Dr. Ebrahim Moosa presents his talk, “Reconsidering the Ethical in Contemporary Islamic Thought” on January 1, 2020
After a successful winter intensive with our most recent batch of first year students, Contending Modernities co-director and Primary Investigator for the Madrasa Discourses program, Dr. Ebrahim Moosa, and I travelled to Dhaka, Bangladesh to lead a two-day workshop introducing local ulama (religious scholars) to the Madrasa Discourses program (MD). There, Professor Moosa also delivered a public lecture, “Rethinking the Ethical in Contemporary Islamic Thought,” as a part of BRAC University and Georgetown University’s co-sponsored lecture series on faith and development. Moosa’s lecture on January 1, 2020 drew a large crowd, many of whom stuck around after the presentation to continue the conversation over tea. In his talk, Professor Moosa argued that contemporary Islamic ethics too often focuses on law at the expense of spheres of life that influence ethics such as philosophy, science, and art. He suggested that a renewed approach to Islamic ethics would expand its horizons beyond law to consider how these areas of thought could also aid Muslims in deliberating over ethical matters.
The two-day workshop kicked off the following morning with introductions from Dr. Katherine Marshall (Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center) and from Dr. Samia Huq (Associate Professor as the Department of Economics and Social Science, BRAC University) who organized the public lecture and workshop. Following these introductions, I presented to workshop attendees on the history of science and religion. The lecture and discussion focused on a few chapters from Peter Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion. In the ancient world, I argued, science and philosophy were less concerned with justifying a set of doctrinal beliefs (as they seem often to be now), and more concerned with the formation of the self. Science and religion, in other words, were focused on instilling virtue rather than establishing objective truths about the world. Participants responded by reflecting on the role of personal formation in the Islamic tradition, and questioning whether the relationship between religion and science in the Euro-American context was the same as in the Islamic context of South Asia and the wider Muslim world. In the afternoon, Dr. Rana Dajani (Hashemite University, Jordan) picked up the discussion, introducing students to the theory of evolution and the modern scientific method. The students responded to her presentations with questions that displayed a keen interest in understanding the nuances of the theory of evolution. Throughout the day Professor Moosa tied together the presentations by describing the history and goals of the Madrasa Discourses program and how these related to the curriculum that attendees were sampling in the lectures.
Dr. Ebrahim Moosa discusses the concept of human dignity during the two-day workshop
The day’s activities were followed by dinner with local ulama and educational leaders in Bangladesh. The discussion focused on the desire of leaders in the Islamic community to refine and update their educational system. Several attendees expressed a desire to create an integrated system of education, where both secular and religious topics would be taught together. Yet, concerns were also raised that madrasas and other educational organizations lacked the institutional support necessary to make such changes. Professor Moosa responded to these comments by suggesting that it was the ulama’s responsibility to press for such changes, and that while Madrasa Discourses was not a place where society-wide educational reform could be accomplished, it was a place where experimental approaches to different forms of education that engage the relationship between Islamic thought and modern science/philosophy could be taken up. One question Professor Moosa posed to the madrasa and ulama leadership around the dinner table was whether they would be open to exploring an integrated knowledge tradition, one that took seriously the developments in the humanities, the social sciences, and science, in conversation with the historical Muslim disciplines of learning. There was some ambiguity in the reply, if not reluctance, to engage with modern knowledge given its Western provenance. Some around the table mentioned that they found the ideas of Sigmund Freud unacceptable. Professor Moosa explained that while Freud is an important thinker, he does not exhaust the Western canon and that the matter required further discussion and deliberation.
The next morning Professor Moosa introduced to workshop attendees in greater detail the historical approach to engaging the Muslim knowledge tradition that MD had pioneered. He developed some the threads of his public lecture and highlighted some of the challenges involved in “rethinking Islamic ethics.” Here he focused on what scholars of Islam could gain by reading with fresh eyes the writings of important thinkers in Islamic history, such as Al-Ghazali and others. He noted that returning to these thinkers could especially help when it comes to addressing ethical matters such as the dignity of the human person, human rights, the importance of tradition, and practices of interpretation. Following Professor Moosa’s lecture, students broke up into small groups to further discuss ethical issues in contemporary Bangladesh. Topics included the use of milk banks, the Rohingya refugee crisis, the applicability of the humanities and social science for guiding Muslims in everyday moral deliberation, curfews at universities, and divorce.
At the end of the workshop, it was clear that there was enthusiastic interest in both the topics and approach adopted by Madrasa Discourses, the latter of which involves raising questions and asking participants to explore possible solutions to those questions. It was also clear that there were unique challenges as well as possibilities that might come with expanding the existing program to include Bangladesh, most notably in the complex issues facing educational reform in the country. Nonetheless, MD looks forward to the possibility of welcoming a few select students from Bangladesh to its Summer Intensive Program that will be held in Kathmandu in July 2020.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
The Khanqah-e-Moulla, or Shah-e Hamdan Shrine, in the Old City of Srinagar, is one of the oldest examples of Kashmiri wooden architecture. Photo Credit: Mike Prince.
India consistently pushes the narrative that removing the special status of Indian-administered Kashmir addresses development, curbs nepotism, and fights “terrorism” – all supposedly towards good governance. Scholars, writers, and activists, including myself, have countered the arguments provided in support of the removal as “strawmen.” The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) across India primarily runs on an anti-Muslim and anti-minority agenda. The erasure of Kashmir’s autonomy and dilution of its Muslim majority by settler colonialism have been part of the BJP’s rallying cries since 1947. It must be kept in mind that all Indian governments from the outset have engineered a steady erosion of Kashmir’s autonomy with the aim of absorbing the region irrespective of the Kashmiri demand for a plebiscite and independence from India. The BJP’s “Kashmir solution” has brazen hyper-religious and nationalistic roots entrenched in Hindu supremacy and ethnonationalism (or Hindutva) [1]. This enterprise is fully fueled by the neoliberal order that aims to sustain India as a modern neocolonial force. Currently in India the ideology of Hindu indigeneity, which casts Muslims living in India as invaders and foreigners, has taken hold. In that equation, Kashmiri Muslims are doubly marked as the demonized other: first as Muslims, and second as Kashmiris who are longstanding dissidents committed to the fight for a UN-mandated plebiscite, democratic sovereignty, and freedom from India (Zia 2018: Chapter 3, 103–28). This ideology has taken shape with India passing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) recently. The CAA, along with the planned National Register of Citizens (NRC), are a set of laws that will prove discriminatory primarily to Muslims.
Rising international voices have criticized the brutal crackdown by the government of India on the Kashmiris since the revocation of Article 370 was announced on August 5, 2019. Nonetheless, it seems that the wider neoliberal world has bought into arguments in favor of this removal of autonomy, perhaps because of India’s billion-strong market. Since this announcement, life in Kashmir has remained under siege. The region is reeling under a humanitarian crisis, and no international actors have intervened. Basic civil rights including healthcare, education, economy, and expression are all suspended. Curfews have been the order of the day and the internet is shut down. Only landlines and some cellphones have been operational for the past month or so. Since August, Kashmir has been in a communication black hole with little news trickling out. While India touts the removal as serving the interest of development, the economic loss inflicted by the lockdown has cost Kashmiris $2.4 billion [2].
Kashmiris restricted from open dissent have countered with a civil boycott, or hartal. This means that on top of government restrictions, people have voluntarily ceased their daily activities and are staying indoors. This civilian boycott manifests the excruciating haplessness of the Kashmiri resistance. In order to register some form of protest, people are forced to adopt a politics of self-injury. Only small stores, produce vendors, and automobiles operate for short durations to keep essential supplies circulating. Otherwise, as a Kashmiri friend puts it, “soruy chu thapp” (everything is under a halt.)
When India and Pakistan were birthed in 1947, Kashmir was an independent princely kingdom that wanted to retain its sovereignty. The British gave this swath of a region territorial shape and sold it to a Hindu warlord from the Dogra dynasty in 1846. Called the Amritsar Treaty, this transaction is known as one of the most damaging real estate sales in the history of humanity. The British not only sold the land, but also the people of Kashmir en masse, to the warlord. The Dogra kings in turn brutally extracted maximum profit from their investment. They oversaw an autocratic regime of back-breaking taxes and extreme discrimination against the Muslim populations who formed the majority. The other religious traditions in the region included the Pandits, the name for Kashmiri Shaivite Brahmins given by a Mughal king, and small populations of Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians.
Two of these communities, the Pandits and Muslims, share ethnic and cultural ties. They began breaking into various sects in the 11th century as casteism, ritualism, and schisms began springing up in the ethno-religious life of Kashmiris. The renowned Kashmiri historian Professor Isaaq Khan described the medieval Kashmiri society “undergoing a crisis of what may be described as ‘human sociality’ versus Brahmanic particularism” (8).
Over centuries, the majority of Kashmiris converted to Islam, encouraged by the egalitarian potential of the religion in comparison to previous practices. The Brahmanical community was treated varyingly by successive dynasties and over time they largely adapted well to changing rulers. By the end of 18th century, they were a dominant, educated, and landowning political elite. A small number of Muslim clergy and landowners also enjoyed the privileges of titles and estates under different rulers. But the majority of Muslims lived in penury, illiteracy, and landless peasantry. Indentured/forced labor—called “begaar”—was rampant. Prostitution and human trafficking, which included children, was legal and taxed. The weavers of the world-famous Kashmiri shawl, brutalized by heavy taxes, began the Shawlbaaf Tehreek (shawl-weavers’ movement), an early and pioneering labor movement. This movement was brutally repressed when on April 29, 1865, the Dogra government killed 28 activists, many of whom were detained and died in jails.
Sheikh Abdullah with other leaders of 1931 agitation. Translation: Sitting R to L: Sardar Gohar Rehman, Mistri Yaqoob Ali, Sheikh Abdullah, Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas. Standing: R: Molvi AbdurRahim, L: Ghulam Nabi Gilkar. [Source: Aatish-e-Chinar, Authors: Sheikh Abdullah, M.Y.Taing]In 1931, the majority of Kashmiri Muslims rose against Hari Singh, the last in the line of Dogra rulers, fortifying a long-simmering revolt against him. While India sustained its “Quit India” movement against the British crown, the Kashmiri struggle was congealing as a “Quit Kashmir” movement against the autocratic ruler. Those involved in the struggle envisioned a sovereign independent democratic state. Thus, the Kashmiri movement for sovereignty and independence is older than India and Pakistan.
In 1947, British India and the princely states were an amalgam of different territorial entities and hundreds of kingdoms. They were consolidated under the single dominion of the imperial crown. The partition that followed the end of British rule was predicated on religion: Muslims would join Pakistan and Hindus would join India. In the early parleys of state-making, the Indian government deployed all forms of political, diplomatic, and military tools to annex the Kashmir region. The term deployed to describe this process was “integration.” It was accompanied by supposed consensus-building exercises, but was primarily achieved by military annexation. Soon after the two nations of India and Pakistan came into being, they started a war over the territory of Kashmir. Even though the Dogra king had a standstill agreement with Pakistan, which was seen as a prelude to acceding to that country, he hastily signed off the entire territory, and effectively its people, to India: a modern version of the Amritsar treaty. After the United Nations intervened, Kashmir was bifurcated into two parts: the Indian- and Pakistan-administered territories separated by an UN-arbitrated ceasefire line (now called Line of Control, or the LoC).
Kashmiris strongly contest the accession for which they were not consulted. The fleeing king pledged to join India on the precondition that the final settlement would take place through the UN-mandated plebiscite. The King’s decision to accede to India was also influenced by M. S. Golwalkar, the leader of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization. The de-facto coup against Hari Singh was supported by key Kashmiris who were leaders in their own right, but who fell short as visionaries in ensuring a just future for the region. From the get-go, they wittingly or unwittingly served as India’s client politicians, ironically falling prey to the patina of secularism offered by India. The resource-rich Kashmir region was emotively fashioned by Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India and a Pandit by descent, as crucial for maintaining the secular nature of the dominantly Hindu Indian state. During the violence of Indo-Pak partition, Mahatma Gandhi called the region a ray of hope because of the absence of violence between Muslims and Pandit Kashmiris in the Kashmir Valley. However, in November of 1947, in the other province of the kingdom named Jammu, 200,000 Muslims were massacred in a pogrom. The Dogra king himself distributed weapons to the responsible militia, and the RSS were party to it. The militia helped the Indian army during the war. The BJP, which is ruling India today, is the political arm of the RSS.
Barring a small number, most Kashmiri Pandits have always favored Indian rule. While the majority of Kashmiri Muslims seek independence, a strong section wants to accede to Pakistan. Most Kashmiri Muslims continue to share a deeply affective relation with Pakistan based on religious, spiritual, cultural, and trade ties that predate the partition. The breadth of this relationship is reflected in arguments the Dogra king made when the Indian leaders were influencing him to join their union in 1947. He argued that Kashmir was fully dependent on Pakistan and geographically contiguous as well. Kashmiris across the LoC continue to bear the brunt of the brutal partition of their homeland that separates families and valuable resources.
Article 370, which was drafted to ensure Indian-administered Kashmir’s special status, was in fact a Trojan horse. Nehru and his ilk saw it as a tunnel through which Indian laws and statues could be slyly passed to Kashmir. India steadily implemented laws to criminalize dissent. The laws effectively subsumed the UN resolution for a plebiscite and gradually criminalized the movement for self-determination. Recently, a minister from Indian National Congress—an old party with roots in British politics—publicly boasted that they had diluted Article 370 twelve times without any controversy. Indeed they had done it by discreetly deploying puppet regimes, coercion, rigged elections, and detention. The most important pivot point in the text of Article 370 was Article 35-A, which protected the territorial sovereignty of Kashmir. Native Kashmiris were recognized as “permanent residents” who had the exclusive right to property and franchise, just like any sovereign country.
At the very inception of when Kashmir got its special status, the RSS raised objections and demanded its erasure. This has continued to be one of the main objectives of the RSS. Kashmir’s special autonomous status was seen as an appeasement of Muslims and a threat to Indian unity. It is also important to remember that Mahatma Gandhi was killed by an RSS member because of his belief in the accommodation of Muslims.
A soldier guards the roadside checkpoint outside Srinagar International Airport (SXR) in Jammu and Kashmir, India. (January 2009) License: CC BY-SA 3.0
While the government of India has provided all shades of explanation for the removal of Kashmir’s autonomy, the logic of making India a Hindu Rashtra has not surfaced much. The dominant Muslimness of Kashmir in the context of an India which is simmering in anti-Muslim and anti-minority hate must be accounted for. The lenses of xenophobia and Islamophobia are key to understanding the brutal crackdown on Kashmiris, which run on Hindu supremacy and ethnonationalism, and which are a part of India’s growth as a modern neocolonial power. The day the removal was announced, Hindu nationalists celebrated the event as a “historic step toward establishing the Hindu Rashtra” [Hindu nation]. Indians took to social media taunting Kashmiris about buying land and property in Kashmir. A politician announced that the government was conducting a survey to reopen 50,000 temples which the local Kashmiri pandit leaders countered by noting that Kashmir never had this many temples. Indian politicians and entertainers publicly gave calls to kidnap or marry “fair-skinned Kashmiri girls.” This ethno-nationalistic outpouring in India was the colonial gaze manifest, one which fetishizes an occupied land and its people, and perceives them as spoils of war.
The dilution of the Muslim-majority demography of Kashmir is key to understanding the erasure of Kashmir’s autonomy. With Kashmir’s autonomous status gone, all Indian laws are automatically applicable to the region, hence the CAA & the NRC are stoking further fear in Kashmir. There are protests across India challenging this legislation, which some have compared to Nuremberg laws that laid the foundation of the Jewish Holocaust. In context of rising institutionalization of discrimination against Muslims, Kashmiris fear that Indian settler colonialism and dispossession are becoming increasingly real inside the valley. The question now is: will the world keep silent?
Madrasa Discourses students and faculty visiting India Gate. New Delhi, India
The public event that opened the Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive in July 2019 was intended to introduce the Muslim community in India to the Madrasa Discourses project. It was attended by a large number of senior clerics and madrasa graduates, and became the focus of attention for a segment of the Muslim community in India. One of the questions that emerged in the debates during and after the public event was why it was necessary for Madrasa graduates to study modern science and philosophy. Some present at the event argued that Madrasas are meant to preserve traditional religious learning, and therefore burdening madrasa students with such disciplines as philosophy is both unnecessary and undesirable. Others claimed that it is not the responsibility of Madrasa graduates to provide rational explanations for religious beliefs. One of the participants at the event went so far as to say that religion has nothing at all to say on human problems in this world. Rather, it is entirely oriented towards the other world. The implication of this claim was that there is no need for the religious scholars to study any disciplines pertaining to our physical and social world.
During the discussion session, participants seemed somewhat willing to engage with the questions of the physical sciences. However, most expressed the view that social sciences and philosophy were not to be taken seriously because of the belief that these disciplines are not as accurate as physical sciences, are more speculative, and are largely based in a “western context,” having nothing to do with other societies. This entire discussion felt overwhelmingly ahistorical and mistaken, however, because the Islamic tradition of which these scholars claim to be preservers is one which has been nothing if not deeply philosophical.
These issues, moreover, have practical implications for the everyday lives of Muslims. A glance at the lived experiences of Muslims in the modern world reveals that in their everyday lives, they are confronted with practice-based problems, such as where to invest their money so as to keep the investments both safe and halal, whether it is acceptable in Islam to buy products on EMI (Equated Monthly Installments) with interest, what kind of dress to wear, what kind of jobs to take, or how to study those aspects of physical and social sciences that contradict the age-old practices and beliefs deemed Islamic by Muslim societies and communities. Another kind of dilemma that Muslims encounter is one of an intellectual and philosophical nature. For example, a teacher of biology may teach evolution in the class and then be lectured by an imam during Friday khutbah on how modern scientific ideas such as evolution are contrary to the Qur’an.
Practice-based and philosophical dilemmas may seem very different, but they both hinge on how Muslims cope with a rapidly changing world and how effectively and promptly they translate their religious tradition across cosmologies so as to reconcile their lived experiences with their religion. Madrasa Discourses attempts to familiarize Madrasa graduates with some of the questions that modern philosophy and science have raised for the Islamic tradition as it has developed through the centuries.
No Intellectual Enquiry without a Robust Epistemology
Over the past two years in the Madrasa Discourses program, we have learned to think about philosophy as “thinking about thinking.” Practitioners of any intellectual discipline, be it physics or history, deal with questions concerning what counts as valid knowledge and what theories and methods are acceptable for producing new knowledge. As a result of reflection by practitioners of those disciplines, theories change and new theories and methods emerge. Such self-reflection provides a discipline with its epistemological grounding. In the absence of a deep understanding of epistemological problems and issues in one’s discipline, there can be no agreement on what constitutes valid knowledge. This makes it is easier for an opinion backed by power to reign as authoritative on the one hand, and on the other, for each individual to form their own views on each matter without a learned consensus of any kind between different members of an intellectual or faith community. Both these situations are counterproductive. Some of us feel the presence of both these problems in Indian higher education. The issue is particularly rife in departments of Islamic studies. These departments operate largely in isolation from other disciplines in both the physical and social sciences and in a complete epistemological vacuum. For Islamic studies to develop as an academic discipline worthy of the name, it has to seriously engage with the new picture of the world that is emerging as a result of more recent philosophical and scientific developments in other disciplines so that it may add to, contest, or problematise the conclusions reached in other disciplines on firm epistemological and methodological grounds.
Virtually absent in Islamic studies is any discussion of epistemology and methodology. Researchers can make unexamined claims about physical and social phenomena irrespective of actual status of knowledge and research about those phenomena in their concerned disciplines. For example, on page 92 in his 1992 book, Islam ka Nazariya-i-jins (The Idea of Gender in Islam)[1], a senior professor in the department of Sunni theology in Aligarh Muslim University, Sultan Ahmed Islahi, extensively quotes jurist ibn Qayyim (d. 1350) on male and female sexuality to defend polygamy, without any hint that modern scientific knowledge on sex and sexuality has changed beyond recognition since the time of ibn Qayyim.
Historical Relation between Philosophy and Religion
Talha Rehman engaging the afternoon panel session of Madrasa Discourses Program. Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. July 23, 2019.
Philosophy emerged in the ancient world amongst those few who tried to explain natural phenomena using rational explanations. The early philosophers indeed were a rare species because in an era when most people attributed the shining of the sun to the sun god, the falling of rain to the rain god, the thunder to the thunder god, and harvest to the harvest god or goddesses, it was the philosophers who thought that there ought to be rational explanations for what causes these natural phenomena. Philosophy, however, came to be the study of much more than just the natural world. Because philosophers discussed questions related to all areas of inquiry, philosophy gradually became the fountainhead of all human knowledge in the ancient world. Philosophers pondered human society, along with politics, and the ethical principles that ought to guide the organization of both. Most importantly, however, were their discussions of what constitutes valid knowledge in a given field of inquiry. Theories about the nature of reality and how to go about accumulating valid knowledge of it became foundational for all academic disciplines and continue to be important today.
One of the most interesting developments from the point of view of a student of Islamic Studies is that many important philosophers declared that belief in several gods, spirits, and/or genies was superstitious. Philosophers instead proclaimed the existence of one God. Although the God conceived of by Plato, Aristotle, and their successors was dissimilar to the God of monotheistic religious traditions, in many ways Greek philosophy prepared the ground for the later success of those traditions.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe in a personal God. Their God intervenes in human history and listens to the prayers of believers. The God of the philosophers, on the other hand, could only know universals, and did not directly intervene in history or create the world. Nonetheless, theologians of monotheistic traditions borrowed the dialectic method of the Greeks to provide rational justifications for the God revealed to them in their religious texts. Therefore, all scholars, whether the philosophers or those opposed to them, wrote in the shared language of the dialectic method, and used syllogistic forms of argument borrowed from the Greeks.
Resolving the Crisis through the Idea of Historical Contingency
In the Muslim circles, we often hear vehement rejection of tasawwuf (Islamic mysticism), Kalam (theology), and falsafa (philosophy) as what are often dubbed “decadent” parts of the Islamic tradition. A return to the primary sources—the Qur’an and Hadith, and according to some positions, only the Qur’an—unmediated by any kind of philosophy, is advocated with quite some vigour. The standard claim today that all the answers are available in the Qur’an seems to ignore the fact that one’s presumptions and biases often lead to divergent readings of the Qur’an. The response by some people when concerns about different interpretations are raised is to claim that their opponents are “misguided,” “biased,” or “distorting the meaning of the Qur’an.”
In cases where the pronouncements made by earlier authors seem contrary to what appears to be just, fair, or sensible to today’s scholars, it is often argued that they were simply misreading the Qur’an and that today’s Muslims have somehow reached the “right readings.” These claims are made by several actors, but are particularly visible in cases of authors who write on science and the Qur’an. Verses on scientific subjects are said to be unintelligible to the older generations of Muslims and somehow accessible to their present readers: “A reading of old commentaries on the Qur’an, however knowledgeable their authors may have been in their day, bears solemn witness to a total inability to grasp the depth of meaning in such verses” (Dr. Maurice Bucaille, TheQuran and Modern Science). Claims such as these do not recognize the contingent nature of all readings of the Qur’an. For example, Tooba Fahad, in her article “Human Embryology, The Holy Quran and Modern Science,” published in 2018 in the Journal Islamic Research Annual, (pp 46-55) claims that the three (veils of) darkness mentioned in the Quran 39:6 “may refer to the anterior abdominal wall, the uterine wall, and the amniochorionic membrane.” She marvels at the accuracy of Quranic information about human embryology long before modern technology made it possible to observe them. That earlier generations of Muslims read and understood these verses differently is either ignored or explained away as their inability to understand the right meaning.
What are known as physical sciences today were studied in the medieval period as a part of philosophy. Therefore, some modern Muslims claim that earlier readers of the Qur’an were simply wrong in their understanding of religious texts because they studied too much philosophy. This impacted their reading of the Qur’an and led them to incorrect conclusions. However, as seen in the above examples, modern readers are reading modern scientific discoveries into the Qur’an, unmindful of the fact that scientific theories, and the philosophical claims that support them, change over time. Some Muslims today attempt to read modern scientific discoveries into the Qur’an to provide evidence of its divine origin, while criticizing earlier exegetes for doing the same. They also claim that they can, or have, overcome the problem of misreading the Qur’an by reading it directly without being influenced by the experiences, presumptions, or knowledge of their time. A sound understanding of philosophical principles involved will allow scholars to see the pitfalls that they constantly fall into.
One of the ideas that we have explored in Madrasa Discourses is contingency. The term refers to the situation of a human person within the intellectual horizon of their time. Our rejection of Aristotelian science and philosophy has become possible only in retrospect, in sync with our own intellectual horizon. All the arguments against Aristotelian philosophy and medieval science have become possible only when their inconsistencies have been made apparent by modern scientific and philosophical inquiry. Human understanding of the Qur’an is always influenced by the pervasive cosmology of a person’s time. Since we as humans have very limited intellectual horizons, any human understanding of the Qur’an is therefore at best contingent.
Another noteworthy aspect of contemporary Muslim thought generally is that even those who argue vehemently against Aristotelian philosophy and science continue to think more or less within its paradigms. This is particularly visible in case of Muslim discourse on sex and gender. Here, the ideas about the nature of male and female, including their temperament, psychology, and physiology remain deeply Aristotelian. Some scholars, such as Wahiduddin Khan, who make use of such modern terms as hormones, do so only superficially. They adjust modern terminology within an overall Aristotelian paradigm: “man and woman are born different from each other in nature” (176). This view takes man and women as two homogenous and opposite categories where the “nature” of each individual, their skills, talents, choices, likes, and dislikes, are all determined by their sex. The author describes a dubious experiment where injecting women with male hormones led them to develop male characteristics. This led him to the conclusion that male and female nature are different and that therefore their social roles are also different. Modern notions of sex and gender make a distinction between sex as biologically determined and gender as socially determined. Social roles of men and women, as the name suggests, are determined by the society and not by their biology. There is nothing in female or male biology that makes them incapable of performing social roles assigned to the opposite sex.
Afternoon Session of Madrasa Discourses Program. Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. July 23, 2019
Furthermore, while modern Muslims have blamed Aristotelian science and philosophy for harming the religious tradition and have remained skeptical of modern sciences, they have not framed a coherent worldview of their own apart from these two, but only randomly combined ideas from the two completely different worldviews. Primarily these combinations are motivated by a desire to justify certain pre-conceptions about persons and the world, as seen in the examples above. This has given rise to innumerable tenuous permutations and combinations based on individual preferences that do not have as their ground any agreed upon basic principles. The absence of a rigorous epistemology creates blind spots that are not easily seen by scholars who are making incoherent claims.
This incoherence is largely caused by the fact that the tradition that Muslims inherited has ceased to faithfully express the lived experiences of the community in modern times, leading to a situation resembling something akin to what Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has identified as a “crisis” in an intellectual tradition. Dr. M Maroof Shah describes the incoherence of the combined Muslim response to modern science when he writes, “[The] conflicting nature of various interpretations of some verses which have ‘Scientific allusions’ also problematizes Muslim rationalist position, e.g.; Bin Baz and Ahmad Raza Khan wrote books against motion of earth (apparently inspired by Quran according to them), Sir Syed sees it impossible to prove either earth’s motion or its stationary nature from the Quran and Zakir Naik proves motion of earth and celestial bodies from Quran” (722).
In response to the current intellectual crisis, Muslims have adopted many new positions with respect to the Islamic tradition and modern sciences. Yet due to weak philosophical and scientific perceptiveness, adherents and authors of most of these positions remain oblivious to the inconsistencies in their thought. There is a need to have a serious discussion on epistemology in order to rebuild the Islamic tradition in a new manner that is robust and coherent on the one hand, and on the other, is flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances that future generations are bound to encounter.
[1] Sultan Ahmad Islahi, Islam ka Nazariya-i-jins (Aligarh: Idara Ilm-o-Adab,1992)
Talha Rehman is a PhD Candidate at the department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She is a participant in Madrasa Discourses curently in her third and final year in the course. Her academic interests involve Islam and gender justice, science, multiculturalism and religous pluralism.
Nigeen Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo by the author.
Kashmir has a special place in the South Asian imagination not only because of the famed beauty of its landscape but also because of its unique religious and cultural history. The idea of Kashmir as a “special place” is an old one. We encounter it in pre-modern Sanskrit religious and literary culture, Persian histories, political discourse in postcolonial South Asia, and in modern popular cultural forms such as Bollywood film. The historian Ronald Inden has made a compelling case that it is these imaginings of Kashmir as a special place that account for the intractability and intransigence of India and Pakistan on Kashmir.[1] What is, and remains, special about Kashmir is a unique vision of religious pluralism in its religious and cultural history that has not yet found political articulation.
The modern State of Jammu and Kashmir, which the Indian government has reorganized through an act of the Indian Parliament (Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019), was born as a feudatory, princely State of British India ruled by the Dogra dynasty of Jammu (1846–1947). It emerged at the end of the Anglo-Sikh war with military help from the British. The idea of Kashmir as a “special place” had already been in place when it was mobilized by Kashmiri Muslim nationalists from the 1920s to the 1940s to challenge the legitimacy of Dogra rule. But it was only in the 1930s, after the Dogra army massacred protesting Kashmiris, that the latter launched a popular movement for sovereignty that received support from prominent Indian nationalists agitating against the British colonial rule. Such nationalists included Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Maulana Azad. By the late 1930s, many Kashmiri Hindus had joined Kashmiri Muslims in this struggle for the idea that Kashmir belonged to Kashmiris. This movement was interrupted by the Partition of British India in 1947 and rapidly unfolding events in its aftermath (communal strife which spread from Punjab into the Jammu region, the revolt against the Dogra State in Poonch, and the arrival of the Indian Army in Kashmir on October 26, 1947 to ward off Muslim tribal irregulars from Western Pakistan backed by the Pakistan Army that had entered Kashmir, and the first India-Pakistan war of 1947–48). Even though the post-Partition sectarian strife receded, it morphed into a political dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Louis Mountbatten discusses the partition plan with Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and other leaders in 1947. {{PD-India}}
In 1948, the State of Jammu and Kashmir was effectively divided by the first India-Pakistan war into a Pakistani-controlled territory and an Indian-controlled territory (most of the Kashmiri-speaking region, however, passed into Indian control). The Kashmiri nationalists had close relations with the leaders of the Indian freedom struggle (Mahatma Gandhi had visited Kashmir just before India’s Partition in the hopes of reconciling different views in Kashmir) and the idea of Kashmir as a “special place” with unique political aspirations was recognized in the form of the special provisions of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The terms of Kashmir’s membership in the Indian union were debated for five months among the Kashmiri and the Indian leadership in 1949, with the result that Jammu and Kashmir emerged as an autonomous State within the union of India. Yet the aspirations for full independence never died down in Kashmir (even as pro-Pakistan politics were increasingly suppressed within Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir ) and tensions emerged as early as 1953 when Kashmir’s nationalist leader, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, was jailed for allegedly seeking independence. The arrest of Kashmir’s most popular leader, Sheikh Abdullah, in 1953 also started the process of diluting Kashmir’s autonomy and slowly eroding Article 370. Such slow dilution was evident as early as 1963, when India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke of “the gradual erosion” of Article 370. These events, seen as a political betrayal by Kashmiris, were also the culmination of a strong protest movement by the Hindu nationalists in India who considered these special provisions to be nothing other than yet another shameful capitulation by the ruling Indian National Congress Party to Muslims.
It is this Hindu nationalist view which has triumphed in the Indian government’s recent decision to completely and unilaterally abrogate Article 370. Such a decision was made ostensibly to help better fight a decades-old anti-India insurgency in Kashmir (an insurgency which has for the most part been inconsequential, but has been significant enough to disrupt political processes and keep the Indian Army engaged in the region now for more than thirty years). It is far from clear if cancelling Kashmiri autonomy can boost India’s counterinsurgency efforts and produce a decisive victory, but it is possible that it could return Kashmir to being narrowly imagined as a site of sectarian Hindu-Muslim conflict. One might even wonder if a return to the original provisions of Article 370 that had been negotiated in 1949 and were demanded by Sheikh Abdullah’s son, Farooq Abdullah, on his return to power in 1996, could have stopped this insurgency in its tracks at a time when it was struggling militarily.
One ends up in Kashmir where one started off in the first place. The political claims of both India and Pakistan on Kashmir not only go back to the moment of the creation of the two States in 1947, but also pass through the history and memory of the sectarian conflict between the Hindus and Muslims of South Asia, stretching back even further in history (in the case of Kashmir, to the fourteenth century). The genesis of the Kashmir conflict, and its trajectory in the late twentieth century, is a complex subject. But what is clear enough is the symbolic centrality of both the religion and culture of Kashmir to India and Pakistan. Such culture includes shared sacred spaces such as astaans, Kashmiri Sufiyana music, folk forms such as Kashmiri folk theatre (band pather) and Kashmiri folk music (chhaker), Kashmiri poetry, and Kashmiri arts and crafts. These would be claimed by Pakistan as a distinctive Indo-Muslim culture and by India as an example of its secular and plural traditions. Religion and culture have been fundamental to shaping the idea of Kashmir as a “special place.” But even though the Hindu and Muslim religious cultures in India and Pakistan offer us fantasies of Kashmir as either a sacred Hindu space or a lost Muslim paradise, the actual Kashmiri Hindu and Muslim religious culture affirms Kashmir as a heterodox and plural spiritual space.
Dance of the Sufi Dervishes by Behzād, circa 1480/1490. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. {{PD-US}}
For most Kashmiris themselves, it is the vision of a Kashmiri spirituality expressed as a continuum of Saiva-bhakti-Sufi-tantric ideas in Kashmir’s literary culture—in particular, the mystical poetry of the Saiva saint-poet Lal Ded and the Muslim Sufi poet, Nund Rishi—that best articulates the idea of Kashmir as a place, even a “special place.” A close reading of these saint-poets reveals a deep commitment to religious tolerance, caste equality, and philosophical thought which gets taken up by generations of Kashmiri poets and historians, and informs Kashmiri ideas of the self. The Saiva, Lal Ded, uses Sufi metaphors and the Sufi, Nund Rishi, uses Saiva metaphors (Nund Rishi calls the Quran sahaja, the simple yet blissful path). This recognition, and the recognition of the political desires that flow from it, has become difficult to express in light of the rise in sectarian tensions in Kashmir and the rest of South Asia since the 1990s. It is likely to become even more difficult after the controversial end to Kashmir’s residual autonomy under an already eroded Article 370. One could dismiss this vision of Kashmiri religious pluralism as disguised nationalist rhetoric (as studies on “Kashmiriyat” or Kashmiriness as a nationalist, or subnationalist, ideology purportedly promoted by the Indian State often do), but these ideas about religion and culture are not only affirmed by many Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims. They also represent the possibility of a future that rejects sectarian understandings of Kashmir’s multiform past. But Kashmiri religious pluralism (philosophical thought of Lal Ded and Nund Rishi, in particular) also poses a challenge to official versions of Indian secularism that have not been able to ward off the threat of majoritarianism and offers a different way of thinking the secular (much like the thinking of Kabir and Gandhi) as an enabler of respect for and dialogue across religious traditions. The Saiva-Sufi milieu in Kashmir is one of the many distinctive moments of religious pluralism in South Asia. A deeper understanding of this religious pluralism can open up new pathways for thinking about democracy and freedom not just in Kashmir but also in the rest of South Asia. This idea of Kashmir is impossible to abrogate.
*Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the positions or policies of Ashoka University.
Abir Bazaz is Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University. His research interests include Religion and Literature, Comparative Indian Literatures and Cinema Studies. He is also a documentary filmmaker.
A flag waver on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson.
Revolution was far from my mind when I first began ruminating about martyrs, miracles, and wonderwork in Egypt. Doing fieldwork during Mubarak’s last decade felt like an exercise in hunting for the new in the old. I soon discovered myself and my research caught up in an exhilarating timeline of uprisings and overthrow, followed soon after by hellish rounds of arrests, torchings, and massacres. My ethnography similarly hints at vacillations between promise and despair, beginning with courageous protests for change and ending with fears of terrorism. Even as I write this, I am battling doubts that saints have anything to do with the things that “really” matter: soaring poverty, crushing protest bans, and a steely leader set on staying in power until 2030. Mega-cathedrals are being built by Sisi and martyrs are being given military funerals. The holy in hindsight looks like yet another sign of authoritarianism’s come-back with a vengeance.
In their generous reflections on my book, my three readers—Kathryn Lofton, Rachel Smith, and Anand Taneja—explore the holy without forfeiting the necessary critique of violence. Brimming with vivid glimmers of insight, they show how worlds of divine imagination exceed repression and bloodshed behind the scenes. More remarkable is how they manage to do this while holding in view the coercive realities of Egypt’s authoritarian present. What lies between the ecstatic thrill of miracles and the brute force of militarization? Whether it takes the form of generative excess or dialectical tension, the instability of the saint-state relation supplies some release from the overdetermining forces of counterrevolution. It is on the revolutionary subject of saint-state instability that I engage with my readers’ comments here.
Rachel Smith makes the wonderfully bold case that remembering the holy dead is wildly anachronistic. In a provocative reversal of my book’s last line, she argues for the possibility that anachronism is a “living, labile force of the present.” Herself a historian of hagiography, Smith is familiar with anachronism’s lowly, even mortally sinful, state in secular historiography. Martyrs and mystics in contemporary Egypt roam wildly, as do medieval Europe’s forgettable laywomen who lie outside the sciences of preservation. Smith upholds the strange potency of devotion and the unruly persistence of memory across periods and traditions of valuing the dead. I see her also speaking to a frequent gripe that I’ve encountered in the field: much to their disadvantage, Copts are too caught up in the ancient era of glorious martyrs and the bloody reproduction of violence. “Saints have nothing to do with what is going on now,” so the secularists say. Hence, the political charge against anachronism: traditions that austerely boast two millennia of the same old rituals risk losing sight of the ever-shifting present of revolution and counterrevolution.
The radical malleability of memory is a truly frightening force in times of tumultuous change. More than any other incident of violence against Copts, the Maspero Massacre of 2011 was powerful proof that the military was (and is) far from a steady, trustworthy ally for Copts and their future security. On October 9, 2011, demonstrations at the Maspero television tower ended with Egyptian army soldiers in APCs attacking protestors with live ammunition. Only a few years later, in 2014, I was startled by several Copts who claimed that it was the Muslim Brotherhood who had stolen the tanks and trammeled over protestors in the guise of army soldiers. How do we assess the politics of such a wildly anachronistic account? How do we make sense of this complete 180 in the crucial game of political accountability, at one moment directed at the military state and at another, theatrically away from it?
For now, the answers seem to lie within Egypt’s timeline of shifting political tides: in 2012, Mohamed Morsi was elected to the presidency, and in 2013, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi booted him out. In the secular dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution, national contexts of authoritarian rule overdetermine the symbolic value of dead bodies. Combating this historicist genre of predeterminism, Smith’s essay revives the rebellious potential of anachronism. The out-of-time quality of saints is what makes their resignification feel plentiful and abundant in empty historical time. Martyr memorialization does not conform, weirdly and wildly, to the linear march of secular national history. Here is where I find Smith’s final provocative reversal to be revelatory. As she puts it toward the end of her response, “Secularism is more truly anachronistic insofar as it is not in sync with the vicissitudes of time.”
On the question of time, Anand Taneja has also journeyed to the edges of religious tradition where Delhi’s secular history is out of sync with miracles in its medieval ruins. Or, perhaps it is precisely the jarring capacity of miracles to sync up with postcolonial history that energizes his response. In his attentive reading of holy images from Egypt, Taneja picks up where I begin, with the iconic Virgin of the Apparition and its curiously overlooked origins in foreign Catholicism. Yes, there is Egypt’s authoritarian making of the Arab Virgin and post-1967 Christian-Muslim unity. The Virgin of Zaytun is solidly assimilated into national-sectarian history. Yet, Taneja daringly opens up an extrinsic, indeed “foreign,” angle on the whole enthusiastic affair of populism and mass politics. What about those genealogies of the French Virgin and the photographic Virgin that arrive “unbidden, out of the corner of one’s eye”? Experiments in political theology call for blurring genres of secular and religious imagination. Joining Taneja, I have also been thinking about the Paris protests in May 1968.
Tahrir Square in 2011. Photo Credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy.
Just last week, I was giving a talk on the Virgin of Zaytun, when a person in the audience declared after viewing the photos: “This looks like a protest!” Resonating with the spirit of revolution, her observation got us all thinking about the choreography of crowds and the assembly of people that “appear” to come out of nowhere. No one saw Tahrir coming. For all their laws of prediction, the sciences of social movements and state politics did not forecast the 18-day rush that brought the 30-year Mubarak regime down. In hindsight, it was not only the rush of energy but also the terrors of repression and the horrors of bloodshed under Mubarak’s long rule that brought holy images into historical consciousness.
Repression is the topic that Kathryn Lofton takes up to tackle secularism sideways. If Taneja is searching in the corner of your eye, Lofton is craning toward your sotto voce. The wonder-working underground—of dusty baraka and unassuming oils—is slow and quiet. If there is any political critique to be heard from beneath and beyond, it is one that emerges from far-flung mechanisms of silencing and hiding. Lofton submits her acute intuitions on repression: “The more the miraculous, oil-exuding religious is routed away from the public, the more the public starves for real religious feeling.” Irrepressible intimacy! Defying secularist impulses to divide and separate, feelings for the real broker relations not only between the I and Thou, but also between Christians and Muslims under sectarian rule. Here is where I hear Lofton’s appeal to radical discontent and its sociological powers to overcome repression on multiple registers. If you catch me on a more cynical day, I may even say outright that human desires for holy mystery and saintly masquerade only further reinforce and shore up systems of repressive rule.
Since wrapping up my fieldwork in 2015, Sisi’s brutal crackdown on dissent has solidly returned Egypt into the military’s hands. What this has meant is the military’s subsuming of martyr memory within its authoritarian annals of history, not to mention the systemic repression of social movements and mass mobilization. Like my fellow scholars of religion here, I am dissatisfied with reading religion as the mere fodder for manipulation and control. The major challenge remains a deeper understanding of what religion and political theology can enact beyond the authoritarian state’s grip. I sign off from this reply now, a couple weeks after a rare round of September protests erupted across Egypt and only a few days before the eighth anniversary of the Maspero Massacre. Here’s to the impending possibility of contending modernities in real time.
Angie Heo is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. Previously, she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany and held a visiting position at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has conducted fieldwork research on Coptic Orthodoxy and Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt, and more recently on Evangelical Protestantism and Cold War history in South Korea.
Contemplating St. Mark’s life and death, Tomb of St. Mark the Martyr. Patriarchate Cathedral of St. Mark ‘Abbasiyya. Photo by Angie Heo. Used with permission from University of California Press.
Towards the end of The Political Lives of Saints, Angie Heo says an imperative notion in a very quiet way: “The repression of holiness is, in fact, what animates the social imaginary of the wonderworking underground” (213). The entirety of what precedes proves the political fact of this sotto voce assertion. Once you read it, you pause: right. That’s exactly right.
Freckling this volume are instances like these, poignant encapsulations of the theoretical frontier where Heo draws her readers. “Collective images of the self are necessary for communal self-transformation,” we read in one early chapter (38). “To the extent that Christians and Muslims have mixed sensibilities of what a saint or wonderworker does and looks like, they thus compose a shared religious public” (180). The data of this volume doesn’t ascend to a lengthy abstract disquisition about the anthropology of mediation. Instead, The Political Lives of Saints is an in-depth drop into the political work of boundary maintenance between Christianity and Islam in Egypt. “The sectarian divide is owed, not to essential, irreconcilable differences between Christianity and Islam but to common points of overlap between Christian and Muslim practices of visual mediation and saintly manifestation that enabled public disorder” (204). Holy power transacted in the common currency of saints is the integrant of communal difference. Through this book, Heo never wavers from her practical effort to convey the ecumenism of saints in the diversity of community.
Miracle of the Virgin, Church of St. Bishoi the Great, Port Said. Photo by Angie Heo. Used with permission from University of California Press.
I have run a bit too far ahead, perhaps. Angie Heo exposes here a particular situation in which the mediation between two religious groups (Christian and Muslim) composes the state in which they mediate (Egypt). Heo looks at a variety of specific material things—a hand exuding oil, a saint’s relic, or a film depicting a saint’s death—but doesn’t linger on that object’s physical particularity as much as she focuses on the “embodied skills and media technologies” that connect communities to those things. How are we able to kiss or press our face into one particular artifact? How do we know the meaning of a priest’s hand as we embrace it? It isn’t a stock image of holiness Heo examines, but the way baraka, holy power, becomes ours. Baraka channels through air, oil, and fragrance; also, too, it travels through “tactile sympathy and televisual extension” (77). And its travel is round-trip, sent back by me as something else after the smear becomes spirit. The oil or the hand aren’t the point, but the process. The mediating witness is the power of holy power.
Even though I’m tumbling into intimacy, Heo’s gaze isn’t so easily distracted. She takes us to a critical political epoch—post-1952 Egypt—and examines it through the 6-10 percent of its population that comprises Arab Middle East’s largest “religious minority,” the Copts. The Copts, in Heo’s retelling, are the minority metonym that articulates the mass. Located in the ellipsis between the Christian West and Arab Islam, Copts claim Egyptian origins and Egyptian dominion. Many sectarian groups define their sociological, ideological, and spiritual experience in opposition to centralized power. The Copts, however, have become the prime articulation of state power, a self-understanding that Heo exposes as incorporated into their every ecclesial decision, from deciding which of their church buildings are axiomatically national sites of worship, to restricting public access to miraculous incidents. Heo wants “to deprivilege the sensationalizing din of persecution politics and Islamophobia that currently overdetermines the global portrait of Copts” through an examination of Coptic hagiography and martyrology (5). Coptic secularists might try to sequester the Copt sensorium to mere spiritual consequence, but to no avail: orthodox adherents refuse to hide their reverence for bishops or felt connection to relics. No secularism can shunt their enfolding in holiness.
But that secularism can and will, as the inaugurating quotation suggests, elaborate, even encourage, that holiness. Canonization has mimetic political effects, as Heo wagers in her careful final comment on the communal legibility of ISIS’s beheading videos. Although the majority of Heo’s examples emerge from specific churches and specific everyday encounters, her focus at the end on the popularity of violent martyrdom in contemporary geopolitics suggests the force of this accrual isn’t about quiet holiness but holiness crying out from the fissures of a dissatisfying secular. Heo seems to be saying that the more the miraculous, oil-exuding religious is routed away from the public, the more the public starves for real religious feeling.
By the time the reader arrives at this archive of martyrs’ bodies, she has traveled through much more quotidian and churchly familiar climes with Heo. She has visited the Church of the Virgin in Zaytun, the Church of the Virgin in Musturud, the Cathedral of St. Mark in Azbakiyya, and the Church of St. Bishoi the Great in Port Said. She has, with Heo, taken night classes at the Clerical College in the Archdiocese of Qalyubiyya in Shubra al-Khayma, visiting graves of martyrs, and attended feast-day celebrations for St. Simon the Tanner. She has witnessed discussions of miraculous appearances and dissected techniques described in tracts for disproving claims of laser usage at apparition sites. She has met deaconesses and demon exorcists, students and priests, filmmakers and garbage handlers, construction workers and shopkeepers. She has met, in one exquisitely rendered passage, a convert named Khalid. Heo’s ethnography is a model effort to think theoretically through the gorgeous diffusion of the human particular. Yet her gentle turn from this hand-crafted ethnographic mélange to the mass-mediated violence of ISIS suggests that the purpose of her interest in the diffusion is the case it makes for wonderwork as a human need. Heo incorporates the best political critique of religion without forgetting the very human subjects that comprise her ethnographic and theoretical capacity to think, see, feel, or know. This is a work with which students of religion will be thinking for some time, learning from it anew what it is to classify holiness in empires of religion.
Angie Heo’s The Political Lives of Saints. Book Cover used with permission from University of California Press.
“While collective imaginings of sainthood have been subject to the space and time of modern nationalism, they also offer an inheritance that exceeds the Coptic Church’s institutional grip on miracles, in their secret lives and their sectarianizing fates” (4). I find this sentence from Angie Heo’s introduction to The Political Life of Saints to be an apt summary of this remarkable book. Saints and miracles, while they index otherworldly irruptions into the domain of the mundane, have always been political. Heo’s book does a remarkable job of thinking through the complex ways in which relics, apparitions, and icons central to the Coptic Christian imaginary in contemporary Egypt are deeply intertwined with the political, and how the Coptic Church and the Egyptian state have sought to control and interpret the afterlives of martyrs, collective visions, and saints for explicitly political purposes. This is not the only story this book tells, however. In beautifully constructed dialectical tension, the second half of Heo’s book dwells on stories of how visions and miracles disrupt the carefully patrolled sectarian boundaries of Coptic and Muslim, dis-order the majoritarian “secularism” of the Egyptian state, and make possible a mystical counterpublic that abides “beneath and against the Christian-Muslim divide” and the Islamic domination of the public sphere in Egypt (213). In doing this, the book also gives us new ways of thinking about religion and public life: especially in the ways in which everyday life is full of remarkable encounters at, and experimentation with, the overlapping edges of religious traditions. It is images—whether encountered as dream, apparition, or street-side poster—that are central to these crossings and blurrings. This is very different from the role of increasing religious polarization and violence that “religious” images circulating in public life, such as “angry Hanuman” in India, or Jylland Posten’s deliberately offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, have played in recent times. Heo’s sensitive ethnography of the lives of miraculous images—both spectacular and everyday—helps us see the pervasiveness of images in public life in a way that is not just about iconoclash, to use Bruno Latour’s term. Rather, she shows us how living with a proliferation of images, as we all do in modernity, is also to live with knowledge and affects that breach the boundaries not just between religions, but between the domains of the religious and the secular.
On the cover of the book is an image of a street side poster of ‘adhra’ al zuhur, the Virgin of the Apparition, who, as Heo notes, is “a touchstone figure in the Coptic Orthodox imagination today” (1). Remarkably, this image, which is widespread throughout Egypt, is the same as the Roman Catholic imagery of the “Miraculous Mary” of 19th century France. The Virgin first appeared in Cairo in 1968. The first witness to the Virgin’s appearance was a Muslim mechanic. In Heo’s analysis, this is a significant, recurring pattern in the evidence marshalled by the Church to authenticate this, and subsequent, Marian apparitions. The Muslim witnesses make it possible for the apparition to be not only a Christian but also an Egyptian miracle. Heo analyzes how, manifesting in the aftermath of the territorial losses suffered by Egypt and other Arab nations in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, “The apparition, an image of blessing across nation-state borders, offered a material extension of Holy Land that was suddenly out of reach” (100) for both Arab Christians and Muslims. Both the Egyptian state, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the Coptic Church, under Pope Kyrillos, promoted an understanding of the apparition as a sign of Christian-Muslim and pan-Arab unity. And while Muslim witnesses remain important to the Coptic Church’s authentication of miracles, as inter-religious relations have deteriorated in Egypt, Marian apparitions like the 2009 appearance of the Virgin in Warraq, Cairo, have largely been greeted with skepticism by the Muslim majority.
Mass Aparitions. Photo by Angie Heo. Used with permission of University of California Press.
This skepticism, as Heo shows, is linked to “visual and sonic competition” between mosques and churches in mixed neighborhoods like Warraq. But Heo’s ethnographic openness also allows us to glimpse other stories and other potentialities, a miraculous inheritance that exceeds statist policing and identitarian boundaries. At the church in Warraq, one year after the apparitions, Ahmad, a Muslim construction worker approached her and told her the story of how he too had been a witness to the apparition of the Virgin—though the image that he saw contradicted official Church depictions. This vision prompted him to try and build a commemorative monument to honor the Virgin of Warraq. For instance, there is Mus‘ad, a Coptic shopkeeper on intimate terms with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who “learning from old pamphlets of the spiritual sciences, … prescribes the names of extremely obscure angels (and likely of Islamic origin) to a Muslim customer, and brings his love affair with a female jinn into the institutionally authoritative presence of Pope Kyrillos at the Patriarchate” (147). Jinns, dreams-visitations, religious boundary crossing: this is a world remarkably similar to the one I explore in my book Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. In Delhi too, it is amongst a largely working-class population that “images that come unbidden” (to borrow a phrase from Naveeda Khan) prompt boundary crossings—for instance Hindus going to a Muslim shrine—and radical self-transformations, despite worsening sectarian tensions between Hindus and Muslims. To do justice to the world I was encountering, I had to rethink inherited notions of what constitutes a religious tradition rather than relegate the world I was encountering to the categories of heterodoxy and “syncretism.” Similarly, Heo also draws on a more “distributed and diffuse notion of tradition and authority” (147), and her work pushes the field of the anthropology of religion to think of how “crossovers between religious traditions also intersect with crossovers between institutionally separated disciplines of knowledge—namely that of ‘religion’ and ‘science’” (149). It is in the spirit of such crossovers, inspired by Heo’s work, that I offer my concluding reflections.
In Jinnealogy I ask, “What do we do with a tradition that is encountered not as authoritative discourse but, as it were, out of the corner of one’s eye, in dreams and waking visions, in stories told by neighbors and strangers, in snatches of song playing on the radio (85)?” Heo’s book is valuable because it thinks so deeply and provocatively about images—across the genres and media of apparitions, cinema, dreams, icons, relics, television—as part of the life of religious traditions. And images often do come at us unbidden, out of the corner of one’s eye, changing both the traditions, and its (often unintended) receivers, in unexpected ways. For images carry accreted with them deep histories that often evade the boundary-work of more discursive systems of knowledge (including religious knowledge) production. I am thinking here of the billboards advertising designer wedding wear for men and women in elite parts of South Delhi. The male models are almost all bearded now, and the designer wedding suits they wear are all sherwanis, long formal coats long associated with India’s Muslim elite. In the most exclusionary and Islamophobic parts of India’s capital, at a time when the names of Mughal Muslim rulers are being erased from Delhi’s roads, the larger-than-life models on South Delhi billboards are dressed in fashion that wouldn’t look out of place in a Mughal painting. Images of fashion carry a public secret. We hate the Mughals but we aspire to dress like them. How do we understand this? And how do we understand that the Virgin of the Apparition, made famous across the Arab world in May 1968, appeared not as a Byzantine icon, but as an image from 19th century France?
A few organizers of the protests of Tahrir Square, Egypt, visiting Occupy Wall Street. Photo Credit: Harrie van Even
In his recent book, The Mana of Mass Society, Willam Mazzarella proposes the idea of the mimetic archive—rather than “culture”—to better understand the ways in which the collective forces of the social resonate with us (or not). “By likening these collective forces to an archive, I want to invoke the sense of resources deposited and variably available for excavation and citation—for activation” (145). Mazarella’s idea of the mimetic archive also gets us away not just from the idea of culture, but of the binary of “religion” and “culture,” when it comes to thinking about transmission—whether of traditions or of collective social energies. As Heo’s work makes clear, despite the boundary policing of Coptic and Muslim communities, the images of saints and miracles—on street-corners, on television screens, in dreams and waking visions—are an archive of the shared histories, cosmologies, and proximities of Christians and Muslims in Egypt, and also point us to horizons beyond the boundaries of geography and religion. Heo encounters the story of a Coptic man in Australia cured of his blindness by the image of the relic of Saint Marina on his screen: the televisual transmission of baraka or blessing we could say. Is this less or more miraculous than the energies that spread out from Tahrir Square in 2011, through television and computer screens, and inspired Occupy Wall Street? This is only speculation, but perhaps the French-ness of the image of the Virgin of the apparition points us to an earlier moment when a “certain rush of energy” travelled across the globe, an archive of other potentials. For May 1968, when the Virgin of the Apparition appeared in blurry newspaper photographs across the Arab world, was also the month of the Paris protests, a moment when new solidarities were formed, old certitudes were broken, and the world was imagined anew. In looking at popular religion in rural North India, the anthropologist Bhrigupati Singh argues that deities are associated with forms of life and aspiration, and that the waxing and waning of gods and their popularity is linked to the waxing and waning of forms of life. “An ascendant deity has a particular rhythm, musical, moral and temporal… ,” Singh argues, “a deity must add something ‘new’ to an ongoing movement of life” (441). In May 1968, another world was possible, as the slogan goes. Could these “secular” energies dress in religious garb from the mimetic archive? Could this be the secret life of the Virgin’s miraculous apparition in French fashion, the inheritance that exceeded the Coptic Church’s institutional grip?
Photographic icon of the Libya Martyrs. Photo by Angie Heo. Used with permission of University of California Press.
At the heart of Angie Heo’s remarkable book is her demonstration that “saints are not anachronisms” (253). In her ethnography of contemporary Christian and Islamic life in Egypt, the living and the dead mingle. The dead return through memorialization (pilgrimage, relics, icon veneration, hagiography, liturgy), and the living take up the intimacy of this renewed bonding. Perhaps, in fact, we might rather say that all this is wildly anachronistic from a modern historiographical point of view—in which the aim is to rigorously preserve the past as such [1]— showing anachronism to be politically and socially powerful in modern Egyptian life. As Heo’s book repeatedly demonstrates, devotion to the holy dead shapes the horizons of possibility for the living—and those dying in the present. The Epigraph to the book’s final chapter is taken from a liturgical commemoration of the “New Libya Martyrs,” who were 21 Christians beheaded on February 15, 2015 by ISIS, and whose deaths were recorded and disseminated through the internet [2]: “Martyrs of the new covenant/Their blood was renewed/And their remembrance became a feast day” (237). The blood of the victims is renewed—purified—by the red baptism of martyrdom. Their deaths also renew the blood of martyrs past, including Christ’s. Recall Tertullian’s famous second-century dictum: “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”[3]
What forms of belonging do the memorialization of martyrs, ancient and new, make possible in the present? What uses do the living make of the dead? As Heo notes, “The Coptic Church is reinstituted across each act of remembering scenes of holy suffering and violence” (38). But the mobilization of memory through historically situated narratives that frame their deaths leads to very different communal boundaries, calibrating and foreclosing “horizons of Christian-Muslim belonging” (242). Important here are the ways in which the Libya martyrs were deployed as part of Sisi’s war on terror, a strategy related to his domestic project of suppressing Islamist elements in Egypt, beginning with his crucial role as commander of the Egyptian Armed Forces in the coup that deposed Morsi, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. This use of the martyrs by Sisi produced ambivalent effects for Copts. Seeking to forge a collective Egyptian identity, the state placed the martyrs under the supra-confessional rubric of the nation. Deeming the cause of their deaths “terrorism” rather than “sectarian” violence, the murders were interpreted as “attacks on the nation” (244) and leveraged to justify the state’s “war on terror.” The state approved the construction of a church in honor of the martyrs in the village of ‘Aur, home of fifteen of the victims. Their bodies and the church that commemorates them function as an ambivalent “territorial sign of minoritarian identity and military protection” (241). The state’s authorization of Coptic inclusion has also led to the exacerbation of Christian-Muslim tension. State sponsorship of the martyr’s memories has inspired some backlash among Muslim neighbors, generating resentment and violence (247-48).
A crucial part of memorialization, Benedict Anderson notes in chapter 11 of Imagined Communities, is forgetting. If there is a surplus of memory in the case of the New Libya martyrs, other deaths are strategically silenced. One example will have to suffice. In the “Maspero massacre” of 2011, state forces killed 28 unarmed Copts of the Maspero Youth Union. The youth were peacefully walking to the national TV headquarters, trying to find ways to represent themselves independently from the institution of the Coptic Church. Their deaths do not count as acts of martyrdom. “Their omission from communal memory,” Heo writes, “indexes the vulnerabilities attached to those Copts searching for a sense of Christian-Muslim belonging unyoked to religious institutions” (245).
Candlelight vigil/march for victims of Maspero massacre. Photo credit: Joseph Hill.
What we see in the radically different response to Maspero and Libya is what Heo, following Judith Butler in Frames of War, calls the “differential grievability of lives” (243), a difference that is determined largely by what is allowed to count as worthy of memory and what is consigned to forgetting in the name of forging a certain kind of community. In the case of Maspero, the Coptic Church aligned itself with the state in its forgetting of victims, seeking consensus with ruling powers. The Church disavowed the memory of some victims in order to determine the territory and terms of a certain form of community.
Heo’s book repeatedly shows the way in which devotion to the saints cannot be understood simply as a privatized affection for the holy figure, but is a site where the power of imagination and narrative in crafting particular frames of the holy helps conquer territory, define political fortunes and communities, and establish the boundaries of piety. Her account of contemporary Egypt resonates with my own work on thirteenth-century sanctity in the Southern Low Countries. In this context, lay women previously not seen as viable candidates for memorialization as holy figures—forgettable women—were advanced as saints by clerics through the creation of hagiographical narratives and political advocacy. The hagiographical representations of these figures (who manifested profoundly embodied forms of sanctity) were enlisted by the church to counter Cathar claims that the divine was necessarily immaterial (excluding the physical sacraments and the Incarnation). These theological defenses were used to underwrite military aims: the Lives written by Thomas of Cantimpré and James of Vitry called for Crusading efforts against Cathars. The depiction of the saint became a means of determining who counts in an emergent definition of “Christianitas,” the social body of Christ. The saintly body is not here only a synecdoche for the communal body, but is also a site of devotion that organizes the affections of the devout and sculpts their desire and memory in ways determinative of material realities, including the war on “heresy.” Seeking the generativity of anachronism, late ancient models of sanctity were recapitulated and repurposed for a new context.
However, as Heo shows, the memory of the saints is radically malleable, their futures never predetermined by their pasts; attempts by the state to enlist support for the war on terror through the sponsorship of the new Libya martyrs generated many unanticipated effects as they continued to signify multiple meanings and arouse very different allegiances for different communities—Muslim, Coptic, Evangelical, and Catholic. For Thomas of Cantimpré, insofar as his hagiography are works of propaganda, they are attempts to control just such malleability. However, even in this midst of this political project, his works demonstrate that saints remain in excess of attempts to quell their polyvalent, often ambiguous, potential. They are excessive not only because of the shaping power of audience expectations and the changing contexts in which their memory is taken up, but also because of a theological principle, recognized by Thomas, that insofar as a saint’s perfection manifests a divine plenitude that exceeds human attempts to shape or contain it, the narrative that re-presences it will never succeed at such attempts at capture, thereby keeping open the multiplicity of the possible afterlives of the saints, their exemplarity functioning to inspire forms of belonging and life together in ways that Thomas himself might have found perverse or unimaginable.
Coptic Icon of 21 Holy Martyrs of Libya. Photo Credit: Fadi Mikhail.
Different ways of telling the same story delimit different possibilities of inclusion even as memorialization entails a symbolic circulation that cannot be entirely predetermined at the outset. Heo hopes for change in the Egyptian political situation through the transformative solicitation of memory: “activating the memory of saints and martyrs, their appeal to millennia-long traditions point…to a set of deeply engrained sensibilities and landscapes that can retool horizons of memory and action, and hope toward common flourishing” (252). In other words, Heo is suggesting that communities might coexist and belong together differently depending on how narratives about saints are used by them.
This capacity for devotion to the saints to structure and make possible different kinds of community is not a form of anachronism—a melancholic nostalgia seeking revenge upon time—but rather a living, labile force of the present. If Heo argues that saints are not anachronisms, she is thereby making a larger claim about the persistence of religious traditions and communities of devotion across time. In the broadest sense, what Heo challenges is the secular assumption that religion itself is anachronistic. In fact, that opposite might be truer, namely that secularism is more truly anachronistic insofar as it is not in sync with the vicissitudes of time.
Heo’s work articulates the powerful potential of the (non)anachronism of the saints. This does not mean that Heo’s work on Egypt should be used to generalize about all other contexts. However, recourse to Heo’s work may help us to recognize the different forms of anachronism that compose many modernities that are of the time and above it, and thereby remember and tell stories that facilitate other kinds of belonging.
[1] For an account of the moral valence given to anachronism by historians, for whom it is a “mortal sin,” see Jacques Rancière, “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth,” The History of the Present 3.1, art. 3 (2015): 26.
[2] Heo shows how modern technology has, in this case, allowed sanctity to be demonstrated in a much more expeditious way than the labored means of hagiographical narratives, miracle accounts, and eye witness statements. ISIS recorded and disseminated video of the beheadings that show each of the victims speaking the name of Jesus. This video was used as proof of the martyr status of all 21 victims, and the typical 50-year period required by the Coptic Church before sainthood can be declared was not applied (240).
[3] Tertullian, Apologeticus, ch. 50. Quoted by Heo, 38.
Angie Heo’s The Political Lives of Saints. Book Cover used with permission from University of California Press.
In her ethnographic account of Coptic life in the modern Egypt, The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt, anthropologist Angie Heo seeks to counter the belief that religion, the secular, and the nation-state act independently of one another, instead reimagining them as interconnected sites of authority and power. However, rather than solely pursuing a discursive analysis, Heo trains her attention on the embodied practices in which Copts engage when they take up saintly relics, apparitions, and icons. Through various vignettes that analyze how such practices of veneration intersect with the wider institutional and ideological forces, Heo shows how Copts configure themselves in relationship to the Muslim-majority in Egypt as well as to the authoritarian Egyptian government.
The three essays in this symposium focus on how Heo makes space for the religious outside of, and sometimes in contest with, the secular. The religious here is not “apolitical” escape from the nation-state, but instead a politics imagined otherwise than what has been proffered by the state. Rachel Smith focuses on the interruption of secular temporalities that engagement with manifestations of saints makes possible. Anand Taneja shows how the affective energies transmitted by saintly images exceed the grasp of the religion/secular binary. And Kathryn Lofton reflects on perceptions of saintly wonderwork, arguing that such wonderwork suggests that there are human needs unmet by secular political configurations. In her reply, Heo responds by reflecting on both the possibilities and limits of theorizing saintly images as challenges to the secular.
Heo’s book and the essays collected here generate new ways of theorizing religion and secularism in the modern world that the Contending Modernities initiative seeks to foster. By thinking outside the US and European context about how secular and religious forces interact in the modern world, Heo’s book reminds us of the theoretical richness that is gained from expanding our accounts of religion and secularism.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
End Islamophobia, Silent Protest at Union Station, Washington DC. Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull.
A postcolonial approach to the study of religion and peacebuilding must begin with demystifying the dominant myths that impede productive discussion. Popularized by academics, pundits, and the media, these myths reflect Eurocentric and Euro-American biases that have deep connections to colonialism. Demystifying these myths will make it easier to engage in peacebuilding work across religious traditions.
The first myth is the “clash of civilizations” myth proposed by political scientist Samuel Huntington. Huntington suggests that future wars and conflicts will not be fought because of ideological differences, but because of clashes between religiously based civilizations. His hypothesis became popular because it asserted Western hegemony and provided an explanation of world politics in the post-Cold War era. However, his understanding of cultural and religious difference has deep roots in colonial discourse. In Orientalism, Edward Said pointed out how, in pursuit of colonization, the West created an image of the “Orient” as inferior, backward, and uncivilized for the purposes of control and domination. Huntington reactivated this threat and the fear of colonial difference by treating civilizations as homogeneous and bounded entities with no cross-civilizational interactions and crossovers.
Edward Said. A Mural on a San Francisco Street. Photo Credit: Rachid H.
The second myth is the myth of secularization, which regards religion as irrational and incompatible with modernity. The secularist myth sees religion as either irrelevant or a problem for social life in general. More particularly, it sees religion as an obstacle to conflict resolution. Proponents of secularism point to religious elites and religious institutions as the sources of social conflict. This secularist myth displays Eurocentric and colonialist biases when it takes the development of Western history since the Enlightenment as the normative measure of the trajectories of other societies. In Formations of the Secular, anthropologist Talal Asad gives an historical account of the concepts and political formations of the secular that have shaped secular attitudes in the modern West and Middle East. He argues that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion or be seen as more rational than religion. The secular has a multilayered history in different cultures. His study challenges a monolithic understanding of modernity that uses capitalist modernity as the model, and invites further inquiries into what scholars have called “global modernities.”
The third myth is dangerous and Islamophobic, for it proposes that some religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, are inherently peaceful, while Islam is militant and condones violence and Jihadism. This argument is dangerous because it can lead to false stereotyping and the scapegoating of whole populations. It is ahistorical because it overlooks the Crusades, Christianity’s complicity in genocide and colonialism, and the internal rivalries within both Christian and Buddhist traditions. The association of Islam with religious violence and the language of “religious insurgence” as threatening also shows again a strong Orientalist bias. It downplays the history of colonialism, marginalization, and displacement in the Muslim world. The acts of a tiny minority of Muslim extremists should not be taken as representative of Islam as a whole. There are many Muslim leaders and organizations working tirelessly for peace. In Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam, Mohammed Abu-Nimer shows that there are principles and values in Qur’an, Hadith, and other elements in the Islamic tradition that support peacebuilding and conflict resolution.
Postcolonial studies can help demystify these myths and also shed light on problems inherent in the study of religion. Postcolonial critics point out that “religion” is a problematic category and the study of religion in the modern West has often been linked to racism and the construction of the Other. When the academic study of religion developed in the mid-nineteenth century during the heyday of colonialism, Christianity was taken to be the reference when compared to the “mythic” religions of the East and the “primitive” religions of Africa. As religion emerged as a field of study in academia, there was a tendency to treat “religion” as sui generis and separate from other cultural, social, and political aspects. This reductionist and simplistic approach continues to be seen in introductory “World Religion” courses. Here, different religious traditions are reduced to certain belief systems, creeds, heroes, and a few key practices. In the name of religious literacy, a very truncated form of knowledge is introduced, which may heighten the differences of diverse traditions and reinforce biases students have already held. These kinds of introductory courses do not promote dialogue and peacebuilding because they reinforce colonial and Orientalist myths. Using insights from postcolonial and decolonial studies, Richard King, David Chidester, Santiago Slabodsky, and myself have pointed to new ways of conceptualizing the study of religion and theology drawing on our studies of Indian religions, African religions, Judaism, and Christianity respectively.
Postcolonial studies also offers constructive criticism for the emerging field of religion and peacebuilding, which focuses on the themes of interreligious dialogue, the retrieval of religious resources for peacebuilding in various traditions, and the instrumental role that religious actors and networks play in the dynamics of both conflict and peacebuilding. While studies in these areas have much to contribute, too often their focus has been on male academics, educated elites, and prominent religious leaders. More than thirty years ago, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading postcolonial theorist, asked, “Can the subaltern speak?” Her question raised issues concerning the politics of representation, the relation between power and knowledge, and the importance of creating infrastructures so that subaltern voices could be heard and understood. In the study of religion and peacebuilding, it is crucial to pay attention to subaltern religious consciousness and grassroots efforts in promoting peace.
Cathayan Nestorian Cross from the Nestorian Stele. {{PD-US}}
Women’s participation in peacebuilding also needs to be highlighted. Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding discusses the obstacles and opportunities women religious peacebuilders face because patriarchal practices have often prevented them from assuming authority in religious organizations and leadership in peace efforts. Some women seek to work through religious institutions or find other spaces to promote peace and exert their influences. The late Dekha Ibrahim of Kenya, a devout Muslim, served as a trustee of Coalition for Peace in Africa and received several international awards for her peacebuilding efforts. Buddhist nun Mae Chee Sansanee from Thailand led a peace walk and reached out to Muslim women when conflicts broke out between the Buddhists and Muslims in southern Thailand. She has also led interreligious dialogue in conflict zones around the world. Catholic sister Marie-Bernard Alima of Congo formed a network called the Coordination of Women for Democracy and Peace to educate and train women to provide leadership in human rights, political movements, and efforts to prevent sexual and gender-based violence.
Postcolonial critics regard cultures and histories as overlapping and mutually inscribed, and such recognition can aid in peacebuilding. It is helpful to use the lens of hybridity to investigate how different religions and cultures have encountered, learned, and borrowed from one another and changed as a result. For example, when Christianity came to China in the seventh century, it had to borrow Buddhist and Daoist concepts to translate Christian terminologies. The symbol of Nestorian Christianity was a cross resting on a lotus flower, the latter of which is a symbol from Buddhism. A hybridized understanding of religious traditions and religious identities will help overcome a binary construction of “us” versus “them” and recover the history of complex interactions among diverse religious traditions. It will also open avenues to imagine identity and difference as fluid and changing in our increasingly interconnected world.
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