the interrelation between “modernity” as a narrative of progress and the labor of slaves and the logic of displacement and extermination of indigenous communities. It is also a concept that shares elective affinities with the earlier narratives of conversion and totalizing Christian cosmology, which eventually morphed into a totalizing secularist temporality. Without a robust account of the Christian tradition’s complicity with the persistent legacies of coloniality, efforts for religious peacebuilding and interfaith performativity of solidarity are lacking. Indeed, Christian feminist postcolonial theologians have long recognized the necessity of linking decolonial and feminist theological work with an intersectional capacity for social and political solidarity. In the same way that culturalist explanatory frames (that attributes causality to culture/religion/civilizational identity) engage in abstraction and betray an underlying orientalist perspective when they interpret Muslim violence without attending to geopolitics, Christians engage in abstraction when they disown claims to their tradition by white nationalists who commit murderous actions. Instead, it is critical that scholars and religious actors examine the interlacing of religion and race in the construction of belonging and non-belonging in the “nation” and even more broadly “humanity.”

U.S. Islamic World Forum on May 30, 2012. Plenary II: Social Change: The Power of Non-State Actors moderator. Pictured here (in middle): Yemen Rami Nashashibi, Executive Director, Inner-City Muslim Action Network, United States. Photo Credit: PM411528

Indeed, scholars have long identified the complicity of the comparative study of religion (together with anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences) with the construction of the (Christian) modern West and its political projects. Critical accounts of the construction of “religion” and “modernity” require interrogating, therefore, the complicity and entanglements of such approaches with global patterns of racialization, slavery, genocides, and capitalist exploitation. Rather than reclaiming a supposed authentic account of one’s faith (itself a modernist construct), intercommunal and interfaith solidarity that moves beyond performance focuses its critique on the modernist buttressing of communities and the employment of religion in the ghettoization and patterns of domination these communities experience. Hence, grassroots interfaith solidarity refuses the modernist logic of domestication and ghettoization of religion precisely through recognition, emerging on the ground in the inner cities as well as at the margins of religious communities themselves. As Ginna Green from Bend the Arc said in an interview for NPR: “we are not safe unless we are together.” The commonality among the acts of terrorism against communities of faith, even when Christians themselves are targeted in Sri Lanka, is their respective relation to the entanglement of Christianity with colonialism, white nationalism, orientalism, and modernist patterns of racializing and nationalizing religion. Therefore, even if, under one scenario, acts of targeted violence are intended to embolden antagonism and enhance communal divides, the response to such violence cannot settle into the existing frameworks that perpetuate such violence. Activist Rami Nashashibi, head of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network on the south side of Chicago, lucidly dispelled the modernist ghettoization. “Both the physical and spiritual well-being of our communities,” he told the interviewer in the same NPR piece, “depend on how well we are connected to one another.” This means, he added, that “Our isolation, our disconnection from one another only makes us that much more vulnerable to the forces of evil.…To the forces of hatred and bigotry that either want to silence us, intimidate us or pit us against one another to carry out really insidious agendas.” This important insight informs his and other grassroots faith-based activists’ coalition and solidarity work with one another.

This work moves beyond the imperial performance of vigils designed to reassert “authenticity.” It requires a deep intersectional analysis of the interlocking matrices of power, and a recognition that overcoming the logic that such matrices are built on requires not only exposing oppression, but also imagining cohabitation and solidarity outside the logic of imperial and domesticated religion. It is the same very insight that has animated Jewish activists in the aftermath of Charlottesville in 2017. When white nationalists marched with Klan-like torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us” as part of a protest against the supposed erasure of an icon of the Confederacy, (some) American Jews resolved to enhance their commitment to co-resistance against white supremacy (also tackling the construction of Jews as white) by deepening their understanding of the complex relations between anti-black racism and antisemitism. Similarly, Muslim community organizing excelled and exceeded organizers’ fundraising goals to help American Jews repair vandalized graves in Jewish cemeteries. In a different context, but one that nevertheless contained similar dynamics, in 2018 a six-day Emergency Religious Delegation to Honduras—comprised of fifty faith and civil leaders from the U.S., Canada, Colombia, and Argentina—accompanied human rights protectors, witnessed state violence, and reported about it through their local and global channels. Likewise, faith-based actors have persistently spent time at the US-Mexico border, calling out the geopolitical violence at the heart of the despair of asylum seekers and refugees. These are just a few (prophetic) examples that illuminate pathways for religious agency and expressions of interreligious solidarity that also centralize critical engagement with the violent legacies of modernity. These are forms of intercommunal solidarity that move beyond merely expressing surprise and indignation at the supposed perversion of religion manifested in such spectacular terrorist acts like those that occurred in Christchurch, Colombo, and at The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Such expressions of indignation reflect little interrogation of religion’s complicity in global and local patterns of racialization, marginalization, and nationalist violence.

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Global Currents article

Something Else A’Comin’ . . .


Dance of the Starlings, Photo Credit: Conni Nielsen

This paper was originally conceived of as a response to an important panel conversation at the American Academy of Religion in Denver, Colorado on November 17, 2018. Moderated by Professor Atalia Omer, the panel was the occasion for a conversation between leading scholars on the theme of “Moral Obligations, Prophetic Actions, and the Search for Solidarity from Historical, Transnational, and Global Perspectives.” The panelists were Professor Daniel Boyarin (in abstentia; UC, Berkeley), Professor Farid Esack (University of Johannesberg), Professor Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College), and Santiago Slabodsky (Hofstra University).

The to-and-fro and the back-and-forth of the dialogue suggests a conversation that took with the utmost seriousness the intellectual and ethical urgencies of the subject matter, particularly as it relates to the specific cases of South Africa, Palestine, and Israel. These places and cases command and demand our attention today, especially the attention of those of us who work in religious studies inasmuch as the drivers of the devastation and death, both spectacular and slow, monumental and everyday, in these places in the world are inextricably bound up with questions and the very meaning of religion and life together. And now to my response…

While I am unable to do justice to all of the nuances of the panel conversation, I would like to surface an issue that moves at the oblique edges of the discussion. This is the issue not just of colonialism, which was explicitly invoked and theoretically attended to, but of settler colonialism. Here we might think of settlerism along with enslavement as modernity’s inner logos or meaning, the pillars that stand up the modern world as an arrangement or an economy and ecology that, with Cedric Robinson, also bears the name “racial capitalism.” As such settlerism (or land theft) with enslavement (labor theft) is that through which modern consciousness, modern desire, and modern life emerges. It is that through which Western life and thought lives and moves and has being. It is the practice of a violent and limited, an appropriative and expropriative, a thieving and exclusionary “We-ness.”

Putting a fine point on this, Iyko Day observes that “settler colonial racial capitalism is [neither] a thing” nor is it adequately understood as a historically isolable event or series of events. Rather, “[settler colonialism] is a social relation.” That is to say, settler “colonial capitalism is more appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than a linear chain of events” (112-13). This ecology manifests in relation to that Westphalian international system of states associated with what has come to be called the West and whose activity is carried out under presumption of a particular figure.

This is the figure of “the settler.” Within (post) enlightenment philosophy the settler is known as the sovereign, self-determined subject, and within political thought as the “citizen.” As normative citizen, the settler indexes or represents and even stands as a proxy for what is proper, indeed, for the properly human whose standing is over and against those imagined as Man’s nonhuman or less-than-human Others, those, that is, who fall short of the human as such. If the settler as citizen embodies propriety and proper (political) subjecthood and thus embodies proper life and thus is properly human, then the Other to the citizen gets cast as nonhuman or less-than-human or marginally-human or infra-human and ultimately a threat to the political economy of citizens or those deemed properly human, the community of the human “we.”

However, what philosopher and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter gives us to understand about this imaginary of the human is that it is an “overrepresentation.” By this she means that rather than being made to the measure of the world, this specific genre or version and historical unfolding of the human has come to stand in the place of the human as such. This is the genre whose spatiotemporal and geographical and even geological unfolding is named (Western) Man.

In “worlding” himself, Man enacts two things. On the one hand, Man seizes, settles, or acts to possess the earth for himself. John Locke gives us the philosophy of this settler colonial seizure of the earth through his theory of property. On the other hand, precisely in his geopolitical and geological rupturing or “anthropocening” of the earth, Man also registers the biopolitical production or “massification,” as Jasbir K. Puar has recently put it, of populations. The point of Man’s conversion of populations into unhuman masses is so that total value or total life might be seized or cannibalized, indeed extracted from them for the founding and sustaining of the settler state and for the general sustaining of its central, normative figure, namely, the human (homo politicus, homo economicus). In other words, Man is a figure of ontological and planetary terror, as Calvin Warren powerfully argues. The terror of Man both produces and targets the nonhuman or the less-than-human mass(es) figured as the Racial Other.

The ongoing attacks against black life and native peoples in the United States, along with the specific cases of South Africa and Palestine in the latter’s ongoing struggle against Israeli settler colonialism, I contend, showcase the problem of the human as the central problematic internal to settler colonialism. But also, I would argue, it is at this site of the unhuman, the loci of an “inhuman” darkness, that we find a strange, queer diaspora that, precisely in its unhumanity, its parahumanity, its humanimality, indeed, in its adjacency to the mushroom—which, as Anna Tsing elaborates, finds a way to survive devastation—bespeaks an alternative: Modes of life beyond or in excess of the temporality of Man. Let us, again, call this the mass(es), that dark swarm whose movements are like the murmuration of starlings, a murmuring mass. Like the wandering monks of old (I mean the “gyrovagues” who freaked out St. Benedict and against whom he wrote his “Rules” of obedience), the murmuring mass is a wandering, borderless, non-settler “we” whose very presence unsettles every property line, every boundary that the settler imposes. This is a different kind of “we,” one not centered on the human. This is a ”we” that is before, after, and beyond every state-sanctioned or exclusionary “We the People…” We need a language for this different, non-statist we-ness.

A murmuration of starlings at Gretna, Photo Credit: Walter Baxter

When Professor Boyarin calls for a “deep theorization of diaspora” that is neither the same as a “statist nationalism,” with its racism and violence, nor like a “denatured German-style Reform in which ‘Judaism’ is a faith, or a ‘religion,’ or even a prophetic turn of mind, as per the American Council of Judaism,” but rather is a diaspora devoted “not to the government” but to an otherwise we-ness, a we that is “both here and elsewhere” and that is also Palestinian inasmuch as the Palestinian “we” is a “we” “whom ‘we’ [Jews] . . . oppress”—when Professor Boyarin says these things he is pointing to something like the alternative we-ness of which I speak and that settler colonialism seeks to arrest through the imposition of state logics. The alternative isn’t elsewhere, but instead is an elsewhen marked by a kind of quantum communion that is irreducible to statist or biopolitical logics, including statist or settler colonial logics of religion and the settler gods. Professor Boyarin, in effect, calls for the decolonization of time itself. As Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip puts it, our moral obligation is to “snap the spine of [humanist] time” (141) inasmuch as within settler colonial or humanist time support for racist, statist, anti-Palestinian Zionism, which must be rigorously distinguished from Jewish identity, in effect operates as an extension of white supremacy into the Middle East in the name of supporting the state of Israel and in complex ways reverberates back into the U.S. in both antisemitic and antiblack ways.[1] This is the circuitry of settlerism as political theology.

This all brings me to something Professor Heschel says. I am thinking of moments in the course of her comments in which she takes us into what might be thought of as the spirituality of the issues at hand. Her comments are powerful and, in a good way, absolutely arrested me.

After talking about her sojourn through the 1960s and about how hearing Dr. King affected her so, Professor Heschel asks the question, “What does it mean to be moved?” This is a powerful question, worthy of just sitting with, brooding with, dwelling with, as we meditate on our moral obligations in this moment of settler colonial devastation of peoples and of the earth itself.

“What does it mean to be moved,” she asks?

This question is utterly bound up with social movements as historical-empirical phenomena, movements like Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But also what emerged out of May 1968, such as what traveled under the name “Black Power.” And more recently, what is called “the Movement for Black Lives” and the movement for a free Palestine. But never taking her eye off of social movements in their phenomenal appearing, Professor Heschel invites us, as it were, to look inside of such movements to ask a question, to catch sight even if only in a flash of another order.

Hers is the question of how a movement moves you. What in a movement moves you? What gives itself through a movement even as it exceeds the mo(ve)ment? What moves (within) the movement? This is a question of the sacred interior, which is not the interior of the would-be sovereign individual or the settler-as-citizen subject. This is the interior of the mass(es), an interior mass whose fundamental entanglement manifests the sacred and bespeaks a poetics of the social. Perhaps when Frantz Fanon inquired into “that within,” the gulf or abyss or the indefineable vanishing point that exceeds racialization or what epidermal blackening and browning as cultural operations aim to arrest,[2] he too was approaching the question of what moves subterraneously, underneath, and in excess of the political.

“What does it mean to be moved,” Professor Heschel asks.

It’s then that just as her listeners, an audience of scholars, might expect her to offer your classic or scholastic (read: typically academic) answer to the question she poses, she pulls back. She refuses to answer—at least in such a way that would freeze the question in answering it. What comes through is that it is not so much about the answer as it is about keeping the question alive in whatever answer one gives. It’s, in other words, about the ongoing quest(ion)ing.

And so, immediately following upon her asking her moving question, Professor Heschel says that to be moved in social movement is to undergo something. It is to be set in flight, to be set roaming and roving and wandering, to be opened out into what exceeds you, to move into the open, to have one’s limits crossed, all borders breached, the very notion of “world” broken open. In short, it’s to be “in the break.” This Heschel calls “religious experience,” about which she says, “I need that.”

Finally, Professor Heschel caps her reflections by further saying, in effect, that to undergo social movement is precisely to not give into despair, knowing (and this is very deep) that “there is something else coming.” Affectively caught in the wave, so to speak, in the sensation, carried by the feeling of what’s coming, to be touched by and to haptically surrender to that something else beyond the political as we know it—about this Professor Heschel says, “I have to hold onto that,” for “that I guess is what keeps me going with the praxis.”

There is a terrible beauty borne in what Professor Heschel, I think, is getting at. Here we glimpse social movement as an anticipatory praxis of something else coming, manifest in a kind of ante-political assembly, a mode of gathering or assembly or commune-ion that falls outside of though it surges through the violences of state time and history. Her words are a kind of “sorrow song” that celebrates the mass(es) or social movement even if that celebration is singed with some sort of sadness. This all arrested and moved me, I must say, inasmuch as I’ve been thinking a lot about what spirituality means in settler colonial times, about the “mysticism” of social movements, something I’ve recently called the “the mysticism of the riot” and the spirit(uality) of the general strike. What if spirit is of the riot? What if spirit is the general strike, ritual of an alternative cosmology?[3]

To be moved by the more-than-now, by a wholly-other, something-else-future is to be under fugitivity’s sway. Per the black radical tradition’s meditations on the historical figure of the fugitive and the arts of escape, fugitivity here bespeaks an other order of time. This other temporality bespeaks, as Melissa Louidor puts it as she thinks with Fred Moten, a certain “mobilization of black vitality.” It is a “futuristic impulse to claim the not-yet-forged possibilities of existence.” That impulse, to stay with Louidor a bit longer, might be thought about in terms of certain “biomechanic and metaphysical forces [that] activate” imagination, which is to say “effort, an effort that is integral to claiming survival.” To dwell within fugitive time or to be fugitively on the move is to resonate with, indeed to reside or tarry with, the im/possibility of other worlds. I’m talking about new ways of dwelling with and being on the earth. This is a kind of quantum communion, the veritable entanglement of all things precisely at the level of thingliness itself, at the level of base matter or raw vitality. In short, the modernity of fugitivity names the mobilization of a queer vitality, an “aliveness,” Kevin Quashie might say, beyond racial category.[4] While constantly engaging politics and maneuvering with respect to state structures, that which moves in fugitive time moves under the sociopoetic propulsion of an uncaptureable force that is irreducible to political ontology and its presumption of the human. As such, fugitivity is an insurgent practice of prophesy, though without the figure of the singular or sovereign prophet. For in fugitive time the prophet is the mass(es), the swarm of social movement as such.

I cannot help but hear Professor Heschel’s question—What does it mean to be moved?—in conversation with a tradition of black radical thought and the distinct notion of the sacred that is internal to this tradition and that drives its arts of escape, the arts of black rapture. The something-else-future that Professor Heschel’s language conjures or is reaching for is, like black radicalism’s poetics of the sacred, of an insurgent, dissident, rebellious, anti-doctrinal, and non-teleological future. Felt in the present, Professor Heschel’s question registers as a disturbance that is always already in play and that as such witnesses to an alternative present. Such a temporality, such a future, is radical. It is a future without frame, without foreclosure, marked by a peculiar kind of nonhumanist dispossession, movement outside of propertied self-possession.

To be under the claim of such a future is to be indebted to a future of something else coming, Heschel says, or that is “a’comin’,” to purloin from Judith Weisenfeld. And because it is a’comin’, it moves one into a different kind of now, a now that, again, exceeds the time of the human. This revised understanding of the future where the future is not merely what follows past and present suggests what might be called, defying grammatical convention, the tense of the future-now.

What might the future-now mean, where both “the now” and “the future” are unmoored from liberal humanist progressive narratives or temporalities (of death), unhooked from time schemes that presume the settler, or the sovereign, individuated subject? What could freedom released from settler time mean? And, what does this all mean for social movement(s), for a free Palestine, for Palestinian life in its adjacency to black life, and for a Jewishness released from Zionist-statist-settler logics and thus thought of as conspiring with, literally breathing with, blackness and Palestinianness, a Jewishness entangled in “blackpalestinian breathing”?

With Professor Heschel, I offer this answer which is not and cannot be one. At a minimum the tense of the future-now might be thought of as the opening of the imagination to the impossible. The tense of the future-now brings into view what settler time forecloses as not possible. Nevertheless the impossible surges through, fracturing time and history to announce another beginning. Genesis otherwise. The tense of the future-now is the tense, to borrow from Dawn Lundy Martin, of “unforeclosure” and the unforecloseable.

Unsettling settler time or the time of patriarchs and sovereigns, the tense of the future-now is marked, as experimental film maker and video artist Arthur Jafa has put it, by both tension and potential. Beyond time as given to us to shut down imagining the im/possible, the future-now discloses every instant as measureless, saturated by “potension.”

Could this be what moves a mo(ve)ment? Could it be that the tense of the future-now is nothing less than the tense of spirit-time, what is of the life (and) times of the unhuman wherein we are given to dwell with the earth even as we work to survive the settler world (of Man)? The riot, the rebellion then, is a threshold of the sacred where in passage we dwell in fugitivity’s future-now, rhythming “freedom time,” an alternative conception of time that presences an alternative present. Music-ing fugitive time is the creative, the ethical, the “poethical” task. . .Task of a homiletics of the unhuman, witnessing to a wounded, unspeakable joy . . . Task of something else a’comin’ . . .

(I dedicate this essay to a free Palestine)

—

[1]See Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “Black and Palestinian Lives Matter: Black and Jewish America in the Twenty-First Century,” in On Anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 31–41.

[2]Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967), 71.

[3]J. KameronCarter, “Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred).” Social Text 139 (forthcoming).

[4]The idea of “vitality” and “aliveness” reflects conversations with Quashie around his forthcoming book, Black Aliveness; or, The Being of Us.

 

*The opinions expressed in this piece do not represent the official opinions of Contending Modernities research initiative and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies or their faculty and staff.

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J. Kameron Carter
J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He works in black studies, theology and philosophy of religion, and literature and poetry. His book is Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008). He’s just finished a book manuscript titled American Religion: White Supremacy as Political Theology and he is in the final stages of another book project whose topic is blackness and/as the sacred.
Global Currents article

The Unsettled Morality of Kidney Sales


Kidney advertisement for an A+ blood-type donor hand-written on a mural in Tehran: “A+ [mobile phone number] For sale. Immediately.” Author photo, circa Summer 2009. © All Rights Reserved.
Only in Iran is receiving payment to donate a kidney permissible, bureaucratically routinized, and religiously sanctioned. There are no parliamentary laws regulating the transaction, but a body of protocols has been implemented to centrally administer the matching of donors and recipients and regulate the amount exchanged between them. Though only parliamentary laws in the Islamic Republic must be formally vetted by a council of experts in Islamic law and the constitution, in practice contentious non-parliamentary policies also require the authorization of at least some Muslim jurists in order to be implemented without contestation. These policy-oriented fatwas (Islamic legal opinions on policy-related topics) are usually determined through a dialogical process between jurists, policy actors, and scientific experts. When it comes to paid kidney donation, policy actors were able to secure permissive fatwas from jurists before the policy was formalized. According to most contemporary Shi‘i Muslim jurists, removing a non-vital organ such as a kidney from a consenting adult is permissible so as long as it does not cause undue harm to the donor and the organ is transplanted into the body of a patient whose life depends on it. These same jurists agree for the most part that compensating living donors is allowed, although it is best that payments be dispensed for the right to remove the organs and not for the organs themselves. Even so, the fatwas that set out these legal opinions are regularly listed in Persian-language fatwa compendia under the phraseology of “selling organs.” Despite the religious sanctions afforded by Islamic jurists, selling kidneys remains socially stigmatized and morally obscure. In contrast, brain-death organ donation has not only been legalized but normalized as a heroic sacrifice, even though, from an Islamic legal perspective, the matter remains far more controversial than kidney sales.

***

In the summer of 2012, in the central office of the Iranian Kidney Patient Foundation (IKF) in Tehran, I sat next to a woman eager to fulfill her deceased father’s will by endowing a portion of his wealth to charity. With the help of the NGO, she planned to distribute the funds among patients unable to afford organ transplants. Since transplantation surgeries are nearly free in public hospitals in Iran, the endowment was to cover the expenses of “acquiring a kidney” from a living donor. “Why not donate the funds to the sellers instead?” asked the social worker in the room who, despite years of employment at the NGO, felt uneasy about facilitating the “sale” of kidneys. Perplexed by the question, the woman explained her wish to alleviate the suffering of those in greatest need—patients who would be bound to dialysis machines for the remainder of their lives unless they received a kidney transplant, an existence that in the Iranian imagination is tantamount to “living death.”

Since the 1980s, when the first successful kidney transplant from a living non-biologically related donor was performed in Tehran, Iranian patients with end-stage renal disease have looked to the bodies of healthy strangers as potential lifelines. When related donors have been scarce, compensating unrelated donors has been customary. As demand for kidney transplantation has grown—spurred by soaring rates of hypertension and diabetes on the one hand and rapid improvements in high-tech surgical interventions on the other—those organizations involved with kidney disease have sought to regulate and routinize the monetary exchanges between donors and recipients. By 1997, the IKF had secured permissive fatwas from a significant number of leading jurists and formalized a set of protocols to be administered across the country. Since then, healthy men and women between the ages of 20 and 40 have been able, under specific conditions, to undergo a nephrectomy to improve the life of a kidney patient in exchange for a small monetary payment from the state and a larger compensation from the recipient. The NGO manages the matching of donors and recipients and announces a standard “reward” amount every year. In practice, most donor-recipient pairs negotiate a different amount based on their unique needs and abilities.

While these monetary exchanges are approved by state policy, authorized by fatwas, and regulated by bureaucratic procedure, they are fraught with moral anxiety and social stigma. Bureaucratic routinization has normalized the transactions to the extent that people understand the “buying and selling” of kidneys to be a social reality and  philanthropists can imagine spending their wealth on facilitating such exchanges, but the moral status of the phenomenon remains unsettled. The kidney-seller is seen as an unfortunate victim of poverty and unemployment, and the kidney-buyer the suffering patient whose only hope for continued health and vitality is a new kidney. Their exchange is mostly seen to be regrettable yet unavoidable, but no sustained public discussion has processed the phenomenon from an ethical standpoint or subjected the policy to scrutiny and debate. As a result, there are no consistent moral rubrics for how such transactions should be conducted or how they should be processed by society. In the absence of such rubrics, individuals are left to their own devices to navigate the sticky and tenuous process of reaching an agreement. Even years after transplantation, both kidney givers and patients continue to struggle as they attempt to cope (often in silence and obscurity) with fragile bonds and unresolved apprehensions.

Contrary to what one might expect, the Islamic jurists’ permissive fatwas have neither filled the moral vacuum nor helped resolve the conundrums faced by ordinary people. This is largely because these fatwas were solicited as part of a policy making and implementation process that deliberately excluded the public promotion of organ-selling. After all, there were sufficient people willing to donate for payment, so there was no need to campaign and draw attention to a program that was deemed necessary but morally tenuous and less than ideal. Since the 1980s, members of the IKF, medical doctors, patient activists, and even religious experts have been actively engaging high-ranking jurists in discussions on the science of transplantation and its life-saving potentials. These discussions have persuaded many (though not all) jurists of the expediency of organ transplantation. In turn, policy actors have been able to push forward a national transplantation program without facing overt delegitimization by critics who may otherwise think that selling body parts defies Islamic doctrine. But while these fatwas serve an instrumental purpose for policy actors wishing to lubricate the bureaucratization of transplantation, they do not necessarily serve as guidelines by which donors and patients can navigate the complicated and socially stigmatized process of their exchange. Instead, these individuals’ decisions are largely determined by the fears, desires, and moral valuations that materialize in the space of their intimate encounters.

In 2012, I spoke with Seema, an extremely frail but affluent accountant and young mother who suffered from multiple ailments that had permanently damaged her kidneys. Doctors and relatives had failed to persuade her to obtain a healthy organ from a living donor. She wouldn’t allow herself to pay someone “selling a kidney out of desperation,” when only she knew what it was worth—“more than anything anyone could pay for.”  Even receiving an organ from a brain-dead person was hard to accept. “How can I wait in anticipation of someone’s death so that I can live?” she said. But about a year later, Seema finally agreed to put her name on the IKF’s recipient list. Despair over her declining health and fear of leaving her toddler without a mother had overpowered her previous reservations. She chose to optimize her chances of recovery by receiving a kidney from a living stranger.

Around the same time, I met a disgruntled young donor who had received payment in return for his kidney a year earlier. While he had negotiated the terms of his surgery and exchange himself, the donor complained that the recipient had been “ungrateful” because he had failed to reciprocate his kindness and sacrifice beyond paying the formally agreed-upon amount.

These stories not only demonstrate the range of anxious moral considerations that both animate and challenge paid kidney giving in Iran, but also reflect the normalization of a process in the absence of a consensus on its moral legitimacy, religiously-guided or not. What is particularly interesting is that the majority of those I encountered in Iran, even those who had opted to pay for an organ donation, were unaware of the existence of fatwas explicitly approving the monetized exchange. Some assumed that if any fatwas existed on the matter, they would be prohibitive. Others claimed that they had never asked about such fatwas, but assumed that since the policy was implemented in part by state organizations in an Islamic Republic, it must not have contradicted Islamic doctrine. This shows that the fatwas, despite being deployed for policy purposes, have done so silently and without participating in the formation of public opinion.

There are two major consequences when fatwas are directed toward policy making in this way. One, the legal interpretations of jurists are likely to favor the premises and concerns of the policy actors who have elicited them, rather than the everyday dilemmas of ordinary people like the organ donors and recipients most affected by the policy for compensated kidney transplants. Two, while such fatwas do enable policy making and implementation, they hardly play a role in shaping the public moral understandings necessary for their proper enactment.

Snapshot of the first page of an article in the IKF’s Shafa Journal listing fatwa responses from 1994 on the permissibility of brain death organ donation, given by Ayatullahs Khomeini, Khamenei, and Rafsanjani. Author photo, circa 2008.

Matters are different when successful policy making requires that such policy-oriented fatwas become publicized through incorporation into campaigns (such as those directed toward public health) or otherwise debated in academic settings, journalistic accounts, and most important of all, radio and television programming. It is in these contexts that such fatwas often inform and shape the public’s moral sensibilities and help achieve consensus.

While such public discussion never took place for compensated kidney transplants, it did occur when brain-death organ donation became a viable possibility. Though less than 30% of kidneys transplanted every year come from brain-dead donors, the number is on the rise not only because the infrastructure and logistics accommodating such time-sensitive procedures are improving, but also because more and more Iranians have been embracing the possibility of donating their body parts in the event of brain death as an opportunity for a final grand act of altruism.

The transformation of public attitudes towards brain-death as “real death” has been made possible by a concerted effort to create a “culture of brain-death organ donation.” The Ministry of Health, along with the IKF and other organizations have been working closely with national radio, television, and other media to orchestrate various public campaigns to raise awareness about brain death (among other things through serialized dramas broadcast during peak family viewing times). Nephrologists and neurologists sometimes appear alongside clerics to marshal the cause of brain-death organ donation as a clinically sound, religiously sanctioned, but most of all heroic and spiritually rewarding act. This is all despite the fact that there is more disagreement among jurists on the equivalence of brain death and real death than there is on the legal permissibility of paid kidney giving.

While Western bioethicists often look to the fatwas of Muslim jurists to understand Islamic ethical positions on modern biomedical interventions, we have seen that these fatwas do not always reflect the attitudes of believers on matters of ethical import. When it comes to “kidney selling,” these moral concerns are varied and unstable, dependent as they are on an individual’s relationship and proximity to the context of exchange—as an ailing patient, struggling donor, generous benefactor, passive observer, social critic, and so on. Moreover, fatwas are never automatically efficacious. They must be elicited, mobilized, elaborated, and deployed by the right people, with the right instruments. To understand the ethics of any critical social practice in an Islamic milieu, then, it is paramount both to differentiate between those Islamic legal opinions that are elicited in policy contexts and those that are not, and to examine how policy-oriented fatwas circulate: as contributions to debates over matters of public interest, or as instruments of policy that languish in compendia but rarely see the light of public scrutiny.

Array
Elham Mireshghi
Elham Mireshghi is an anthropologist of medicine and public policy and a lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Her ethnographic research on Iran’s unique paid kidney donation program examines the development of transplant policy and legal opinions by Shi‘i Muslim jurists, as well as the emergent moral valuations of the exchange that challenge widespread bioethical conceptualizations of bodily commodification. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship on Religion and Ethics.
Global Currents article

From “Shooting and Crying” to “Shooting and Singing”: Notes on the 2019 Eurovision in Israel.


Olivia Wieczorek performing at the 2016 Polish National Final. Photo Credit: Serecki, Wikimedia Commons.

Israel is a nation that has no secrets. The democratic process of self-exposure is celebrated time and again. Its model of self-reflection, however, has changed over 70 years of military brutality, occupation, and settler colonial violence. Long ago, it used to follow a model of remorse, also known as “shooting and crying.” The tradition is traced back to S. Yizhar’s powerful novella Khirbet Khizeh (also spelled: Hirbet Hizeh or Hirbet Hizah), originally published in 1949. The novella tells the story of several young Israeli soldiers who are ordered to “clear” some Palestinian villages right after the end of the 1948 war. The text is a moving depiction of post-war atrocities, of colonial violence, of performative militarized masculinity, and of the inner turmoil of the narrator, who himself is a young soldier. The soldier wishes to belong to his fellow warriors, but his conscience hurts. Eventually he decides to join the rest in evacuating the village and leaves his remorse to be dealt with in the future.

Yizhar’s text is important because it is a very early documentation of the Nakba (Arabic for “Cataclysm” or “Catastrophe”). The significance of including the Nakba (with detailed accounts of destruction, violence, and expulsion of Palestinians) in one of the earliest Israeli novels to be published in Hebrew post 1948 cannot be overstated. That this very text became required reading for all Israeli high-school students right around the 1967 war, then a best seller, and finally a TV series a few years after the 1973 war, leaves little doubt about the significant impact this short text has had on generations of Israelis. What is this impact? Without undermining the outstanding literary qualities of the text (there are but a few Hebrew writers as talented as Yizhar, and this novella is a true masterpiece of modern Hebrew literature), one must recognize the poetic and political ethos of this text as one that soon became a model for many future Israeli novelists, songwriters, and filmmakers. In the work of acclaimed authors such as Amos Oz, David Grossman, and even more contemporary writers, this trope is dominant. A few of the more familiar cinematic works that follow this model include Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Lebanon (2007), and more recently the TV series, Fauda (2018).

If the tone of remorse and hesitation is strongly captured in Yizhar’s early novella, over the years the trope of “shooting and crying” has become just as much about remorse and moral dilemmas as it has become about self-justification and the creating of a masculine, warrior subject. Such a subject is human and sensitive, but also logical and responsible. Amos Oz—a writer who has always been considered “leftist” by the right and “right” by the left—best captured this model of subjectivity in his response to a question about his feelings concerning his service as an Israeli soldier in both 1967 and 1973: “I have done many things that I am sorry I had to do, but nothing that I am ashamed of.”

“Sorry for things I had to do.” This “non-apologetic apology” was the model of self-critique advanced in Israel in many politically reflective works of literature and cinema. “Shooting and crying,” as this style became known, was a way of maintaining the nation’s self-image as youthful and innocent, along with its sense of vocation against the reality of war, growing military violence, occupation, invasion, and an overall sense that things were going wrong. All in all, this long poetic tradition, which has at times produced better works than others—Waltz with Bashir is undeniably a cinematic masterpiece—followed the very same logic of Golda Meir’s somewhat less artistic, and significantly more coarse statement: “We can forgive you [the Arabs] for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

But the days of shooting and crying are over. Shooting continues, but crying has stopped. It has been replaced with laughter: hysterical, cynical, crude, perhaps even desperate laughter. The general logic is the same: Israel hides nothing. It does not deny the violence and the shooting in which it is involved. It does not deny the occupation, the violations, the torture. Israel denies nothing. On the contrary, it openly depicts and documents its wrongs. In the past, it was the soldiers who were shooting and crying. This time around, the soldiers are shooting and the rest are dancing. And everything takes place out in the open. There is nothing for anyone to look for, to dig up, to expose; all is out in the open, because Israel has nothing to hide.

So what do we get now, when we are no longer shooting and crying, but rather shooting and singing? The more recent and more cynical (and perhaps more effective and dangerous) Israeli poetics and politics of self-reflection no longer bothers to portray Israelis as sensitive beings who shoot out of necessity, “We will never forgive them for what they made us do to them!” This change in style can be first detected in Waltz with Bashir, a film in which the old melancholic tone of the crying soldier is replaced with a dance soundtrack, neon colors, and a club scene. But it has only recently reached full maturity in the most vulgar presentation of a campy campaign that promotes something like: “We’re here, we’re occupiers, get used to it.”

Late last week, Israel released a response to the ongoing international critique against holding the 2019 Eurovision contest in Tel Aviv. Produced by a private media company, the video features two singers (one identifies as a Russian, the other as Arab) who meet two reluctant young blond tourists at the airport, most likely with the intention of convincing them that they should support Eurovision in Israel. The young tourists never appear convinced. On the contrary, they seem concerned, suspicious, and bitter, and they eventually leave their hosts. Meanwhile the Arab and Russian Israelis are jumpy, lively, and overtly “marketing” the country: “Stop! Don’t say a word! I know just what’ve you heard—that it’s a land of war and occupation.” The singing goes on, sparkles in the air, as the four leave the airport for a brief tour: “We are here to be your guide—a small country with pride!”

Truthfully, the video is confusing. If one does not know it is part of an official Israeli campaign, one is likely to think it is a parody, or perhaps even another BDS commercial (part two of the queer for Palestine dance revealed earlier this month). “This is the land of honey, honey . . . Our land is always sunny, sonny” the two hosts sing as they invite their hesitant tourists into a short “indoctrination,” telling them everything Israel has to offer in addition to the occupation: a dying Dead Sea that is shrinking due to capitalist activity; beaches full of bitches (also known as feminine gay men); lots of Jews (and only some are greedy); great shawarma everywhere; and the Al-Aqsa Mosque as symbol of “the beloved capital.”

So why would this be the formal Israeli campaign? Precisely because this “humor” and campiness have become clear and identifiable political and poetic tactics that can be easily mimicked, regenerated, and used as if following a narrative of reclaiming. Once again, Israel generates its message from the position of “strategic weakness”: the world says these horrible things about us? Well then it is either because everyone is anti-Semitic (they think all Jews are greedy!) or because they think we don’t know what they know and they think they need to teach us. But we know all there is to know, and we know better than they know. Even so, they patronize us, suggesting we don’t know what we do know: “the occupation isn’t nice.”

Shooting and crying is passé. Shooting and singing is more appropriate, especially as a promo for Eurovision in Tel Aviv. There is no point in denying the Israeli occupation (no one denies it) and no point in denying colonial violence and destruction (no one denies it). So? Lets dance! Where the mockery about nostalgia (“land of milk and honey”) comes on the same plate with the self-negating anti-Semitic jokes about greedy Jews and the matter of fact acknowledgement of the occupation (in the campaign’s first line no less!!), there is not much left for the critic to say. This is the importance and the danger of this new “campy” style. Its self-reflexivity and ironic nod is far more sophisticated, politically speaking, than crying. This is not merely replacing shooting and crying with shooting and singing. It is more like replacing shooting and crying with shooting and singing about just how vulgar it is to be shooting and singing. The bottom line message? Do you want to be shooting and crying? Crying about shooting? Or… would you rather join the singing? Don’t spoil the party. That’s not cool.

Array
Gil Hochberg
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, the modern Levant, Semitism, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema and art. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives, and the production of knowledge.
Global Currents article

Reading Frankenstein in a Time of Germline Editing


 
Family at Scribe Winery, California. Photo Credit: Justin Schuck, 2014.

On the morning of November 26th, 2018, I met with sixteen Saint Anselm College first year students to discuss Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The timing could not have been better to read a two-hundred year old text. That morning the news had broken that a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced two live births from germline edited embryos. Dr. Jiankui used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool that Natalie Kofler discusses in her essay in this Contending Modernities series. On that cold wintery morning, the book seemed less like early 19th century science fiction and more like a cautionary tale for our time.

During the seminar we discussed how Victor Frankenstein’s unnamed creature destroyed Victor’s life, whether Victor or the creature (or no one) was the sympathetic figure in the story, and whether or not Victor should have acceded to the creature’s demands to create a female companion. We also took up questions related to having children and the obligations of creators to creatures. Given the news that had broken that morning, these questions took on new urgency as we debated the prospects of designing our own children.

The students noted that Victor immediately rejected the creature after bringing him to life. Some defended this response. These students argued that the creature failed to meet Victor’s expectations; he was too gruesome and ugly to be lovable.

He Jiankui at Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing. Photo Credit: VOA – Iris Tong, 2018, Wikimedia Commons.

These students applied what I call the logic of creation to the case. The logic goes like this. Persons create things for a certain end. Chairs, for example, are created for sitting. All acceptance and rejection of the creation is predicated upon whether or not it fulfills its intended end. When the creation meets its goal, it is accepted. When it does not, it can be rejected and destroyed. And so, we keep functional chairs and trash the three-legged kind. Such rejection and destruction are permissible because the creation is owned by the creator. John Locke famously argued that goods become private property when a person combines his labor with what he is creating. The fruits of one’s labor are privately owned by the laborer. Because the monster was Victor’s creation, it was not unjust for Victor to drive him away. The monster was a “broken” creation, a three-legged chair if you will, worthy to share in such a chair’s fate.

Others sympathized with the creature. They argued that only non-personal creations, such as chairs, should be created. While the word “begetting” never made its way into the conversation, their argument suggested that personal creatures should be begotten, never made.

As a theological ethicist, I heard what I call the “logic of begetting” in their arguments. Christianity’s central dogmatic creed, for instance, suggests that the logic of begetting is different than that of creating. There we find that the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, “was begotten, not made.” Human parents image God insofar as they beget, but do not create or design, their children. The process of begetting is mysterious, and retains a spirit of openness to whomever the child is because the child is not a manufactured product. Children emerge as gifts to parents. Gifts, Pope Benedict argued in Caritas in veritate, are gratuitously given, and are freely accepted. Because gifts are gratuitously given by the giver, they should never be requested by the recipient. Christians throughout the world have managed to misunderstand this aspect of gifts through the creation of gift “wish lists” regarding Christmas and weddings. How many times have we requested a gift, only to be disappointed to not receive exactly what we wanted? In those moments we evaluate the gift before fully accepting it. At times, we ask the gift giver to exchange the gift for something “better.” In these instances the experience of gifting has been lost. Compare those experiences with the times in which one has been surprised to receive a gift at all. In these moments, moments in which there is no expectation of or request for a gift, we are genuinely moved by the gift, and grow closer to the gift giver as a result. Here we experience the gratuitousness of a true gift and respond with appropriate gratitude for the gift, no matter how small it may be. In these instances we immediately accept the gift without first evaluating the gift’s merits or flaws.

Frontispiece to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein published by Colburn and Bentley, London 1831 Steel engraving in book 93 x 71 mm, Photo Credit: Theodor von Holst, Wikimedia Commons.

Children should be received in the latter manner, not the former. Parents should freely accept and love their children unconditionally. However, if we design our children, if we “ask” for certain kinds of children, we move away from understanding and accepting our children as gifts. Our acceptance of them becomes conditioned on whether or not they fulfilled the end we intended in creating them.

Although we may be able to edit out the genes at the germline level that code for diseases such as Tay Sachs or Huntington’s, it would be immoral to do so. Germline editing (whether therapeutic or for purposes of enhancement) is morally wrong because it changes the relationship of parents and children from one of begetter-begotten to creator-creature. Frankenstein vividly depicts the dangers of such a relationship. Such a change harms the relationship of parents and children, rendering it more difficult for parents to unconditionally accept and love their children.

The scholars on the “Out of the Lab” podcast repeatedly queried the existence of universal moral norms to guide a cross-cultural ethical analysis of germline editing. I believe that the logic of begetting/gifting is the best candidate for a universal moral norm to guide this analysis. While I have produced this argument from within the Christian tradition, one does not have to be Christian to believe that children should be begotten and should be accepted for who they are, and not who the parents would like the child to be.

Recall that the students who objected to Victor’s actions did not argue that he usurped the role of God, as many Christians have argued regarding gene editing. Nor did they channel Maura Ryan’s important approach in the “Out of the Lab” podcast, where she suggested that the debate ought to consider possible harms to the common good. Their argument did not emerge from religious principles. Instead, these students drew upon a normative account of the relation of parents and children. This account emerged inductively, from the experience of being a child and from the experience of other children. Personal and collective experience shows us that children rightly desire to be received and accepted by their parents as gifts, regardless of their abilities or genetic makeup.

 

Suggested Further Reading:

Michael Sandel, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

Congregation For the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions”

Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate

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Daniel Daly
Daniel Daly is Associate Professor of Theology at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire where he has been on the faculty since 2006. He will join the faculty of Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry in the fall of 2019. He received his Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College under the direction of James Keenan, SJ. He serves as the ethicist on the ethics board of the Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, NH, and is a member of the Catholic Health Association’s Theologian/Ethicist Committee.
Global Currents article

Muslim Jurists’ Contribution to Islamic Bioethics


San Francisco sculpture of human genome. Photo Credit: Jeremy Keith.

Technological progress represents one of the key characteristics, and concurrently one of the fruits, of modernity. Biomedical sciences and their technological applications in particular have witnessed revolutionary progress from the twentieth century onwards. This progress managed to achieve near-miracles by eradicating some lethal diseases, enabling humans to live longer and also to have a better quality of life in general. However, as rightly put by Thomas Misa, “Technologies interact deeply with society and culture, but the interactions involve mutual influence, substantial uncertainty, and historical ambiguity, eliciting resistance, accommodation, acceptance, and even enthusiasm” (Misa 2003, 3). In their interaction with modern biomedical technologies, Muslim individuals, societies, and countries have had to grapple with questions related to which of these technologies should be resisted, accommodated after modifications, or unconditionally welcomed. Specialists in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), or jurists (fuqahāʾ), were at the forefront of those who tackled these questions from an Islamic perspective. The contribution of Muslim jurists to the emerging field of Islamic Bioethics is so seminal that some critical voices find it unfortunate that there is almost no substantial contribution from other disciplines, including Islamic theology, philosophy, and Sufism.

In this essay, I give a concise analytical review of Muslim jurists’ contributions to Islamic bioethics based on works written in Arabic by Sunni jurists today. I address three main questions: What are the identities of the contributing jurists? How do they address the ethical questions posed by modern biomedical technologies? What are the key challenges that need to be addressed in the future?

Who Are the Main Contributing Jurists?

So far, we have no Muslim jurists who specialize in addressing exclusively bioethical issues. Almost all of them are graduates of Sharia faculties who received training in addressing a wide range of topics that cut across almost all aspects of life including social, political, financial, and bioethical questions through the lens of Islamic jurisprudence. So, unlike the situation in many Western countries where theologians and philosophers will specialize in bioethics and dedicate their whole career to this field, we still have no bioethical jurists or juridical bioethicists in the Islamic tradition. One of the main consequences of this situation is that we do not see any specific interpretive techniques or modes of reasoning which are unique to Islamic bioethics. In their attempts to address bioethical questions, Muslim jurists do not feel compelled to develop any new techniques that go beyond the traditional system of Islamic jurisprudence, as will be explained further in the section below. They are usually confident that the system which helps them answer questions related to modern domains like economics and finance will also do the job with the field of bioethics.

Some of the contributing jurists have engaged with bioethical questions early on in their careers by writing their M.A. theses or Ph.D. dissertations on specific bioethical issues. Because of the relatively new character of these bioethical issues, many postgraduate students are inclined to choose such topics so that they will not run the risk of rehashing what their predecessors have already said on exhausted topics. Some of these works have found their way into wide circulation and have become important references in the field. Just as examples, I refer to the works of Muḥammad al-Shinqītī on medical surgery,[1] Saʿd al-Shuwayrikh on genetic engineering,[2] and Ismāʿīl Marḥaba on biobanks.[3]

Besides these junior jurists, many senior and prominent jurists also write on bioethical issues to show how their long-established expertise will help them address such complex questions in a robust and rigorous way. Just as examples, I refer to the works of Mukhtār al-Sallāmī[4] and Muḥammad Naʿīm Yāsīn[5] on miscellaneous bioethical issues and Muḥammad Raʾfat ʿUthmān[6] on genetics.

How Do Muslim Jurists Address Bioethical Questions?

As mentioned above, the jurists who write on bioethics are generalists who address all types of questions through the lens of Islamic jurisprudence without developing any specific methodology tailored for the field of bioethics in particular. Like the approach to any other issue in Islamic jurisprudence, the jurist usually starts with consulting the main sources, namely the Qur’an and Sunna, looking for relevant scriptural references and then follows with consulting the so-called secondary sources of legislation including those related to induction, deduction, inference, and so forth. Weighing between possible benefits and expected harms, which comes close to the well-known risk-benefit assessment in mainstream bioethics, is one of the most frequently used tools to assess various biomedical technologies from a juristic perspective. In this specific regard, contemporary jurists try to benefit from the relatively new concept of fiqh al-muwāzanāt (lit. “jurisprudence of balancing”) which has roots in classical fiqh.[7]

Because of the novel character of most of the bioethical issues, jurists heavily depend on the mechanism of independent reasoning (ijtihād) where they would independently examine available sources without necessarily adhering to any of the established schools of law in the Islamic tradition. One of the relatively unique aspects of practicing ijtihād in the field of bioethics is that it usually assumes an interdisciplinary character. Because of their educational background, which consists of training exclusively in the Arabic language and in disciplines related to Islam as a religious tradition (the so-called al-ʿulūm al-sharʿiyya), contemporary jurists have hardly had access to biomedical sources. In order to grasp the crux of the bioethical questions at hand, they get external help from biomedical scientists who simplify the biomedical information they need so that they can give informed answers. This mechanism is known in Islamic studies as collective ijtihād, and it was institutionalized by the beginning of the 1980s. Three main transnational institutions took the lead in this regard, namely the Organization of Islamic Sciences (IOMS) based in Kuwait, the Islamic Fiqh Academy (IFA) based in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and the International Islamic Fiqh Academy (IIFA) based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The three institutions work closely together but they do not necessarily adopt identical positions on the bioethical issues they discuss (Ghaly 2019, 47-51).

What Are the Key Challenges Ahead?

The field of Islamic bioethics has witnessed considerable progress during its five-decade history, thanks to the contribution of Muslim jurists, among others. However, this nascent field still has various challenges ahead that need to be addressed.

Genome Engineering Lab 7. Photo Credit: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, 2018.

First of all, the aforementioned mechanism of collective ijtihād entails serious difficulties. The collaboration between Muslim jurists and biomedical scientists was premised on the idea that the role of scientists would be restricted to providing biomedical and technical information about the issues at hand, whereas developing the Islamic perspective would remain the exclusive right of those who are experts in Islamic normative knowledge, namely the jurists. However, this division of tasks proved to be impractical and often unimplementable during the actual collective deliberations. It is true that some scientists are themselves willing to engage in the process of ijtihād and cross over the boundaries of their discipline by jumping to normative conclusions about how a specific issue should be judged from an Islamic perspective (Ghaly 2015). The real problem, however, seems to lie in the very nature of biomedical sciences. Unlike what Muslim jurists and some scientists think, biomedical information does not only convey value-neutral facts, but often also implies value-laden and normative positions. Additionally, it is true that both jurists and scientists can share common religious beliefs as Muslims, but they belong to different disciplines, each of which has its own terminologies, fact-finding methodologies, ways of reasoning, and also its own biases.

Just to give a concrete example showing how such challenges can affect the communication and collaboration between these two groups, I refer to discussions on the beginning of human life. Within Islamic jurisprudence, determining the beginning of human life is closely tied to the metaphysical concept of the soul, where life would start by the ensoulment of the embryo at a specific moment during pregnancy, a process determined in the Prophetic traditions. On the other hand, determining the beginning of human life in biomedical sciences cannot be based on a metaphysical concept but rather must be based on measurable and verifiable criteria that can be observed and tested through the scientific tools of the physician. Such discrepancies in the epistemology of each discipline created two main divergent approaches. The advocates of one approach were in favor of medicalizing the tool of determining the beginning of human life, and they argued that the recent advances in modern embryology makes dependence on metaphysics in such issues an archaic idea that cannot be part of our modern world. However, the proponents of the other approach could not envisage the possibility of betraying the long-established methodologies of fiqh, where scriptural references including a specified number of days after which ensoulment takes place, cannot be overruled in the name of complying with scientific progress (Ghaly 2012).

Another challenge relates to the scope of interdisciplinarity in contemporary Islamic bioethical discussions. As mentioned above, many critics argue that the Islamic tradition cannot be reduced to the discipline of fiqh only and thus these discussions should be broadened by engaging other Islamic disciplines like theology, philosophy, and Sufism. Additionally, the complexity of questions raised by modern biomedical technology cannot be properly and comprehensively understood by consulting experts in biomedical sciences only. Contributions from other disciplines like medical anthropology, sociobiology, and philosophy of medicine should also take part in these collective discussions. However, the abovementioned issue, resulting from involving biomedical scientists in the process of ijtihād, should forewarn us that broadening the scope of interdisciplinarity may also come with its own challenges.

 

[1]Muḥammad al-Shinqītī, Aḥkām al-jirāḥa al-ṭibiiya. 2nd ed., (Jeddah: Maktabat al-Ṣaḥābā, 1994).

[2]Saʿd al-Shuwayrikh, Aḥkām al-handasa al-wirāthiyya, (Riyadh; Dār Kunūz Ishbīlya, 2007).

[3]Ismāʿīl Marḥaba, Al-bunūk al-ṭibiyya al-bashariyya wa aḥkāmuhā al-fiqhiyya, (Jeddah/Cairo: Dār Ibn al-Jawzī, 2008).

[4]Mukhtār al-Sallāmī, Al-ṭibb fī ḍawʾ al-īmān, (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2000).

[5]Muḥammad Naʿīm Yāsīn, Abḥāth fiqhiyya fī qaḍāyā ṭibbiyya muʿāṣira, (Amman; Dār al-Nafaʾis, 2008).

[6]Muḥammad Raʾfat ʿUthmān, Al-Mādda al-wirāthiyya: al-jīnūm, (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, 2009).

[7]See for instance Nājī Ibrāhīm al-Suwayd, Fiqh al-muwazanāt bayana al-naẓariyya wa al-taṭbīq,  (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2002).

Array
Mohammed Ghaly
Mohammed Ghaly is professor of Islam and Biomedical Ethics at the research Center for Islamic Legislation & Ethics (CILE), College of Islamic Studies at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University. During the academic year 2014-2015, he was Visiting Researcher at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, USA. Besides his book Islam and Disability: Perspectives in Theology and Jurisprudence (Routledge, 2010) and the edited volume Islamic Perspectives on the Principles of Biomedical Ethics (Imperial College & World Scientific, 2016), Ghaly is the single author of over thirty peer-reviewed publications.
Global Currents article

Beyond Aztlán: Latina/o/x Students Let Go of Their Mythic Homeland


Art Heals mural in Los Angeles, California. The image draws on the mythic imagination of Aztlán but depicts a Tongva woman and rebel leader, Toypurina, at its center. Photo Credit: Author.

On March 31, 2019, student leaders from the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA; the Chicanx Student Movement of Aztlán), a U.S. Latina/o/x organization present on many high school and college campuses across the country, voted to change their fifty-year old name. They decided that they had to drop two of the most mythically politicized facets: “Chicanx” and “Aztlán.” Although they haven’t decided on a final name, right now they have chosen an Espanglish acronym: Movimiento Estudiantil Progressive Action (MEPA). In an Associated Press story, some MEChA alumni criticized the students for running away from or trying to erase their history. 

Given that the names “Chicano” and “Aztlán” have been contested for fifty years, by debating these terms and voting to alter their names these students are actively participating in that history. In a statement on the decision, their national board made clear that they are not disavowing earlier generations.

Becoming MEChA: Historical Context

In the late 1960s, across the country, students mobilized to demand courses and programs of study that decentered modern European thought and reflected a greater sensitivity to the full human experience. The struggle for self-naming was part of the struggle for self-determination and greater educational opportunity that proliferated among these movements. For those engaged in decolonial struggles, there was often a hope that pre-modern stories and traditions might offer fuel in resisting contemporary colonial structures. The names “Chicano” and “Aztlán” were themselves invested with meaning by young people who were searching for names and ideas that would reflect their self-perception better than the terms outsiders had placed upon them.

At the same time, these movements were always more diverse in composition and less unified in perspective than later narratives like to depict. As a student of Christian scriptures, I am familiar with the ways on-the-ground human diversity often gets flattened in the memorialization of supposed moments of origin. I partially offer this reflection in the hope that MEPA narratives can do a better job of remembering how much of their fifty-year history has involved a multiplicity of perspectives and ongoing contestation.

Dominant Chicano movement narratives offer a clear and progressive origin story that begins with the triumphal inclusion of Chicano and Aztlán as terms of self-identification. In March of 1969, possibly 1500 activists met in Denver with a focus on Chicano nationalism. The term “Chicano” had started to circulate among activists a few years before. It felt like a reclaiming of an older term, and a variety of myths about the exact origin of the word abounded, though many thought it came from “mechicano,” a reference to the indigenous Mexica peoples. “Chicano” was also deployed with pride in contradistinction to the derogatory names that had been placed upon “ethnic Mexicans” (a term I take from historian Ernesto Chávez in order to speak to the pan-ethnic conglomeration of diverse peoples) by outsiders since the United States had seized and conquered the northern half of Mexico in 1848. From the history of 19thand 20thcentury lynchings in the borderlands amid Anglo depictions of “dirty Mexicans” to the use of “Operation Wetback” as a name for a mid-20thcentury federal government operation of mass deportations, ethnic Mexicans had confronted a variety of slurs employed to justify violence.

During the 1969 conference, the poet Alurista wrote the preamble for El Plan de Aztlán, where he renamed the southwestern United States “Aztlán,” the land the Aztecs migrated from before moving to the Valley of Mexico and the land to which they promised to return. Alurista intentionally drew upon a myth that antedated European colonialism, a myth that invoked both a pre-Columbian past and a future where colonial sufferings have ended.

MEChA Logo

In choosing the name “Chicano” for themselves and “Aztlán” for the lands on which they met, activists refused dominant depictions of ethnic Mexicans as foreigners. Instead, the United States was the foreign interloper in a grander history. Chicano/a/x activists were claiming a deep ancestral connection to the lands on which they lived. Precisely because ethnic Mexicans had faced so many forms of displacement and erasure in U.S. history, the powerful longing for place that rests behind these names persists through fifty years of engagement with Aztlán.

In April 1969, more than one hundred ethnically Mexican students, staff, and faculty from twenty-nine of California’s public colleges and universities met in Santa Barbara in order to craft a plan for higher education. But they also brought together several distinct student organizations and combined them into one new group: MEChA. The name was meant to signal a radical vision and commitment to self-determination. They were not “Mexican American” but Chicano. They were a movement in Spanish. They were not in California but Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the people we call Aztecs. Collectively, they became a mecha, a “matchstick” or a “fuse.”

Contestations over Aztlán

Yet Chicanos were themselves a diverse group, and they were more divided over the name and their platform than the October 1969 publication of El Plan de Santa Barbara makes it seem. Chicana feminist and Santa Barbara steering committee member Anna Nieto-Gómez has long observed that the published text flattened out the diversity of voices and the plurality of visions that had been present in Santa Barbara. Nieto-Gómez tells a different narrative about the Chicano movement’s history. For her, certain questions and practices of internal contestation were always part of ethnic Mexican student activism. 

Even in 1969, some young activists already wondered if the name “Chicano” represented too much of a break from their own past. The term “Chicano” was more commonly used within particular academic and activist contexts. What about friends and family who were not as educated in activist lingo? Many wondered whether the name worked to exclude rather than to unite. 

Aztlán, with its promise of a once and future homeland, was also quite pliable in its imagination and reception. Some participants in the Chicano movement, as filmmaker Jesús Treviño describes in his autobiography Eyewitness, may have hoped for a more literal reconquest of Mexico’s northern territories. And some activists, like Alfredo Acosta Figueroa as he describes in his book La Cuna de Aztlán, may have really believed that they had found the literal homeland of the Aztecs in a specific place in California. 

Most, however, quickly turned to a more spiritualized description, where Aztlán became more of a state of mind. They saw it as an alternate utopian space, or, as Luis Leal described it, “Aztlán symbolizes the spiritual union of the Chicanos, something that is carried within the heart, no matter where they may live or where they may find themselves.”

Current MEChA member from Seattle University, Nicolás Cruz, in his widely circulated paper criticizing Aztlán (“Reflections on Aztlán and Its Role in the Chicanx Student Movement”) makes note of the possibilities of this spiritualized approach. Cruz particularly engages with the analogy of what Israel means to different Jewish communities, highlighting their long history of contesting the meanings of homeland and diaspora. Yet, he still leaves that comparison wondering if spiritualizing Aztlán sufficiently addresses critics’ concerns. 

Cruz’s criticisms and those of other student leaders target these visions of Aztlán as themselves implicated in colonialism, racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, and transphobia. In a move familiar to students of religion, many elder activists depict these criticisms as contemporary impositions that fundamentally misunderstand an ancient myth and the historical context of the movement from which these ideas emerged. But I would suggest that, even if we discuss them on different terms now, all of these critiques have long histories. 

Chicano Park mural of Aztlán. Photo Credit: Author.

As early as the 1970s, some activists wondered if Aztlán relied too much on a romanticized, imperial vision. Aztlán, as it was imagined, partially derived its power from Spanish interpretations and manuscripts. The Mexicas, to whom “Chicano” supposedly referred, also colonized and dominated a great diversity of indigenous peoples before the Spanish arrived. Many ethnic Mexicans are indigenous but not Mexica. Additionally, in the last fifty years, the U.S. Latina/o/x population has grown and diversified dramatically. Many members of MEPA trace their ancestors to various parts of Latin America and not just Mexico.

Moreover, appealing to the Mexica people and to Aztlán grew out of a 1920s Mexican nationalist revolutionary mythos that valued racial mixture (mestizaje) rather than indigeneity. As Néstor Medina has succinctly outlined in his book Mestizaje, certain Mexican nationalists appropriated indigenous imagery even as they opposed indigenous rights and erased Mexicans of Asian and African descent. 

Attempts to narrate and contest the complex racial stratification of the Americas have hundreds of years of history, even if, again, how we name those contestations now looks different. So too, in the case of the Chicano movement, do we find long-standing concerns about how indigeneity is respected in relationship to mestizaje. Indeed, indigenous ethnic Mexican objections to the concept of Aztlán may have been one of the most important factors in the decision to change the name. Even Alurista quickly rethought his positions, and his Nationchild Plumaroja (1972) sought to be more gender inclusive and more focused on indigenous traditions rather than mestizaje. 

Since 1970s Chicano activism was borne out of solidarity with other minoritized communities, some activists also asked about the rights of other minoritized populations, such as African Americans, American Indians, and Asian Americans. Aztlán seemed to refuse other claims on a shared space. 

In the history of settler colonization of the Americas, many colonizers entered territories and mapped new names (or misappropriated indigenous names) on places that already had names recognized by the indigenous people living there. What does the idea of Aztlán mean for the place names of the many living indigenous communities throughout the United States? Do visions of Aztlán enable solidarity with their quests for sovereignty, or does Aztlán simply become another settler colonial misappropriation and misapplication, where an indigenous name from one part of the continent gets appropriated and mapped onto another, erasing the claims of indigenous peoples? This question is at the heart of the current debate and decision to move beyond Aztlán.

The criticisms around the inclusion of women and LGBT* students also have longer histories, even if they are not as directly apparent in the vision of Aztlán. Triumphal unified narratives of the 1970s Chicano movement too often focused on the leadership of cis-male heterosexual mestizos. As Maylei Blackwell researched in ¡Chicana Power!, Chicanas formed their own organizations quite early in order to create space outside of patriarchal demands. The Chicana feminist newspaper Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was already in print by 1971, and in Houston, more than 600 Chicanas gathered for the Conferencia de la Mujer. 

Nieto-Gómez, among others, laid challenges to Chicano movement leadership structures that favored men and compelled women to be subservient, enabled sexual harassment and abuse, and that proclaimed an ideology of family grounded in patriarchal hierarchy while erasing women. Feminist critics specifically coined the term “hermanidad,” a more gender inclusive sense of siblinghood, to counter the more masculine dominated language of “carnalismo” or “brotherhood.” By the late 1970s, Chicana feminist Anna Nieto-Gómez was pushed out of Chicano activism because some figures wanted to eliminate practices of internal contestation, especially feminist contestation. 

As Richard T. Rodríguez has demonstrated in Next of Kin, LGBT* Chicana/o/xs also worked inside and alongside the movement to create their own visions of Chicano/x/a familia and Aztlán. In the early 1990s in her collection The Last Generation, author Cherríe Moraga said “Aztlán gave language to a nameless anhelo [longing/yearning] inside me.” Yet this reflection is found in an essay (“Queer Aztlán”) that underscored the ways patriarchy and machismo had undermined the 1970s movement.

“Women of the Resistance” Mural in Balmy Alley, San Francisco. Photo Credit: Author.

Why Aztlán’s Time Is Up

Moraga may have found a way to queer Aztlán, but every generation wonders if they should continue to refashion the myths they have inherited or if it is time to create new ones. MEChA is not the first 1960s/70s-era Latina/o/x organization to confront such a name change. The National Council of La Raza changed its name to UnidosUS in 2017. Rodríguez has also wondered about whether familial metaphors are still usable, after the movement-era struggles around hermanidad and carnalismo (and queer belonging within and outside of both metaphors). He argues that the long-standing power of familia means that these metaphors cannot be abandoned, but he still awaits a “next of kin,” some other approach to fictive family.

To be sure, the generation that created MEChA, and the generations in between who benefitted from their struggles, have an emotional attachment to the name. Chicano scholar and activist Alvaro Huerta captures how important MEChA was to transformations in his consciousness and his life in “Reflections of a MEChista.” I wrote my 2016 book, Revelation in Aztlán, precisely because I was intrigued by the power that this mythic place name wielded for people who felt that they have been denied place in the United States. 

Today’s students, however, are still carrying forth the legacies of conscientization, rigorous intellectual debate, and critical social action that made Aztlán a potent utopian imagination for previous generations of MEChistas. Current students have seriously debated the meanings of “Chicano” and “Aztlán,” and despite recognizing their potent histories, they worry that the baggage associated with them hinders their abilities to craft the better world that earlier generations sought.

In this regard, these current students are also participating in debates that rage across the globe about how best to relate to the traditions our ancestors passed down to us, especially when those traditions seem deeply implicated in historical practices of oppression such as colonialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and/or transphobia. Some figures, like Moraga and Rodríguez, struggle to retrieve the histories of complexity and contestation without abandoning those myths. Some like Leal repurpose the content of those myths and how we engage with them, in order to find ways to make them useful to the current moment. 

But other generations give up on those myths altogether. In 1969, student activists decided to give up on the names they inherited, and they turned to a mythic past in order to create new names for their present. Current students have likewise decided they no longer wish to carry the names they inherited forward. What students of religion around the world should take note of here, however, is the students’ decision to reject the name without creating a finalized alternative. These students were skeptical that any previous tradition might be made usable for the present. 

For students of religion in the United States, we may see a familiar lesson in this decision to change MEChA’s name. Sociological studies of religion in the United States have found a similar dramatic decline in youth participation in Christian churches. Many of our students no longer want to associate themselves with inherited traditions that have been mobilized to oppress people. Even as these students have taken much of their vision of social justice from previous generations’ articulations of Aztlán, they wish to move their organization forward without evoking ancient mythic traditions. This decision is one option familiar to those who watch how minoritized populations navigate the competing modernities they have inherited.

Still, a change of name does not necessarily mean students are running away from their history or disavowing the struggles of generations before them. In fact, MEPA students embrace the same desire to self-name that marked previous MEChA generations’ quests for self-determination. They know that names are always ambivalent, contingent, and contested, that utopias are always unfinished works-in-progress. Future generations may someday find MEPA’s new name inadequate, but el movimiento will keep moving then too.

May 2023 Update

Although leadership members voted for a name change in 2019, that name change never took effect as it needed to be voted on the following year. According to participant Diego Sanchez, national leadership ultimately decided to eliminate the acronym approach to MEChA and go by the name Mecha under its meaning of “fuse.” They also adopted a revised constitution preamble with the express goal of centering “Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, Non-binary, and Femme people.”

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Jacqueline Hidalgo
Jacqueline M. Hidalgo is associate professor of Latina/o Studies and Religion at Williams College. She is the author of Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement and the co-editor (with Efraín Agosto) of Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration. For 2018-2019, she is president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States.