A global warming-affected farmer in Peru whose village is dependant on the Ausangate glacier. Photo Credit: Oxfam International, 2009.
With the United Nations climate change panel recently releasing a report that stated limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius “would require rapid, far reaching and unprecedentented changes in all aspects of society,” the Ansari Institute’s panel on “Sustainable Habitats: How Religions Can Repair Unsustainable Environments,” proves timely. While we are used to hearing scientists, economists, and politicians weigh in on the environment, it is less common to turn to religious traditions as potential collaborators. Nosheen Ali (Aga Khan University), Daniel Castillo (Loyola Maryland), and Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (University of Buffalo) showed the rich resources these traditions can bring to the conversation. One commonality that ran across each presentation was the importance of reimagining the relationship between humans, other animals, and the earth. Given that we are now in the age of the anthropocene—climate change brought about by human actions—such reimaginings are key for developing a sustainable relationship with the earth.
Daniel Castillo raised dual concerns from the Catholic tradition: how can the life of faith inform both the preferential option for the poor and the option for the earth? Castillo drew our attention to the reality that these two concerns are intimately interlinked: those who will suffer the most from the earth’s rising temperatures are those in the Global South who do not have the economic resources to shield themselves from the effects of climate change. Turning to the Hebrew scriptures, Castillo rejected the harmful anthropocentrism that has arisen in response to the Genesis 1 narrative of man having dominion over the earth. He instead emphasized Genesis 2:15, which calls humanity to cultivation and care. Castillo argued that the symbolic vocation in Genesis 2 is the gardener who lives out the imago dei (image of God) through love of God, neighbor, and the earth. Cultivation and care extends toward both neighbor and the rest of creation, emphasizing our embeddedness within these relationships.
Glacier ceremony celebrating Christ and spirit of the mountain, as part of the Qoyllur Rit’i. Photo Credit: Sebastien Lafont, 2008.
Nosheen Ali spoke from an Islamic perspective and the context of her fieldwork in Shimshal, Pakistan. Ali noted that policies focused on sustainability have become entrenched in the very capitalist system responsible for creating environmental degradation in the first place. We can learn from the people in Shimshal who, because of their view that nature is sacred, have developed forms of human labor that can complement the processes of nature. Yet, Ali noted, often this sacred view of nature is “denied legitimacy in mainstream notions of science.” She underscored the importance of making space for ecology as a spiritual concept. Ali then considered the history of asceticism in Islam, describing Baba Farid (1173-1266), a revered Sufi spiritual leader, who believed a practice of anti-accumulation was essential to his religious life. An ecological spirituality combined with an emphasis on anti-materialism offers a model for sustainable human practices.
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo presented her ethnographic research with impoverished Peruvians who “draw on indigenous traditions to collaborate with sacred, sentient landscapes.” Bacigalupo presented the Peruvian workers’ divinization rituals as a form of resistance against the extractive resource industry. They believe the natural world has its own moral agency and argue that we have angered the earth. This has led to a movement, amongst some Peruvians, demanding the recognition of the legal personhood of nature. Bacigalupo argued that this approach to nature as a sacred, sentient landscape has led to new models of mobilization against climate change.
These three scholars show us that ecological spirituality as an embodied practice has the potential to reorient our relationship with the earth. Practices of caring for a garden, cooperating with nature, and extending solidarity beyond human persons to the rest of the natural world foster a vision of a relationship with the earth grounded in kinship rather than extraction. This allows the human person to see herself as not only embedded in the human community but also in the broader community of the earth and all creatures.
Yet, as we recover and/or develop these ecological, spiritual practices, Ali warned us to guard against universal solutions. Each ecosystem has unique features, and so each community will need to develop their own ways of cooperating with nature. In the words of the American poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry, the over-emphasis on “Think Big,” such as macro-level planning, policies, and laws, has blinded us to the power of “Think Little” and the creative possibilities that emerge when we fully engage in our own backyard and community. Religious actors, traditions, and resources can also help to further develop this point. For instance, within my own Catholic tradition, Pope Francis has emphasized that we require a “lifestyle and spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm,” because technical expertise can only provide, at best, a partial solution to climate change (Laudato Si’ #111). Pope Francis calls for an “ecological conversion” within each of our communities (Laudato Si’ #219). While public policies and laws are important, for Ali, Berry, and Pope Francis these measures alone won’t save us. We must also foster ways of thinking little within our local communities, which as a collective have the transformative power to impact climate change.
St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Memphis, TN. Photo Credit: Gary Bridgman.
The Ansari Institute’s panel offers an important starting point for thinking about religious resources for combating climate change. Moving forward, it is important that panels like this attend to intersectionality at a deeper level. While the intersectionality between the environment and the poor was highlighted, other points of intersectionality, like gender, deserve more attention. During the question and answer period, Harvard Divinity School professor and Director of the Religious Literacy Project Diane Moore raised concerns to Castillo that the same Genesis 2 text being used to safeguard the environment has also been used to suppress women. For example, Genesis 2:18 states: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Historically, this has been used to justify a hierarchical relationship between men and women. The same text used to support a relationship of care with the earth has also been used, in one prevalent reading, to justify the subordination of women. In our attempts to correct a harmful tradition of anthropocentrism, can we use a text that has been used to discount women’s equity?
For the feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, we must address both forms of oppression together because “the subjugation of women has formed the symbolic basis for the subjugation of the earth.” This means that work in ecotheology must also attend to gender. In the case of Genesis 2, the ecotheological reading of the human person as a gardener that images God by nurturing the earth must be in conversation with feminist theological interpretations of Genesis 2 that challenge sexist readings of the text. Otherwise, we risk realizing justice in one dimension only to undermine it in another.
The stakes of incorporating an intersectional lens are more than theoretical; there are substantive practical implications as well. For example, recent studies have shown that women are disproportionately affected by climate change, particularly in communities where they also lack equal access to other resources such as education and economic opportunities. Given this reality, it is necessary to think about how religious resources and ecological spiritualties interact with gender as well as other pertinent issues such as racism and decolonization. Indeed, such a process is necessary in order to build a spiritually informed, holistic vision of climate justice.
Suggested Further Readings:
Theology and Ecology across the Disciplines: On Care for Our Common Home. Edited by Celia Dean-Drummond and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser. London, UK: T&T Clark, 2018.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Moore, Niamh. “Eco/Feminism, Non-Violenc and the Future of Feminism.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 10, no. 3 (2008): 282-98.
Marie-Claire Klassen is a PhD Candidate in Theology with a minor in Peace Studies at Notre Dame. Her research utilizes theological ethnography to study Palestinian liberation theology. She is currently a Dissertation Year Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
US border wall meets the Pacific in Tijuana. Photo Credit: Jonathan Macintosh, 2009.
What role does religion play in promoting the flourishing of the individual, community, and environment? How can the “metaphysical anguish and ontological delight” that allows us to “cross,” in the words of Ansari Institute Director Tom Tweed, between life stages and through space mobilize resources and structures for holistic human development? The inaugural conference for the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion at the University of Notre Dame, held on the 25thand 26thof October, 2018, took a close look at the ambivalent role of religion in the present-day migration and ecological crises, as well as in the public discourses of media misinformation. In this series, we cover the event in essays by University of Notre Dame doctoral students Lailatul Fitriyah, Marie-Claire Klassen, and Khan Shairani.
The genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar. Global North depictions of “good” and “bad” Muslims. Irreversible climate change. Each panel recognized the complicity of religions in structures of violence, be it through the construction and upholding of subjective boundaries of belonging that participate in and reinforce modern orientalist and nation-state divisions; or through the undergirding of an anthropocentrism that has given carte blanche to the despoiling of the water, earth, and air on which we all depend. With the emergence of the modern nation-state and international economic system, religious traditions—simultaneously siloed beyond the public sphere and folded into the modern imaginary of the nation as ethnically-cum-religiously homogenous—have absorbed and furthered these exclusivist formations. The fact that churches are among the most segregated places in the United States is a glaring example. In her essay, Lailatul Fitriyah explores the layering of borders not just without but also within, or on, the bodies of policed “border-crossers,” sharing the scenario of Muslim women of color navigating and contesting boundaries of national and religious expression.
Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion Inaugural 2018 Conference Poster.
At the same time, religions provide “powerful narratives of history and the universal,” that offer alternate understandings of human community and trajectory, as noted by panelist Erin Wilson (University of Groningen). Religious language and values can be used to make visible and contest cultural and structural violence, challenging, for example, the underlying worldview of the modern nation-state system through alternate readings of community (who deserves to belong?) and human worth (which identities are valued most highly?). By some readings, certain religious and social histories may create orientations, even obligations, towards forms of solidarity that supersede modern boundaries. But to build peace, religious actors “must claim a normative platform,” Diane Moore (Harvard University) argued, “rather than pretend to be neutral.” The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s refugee resettlement efforts come to mind, emerging out of Jewish experiences of seeking refuge and evolving to support refugees of all backgrounds. Laudato Si’ resoundingly critiques the modern economic system and how it assigns value.
Could religion’s most powerful positive contribution to flourishing be to promote a generative understanding of complexity? Panelists put forth examples of the ways in which religious teachings could disrupt existing assumptions, invoke empathy, and give legitimacy to new ways of knowing and being. In her essay, Marie-Claire Klassen relays religiously- and spiritually-grounded re-orientations of the relationship between human and earth, including, in one case, the attribution of sentience to the landscape.
These efforts face an uphill struggle as they seek to question the frames through which society subconsciously operates; the “air” we breathe. The media can play a destructive role in this sense, reifying broadly accepted discourses like “religious violence” without exploring how religious identity is both internally multifaceted and interwoven with other social, cultural, and political markers, as Khan Shairani notes. In addition, the changing nature of religious authority, a topic of particular interest here at Contending Modernities through our “Authority, Community, and Identity” working groups, may change the playing field, as orthodox forms of religious expertise and knowledge transmission fade or splinter, and new actors take the stage deploying novel modes of authorization and communication. Complexity, and, as audience member Caesar Montevecchio (University of Notre Dame) commented, ambiguity, can be troubling; they require a predisposition or openness towards uncertainty. Perhaps, Tweed closed, our aim should be to construct communities that welcome complexity, together.
Dania is Program Manager at the Contending Modernities research initiative, where she oversees operations and contributes to program development. Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies. She is active in efforts to establish restorative justice pathways in her local community, and volunteers to advance grant making for community-led social cohesion programs globally. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Madrasa Discourses student Farheen in the temple district of Kathmandu, July 2018.
The Madrasa Discourses 2018 summer intensive brought together a diverse and vibrant group of people in an intellectually stimulating environment in Nepal. The participants—who included madrasa graduates from India and Pakistan, students from South Africa and the University of Notre Dame, and faculty members from India, Pakistan, the United States, and South Africa—helped bring different perspectives to discussions on the challenging issues of Islamic legal tradition and gender justice, human nature and the body, conflict and peacebuilding, pluralism and inter-faith dialogue, and Muslim responses to modernity.
For instance, how did the medieval mercantile society define and value different bodies? Under what legal assumptions could one buy, sell, own or manumit another human? How was the full or partial tamlik (ownership) of another’s body legally thought about? How many kinds of ownership were there? How did these assumptions shape what we have inherited as Islamic law? And, do modern Muslims share those assumptions? Some of these questions kept us thinking during the three days of lectures and discussions with Dr. Saadia Yacoob from Williams College, USA. Most of us had never heard of the term tamlik, while others had read it in the madrasa without giving it much thought. However, this term, when it cropped up in Yacoob’s lecture, became a focus of long discussions and a cause of acute discomfort for many. The readings assigned by Dr. Yacoob were a collection of dense and nuanced texts on Islamic law, including Sexual Violation in Late Antique Near East by Hina Azam, excerpts from Her Day in Court by Maya Shatzmiller, 11th century jurist Al-Sarakshi’s Kitab al-Mabsut’s portion in which he writes about zina (adultery) and legal accountability and Kecia Ali’s article from Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender and Pluralism. Why, then, did only a single concept, tamlik, elicit unending explanations and discussions from the participants from India and Pakistan?
Azam’s piece on sexual violation in the pre-Islamic period in the Middle East discusses two competing systems of ethics—propriety and theocentric—that shaped legal thinking on sexual violation and women’s autonomy across various legal systems, including Ancient Mesopotamian laws, Mosaic and Rabbinic laws, Roman and Christian laws and pre-Islamic Arabian customs. Propriety ethics regarded “sexual violation of females as primarily a property crime, akin to usurpation—the unlawful taking of another’s possession for one’s own use—or abduction—the unlawful removal of live property from the control of its owner” (p. 24). Propriety ethics views sexual violation as a crime of a man against another man; therefore the remedy consists of the violator paying the wronged party, that is, the father or husband of the woman, as compensation for his loss. Theocentric ethics, on the other hand, regarded sexual violation as a transgression against God, that is, a sin. Theocentric logic therefore required physical punishment of the violator, rather than simply a monetary compensation for the theft of female sexual and reproductive capacity. Legal thinking about the female body reflected a tension between the two types of ethics that co-existed in varied combinations in ancient Middle Eastern legal texts, which formed the context for Islamic legal discourses on the topic later on. Maya Shatzmiller discusses the monetary value assigned in Islamic legal discourse to different bodily functions such as intercourse, breastfeeding, pregnancy, and taking care of the young (pp. 93-117). First intercourse, that is, the consummation of marriage, triggers property rights of mahr (dower) and nafaqa (maintenance) for the bride, while pregnancy triggers property rights of the unborn child.
Al-Sarakshi’s text is one of the Hanafi legal positions on the punishment accorded to a man and a woman engaged in zina (adultery) in different scenarios of legal accountability and consent (pp. 54-55). The case of a mature and sane woman involved in a consensual illicit sexual act with a mature and sane man led to both being punished. If the woman does not consent, is a minor, or is insane, she is not punished but he is. However, if the man is insane or a minor and therefore not legally accountable he is not punished, but interestingly, the woman also goes unpunished. Al-Sarakshi reasons that since the primary doer in the sex act is a man (the woman being the locus) she cannot be punished if he is not. Moreover, in any of the above scenarios, the man is being punished for committing adultery whereas the woman is punished for making herself available and therefore facilitating adultery. Dr. Yacoob assigned this reading to tease out the assumptions about human sexuality at play in legal rulings and to point out that if these assumptions are taken away, the internal logic of the laws crumbles. Therefore, religious texts are not interpreted in a vacuum by the jurists, but with some presumptions that shape the legal rulings.
Madrasa Discourses students view a video at the 2018 Dhulikhel Summer Intensive.
Finally we turned to Kecia Ali’s argument that in Islamic jurisprudence, “the overall framework of the marriage contract is predicated on a type of ownership (milk) granted to the husband over the wife in exchange for dower payment, which makes sexual intercourse between them lawful” (p. 165). Marriage, as understood in Sunni schools of Islamic law, therefore is an exchange of exclusive sexual access to the wife in return for dower (mahr) and her continued sexual availability in return for financial support (nafaqa) by the husband. A husband’s right to unrestricted sexual access to his wife also allowed him to control her mobility. The idea of ownership contained in these terms used in juristic discussions on marriage prompted a large number of responses from the Madrasa Discourses summer intensive participants. Many tried to explain that tamlik really doesn’t mean ownership or that there are different kinds of ownership, that a husband’s ownership of a wife is different from the way one owns an inanimate object or a slave, and also that modern Muslims don’t think about their wives as their possessions. One participant shared how a friend’s joke about owning his wife caused a lot of uproar in the families on both sides, due to which he had to apologize to his wife. This whole discussion, and the discomfort around the term tamlik, is precisely what Ali pre-empts when she argues that this way of thinking about marriage is “unthinkable today for the majority of Muslims” (p. 165).
By the end of Dr. Yacoob’s session, heads were spinning, both because none of the participants had thought about Islamic law in this perspective, but also because it was liberating and scary at the same time. It was paradigm-shifting to recognize that in the formative period of Islamic law, gender norms were the outcome of human interaction with the texts, and different presumptions or approaches to the texts could have and did lead to different legal rulings. This liberates Muslims to rethink Islamic legal tradition. This rethinking, however, is not going to be smooth or painless. It requires a constant struggle with oneself and one’s beloved tradition, one’s identity and the political realities of Muslim communities around the globe that shape popular discourses and attitudes.
References
Ali, K. (2006). Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: The Necessity for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Law. In O. Safi, Progressive Muslims on Gender, Justice and Pluralism (pp. 163-189). Oxford: One-World Publications.
al-Sarakhsi. Kitab al Mabsut. Beirut: Darul Marifa. (الجز اللتاسع من كتاب المبسوط لشمس الدين السرخسي, دار المعرفة, بيروت-لبنان)
Azam, H. (2015). Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence and Procedure. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Shatzmiller, M. (2007). Her Day in Court: Women’s Property Rights in Fifteenth-century Granada. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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.
Madrasa and Notre Dame students particpate in a discussion during the Kathmandu Summer Intensive program of Notre Dame’s Madrasa Discourses in July 2017, in Nepal.
(RNS) — When Waqas Khan, a 29-year-old Pakistani, graduated from his madrasa in Karachi, he felt disillusioned.
Though he had earned top grades throughout his education, he felt confused about the role of religion and Islamic scholars in the 21st century. “I could not connect the learned knowledge with the world I am living in,” Khan told Religion News Service. “I needed to know what I am missing but I could not.”
Then he met Ebrahim Moosa, and the dots began to connect.
Moosa, a South African, had felt similarly disenchanted after graduating from the one of the most esteemed madrasas in the Muslim world, the famous Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama seminary in Lucknow, India. His curiosity pushed him to get a certificate in journalism, which led him to report on his native country’s struggles over apartheid.
He then pivoted toward academia, earning degrees at the University of Cape Town before moving to the United States to teach Islamic studies at Stanford, Duke and Notre Dame University in Indiana.
Those experiences, Moosa told RNS, helped fill in the critical gaps in his madrasa education and convinced him to help other highly but narrowly educated Muslims. In 2015, Moosa founded the Madrasa Discourses, a program of study based at Notre Dame that connects madrasa graduates — students like Waqas Khan — with the scientific and philosophical questions traditional madrasas often skip.
Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame
Madrasa is the Arabic word for a school of any kind but most often refers to Islamic seminaries, usually attached to mosques. They are invaluable, said Moosa, author of the 2015 book “What Is a Madrasa?” as “repositories of Islamic tradition.” But some orthodox Muslims, he says, “make an idol out of tradition, without recognizing that tradition is an active thing.”
Studying with Moosa and his colleagues, Khan said, has allowed him to understand “difference of perspectives.”
Moosa’s initiative, funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, is now in its third year and has taught more than 80 students at Notre Dame and at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India, and GIFT University in Gujranwala, Pakistan.
The effort is meant to benefit the madrasas themselves as much as it is their students. The ulema, or the world’s body of Islamic scholars, were once intellectual and spiritual leaders within Muslim societies. Today, Moosa says, they are rapidly losing their moral authority as their madrasa educations have left them out of touch with the times.
The Madrasa Discourses aim to curb the “armchair theology tendencies,” in the words of coordinator Mahan Mirza, of today’s madrasa scholarship by bringing it into dialogue with modern intellectual currents.
Imparting basic scientific literacy is therefore critical.
Moosa, who considers himself primarily a theologian, leans on experts with scientific backgrounds to help participants understand scientific history and processes.
His colleague Mirza, a Notre Dame professor who leads the Contending Modernities program, helped design the curriculum and teaches online every week.
Mirza, with religious studies degrees from Hartford Seminary and Yale University, has studied mechanical engineering in Texas. Mirza has also served as the dean of faculty at Zaytuna College, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college, where he taught Arabic-Islamic studies and the history of science.
Those who come to the program from traditional schools have little to no scientific literacy. “Some of them might perhaps know what the periodic table or an atom or an electron is,” Mirza said. “But we start with next to nothing.”
Pakistani student Waqas Khan shares with the conference highlights from the discussion his table had been having on the topics of the day.
Their knowledge of classical Islam’s long engagement with philosophy, reasoning and science, he said, gives them a strong grounding on which to build. “Those kinds of things are already integrated into practical theology,” Mirza explained. “But students don’t really recognize them as science anymore, because they consider them part of the Islamic intellectual tradition.”
The Madrasa Discourses team uses what it calls an “elicitive” approach. “We work from within the tradition and help them recognize the scientific reasoning already embedded within the tradition,” Mirza said.
That, Moosa told RNS, is the key breakthrough: “Once our participants understand that Islamic history is not static, that this is a history of growth and development and alteration, it makes them very comfortable.”
Learning about figures like Ibn Khaldun, an Arab historian who died in 1406 and is considered a founder of the social sciences, “rattles their cages.”
In the second year of the three-year course, the students participate in roundtable discussions with local scientists and compare texts from Islamic and Western science and philosophy. They are given readings that depict how Islamic intellectual history is constructed and debated.
One important conceptual framework for the second-year course is the notion of “Big History,” a recent academic trend that looks at the development of the universe and humankind in terms of large patterns instead of culture-by-culture, politically focused events.
For Waqas Khan, the biggest mental shift was understanding evolution. Before arriving at Notre Dame, he didn’t believe it was real. Now, he said, he sees it as a “significant scientific concept.”
Not everyone walks away from Madrasa Discourses having done a 180 on their beliefs. To the program’s organizers, that’s perfectly fine.
“You’re not going to get any answers in this program,” Mirza said. “But you will get a lot of questions. And we want to make sure that you understand these questions.”
The aim is not to prove, for example, that evolution is true. The point is to explain what a scientific theory is, so that madrasa graduates can no longer dismiss evolution as “just a theory.” Many madrasa-trained thinkers, said Mirza, regard scientists who traffic in theories as “incompetent goofballs” playing guessing games.
Once participants begin to appreciate that complexity, Mirza said, “they start asking, ‘What does this mean for creation? How are we supposed to think about this theologically?’” Mirza said.
“But that’s where our work stops. Because they are the ulema, they are the scholars, and that’s why we invited them,” said Mirza.
Mahan Mirza leads the Contending Modernities program at Notre Dame. Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame
At that point, Mirza tells his charges, “Hopefully now you can develop a culture where you begin to engage these questions — and perhaps come up with some answers.”
Some Muslim scholars and madrasa leaders have criticized the Madrasa Discourses, questioning why Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, should be so concerned with reforming madrasa education. “There’s a concern that this is some kind of a neocolonial project,” Mirza said.
But Moosa and Mirza say they have no desire to impose any Orientalist Western reform on the madrasas. They point out that the project’s local faculty in India and Pakistan are drawn from the prestigious Jamia Hamdard and Al-Sharia Academy, respectively, and that they have buy-in from community leaders.
“We’re asking these questions and thinking about these concepts together” with Muslim communities, said Mirza. “We’re learning and struggling together rather than making a top-down attempt to unsettle everything.”
The proof, perhaps, is in the pride Waqas Khan now takes in his traditional education. Before working with Madrasa Discourses, Khan said, he had begun wishing he had studied at a typical university instead of Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi, the traditional madrasa he attended. But working with Moosa helped him realize the value of his Islamic education.
“Now I think that in a society like mine it is good to have both educations, traditional and conventional,” he told RNS. Working with scholars like Mirza and Moosa, he said, helped him “to connect them both and how to understand the religion in our time.”
Fellow participant Zaid Hassan, who lives in Gujranwala, agreed. While at Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi, where he completed his studies in 2015, he felt satisfied with all that he learned in madrassa, although he noted that his “heart was sometimes troubled with the seeming impracticality of these teachings in the real world.”
He says he is therefore grateful to Madrasa Discourses for introducing him to a new way of thinking, one that is entrenched in the Islamic way of thought but is open to a multitude of perspectives.
But learning this way of thought, Hassan told RNS in Urdu, “has given birth to new burden, a feeling of a great weight on our shoulders.” Because moving forward with the concern of “harmonizing religion to the new modern society” in conversation with the world around him is no easy task, he said.
Aysha Khan is a Boston-based journalist reporting on American Muslims and millennial faith. Her newsletter, Creeping Sharia, focuses on Muslims in the U.S. Previously, she was the social media editor at RNS.
Women at a bakery in Adamawa, Cameroon. Photo Credit: UN Women
What is the relationship between gender and authority in different religious communities in Cameroon? Our project addresses the intersection of women, religion, and ways of being modern in the nation-wide Catholic Women’s Association, a small group of Muslim women who meet regularly in Yaoundé, and a Muslim and “traditional” village in the Adamawa region of the country. But this question immediately raises additional ones, because no “community” is hermetically sealed for examination by the external gaze.
Any discussion of patterns and practices of authority within these communities, therefore, also needs to take into account the relations of authority, intended or unintended, between these communities and outside actors, especially with a) the state, b) the humanitarian world of nongovernmental organizations, and c) given our research, interactions with members of our team. Each of the communities we address in our project has had different levels of interactions with these actors, and with us. We also note that no one is a completely passive agent in any of these relationships.
Logo of the Catholic Women Association (CWA).
Our previous essay for Contending Modernities explored some of the structures of authority within Catholicism, as well as some of the dynamics in the Catholic Women’s Association (CWA) in Cameroon’s capital city of Yaoundé. We begin with a short update on additional research in Bamenda (in the Anglophone part of the country), before describing our visit with Muslim communities. A visit to Bamenda demonstrates that women of the CWA take great pride in their work in several domains: providing the sole Catholic women’s entity that crosses the Anglophone-Francophone linguistic divide (in a context of an Anglophone secessionist demand), developing a center at the Bamenda headquarters to assist women in need with classes in sewing and computers (which we plan to make a contribution to), and working within the national electoral system.
One of us attended an annual meeting of one of the district associations, in which CWA members celebrated their accomplishments for the year, hosted a priest as speaker, and broke into small groups to address important questions for the upcoming elections. Lines of authority appear to be fairly firm between clerics and laypersons; the lay womens’ groups each have a priest who acts as a kind of mentor to the group, and in turn clerics respect the women elected to significant positions in the organization. This is a group in which the leadership tends to be both highly professionalized (in terms of the procedures of the organization and the professions of women in the group), and well-established within the Catholic hierarchy of the country.
In the small group of Muslim women in Yaoundé, the founder of the group is also its de facto leader: she brought the group together and plays a large role in making it work, both in its religious component (the women meet regularly to study the Qur’an and also to learn Arabic with a small rotating group of imams and instructors), and its mutual assistance component.
The women of the Muslim group of Yaounde and their instructor, Oussa, at a Koran study group.
Regarding the latter, the women have tried several projects to supplement their income, including growing food on a small plot of land, making therapeutic black soap, and most recently, making laundry soap and a juice beverage from a local plant.
Most of these projects became possible because of relations with government authorities. Many civil society and women’s groups usually go to the state first for technical, financial, or logistical support. For this group of Muslim women (located in the capital and central region of the country), relations with the state occur in several ways. The women, for example, take part in a number of activities sponsored by the Ministry for the Promotion of Women and the Family, as well as by the Ministry of Social Affairs. These government ministries fund such local groups to work with affected populations through establishing and administering centers “for the promotion of women and the girl-child.” Through these centers, marginalized women can train for jobs as seamstresses or for eventual employment in the restaurant, hotel, or information industries, to help them become more independent. These women, however, also frequently take the initiative to propose projects of their own to gain support from both national and local government authorities.
The decision-making regarding which small enterprises to propose appears to be fairly democratic in the group, with ideas coming from various women of different ages. Different patterns of authority influence whether or not each of these schemes work: for example, the plot to grow food was abandoned because husbands did not want their wives to travel outside of the neighborhood to the site (thus, intra-familial, gendered lines of authority); the black soap-making was abandoned because the woman who was to train the group first implied that she would provide her services without charge, then decided to set a fee that was too high for the women to pay (the power of an external “expert” authority to control the terms of assistance). The laundry soap and juice efforts, however, appear to be successful thus far. (We note that we are providing support for this initiative through our Contending Modernities grant, but we have set no conditions regarding what projects the women engage in with the funds.)
The leaders of the Muslim women’s group of Yaounde and a member of the research team show the soap made by the women of the group.
In Cameroon, there are numerous channels for women’s and civil society groups to work with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Humanitarian and development NGOs often go through state authorities to obtain contacts within the populations they want to serve based on their missions and objectives. Sometimes, however, individuals or groups in need of such services also approach NGOs directly. Either way, of course, such relationships do not always succeed. Indeed, there are cases where local groups do not want to cooperate with NGOs, especially when these organizations press for changes to local traditions that they are not prepared to tolerate. Evidence from two research trips thus far indicates that this is the case for the group of traditional Muslim women in the Adamawa region. For example, the NGO CARE conducted one project to bring clean water and another to increase women’s autonomy in the community. The second project ran into problems because only a small number of women signed up to participate, most likely because the project itself challenged the patriarchal character of authority in the community. This example raises two interrelated issues with NGOs: NGOs often condition aid on the participation of a certain percentage of the population in the project; but in failing to reach this number, NGOs also obstruct their own goal of providing services to a group that needs assistance.
The dynamic at work between these actors is interesting on several levels: when marginalized women in given milieus seek to enter into a relationship with humanitarian organizations, thus benefiting from NGO “modernization” programs, they are opening themselves to a kind of alterity, a voluntary inscription into a process to try something new that might improve their living conditions. For example, on our first visit to the Adamawa Muslim group, several of the women noted that they enjoyed working with a previous NGO who taught them knitting, because it allowed them to do something to earn money as well as learn about things outside of their community.
At the same time, as is well-known, humanitarian and other external actors can bring ideas, programs, pressure, and funding for changes that are too radical for those they wish to “help,” although in this case it appears that men and women view these changes differently. It is important for our project to try to discern these patterns and nuances.
We are gaining a greater appreciation for pre-existing structures of authority in these groups, as well as members’ assumptions about authority within our own group of researchers. While we cannot completely overcome the professor/student hierarchy, we now realize that our interlocutors assume there is a stronger division of authority and decision-making within our group than (hopefully) exists. We hope to demonstrate our joint decision-making to these groups of women as well as develop ways to allow for joint ideas and processes to develop with them in our research. We realize that we are one more entity—although not as influential as the state or NGO authorities—that can mobilize resources that affect the internal dynamics driving these communities, and that this fact requires continued reflexivity on our part. Our notes in this post reflect some of our findings on multiple lines of authority within these communities as well as between them and the state, NGOs, and ourselves. We anticipate that these reflections in addition to ongoing research will raise additional questions about conceptualizations of authority and gender in religious communities.
One of the princes with us and the women in the community.
The Adamawa group is one of the most interesting for our analysis of lines of authority. We are still assessing a recent research trip by three members of our team, but here note two features of the group from a previous trip last fall. First, gendered relations are both clear within the community and possibly changing slightly—the (male) princes were our primary interlocutors, although they took us to the women’s compound (of the community leadership) to have an initial conversation about our research with some of the women. The princes interpreted for us, also prodding the women to feel free to speak to us about their concerns. We did not press very much, however, thinking that a subsequent trip, in which the two graduate student members of our team (one woman and one man) were invited to stay in the community, would provide less abrupt means of interacting. Second, both women and men in this community appeared to be eager for input from external actors. The princes, for example, told us of methods they had heard to fatten cattle and make other agricultural “modernizations,” and the women remarked that they enjoyed the training of a previous NGO that came through to teach them how to crochet, because it gave them something productive to do that also earned money. Unlike Yaoundé, this community’s ties with outside NGOs have diminished because of its propinquity to the North. Often exaggerated fears of Boko Haram activity have made many NGOs reluctant to work in the region. However, fear of insecurity is not the only explanation for the absence of NGO’s in the village, although the risk is real. (Indeed, the border with the Central African Republic is only a few kilometers away and many incidents of hostage-taking as well as attacks on villages have been recorded.) There is also the extent of the community’s closure to this category of actors, especially when it comes to interventions targeting women. These organizations are seen as elements of disorder in the religious sense of the word. On an ad hoc basis, some outside groups can be admitted. This is the case for the Peace Corps which is very active in the Northern part of the country. One of its representatives has been working in the village for more than a year and has been providing technical and material support in livestock farming to the community. However, she is essentially exclusively in contact with men in her work. It can be inferred that NGOs involved in the community are either not particularly interested in the local women (this appears to be the case of Care International) or are not able to gain meaningful access.
In sum, there are several layers of authoritative practices—gendered, religious, political, financial, external—within these communities. But it would be a mistake to focus only on particular gendered aspects without also examining the authority exercised by external actors, of which we are one. In subsequent work, we will explore in more detail the implications of the intersections of these lines of authority, along with their relationship to issues of community and identity.
Dairou Bouba is a researcher in Political Science. A graduate of the University of Yaoundé II-Cameroon, his research interests are focused on topics related to cross-border insecurity, terrorism, conflicts, public action and public policies, gender, authority and community. The security issue was at the heart of his research paper on the theme: "L'action publique de lutte contre l'insécurité transfrontalière au Cameroun : analyse des mécanismes sociaux de gestion de la crise terroriste à l'Extrême- Nord." Bouba has conducted international surveys in the North of Cameroon on religion, power and modernity.
Fouda Ange Tatiana is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Yaounde II in Cameroon. Her research focuses on political behavior, mobilization and collective action, as well as questions of citizenship and political commitment. She is part of the ACI Cameroon project team as the field survey administrator.
Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is an expert on international relations, religion and ethics, humanitarianism, and civil society, and has researched and published extensively on topics related to peace, security, international organization, globalization, humanitarianism, and religion. She co-edits the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) Blog, at www.cihablog.com.
Nadine Machikou is Professor of Political Science and researcher at the Center for Studies and Research on Political and Administrative Dynamics, University of Yaounde II. She is also Director of the Center for Studies and Research in International and Community Law (CEDIC). After a thesis on the construction of decision support in health policies and studies on the political economy of public reforms and the evaluation of public policies in various fields, her work has been oriented towards religious and symbolic uses of power.
Kathmandu, Nepal at sunset. Photo Credit: Mike Behnken.
Before I departed for the Madrasa Discourses intensive in Kathmandu, my dad gave me a gift, a copy of his favorite book, The Razor’s Edge. This book tells the story of an American man, Larry Darrell, who chooses to forsake all worldly material possessions in favor of seeking sainthood, enlightenment, and the true meaning to life. Although Larry travels to India to find his “true self,” my dad thought it was perhaps close enough of a cultural experience with which to send me off. There was one rather long quote in the beginning of the book that immediately jumped out at me and stuck with me for the remainder of the trip:
“For men and women are not only themselves, they are the region in which they are born, the city or apartment or farm in which they learn to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are and these are the things that you can’t come to know by hearsay.”
One of the core principles of Catholic Social Teaching I have encountered at Notre Dame stresses the vital importance of recognizing the life and dignity of every human person. As Catholics, we passionately believe that all people are created in the likeness and image of God and should be respected as such. With this principle in mind and The Razor’s Edge in hand, I exited the plane with an open heart and a desire to learn the things about people that cannot be learned from hearsay.
Throughout my two weeks in Nepal I was blessed to forge wonderful new relationships with people from India, Pakistan, South Africa, Germany, the U.S, and Nepal. Of all of these new friendships, none were as strong as those which I had with my roommates. My two roommates, sisters-in-law from Pakistan, broke down the misconceptions that I had about Islam. These misconceptions are ones that seem to be very prevalent in the U.S.—the narrative that all Muslims are terrorists and that Muslim women are restricted by men in everything that they wish to do. My roommates taught me that Islam is a faith of mercy and grace but just like every faith, radical actors can twist it to inflict horrible pain upon others.
Students Haya Majeed and Elizabeth Boyle chat after class at the July 2018 Dhulikhel Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive 2018. Photo Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service.
The first thing that my roommates taught me was the traditional greeting among Muslims, “Assalamu Alaikum” which translates to “peace to you.” The common response to this greeting is, “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam” which translates to “and unto you, peace.” This exchange was immediately all too familiar, nearly identical to one that I utter in a Church every time I celebrate Mass. The one stark difference between my utterance of these phrases and my roommates’ was that I never wished peace to others outside of the confines of the church, outside of eyesight of Christ in the Tabernacle. I always held Christianity to be a faith led by a search for eternal and earthly peace, but the reality is that Islam as I experienced it may present peace in an even more vivid way. I thought it was quite wonderful that every interaction between the Madrasa students that I witnessed began with this exchange—an exchange of well wishes and a way to share your faith in God with others.
My roommates and I would stay up all hours of the night debating American politics, the concept of “love” marriages versus arranged marriages, college life in the U.S, and of course, faith. It did not take too extensive of an exegesis of the Bible and the Quran for us to realize that our two faiths really are not that starkly different. Every day we pointed out more similarities between our two faiths, and so soon enough the question emerged: Why does society tell us that we are two polar opposites? It was at this point that I remembered the words from The Razor’s Edge, that you cannot know the things that make people who they are by hearsay. It became apparent that my perception of Muslims up until this point had all been hearsay.
I had never been to a mosque before this trip, nor had I ever seen traditional Muslim prayer. Growing up in New York City after September 11, 2001, the narratives about Islam that were shared with me my entire life were ones of extremism and terrorism. Yet the Islam I encountered in Kathmandu is a faith of peace, mercy, and grace, just as we like to believe that Christianity is. If the tides had been turned and Christianity had been labeled the “terrorist” faith, how would the world look and how would I have responded?
My roommates and I realized that the only way people of our two faiths would begin to work together is when the barriers built on misconceptions and media distortion are broken down. Rather than being separated by a wall of hearsay, we must learn to walk on the same path of spiritual, philosophical, scientific, and global inquiry that is paved by the acceptance of cultural and religious diversity.
Student Momina Khan takes in Kathmandu at the July 2018 Summer Intensive. Photo Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service.
The incredible women that I met at Madrasa Discourses challenged my notions of what it means to be a feminist, an advocate for others, and a woman of faith. My roommates and I talked at length about the issues that we are passionate about and the ways we think we should resolve them. For example, on and off campus, I am engaged in advocacy work regarding Title IX and campus sexual violence. I have always used my Catholic faith as my motivation for wanting to devote my time to helping others live a safer, more equitable life. Similarly, to me the concept of the burqa as a symbol of freedom and liberation was completely novel, but began to make more sense after I listened to my roommates more over the two weeks.
In many advocacy communities in the United States, including some with which I am involved, faith is often not spoken about. Because faith has been used as a weapon against people and their self-identification in the past, many advocates disregard faith as a conduit for advocacy work and in turn disregard those advocates who wish to use their faith to promote their cause. Similar to the advocacy community more generally, proponents of feminism in the U.S. often shun religion, as many people view religion as a practice particularly restrictive to women. Through our discussions, I realized that I—and my roommates in Kathmandu—lie at the crossroads of these different approaches to advocacy. I was so grateful that we could have such an open conversation about faith, activism, and feminism, and I left Nepal with a desire to dive into my faith deeper and to explore the role of women in halting the spread of hearsay that causes us to distort our vision of each other.
As I sat on the plane from Kathmandu to the U.S., I opened up my copy of The Razor’s Edge and turned to that quote that started it all. I smiled, knowing that this experience had truly taught me that I cannot live a life based on hearsay. Rather, I must engage with others no matter how different their backgrounds may seem to mine. It is only when we are willing to become vulnerable, to let our guard down, and to let in the thoughts and experiences of others that we will truly learn how to reflect God towards each other.
To my wonderful roommates, who taught me what it actually means to be a Muslim and how faith can be a powerful tool for uplifting the voices of women and challenging the one-sided narrative of other cultures, I wish to you, Assalamu Alaikum.
Elizabeth Boyle is a junior political science and peace studies major from Long Island, New York. She had the opportunity to travel with the Madrasa Discourses team to Nepal this summer and continues to research with Professor Mahan Mirza this year. Outside of school she works as a virtual intern for USAID and as a Policy and Advocacy Organizer for the national advocacy organization, Know Your IX.
Vigil after shooting in the Tree of Life Synagogue, October 27, 2018. Photo Credit: Governor Tom Wolf.
On Shabbat service in Tree of Life Synagogue on an autumn day in Pittsburgh, 2018, 11 people were murdered by a white, Christian, racist, antisemitic, middle-aged man. He justified the massacre as a defensive action against infiltration by elements foreign to the boundaries of his “virtuous” community. Populist nationalisms always thrive on the language of authenticity and purity. The latter opens wide doors and paves clear paths to exclusionary and eliminatory practices. The Pittsburgh massacre exposes the complex ways in which religion participates in boundary and border construction.
American nationalism is intrinsically religious by virtue of its Christian content and valences (e.g. “American is a Christian Nation”; National Motto: “In God we Trust”; “America as a New Israel”; the vocation of American Exceptionalism). In its contemporary manifestation, it is “Christian” by virtue of appeals to a Christian ethnicity which is predominantly white. It is a communal demarcation, regardless of actual degrees of religious literacy and practice. Analytically interpreting questions pertaining to religion and modernity always requires us also to examine race, gender, and other classificatory mechanisms associated with matrices of control and domination as they transmogrify over time and in different locations.
The horrors of Tree of Life’s bloody Shabbat illuminated the intersections of racism, xenophobia, and hyper-deregulation of gun laws. These are combined with anti-refugee rhetoric and antisemitic and anti-Muslim dog whistling. The killer in Pittsburgh targeted Tree of Life because of their connection to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helps to resettle refugees and asylum seekers from Central America. He perceived this as a threat, one further inflamed by rhetorical fear-mongering from the very top of the U.S. political system and mobilized across radicalized and radicalizing social media platforms. He received this messaging as urgent, and demanding urgent measures.
Two interrelated critical points press themselves to the foreground. First, as a variety of commentators and Jewish public intellectuals underscored, the bloody Shabbat culminated a week filled with hateful acts against Democratic political figures as well as all-too-ordinary targeted attacks against marginalized and racialized communities. The violence exposes the complex interrelation between race, religion, and nationalist discourses—in this particular instance that of Trumpism.
Some interpreters underscored how the construction of Jewish people as whites in America—coupled with what James Baldwin referred to in an earlier era as their “moral choice” to become white—explains the apparent privileging of the lives lost at Tree of Life. They are “grievable.” Their senseless deaths appear heinous rather than routine. They give rise to widespread, shared lament.
Other interpreters emphasized an ever-expanding moral clarity. An increasing number within the American Jewish community experience this clarity when faced with the coalescing of antisemitism and Zionism within the framework of white nationalism. This coalescing is explicit in the admiration of Zionism as a model of the kind of ethnoreligious nationalism the suit-and-tie spokesperson of white nationalism, Richard Spencer, envisions in America. Clearly, there is no room for Jews there.
Such coalescing became clear, to highlight just one example, with the Trump Administration’s invitation to explicitly antisemitic religious leaders as speakers at the relocated American embassy in Jerusalem. The same honored guests are also on record as verbally assaulting Muslims, the LGBTQI communities, and other vulnerable groups. This challenges the Jewish establishment’s position on Israeli policies and Israel’s location as the pivot of American Jewishness. It challenges the Jewish Zionist mythology and redemptive narrative positing Israel as a safe haven and telos of Jewish history. It reveals the historically embedded modalities in which religion participates in constructing communal lines and other boundaries of belonging, non-belonging, and potential alliances.
Pittsburgh in mourning after shooting in the Tree of Life Synagogue. Photo Credit: Governor Tom Wolf.
The coalescing of antisemitism, white nationalism, and Zionism therefore, ironically, exposes how the claimed equivalency between criticisms of Israel and antisemitism facilitated an embrace and/or tolerance of antisemitic Zionists whose rhetoric and mainstreaming in the U.S. during the elections of 2016 quite clearly made Jewish people less safe. Antisemitism comes entangled with anti-Muslim or Islamophobic discourses, and this reality is even clearer in juxtaposition to a discursive effort to manipulate Islamophobia and orientalist underpinnings to authorize support of Israeli policies against Palestinians.
Yet other interpreters stress the grassroots acts of American Muslim solidarity and the profound meanings generated by multiple interfaith vigils in key cities across the U.S. while others revisit the need to engage in cross-learning among potential allies in the social movement against racism of the histories, manifestations, and shapes of antisemitism, classically and in modernity. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, for example, broadened its original scope from Jewish refugees to all refugees decades ago, recognizing Jews’ historical obligation to help others in need as they once were.
These sites of interreligious or intercommunal acts of solidarity from the grassroots lead us to the second point the Shabbat massacre illuminates, and which I have already alluded to throughout this exposition. Any effort to isolate and ghettoize “religion” as faith contained in houses of worship or in other demarcated spaces—including a domesticated discourse of American religious pluralism—glosses over the complex and intersectional dynamics participating in the construction of identities and their imaginings, as well as the potentiality of their reimagining. The moral clarity some Jewish people are now experiencing is born of their realization, captured in the killer’s apparent motives, that their safety is bound up with the treatment of all the other minority groups and marginalized communities. The fate of the 11 of Tree of Life is deeply entangled with the killing of African American shoppers in Kroger earlier that same week in Kentucky. All those deaths result from the construction of communal boundaries through exclusionary and selective appeals to Christian belonging and racial categories. Likewise, the boundary construction exercise that employed race and Islamophobia to consolidate the imagining of Jews as white—which continues to authorize an ethnocentric interpretation of Jewish liberation and geopolitical borders embodied in Israelism—is crumbling. Its crumbling exposes the intricate links between antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiments and the potential paths for ally-ship and co-resistance that Muslims, Jews, and others can—and must—articulate against racialized and exclusionary national discourses that employ particular interpretations of Christianity to draw boundaries and close borders.
The Shabbat massacre is not only a hate crime. It is also the latest expression of racialized Christian construction of boundaries. It requires that we grapple with the interrelations and intersections of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish discourses in producing and reproducing white Christian nationalism in the U.S. and in other contexts normally referred to as the “modern west.” The latter, once again, is revealing its constitutive dark sides.
Confirmation at St. John the Evangelist Church in Goshen, IN. Photo Credit: St. John Evangelist-CC.
I am Catholic because my mother lost her driver’s license when I was seventeen.
That is not the entire truth. I am Catholic because my parents are Catholic because their parents are Catholic. I was baptized before I could crawl, a three-month-old baby who slept through Easter Mass and the sacrament that followed. I was sent to Catholic grade school because my parents had attended Catholic grade schools. I chose a Catholic high school because I liked its performing arts program. I applied to Notre Dame on a whim.
For much of my life, my relationship with my faith was lukewarm. I studied for theology tests and attended the occasional Mass. I prayed when I needed something. I didn’t question my beliefs because I didn’t spend much time dwelling on them. This changed during my junior year of high school, when I began preparing for confirmation. I attended biweekly classes in the church basement to discuss topics that I had been exposed to all my life. Yet the tone of the conversation had changed for me. I knew that after participating in this sacrament, I would be recognized as an adult by the Church. I would no longer be able to claim that I was Catholic through my parents’ choice alone.
I didn’t know if I wanted to continue in this faith. I disagreed with several of the Church’s teachings and practices, and I questioned my role as a participant in an institution whose complicated legacy carried persistent negative effects. At the heart of my indecision lay doubt. I didn’t know if I believed in God. I thought that the Gospels were great stories, but I wasn’t sure if they were anything more. My conflicted journey toward confirmation reached its climax while I was on a weekend retreat, a requirement for the sacrament. The retreat leaders were unwavering in their faith and unwilling to discuss reform within the Church. I decided that confirmation was not the right choice for me. I planned to tell this to my mom when she picked me up the next day.
However, my mother had misplaced her driver’s license over the weekend, which meant that my dad was the one to pick me up. My family decided that they would all go with him, and we would get lunch afterward. When I walked out of the retreat building and saw both my parents and my brother in the car, I hesitated. On the journey home, I thought about all the time that had been spent on the confirmation process by myself, my parents, and my sponsor. I didn’t voice my doubts. One month later, I was confirmed.
Nearly three years after that car ride, I sit with my computer and notebook in a quiet area of my dorm. I am talking with madrasa students about the subject of religious conversion and desertion, a continuation of the previous week’s discussion. In some respects, the madrasa students’ religious histories reflect my own. They were all born into Muslim families. They have all pursued religious education, though their study of theology has been much more rigorous than my own. They quote the Quran and cite the Hadith in constant support of their arguments.
Dhulikhel Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive 2018. Photo Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service.
“In the Quran, it is said that we should not disdain others just because they do not follow our path,” Manzar Imam, a student from India says. Our conversation on apostasy has broadened to become a reflection on interreligious relations. Manzar continues, “In Islam there is no basis for discriminating against other religions.”
Waqas Khan, a Pakistani student, pushes back against this claim. “Islam does not allow for conversion,” he says. “Islamic law places restrictions on non-Muslims.” He does not believe that Islam alone is vulnerable to these biases. “Every religion considers itself superior to all others,” he says.
This point speaks to some of my own uncertainties regarding my faith. I have often felt like a passive Catholic, someone who was born into my religion and has done little to explore other faiths. I ask the madrasa students in my dialogue group, all of whom are Islamic Studies scholars, whether they have studied other religions with any intensity. They have not. I think that my doubts regarding my beliefs stem in part from the randomness of faith-by-birth. How easily might I have been born a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Buddhist? I struggle to comprehend the historical atrocities that have been carried out in the name of religion when the grounds for belief always appear so tenuous.
Of course, it is overly simplistic to view religion only in this negative light. The benefits of belonging to a faith are considerable, and the existence of religious groups does not in itself create conflict. Without groups, most individuals would be isolated, unloved, disoriented, [and] relatively unproductive” because within those groups we find the interpersonal bonds that we seek to create (Meyers 1999, p.324).
This sentiment is expressed in our discussion on apostasy. Usman Ramazan argues that the creation of categories is not problematic. “The problem is how we act toward other categories of people,” he says. As Rasheed Naseer points out, “Religion is not the only means of discrimination among peoples.”
I have acquired a more nuanced view of the benefits and dangers of religious practice over the past two years at Notre Dame. When I decided to participate in the Madrasa Discourses, I was most interested in the program’s focus on intercultural discussions of science and philosophy. After a year of leading these dialogues, I have come to understand that our religious backgrounds have shaped our perspectives and informed our opinions in every conversation. We found connections to religion in every topic we discussed, from amortality to social media. In some cases, these connections arose from explicit questions that addressed morality and compatibility with one’s faith. However, we often found ourselves discussing religion even when it had not been overtly introduced in the conversation.
From these discussions, I attained an understanding of Islam that I could not have acquired in a textbook. We did not have the advanced theological debates of which these madrasa students are capable, but nevertheless I find that my perspective has grown. My understanding of how these students viewed robot priests and anti-aging technology greatly informed my perception of Islam. I witnessed how they structured their arguments, and how they challenged me to defend my own beliefs. I found myself providing a “Catholic perspective,” even as I explained my tenuous connection to my faith.
Dhulikhel Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive 2018. Photo Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service.
I made this connection clear in our discussion on religious conversion. After I shared the story of my confirmation, as well as the current doubts and uncertainties that linger in my beliefs, Faiza Hussain discussed her own exposure to faiths outside of Islam. She compared her current life in Germany to her upbringing in Pakistan and explained that she had no contact with other faiths while she was growing up. In Germany she met many individuals who followed different faiths with varying degrees of devotion, along with those who had converted to their current faith, and those who had left religion altogether. Speaking of Pakistan, Waqas Khan concluded, “When living in a country that is 98% Muslim, it’s really complicated to consider changing religions. We belong to our community.”
The Madrasa Discourses project has brought me into contact with intelligent, passionate students who are motivated to critically engage with new ideas. My discussions with these students have greatly contributed to my personal understanding of faith and my own relationship with Catholicism. I used to consider myself a passive Catholic because I did not fully understand the role that religion has had in shaping my most fundamental beliefs. I too have always belonged to a religious community, and my Catholic education has greatly influenced how I view myself and my place in the world. I have come to understand that my moral perspective has been shaped in large part by my faith. This newfound understanding has not entirely changed my relationship with religion. I am still often frustrated with and critical of the Church. I still have moments of doubt. Before participating in these conversations, I thought that these moments defined me. After having the opportunity to think deeply and critically with these students, I have been able to more thoughtfully consider the root of my beliefs, the choices I have made regarding my faith, and what it means to be Catholic in the world today.
Sydney Schlager is an International Economics and Peace Studies student at the University of Notre Dame. She participated in the one-credit Madrasa Discourses Peace Research Lab course through the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in the fall of 2017.
Families displaced by Boko Haram living near Yola, Nigeria. Photo credit: Conflict and Development at Texas A&M, 2015.
This statement seems to me to be both obviously right and obviously wrong, and I am interested in this fact. I would like to think through the intersections of race, civilization, and religion, looking specifically at one case of Christian-Muslim encounter and conflict in Africa.
The idea that anti-Muslim sentiment is a kind of racism has been an important intervention in the discourse about Islamophobia. The most obvious example is the Islamophobia is racism syllabus (to which I contributed), which seeks to expose “the intersection of race and religion as a reality of structural inequality and violence rooted in the longer history of US (and European) empire building.” Syllabus contributors and other scholars aim to show that anti-Muslim-ism is a project, one rooted in structures of power, developed in the context of colonialism, and organized around a logic that is both geographical and racialized. Racial discourse in the United States has in effect constructed a “Middle Eastern” racial category that is deeply linked to a vision, however inaccurate, of where Muslims are from: Muslims from the Middle East are included, as are non-Muslims from the Middle East, and non-Middle Eastern people from Pakistan or Afghanistan, along with a number of others, in the making of a form of racialized identity that draws on the history of Orientalism as well as anti-Arab racism and the intensification of anti-Muslim sentiment after September 11, 2001.1
President Barack Obama greets members of the audience at the Islamic Society of Baltimore mosque and Al-Rahmah School in Baltimore, Maryland, Feb. 3, 2016. Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.
Thanks in part to the work of people involved in the Contending Modernities Reexamining Religion and Modernities working group, we also have a great deal of excellent scholarship that shows how deeply US and European anti-Muslim sentiment is tied to the history of colonialism. This scholarship, along with the highly racialized speech of many anti-Muslim crusaders in recent years, makes the links clear. As Santiago Slabodsky shows us in Decolonial Judaism, the categories of religion and race have often intersected and informed each other, from the earliest structures of Orientalism to the most vicious logics of anti-Jewish racism. The history of the civilization/barbarism divide shows exactly how religion and race can be coproduced through the category of civilization and its others. I agree. I argue in Epic Encounters that anti-Muslim sentiment in the US is deeply linked to the history of US empire. And President Trump seems intent on further racializing Islam with the various versions of the Muslim ban, the most recent of which was upheld by the Supreme Court in June. Indeed, the very existence and widespread circulation of the argument that claimed President Obama was a Muslim was an extraordinary example of how racialization in in the form of anti-blackness could combine with Orientalist and post-9/11 forms of anti-Muslim sentiment.
So, why then make the contrary argument that anti-Muslim sentiment in the early 21st century does not work as a form of racism, at least not inevitably or consistently? What’s at stake and why insist on such parsing of forms of hostility? In making this argument I will draw on my own research on US and European evangelicals in their global encounters. I want to focus particularly on Islam in Africa, because in that context we can see how American and European evangelicals see people who they racialize as black to be differentiated by religion. Although African Muslims are represented by Christians in terms that are quite resonant with the terms of the civilization/barbarism divide, the discourse does a different, although not unrelated, kind of political mapping than that done by European or even US empire. Let me be clear about my intent: I do not want to suggest that racism is not central to the US discourse about Islam as it plays out in a domestic context or as it shapes foreign policy. There is clearly a racialized hostility toward people who are presumed to be “visibly Muslim and/or Arab and/or South Asian.” The incoherence of such a racial category matters not a bit to its real social force, and I am absolutely convinced that racial logic is almost always at work in the US context, even if I also believe there is a specific set of hostilities that is based on a notion that people who are Muslim are dangerous, no matter what their race. So I also want to argue that religious hostility is at work—that a primarily Christian (or Christian-derived) discourse about Islam has force in situations where the Muslims are not so easily distinguished from Christians by racialized language or assumptions.
Christian Evangelicals and Global Religious Competition
In my recently published book, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, and in several articles over the last decade, I discuss in detail how demographic realities are shaping global Christianity. I term one response by US evangelicals “victim identification,” which calls for evangelicals to name and support those who are victimized. That victimization might be from poverty or political oppression, but it is frequently named as religious oppression. In particular, evangelicals are called to support “persecuted Christians” around the globe—particularly those who are said to be persecuted by Muslims.2
10/40 Window. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The discourse of Christians persecuted by Muslims has a long history, of course, and even among modern US evangelicals it can be traced back to at least the attack on Armenians in the Ottoman empire.3 But since the end of the Cold War, this logic has a new intensity in global evangelical life. It was in 1989 that evangelist Luis Bush declared at the second Lausanne Congress that it was time for evangelicals to “redeploy our missionaries” to concentrate on the vast area of “The 10/40 Window”—a region of the world that stretched from Africa to Asia, and from 10 degrees to 40 degrees north of the equator—a belt that included Northern and Central Africa, India, Pakistan, China, and all of the Middle East. Bush explained that the task of evangelizing the 10/40 Window was critical because it in these areas that Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism “enslaved” the majority of their inhabitants and destroyed the lives of “billions of spiritually impoverished souls.” Islam in particular posed a challenge. From its center in the 10/40 Window, Islam was “reaching out energetically to all parts of the globe.”4
The 10/40 Window was embraced by evangelicals globally. And it shaped an incipient discourse in which the Cold War map of communism would be replaced with a global map that pitted Islam against Christianity. It might seem, in fact, that the idea of the 10/40 Window is a perfectly calibrated reworking of the great Orientalist binary, of a Christian West versus a Muslim East. And that was indeed a large part of its appeal. Yet, at the same time, while there were indeed regions mapped as “enslaved” by Islam (or Hinduism or Buddhism), the evangelical mapping of Africa in particular was far more nuanced. With African evangelicals taking a major role in the global evangelical community, and with African Christians so widely embraced and admired by at least some sections of the evangelical community in the US and Europe, countries where Muslims and Christians were in a complex contest for converts–places like Nigeria, Sudan, or Ethiopia—were not mapped as “enslaved.” Instead, US evangelical cultural producers perceived those regions as being both “us” and “not us”—simultaneously enchanting and threatening, occupied by (at least) two very different kinds of people, (black) Christians and (black) Muslims. (I will set aside the ways that evangelicals describe the dwindling population of followers of African Traditional Religions.)
“This car is protected by the blood of JESUS” bumper sticker in Lusaka, Zambia. Photo Credit: Babak Fakhamzadeh, 2006.
As the twentieth century waned, the 10/40 Window and global Christian evangelism met newly missionary-minded forms of Islam in Africa. The da’wa movements of the late 20th century supported not only the propagation of the faith through teaching or publishing, but also hospitals and clinics, basic poverty relief, schools, and mosque building, with programs in all over the world, but particularly in Africa and parts of Asia. The practices of Christian missions clearly had an impact, as Muslims in places such as Tanzania and South Africa too began to hand out tracts, put stickers on cars, distribute cassettes, and invite foreign “revivalists” to preach.5
Christian Muslim Conflict and Global Discourse
American and European evangelicals played an undeniable role in shaping the struggle for believers in Africa. In 1991, for example, the faith-healing German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke traveled to preach in the Muslim-majority northern Nigerian state of Kano.6 In Nigeria, Bonnke was a familiar figure. A Pentecostal whose services often featured miraculous healings, denunciations of witchcraft, and the exorcism of demons, Bonnke had a strong following among a broad swath of Christians in Nigeria, including some Catholics and mainline Protestants who were searching for specific forms of “spiritual warfare” to fight disease or other dangers.7 Bonnke had visited Kano previously, in 1990, when he had preached to crowds that were, he claimed, one million people strong—each night. Bonnke was invited back a year later by the Kano state branch of the Christian Association of Nigeria. But Bonnke’s arrival in 1991 set off a riot. As many as 8,000 young Muslims gathered to meet his plane, their anger sparked by rumors of a negative comment that Bonnke was said to have made about Islam. (The government had also denied earlier requests for Kano to host a popular South African imam, Ahmed Deedat, and Louis Farrakan of the Nation of Islam.) Muslims marched into Christian Igbo neighborhoods and attacked residents; in response, Igbo youths marched with sticks, attacking Muslim shops and mosques. A number of people died in the riots; accounts vary from “several” to “hundreds.”8
National Mosque in Abuja, Nigeria. Photo Credit: Mark Fisher, 2014.
Bonnke’s visit occurred during an already tense context: between the 1980s and early 2000s, there were at lease 48 religious riots in Nigeria.9 However, as scholars of Nigeria point out, defining the nature of the conflict is not always straightforward: in Nigeria as elsewhere, conflict that reads as religious is often fueled by other factors: neoliberal economic crises, ethnic tensions, anger at the corruption and inefficiency of the Nigerian government, etc.10 Certainly the fact that Kano is in the Muslim-identified North mattered, although there are Christians there as well. And so did the fact that most of the Christians who were attacked were Igbo, given that the Igbo were the group most identified with the break-away province of Biafra in the Nigeria-Biafra war of the late 1960s. Indeed, whether we see religious identification in Nigeria as primarily a result of colonial divide-and-rule strategies, or whether we follow Olufemi Vaughan in arguing that Muslim and Christian structures in Nigeria, forged by the two great globalizing religious movements of the nineteenth century, “made up the foundation on which the Nigerian colonial state was grafted,” there is no question that religious, ethnic, and regional identities are profoundly interconnected in Nigeria. There is no such thing as a “pure” religious identity—anywhere.
Still, it remains the case that, in Nigeria as in many other countries, religious identity is often a resource that ties (some parts of) diverse communities together, provides social solidarities and healing narratives, and offers alternatives to the despair that many feel in situations of profound economic injustice and inequality. Muslims and Christians both can draw on transnational ties to support projects and help construct identities that go beyond the local or national, and in those contexts, religious identities are meaningful beyond and in addition to ethnic or communal loyalties.11 Religious hostility is never purely about theology nor easily separable from other forms of social identity, but in such complex contexts, it is not just another form of ethnic politics either. The question of race is even more complicated, since racial formations in Nigeria are shaped by colonialism but reshaped by local contexts of nation, ethnicity, region, religion, and class. It just doesn’t make sense to say in Nigeria what Erik Love can credibly assert in the US context, that, “there are a set of physical traits and characteristics that can mark someone as ‘Muslim,’ regardless of their actual religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Race is the only way to explain how this is so.”12
Bonnke was banned from Nigeria after the riots. In the US, evangelical news outlets such as Christianity Today described the ban as the result of “anti-Christian government leaders” in Nigeria, rather than admitting the role Bonnke played in instigating violence. Indeed, heightened competition across Africa has led to a certain amount of hyperbole among evangelical commentators on Islam. For example, one 2004 document from the Lausanne Committee, a global evangelical organization, anxiously reported that “the movement of Christians into Islam, long familiar to churches living under Shariah conditions, is becoming a significant challenge for the whole church.”13 In reality, there was relatively little conversion from one faith to another at the time.14
The ongoing competition between Muslims and Christians, and the larger political environment, led Christians in particular to feel threatened. A 2010 poll found that, while most people in sub-Saharan Africa found religious tension to be a less pressing concern than unemployment, corruption, or crime, they nonetheless saw religious conflict as a “very big problem.” And Christians and Muslims often had negative views of each other. Although both sides had some positive images—seeing each other as devout, honest, and respectful of women—Christians in particular thought of Muslims as violent. And in some countries, a third or more of Christians reported that they believed that many or most Muslims were hostile toward Christians. Muslims felt the reverse in only a few places.15 Islam was viewed as a local threat in other parts of the world as well, but Africa was a key site of conflict, where local realities were shaped by a larger discourse—prevalent both in and beyond evangelical communities—that presented Islam as a global danger.
A Bible study in Tessa, Niger. Photo Credit: International Mission Board.
I have argued here that, in order to understand Christian-Muslim relations in Africa, we need to employ at least three lenses: a global racial/colonial perspective, an awareness of ethnic conflict, and a view of religious context that is at once local and global. (Other factors such as gender, class, or nationalism, or foreign policy are often also relevant.) The same is true if we want to appreciate the complex ways that race and religion intersect in US evangelical discourse about Africa. Many Americans are invested in a view of global Christianity as multiracial, transnational, liberalizing for women, and tolerant of others—in opposition to a vision of Muslims as multiracial, transnational, conservative on gender, and violently intolerant of others. Old models of binary racializing and imperialist discourse are present here, clearly, and yet the representation of Islam by American Christians is intertwined with, yet separate from, racial and regional mapping. The construction of a globalized Christian identity incorporates African Christians as “us” and African Muslims as dangerous; for Americans, the discourse of victim identification pits black Christian allies against Muslim others.
It is not the case, however, that Christians in Africa are presented by US evangelical discourse as being honorary whites. Certainly African Christians see themselves and are seen by Americans as “like us” in terms of religion, but American believers also construct Africans through the logic of enchanted internationalism—exotic, authentic, spirit-filled, and often idealized, if also implicitly coded as non-modern.
In this global context, to describe anti-Muslim discourse as (primarily) racism seems to me to flatten more than it explains. Imperialism and structural inequalities are highly relevant to the post-Cold War framing of Islam on a global scale and in Africa particularly, but neither race or “phobia” captures the full complexity of the power dynamics at play. In our transnational moment, we cannot simply export descriptions of how anti-Muslim sentiment works in the United States, even as we must continue to actively and insistently oppose the multiple forms of hostility and aggression faced by Muslims or those presumed to be Muslims in the US and beyond.
[1] Erik Love, Islamophobia and Racism in America (New York: NYU Press, 2017); Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, First edition (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018); Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012); Nadia Marzouki, Islam: An American Religion, trans. C. Jon Delogu (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, “Islamophobia and American History: Religion, Stereotyping, and Out-Grouping of Muslims in the United States,” in Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, 2013 edition (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 53–74.
[2] Melani McAlister, “What Is Your Heart For? Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere,” American Literary History20, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 870–95; Melani McAlister, “US Evangelicals and the Politics of Slave Redemption as Religious Freedom in Sudan,” South Atlantic Quarterly113, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 87–108.
[3] Heather D. Curtis, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018); Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[4] The first elaboration of the concept is a 1990 paper that was published on the AD 2000 and Beyond website. This same essay is published in 1996: “Reaching the Core of the Core” Renewal Journal#10 (1997), http://www.pastornet.net.au/renewal/journal10/g-bush.htm. In subsequent years, the essay is reproduced on scores of web sites.
[5] David Westerlund and Ingvar Svanberg, Islam Outside the Arab World (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 97–125.
[6] Paul Gifford, “‘Africa Shall Be Saved’ : An Appraisal of Reinhard Bonnke’s Pan-African Crusade,” Journal of Religion in Africa 17, no. 1 (F 1987): 63–92.Westerlund and Svanberg, Islam Outside the Arab World, 97–125.On Islamic charity in the context of neoliberalism and changing roles of the state, see Mona Atia, Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013).
[7] Gifford, “Africa Shall Be Saved”; E E. Anugwom, “The Bonnke Effect: Encounters with Transnational Evangelism in Southeastern Nigeria,” in Religion Crossing Boundaries (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 211–17.
[8] Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction(Oxford University Press, USA, 2008), 240; Muhib O. Opeloye, “The Socio-Political Factor in the Christian-Muslim Conflict in Nigeria,” Islam & Christian Muslim Relations 9, no. 2 (July 1998): 231.News accounts: “At Least 8 Dead in Nigerian City As Muslim-Christian Riots Go On,” NYT, October 17, 1991; Karl Maier, “Planned Christian Revival Sparks Riots in Nigeria,” Washington Post, October 20, 1991; “At Least 8 Dead in Nigerian City As Muslim-Christian Riots Go On,” New York Times, October 17, 1991.
[9] Matthews A. Ojo and Folaranmi T. Lateju, “Christian–Muslim Conflicts and Interfaith Bridge‐Building Efforts in Nigeria,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs8, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 31–38.
[10] Ebenezer Obadare, Religion and Politics in Nigeria(S.l.: Zed Books Ltd, 2018); Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria(Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
[11] Sharon E. Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, 1st ed., vol. 1, 2 vols. (University Of Chicago Press, 1991); James Howard Smith and Rosalind I. J. Hackett, eds., Displacing the State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).
[12] Love, Islamophobia and Racism in America, 2.
[13]Lausanne Committee, “LOP 49: Understanding Muslims” (Pattaya, Thailand: Lausanne Movement, 2004), 9, https://www.lausanne.org/content/lop/lop-49.The report is utterly vague about specifics, so it is impossible to tell which areas or regions it is talking about specifically. But given that there are few Christians in the Middle East, the most likely reference is sub-Saharan Africa.
[14] Pew Research Center, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050” (Washington, DC: Religion and Public Life, April 2, 2015), 11, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/. Most of the projected increase in the Muslim population in sub-Saharan Africa is due to higher fertility rates among Muslims than Christians. This is true globally, where Muslims are expected to grow twice as fast as the overall population (p 70), and also in Africa, where the Muslim population was expected to increase from 30 percent to 35 percent by 2050.
[15] Luis Lugo and Alan Copperman, “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa” (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, April 2010), 7–8, http://pewforum.org/executive-summary-islam-and-christianity-in-sub-saharan-africa.aspx.Sudan was not included in the survey. On how US policymakers perceived US policies as “secular” even as they were increasingly anti-Muslim, see Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Melani McAlister is an associate professor of American studies and international affairs at George Washington University. Her books include Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East (2005, o. 2001) and The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018), a study of evangelical internationalism since 1960.
The ink of scholars is holier than the blood of martyrs.
–Attributed to the Prophet Muhammad
Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.
–Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
–Albert Einstein
Bright boxes with eager faces lit up the computer screen, revealing a new batch of madrasa graduates from India and Pakistan. A handful of boxes were blank, cameras off to maintain the privacy of veiled female participants. One video feed was pitch dark, not for privacy, but because the power was out in the remote village outside of Delhi; it is a good thing that the laptop was charged and connected through the cell tower. Each of the twenty-six students in class that day logged in from a remote location. The camera of one of the participants, also from India, could be seen bouncing around, as if from the set of a reality show. He had logged in using his mobile device while on a train that had been delayed. One participant from Pakistan joined us from Saudi Arabia. He had not yet returned from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Half way through the customary first-day introductions, a box appeared with what seemed like the inside of Hesburgh library in the background. A Notre Dame student, helping with the project through the peace research lab, had just logged in to take attendance. Thus began the second year of an ambitious effort to advance theological and scientific literacy in Madrasa Discourses (MD).[1]
Professor Ebrahim Moosa, himself a madrasa graduate, initiated MD within the Contending Modernities (CM) research initiative in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies within the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Perception matters: Why is a Catholic institution interested in reforming Madrasa education? Within Notre Dame, MD aligns with the goals of the school and institutes within which it resides. The Keough School of Global Affairs advances “integral human development” through “transformative educational programs”; MD generates “greater understanding of the ways in which religious and secular forces interact in the modern world,” which is the purpose of the CM research initiative; and the activities of MD contribute towards “strengthening the capacity of all for peacebuilding,” which is the mandate of the Kroc Institute. The project is supported with external funding through the John Templeton Foundation, which encourages “civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians, as well as between such experts and the public at large.” The project’s image benefits from the reputation of Notre Dame as a ranked research university in the US that is committed to global engagement for furthering the common good.
Authentic “Insiders” at the Helm
Mahan Mirza (l) and Ebrahim Moosa (r) in the Madrasa Discourses trailer video.
The project also has the advantage of having a strong team of authentic “insiders” at the helm.[2] As the Principal Investigator, Ebrahim Moosa is a world-renowned scholar and himself a madrasa graduate. As the lead faculty responsible for implementing the project, I have a background in the sciences, Islamic studies, and experience working with credible Islamic institutions with global recognition. Like-minded and authoritative partners in India and Pakistan serve as lead faculty to guide and mentor the madrasa participants. MD has no formal institutional partnerships overseas. Instead, MD has contractual agreements with individuals who, in turn, have strong ties to important institutions in their respective local contexts. The lead faculty in India, Waris Mazhari, is a graduate of Darul Uloom Deoband, one of the most prestigious madrasas in India. He serves on the faculty of the Jamia Hamdard, is the founding director of the Institute for Religious and Social Thought, and he has been editing the journal of the Deoband “Old Boys Club” for almost two decades. Dr. Mazhari holds a Ph.D. from Jamia Millia Islamia, a century-old institution of higher learning founded by prominent Indian Muslim leaders.
In Pakistan, our lead faculty Mawlana Ammar Khan Nasir is the associate director of the Al-Sharia Academy where he edits an influential online monthly journal addressing topics at the intersection of Islam and modernity. Mawlana Nasir, also a graduate of the traditional madrasa system, has an MA in English literature, is completing his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Punjab University. He served for several years on the faculty of GIFT University in his hometown of Gujranwala, just outside Lahore. The Sharia Academy is founded and directed by Mawlana Ammar’s father, Mawlana Zahid ur Rashid, who also the head of a traditional Sunni Madrasa, Nusratul Uloom. Our colleagues have provided invaluable support in the recruitment of students, supported curriculum development, taught regularly in the program, established an Urdu public website, and translated curricular and supplementary texts from English into Urdu for the journal. Our partnership helps to allay any concerns that our project has colonial or surreptitious designs through an intimate intellectual kinship forged on trust and mutual respect.
Goals and Methodological Principles of Madrasa Discourses
Credit: Qatar Foundation. Madrasa Discourses 2017 Winter Intensive tour of the Qatar National Library.
The goal of MD is to transform the intellectual culture within madrasa scholarship by bringing it into conversation with contemporary intellectual currents. A fundamental premise of the project is that madrasa education, by and large, is falling short of preparing graduates to meet the intellectual challenges of the day.[3] This failure has resulted in a marginalization of religious scholars (‘ulama’) in society coupled with a collapse of their moral authority. Whereas the ulama were once the intellectual and spiritual guides in Muslim societies, they are now relegated to relics who are largely irrelevant if not ridiculed as being out of step with the times. In order to achieve the goal of raising the level of the intellectual discourse in madrasa circles, MD has recruited a handful of madrasa graduates to participate in a three-year curriculum designed to provide conceptual tools as well as language proficiency to help them better navigate contemporary academic literature in English. Although the instruction takes place in an intimate environment out of the reach of the public largely sequestered from social media, we have launched a public website Tajdīd to allow the conversation that is taking place in the classroom to spill over into the public sphere.
The goal of MD is to transform the intellectual culture within madrasa scholarship by bringing it into conversation with contemporary intellectual currents. A fundamental premise of the project is that madrasa education, by and large, is falling short of preparing graduates to meet the intellectual challenges of the day.”
Guiding MD are two vital methodological principles. The first is that we derive our inspiration to engage critically with new knowledge by appealing to terms or frames of inquiry that are native to the Islamic scholarly tradition. MD draws on the rich textual heritage of Islam to make the case for critical inquiry, dynamism, and creativity as aspects that are native to Islamic religious thought. Although MD is primarily an educational program, it is nonetheless framed within a broader agenda of peacebuilding, affirmation of human dignity, and furthering the common good. Conflict manifests in conceptual categories as well as lived social realities; it can be viewed through the imperfect temporal concepts of “tradition” and “modernity” or perhaps even less perfect cultural/geographic designators of “Islam” and “West.”
The Elicitive Approach
Drawing on theories in conflict resolution, then, and wedding these theories to the educational aspect of MD, our approach is an “elicitive” one. Contrasting with a “prescriptive” approach that “understands the training event as built around the specialized knowledge of the trainer, which is taken to be both transferable and universal”, the elicitive approach “understands training as a process that emerges from already-existing, local knowledge.”[4] The adoption of an elicitive model, which builds on frames of inquiry that are embedded within the vast storehouses of the Islamic scholarly tradition, enables MD to extend the conversations from the past to the present, leading us out from the familiar to the unfamiliar. This not only avoids the shock value of some of our provocations, it also allows us to proceed systematically, taking the familiar ground of the Islamic tradition as the intellectual journey’s point of departure. The elicitive approach allows participants to build on their existing knowledge base and encourages them to make organic connections instead of struggling to assimilate what is foreign in a manner that would be both disorienting and unsettling.
A second methodological imperative of MD is to emphasize from the outset that participants should get used to an intellectual environment characterized by indeterminism and complexity.”
A second methodological imperative of MD is to emphasize from the outset that participants should get used to an intellectual environment characterized by indeterminism and complexity. We do not tell anyone what the answers are, nor do we expect right or wrong answers. Our project is about questions. But we do expect participants to reason well. MD challenges anti-intellectual modes of religious thought that prevail in contemporary madrasa discourses. We do our best to highlight complexity wherever possible so that participants are not able to hide behind formulaic responses transmitted from generation to generation. By working through the rich history of the Islamic scholarly tradition, we emphasize that intelligent people can disagree. In fact, the Islamic scholarly tradition is built on creative tensions. If history is our guide, intelligent students should expect to arrive at different answers to the theological conundrums of our time. When grounded in sound arguments that are accessible to all in a transparent and shared public space, difference is not something to decry. Difference can be something to celebrate.
The Curriculum: History, Science, Theology
The curriculum – designed together by the core faculty – is conceptualized in three parts, one corresponding to each year of study. The first part deals with history. The second with science. And the third with theology. Themes of each of the three parts are interwoven; the core theme of any of the years cannot be treated in isolation from the rest. History provides context for both theology and science; science is informed by history and influences theology; and theology is reconstructed in light of both history and science. Nonetheless, it has been helpful for us to isolate a dominant disciplinary lens through which to enter the conversation in any given year. Poetically, the three years mirror chronology: 1) history (past), 2) science (present), and 3) theology (future). The locus of theology in the future reflects the project’s ambition of “reconstruction” or “renewal” of theology in light of a more expansive view of the past and a receptive attitude toward new knowledge in the present: a kindling of the moral imagination.
The curriculum – designed together by the core faculty – is conceptualized in three parts, one corresponding to each year of study. The first part deals with history. The second with science. And the third with theology. Themes of each of the three parts are interwoven; the core theme of any of the years cannot be treated in isolation from the rest.”
The program begins with confronting the pluralism of beliefs in human cultures. Human beings have always held different views about their origins and destinies. These differences manifest themselves in varieties of myths and religions. The very first class of the program invites students to confront pluralism through creation stories. We have used short and accessible articles published online by National Geographic series on “The Story of God” hosted by Morgan Freeman.[5] The website offers articles on “Creation Myths from around the World,” “Australian Aboriginal Stories,” and “What We Know about Where We Come from.” Unlike the other myths, new knowledge today helps us construct a fresh creation story by integrating the findings of multiple disciplines in the natural sciences. Beginning with pluralism enables us to get to the core scientific and theological questions that undergird our entire program: How do we privilege our beliefs over the beliefs of others? How did the Islamic scholarly tradition address the question of pluralism? What was the role of reason, independent of revelation, in classical Islamic thought, in answering these questions? Is science today adding anything new to the conversation that could be a game-changer for theology?
When the Abrahamic creation story that the Quranic account participates in is juxtaposed to other creation myths, it becomes evident to students almost instantly that our story seems just as “mythical” as the rest: God talks to the first man and woman in a garden with temptations by Satan or a serpent. The humans are deceived and banished to life on earth. On what basis can Muslims claim that their version is truer than the others? It so happens that the founders of one of the major theological schools in Sunni Islam, Abu Mansur Maturidi (d. 944), addresses this very question in his theological Treatise on Divine Unicity or Kitāb al-Tawḥīd.[6] According to Maturidi, if every group were to rely simply on its own traditions as authorities for the truthfulness of their creeds, there would be no way to mediate between them. For that, one must appeal to reason that is universally and independently accessible to all parties. This is why treatises in classical Islamic theology begin with a position statement on theories of knowledge. The fourteenth century theologian Saʿd al-Din Taftazani (d. 1390) informs us that by his time – almost five hundred years after Maturidi –theology (kalām) had become virtually indistinguishable from philosophy (falsafa).[7] Several centuries earlier, the formidable Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) had already declared theology as “the universal science among the Islamic sciences.”[8] This is because “the theologian (mutakallim) is the one who looks into the most basic of all things (aʿamm al-ashyāʾ), which is Being (al-mawjūd).”[9] Seeing that the study of nature was a theological imperative for Muslim scholars of the past, how could it possibly be that insights into nature gained through the various scientific disciplines today are no longer relevant to the foundation of Islamic theology? Should not theologians today engage new knowledge in science and philosophy just as the theological masters of the past had done in their own time?
Our instinct to begin with pluralism is well founded. The sociologist, Peter Berger, affirms: “It is my position that modernity has plunged religion into a very specific crisis, characterized by secularity, to be sure, but characterized more importantly by pluralism.”[10] More recently, a pioneering work in the budding field of Big History entitled Maps of Time offers: “Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.”[11] Ian Markham, dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary, begins his reflections on A Theology of Engagement with the same question.[12] Markham argues that pluralism is a historical fact, that our traditions are heterogeneous, and that the Church might consider reorienting itself to derive lessons from this reality instead of posturing to change the world in her image.
Screenshot from the Madrasa Discourses trailer video.The connections that the theme of pluralism allows us to make with history, theology, and science are developed in the first semester of the first year through the relationship between epistemology and history. We draw on competing ideas of “reason” used by scholars from across the intellectual spectrum from the likes of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209) to Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). We spend time with Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) to witness beginnings of theoretical approaches to history, but also ponder why such critical approaches were never truly absorbed into the mainstream theological tradition. We switch gears by turning to recent historians like R. G. Collingwood and philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer, which stretches the discussion from the medieval to the modern period. Collingwood defines philosophy as second order reasoning, or “thought about thought.”[13] Collingwood connects history with philosophy by identifying both as concerned with “the science of absolute presuppositions.” History enables us to illuminate the dark corners of our own minds by empathizing with others as we strive to know the causes of events and motivations of actors on the historical stage. Given that historical reports emanate from the subjective vantage of observers, that observations are selective, and that interpretations of observations are theory-laden, it may never be possible for us to fully recover the past, even when we have copious reports about a particular event. This is why, argues Gadamer, every generation must re-interpret the past for itself. Successive communities of interpreters must constantly renegotiate meaning in light of fresh experiences that generate fresh questions.[14] Such notions of historical criticism are entirely new to MD participants, and they are indispensable for text interpretation and retrieval of “tradition” in contemporary academic discourses. The second semester invites students to reflect more deeply on Islamic intellectual history and the meaning of “tradition.” Through writings by historians like Marshal Hodgson and Dimitri Gutas, we attempt to place Islam within the broader spectrum of human history, working with concepts such as Karl Jasper’s “Axial Age,” as well as the Greco-Arabic Translation movement from the ninth to eleventh centuries.[15] Foreign influences on Islamic thought in this formative period do not permit us to speak of the intellectual tradition as being “purely Islamic.” To further the historical sensibilities of students, we trace the divergent reception of Aristotelian cosmology in the works of great scholars like Biruni (d. 1048) and Ibn Sina (d. 1037). Ghazali and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) demonstrate contrasting positions on the relationship between philosophy and theology. Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn ʿArabi (d. 1240) exemplify alternative modes of reasoning from their predecessors. Ibn Taymiyya levels a devastating critique on logic, while the latter decries system of thought altogether, setting sail to the winds of allegory. By the end of the first year, students come to view the Islamic tradition as one that is deeply contested.
Students engage with all this material online in an interactive classroom. In addition to the four core faculty members, we also have the privilege of involving guest instructors from various departments at ND. We have had guest appearances by Gabriel Reynolds in theology, Deborah Tor in history, Rashied Omar in peace studies, Thomas Burman in medieval studies, Hussein Abdulsater in classics, and Adnan Aslan in philosophy. The presence of guest instructors in the online classroom has been tremendously enriching for the participants.
The Second Year: Science
The second year focuses on the history and philosophy of science, contemporary theories in the philosophy of religion, “big history,” and the deep history of humanity as it unfolds through “thresholds of increasing complexity” from the earliest stages of the cognitive revolution to a globally networked technological society. Among the questions that we ask are: Does modern science liberate us from God? Is contemporary science independent of metaphysics? Does science prove things with certainty? Is the method of science universal? Is there such a thing as progress in science? How do we distinguish between science and pseudoscience? What are the laws that govern scientific change? If scientific theories and worldviews change, how can we trust the scientific theories of our time? In order to engage these questions meaningfully, the course introduces students to competing theories of truth, thinking philosophically about “facts,” concepts like realism vs. instrumentalism, the underdetermination of theories, and “worldviews” as an interlocking web of theories comprising of empirical facts, philosophic ideas, and methodological approaches. We then apply these concepts to the history of science by studying the transitions from the Aristotelian-Medieval worldview to the contemporary worldview. Names like Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Darwin come to life in our survey.
Contemporary texts from the Islamic tradition accompany us on the journey. In fall 2017, for example, we dissected an essay published in Urdu that attempts to interpret issues in Islamic scriptural sources that are in apparent conflict with science.”
Contemporary texts from the Islamic tradition accompany us on the journey. In fall 2017, for example, we dissected an essay published in Urdu that attempts to interpret issues in Islamic scriptural sources that are in apparent conflict with science. This article draws our attention to prophetic sayings such as Adam was sixty feet tall, a baby’s gender is selected by whichever partner’s fluid dominates, one wing of a fly has a disease while the other has a cure, and the sun will one day rise from the west. The exercise of close reading and careful analysis helps students identify strategies for interpretation that are useful as well as others that are weak if not downright fallacious.[16]
Another text authored by Anwar Shah Kashmiri (d. 1933), a renowned scholar in madrasa circles from the early twentieth century, argues that Quranic statements about nature and the heavens are not intended to be “realist,” but rather “perspectival,” describing things as experienced by humans rather than “as they truly are” according to the latest theories of science.[17] These arguments echo Galileo’s position in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which was rebutted by Cardinal Bellarmine.[18] In a fascinating twist, Cardinal Bellarmine’s response mirrors a position by another prominent Madrasa scholar of the twentieth century, Ashraf Ali Thanvi (d. 1943).[19] In this way, students are able to witness great debates on science and the interpretation of scripture in their own tradition today that replicate debates that transpired four centuries ago in Europe.
Our treatment of the contemporary worldview includes Einstein’s theory of relativity, Quantum mechanics, and the theory of evolution. According to Richard DeWitt’s Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science, “all of these theories require substantial changes in our worldview.”[20]The changes required by these new perspectives to our intuitions about the nature of reality boggle the mind. According to them, space and time are no longer absolute, actions appear to have influences across distances at speeds faster than light, and we are what the universe becomes when it has a chance to evolve over billions of years.
Credit: Mahan Mirza. Indian Madrasa Discourses students grappled with the relationship between religion and science in April of 2017 as well. Here they meet with Hakim Syed Zillur Rahman at the Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Sciences.
In the spring semester of the second year, we read a coherent account of human history and imaginative account of human future as portrayed in Yuval Noah Harari’s bestsellers, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.[21]Sapiens takes us through a journey that begins with the earliest humans, tracing different theories of their origins and evolution. Drawing on a vast array of sources in innumerable disciplines in the natural and social sciences, Harari expertly weaves religion, psychology, politics, ethics, economics, and empire, even including reflections on the meaning of life and human happiness, into his historical narrative. This narrative is not contested by experts; but it is one of the most coherent ones available that serves our purpose of theological provocation very well. Harari helps us start a conversation, not end it. These first two years of the program thus prepare the foundation for the work of theological reconstruction in the third year.
The Third Year: Constructive Theology
Out of the thirty-four students who began the first year with us, ten to twelve of the most promising students will continue to the final year of the program beginning fall 2018. These students will draw on the concepts and theoretical tools from the first two years to ask research questions and engage in a program of constructive theology. The research cohort of the third year may be clustered thematically into three groups. Let us take a look at the issues that each of these three research groups might deal with, bearing in mind that what is said here is provisional.
“The best of generations is my generation, then those that follow them, then those that follow them.”[22] This saying of the Prophet Muhammad has animated Muslim sensibilities through the centuries. It evokes a sense of loss with every passing generation as our temporal gulf from the lifespan of the beloved Prophet continuously expands with the flow of historical time. In that sense, decline is in-built in the very fabric of Prophetic religion. Devotees fulfill their longing to be near the Prophet – the best of creation –through obedience, emulation, and love. It is natural for the breathtaking changes we witness today in our knowledge of the cosmos, nature, and history, accompanied by new patterns of life dictated by mechanical clocks instead of the rhythms of nature, not to mention our new conceptions on the origin of man and his possible future as an interstellar transhuman species, to be unsettling to adherents of revealed religion. The disorientation, loss, and confusion, is unimaginable yet understandable. The nostalgic tug from a past as we hurl inexorably towards an uncertain future poses a dilemma, if not crisis. Can believers remain faithful to their tradition while at the same time engaged and optimistic in what the future holds, or are they forever condemned to view paradigm-changing shifts in human understanding, technical progress, and social development with suspicion?
According to Islamic teachings, the prophet Muhammad is God’s final messenger to humanity (Q. 33:40). He comes at the end of a succession of prophets – reportedly up to 124,000 –to all peoples in every age for their guidance. One of the reasons that God sent messengers was so that people would have no argument against Him on the Day of Judgment (Q. 4:165). The doctrine of the finality of prophethood is so central that it led the government of Pakistan to declare anyone who does not believe in it a non-Muslim.[23]
The finality of prophethood naturally implies that the Prophet Muhammad’s message is universal; it no longer applies merely to a particular group of people at a given moment in history. Instead, it applies normatively to all people until the end of time. This doctrine fits neatly within a linear framework of history that is common to the Abrahamic traditions. As the narrative goes, God sent messengers aforetime in succession because human society and civilization was in a process of growth and development, much like an individual slowly advancing through various stages from childhood to maturity. The message needed to be renewed or updated with changing times with successive prophets. After the prophet Muhammad, there would be no need for messengers because the guidance and teachings of the final messenger would suffice for future cultural and intellectual contexts – forever. That is why God has taken it upon Himself to safeguard the final scripture (Q. 15:9), and that is why traditionalists have paid scrupulous attention to the transmission of tradition from generation to generation.
The doctrine of the finality of prophethood has made it difficult for Muslims to disentangle Islamic norms from the cultural practices of the Prophet and his Companions in seventh century Arabia. Arabness was subsumed within Islam.[24] Because of the fusion of Arab cultural practices with transcendent divine teachings, Muslim scholars have always been well aware of the need to separate contingent social culture from universal religious norms in the teachings of the prophet Muhammad.[25] This tension, however, has never been fully resolved, with the result that the most venerated of scholars even today gravitate towards seventh century Arab culture, at times erroneously and anachronistically identifying later practices with prophetic norms.
Sherman Jackson offers a riveting critique against this tendency in the American context. Immigrant Muslims, he argues, falsely “universalize the particular” by elevating their particular cultural practices to universal religious norms, a move that effectively extends a system of cultural domination over Blackamerican Muslims who are still feeling the effects of another legacy of oppression in the West.”
Sherman Jackson offers a riveting critique against this tendency in the American context. Immigrant Muslims, he argues, falsely “universalize the particular” by elevating their particular cultural practices to universal religious norms, a move that effectively extends a system of cultural domination over Blackamerican Muslims who are still feeling the effects of another legacy of oppression in the West. Consequently, in adopting Islam and accepting the authority of scholarship whose provenance is in Muslim lands and whose content fuses divine doctrine with foreign culture, Blackamericans become compelled to disregard their own legitimate cultural experiences. But how does one begin to identify the line between cultural experiences and transcendent doctrines?
What happens when Professor Jackson’s critique is extended to more stable doctrinal issues that ostensibly lie beyond culture, “intra-Muslim pluralism” notwithstanding?[26] For example, are issues like slavery, marriage, and war under the purview of “culture” or “doctrine?” Our sensibilities in these areas are very different today than they were at the time of the prophet Muhammad. If the Prophet is the best example for all time, could his personal conduct in these areas be considered universal norms of exemplary conduct today? Even sympathetic observers of the Prophet Muhammad’s life will have a very difficult time considering his behavior as universally normative in these areas. The world has changed. But prophecy has ended. How does one square today’s moral norms with virtues that are anchored in the life of a seventh century Arabian prophet? Participants in the third research year may choose to develop research questions in this area, revisiting this doctrine in light of pressing new questions raised in an age of accelerating change.
The movement of history testifies that history did not end in the seventh century. In fact, with rapid Muslim conquests across much of the inhabited world in the first few centuries of Islam, Arabs encountered vastly diverse ethnic, linguistic, and intellectual worlds that they assimilated into their conceptual universe, interpreting scripture in light of ancient philosophy – the “new knowledge” of the time. Just like Islamic thought interacted with Greek philosophy in the past to forge a scholastic intellectual tradition that has been taught in traditional madrasas for centuries, how must the academic formation of Muslims today change in light of new knowledge about the nature of human beings, their place in the cosmos, and the miracles of techno-science?
Acceleration and Islamic Theology
A contemporary historical concept that helps us convey the urgency of the need to rethink long held assumptions about human nature and the human condition is “acceleration.” The German historian Reinhart Koselleck, speaking about the changing nature of human perception of historical time, writes: “there occurs a temporalization [Verzeitlichung] of history, at the end of which there is the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity.”[27] The columnist Thomas Friedman, in his recent bestseller Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in an Age of Accelerations, speaks of accelerations in three areas, which he identifies as technology, the market, and mother nature.[28]
Cynthia Stokes Brown, scholar in the budding field of “Big History,” places acceleration in the context of cosmic history: “Acceleration, an increase in the rate of change, is occurring both in the universe and in human culture on planet Earth… On the cosmological or geological scale, change is measured in millions or billions of years. On the biological scale, with natural selection setting the pace, change occurs in thousands to millions of years. On the scale of human culture, large-scale change used to occur over millennia or centuries, but now it is taking place in decades or even years.”[29] Friedman observes that acceleration itself is accelerating, noting with sympathy that: “This is dizzying for many people.”[30]
In Homo Deus, the sequel to Sapiens, Harari argues that things are moving so quickly, we are seeing developments today that make it not too farfetched to suggest that human beings are at the threshold of making a bid for divinity:
Homo sapiens is likely to upgrade itself step by step, merging with robots and computers in the process, until our descendants will look back and realize they are no longer the kind of animal that wrote the Bible…This will not happen in a day, or a year. Indeed, it is already happening right now, through innumerable mundane actions…humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human…Calm explanations aside, many people panic when they hear of such possibilities.”[31]
Among the people who panic are theologians who see demonic elements behind all these developments. Acceleration is also part of the end-of-time narrative in Islam. If one believes that one lives – after successive periods of decline – in the end times, one’s attitude to things that are new is grave, optimism in the future of this world is dull, and resolve to participate in science is stunted. What you end up passing down to the next generation is cynicism and closed minded conservatism. What can the outcome of an education that embodies an “end time” mentality be other than graduates who are sideshows on the stage of history—if future history remains to be made? Islamic culture needs to contend with the real possibility that there may be centuries if not millennia ahead of us that will witness the most rapid and sweeping changes to human experiences ever known to human history.
Islamic ideas of human nature are closely associated with terms such as nafs (soul), fitra (nature), ruh (immaterial spirit or divine breath). How are we to understand these terms today in light of modern science? Should science influence and reshape traditional doctrines and views, and to what extent? How much of a role does ancient philosophy play in the interpretation of these terms in the premodern scholarly tradition? Should traditional views guide scientific inquiry, and if so, how? Can religious voices lead in the path to scientific progress, or will they always follow, respond, and restrain? Phrased differently, can there be a scientist, working on the forefront of research and innovation, who is not at the same time a heretic? The cosmic decentering of humanity that began with Copernicus has not yet reached its culmination. Scientists are today contemplating the elimination of the distinction between human life and other kinds of life, whether biological or artificial. Can a religious scientist working in these areas be invested in the preservation of traditional theologies based in premodern interpretations of scripture, or must her lived theologies be as dynamic and fresh as her lived experiences?
The challenge for our research group will be to grapple deeply with new knowledge in science: Should there be limits to human enhancements and genetic engineering? What is the definition of human life, and when does it begin and end? As our knowledge of ourselves changes, along with our ability to manipulate who we are and what we can be, what social and political arrangements will be best suited to maximize human flourishing? When does manipulation of nature become unacceptable tampering with God’s creation, and when does is remain within acceptable boundaries?
Tradition, Traditionalism and the Heretical Imperative?
Questions of science and human nature intersect with ethics, governance, and public policy. This challenges students to think carefully about conflicts between classical Islamic thought and contemporary international norms in the areas of gender relations and human rights.[32] Prominent Muslim scholars from around the world recently came together through the convening power of Morocco’s monarch in a summit to address the issue of the rights of non-Muslims in Muslim lands. Called the Marrakesh Declaration, an executive summary of the resolution that has been published online declares that the provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are in harmony with the principles of Islamic teachings, particularly as they appear in the Charter of Medina.[33] The Charter of Medina was a contract in early Islam in which the prophet Muhammad entered into a constitutional alliance with members of other faith communities. Although noble in its intent, the Marrakesh declaration stops short of offering any explicit legal opinion, instead sticking to principles and objectives of the law to make pronouncements that are aspirational. The declaration leaves the grunt work to others, for it calls “upon Muslim scholars and intellectuals around the world to develop a jurisprudence of the concept of ‘citizenship’ which is inclusive of diverse groups. Such jurisprudence shall be rooted in Islamic tradition and principles and mindful of global changes.”[34] In the terms of Rumee Ahmed, it is a summons to a wholesale “hack” of the legal tradition in the area of minority citizenship in Muslim majority societies.[35] Notably, the Marrakesh declaration does not mention women and gender. It only addresses the rights of religious minorities. Nonetheless, once conversation on equality of citizenship begins in light of emerging international consensus and norms, it will be impossible to exclude the issue of gender in Islamic law from re-examination. This is all the more so because the Marrakesh declaration affirms the values embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in turn affirms the equal rights of both men and women.
As Islamic law attempts to align itself with international norms, triumphalist readings of Islamic history will need to be revised, especially as the question of equality before the law within increasingly plural societies comes center stage. All of the tools and concepts that students will have acquired over the course of Madrasa Discourses will need to be harnessed to think critically and constructively about the present and future of human beings on this planet.”
It has become increasingly difficult to gaze at history as the triumph of orthodoxy over heresy. Rather, the champions of orthodoxy as well as heresy seem to participate equally in a kind of “Great Conversation,” to borrow a term from Robert Maynard Hutchins.[36] Debates between scholars of the past are to be visited in ways that show all sides as not only intelligible but also reasonable, allowing students to faithfully choose between them, without polemics or predetermining the winners and losers in these debates. In allowing students to see the construction of knowledge through the experiences of past scholars, we empower them to take their own experiences seriously in order to add to the conversation, thereby becoming not just consumers but also producers of tradition. This is precisely what the eminent sociologist Peter Berger proposes as being the only viable path for religious traditions today: to “try to uncover and retrieve the experiences embodied in tradition,”[37] which he calls the inductive method in religion.
The shift to history will give students theological choices; having choices, in turn, will strengthen both individualism and pluralism; and including former heresies within the spectrum of acceptable religious possibilities will encourage scholars to develop new intellectual skills and adopt new professional roles that require the power of persuasion in settings that are more in harmony with liberal rather than hierarchical or authoritarian societies. Berger reminds us that “The English word ‘heresy’ comes from the Greek verb hairein, which means ‘to choose.’”[38] “For premodern man,” he continues, “heresy is a possibility, usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity…modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative.”[39]
Can Islamic education embrace “the heretical imperative?” Our educational institutions have become overcome with fear, fortresses for what Ebrahim Moosa calls “Republics of Piety.”[40] Madrasas are in the business of the preservation and guardianship of orthodoxy, afraid that future generations will lose their faith in an ever-changing world. But this is not tradition, it is traditionalism, which historian of religion Jaroslav Pelikan put so eloquently as being “the dead faith of the living,” in contrast to tradition, which is the “living faith of the dead.”[41] Muslim culture and institutions of learning today have lost the dynamic spark that once animated their intellectual culture.
Dynamism in Muslim educational culture will be driven in no small part by developments in techno-science that are accompanied by seismic shifts in conceptual worldviews and social norms. Friedman offers the analogy of riding a bicycle to help us understand how we might adapt to the dizzying changes that are soon to come due to the exponential changes taking place all around us.[42] He says that on a bicycle, although one is in a state of motion, one achieves a balance akin to what may be called a kind of “dynamic stillness.” Another metaphor that I prefer, perhaps because it is closer to home is of the whirling dervish. His center is still while the rest of him twirls endlessly away. I am arguing here that our intellectual culture needs to learn how to ride a bicycle or whirl like the dervish.
The ulama today no longer minister to masses whose faith can be taken for granted. Our educational institutions need to help the ulama adapt to their new roles as research scholars in an age of acceleration, teachers in public and private schools, counselors in times of crisis, pastors and community leaders, politicians shaping public policy, and, perhaps most importantly, public intellectuals interacting with leaders across the spectrum of human activity in civil society. Madrasas must be cognizant of the changing roles of ulama in a brave new world, where believers no longer flock to the faith in conformity to old patterns, but trickle in (or trickle out) by free choice.
If the world does not end soon, it is going to be a very different place for our children and grandchildren. Whether or not we are at the end of time, our engagement with new knowledge must be thorough, and it must allow us to be open to new theological possibilities. We have to be guided by tradition, but we also have to let new knowledge take us where it takes us. Can “innovation” and “choice,” even in matters of religion, become good words in the moral vocabulary of the madrasa?
Conclusions: What Lies Ahead for Madrasa Discourses?
I hope that this survey has provided a good sense of the rich and complex intellectual project of Madrasa Discourses. Our ambition is for the intellectual conversations we generate to have transformative ripple effects across madrasa circles. Before concluding this paper with some final thoughts about the future of MD, I would like to highlight some of our activities, challenges and unexpected developments we have encountered, and future prospects beyond the initial three-year term of the present grant. One of the major challenges we have encountered is the widely differing levels of preparation of students who are participating in the program. Some know English fluently, while others are just starting to learn the language. Some have read widely online, others only narrowly within their own area of study. Some are tech-savvy, others not so much. Some have completed their madrasa education with honors, while others have had a less rigorous formation. Students are only able to commit themselves to the program part-time, while the demands of the program to read and prepare for classes, learn English, and write, can be onerous. Providing individualized support and feedback to students has also been challenging for our mentors and partners in India and Pakistan, who are, like the students, engaged in the program on a part-time basis. That being said, the overall level of engagement has met or exceeded expectations in the first eighteen months of the program. Evidence from exams and essays, classroom interactions, as well as interactions in the onsite intensives, indicates that provocations are leading to a higher level of complexity in the thought process.
On the positive side, the new generation of madrasa graduates is already predisposed to receive and experience the world in way that we did not expect. The presence of technology has preceded the arrival of MD at the doorstep. Technology has penetrated beyond the walls of the madrasa to touch the private lives of individuals. This has been a game-changer. Students have smartphones, Facebook accounts, and they seamlessly navigate the World Wide Web. We have found students to be intellectually open to the world and even curious in ways that the previous generation of Madrasa scholars could not have been, simply due to the wonders of technology. Given that online communities are typically insular, tending to operate within self-affirming bubbles, our task is nonetheless daunting. However, we have both the resources at our disposal and a receptive audience.
Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service. Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive discussion group 2018, Dhulikhel
A second unexpected development has been the involvement of ND undergraduate students in the project, first through a generous grant from Notre Dame International and then through a one-credit Peace Research Lab offered through the Kroc Institute. The lab provides undergraduate students in Peace Studies the opportunity to participate in small group dialogue sessions with the madrasa participants on a weekly basis. Students take the opportunity to discuss contents of the course, talk about cutting-edge ethical issues at the intersection of science and religion, and learn about each other’s worlds. Notre Dame’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values hosts a website that students draw from to engage topics like genetic engineering, artificial wombs, and drone warfare.[43] We also stay on the lookout for relevant topics in the headlines. In one case, for example, students opted to discuss the implications of Saudi Arabia’s granting of citizenship to a female robot named Sophia. To set-up the small group discussions, students typically read a short and accessible article prior to meeting, such as Smithsonian Magazine’s “Why Saudi Arabia Giving a Robot Citizenship is Firing People Up”.”[44] What is going on in Saudi Arabia? How is it related to Islam? What are the implications for having a robotic female citizen in an Islamic country? Is the robot citizen free or owned? If owned, will the relationship be governed by Islamic laws of slavery? Would that include the rights and privileges that male owners have over their female concubines? If the relationship is on the basis of free association of citizens, does the robot have autonomy? Does the robot have any duties towards society? Will the robot have religion and be subject to Islamic law (as a Muslim or non-Muslim)?
Small group interactions of this kind have the added benefit of advancing the English learning objectives of MD. To that end, ND students also rotate in the reading of two chapters of Sophie’s World to all of the madrasa participants once a week. Not only does this further help students in English comprehension, the fictional novel surveys the history of western philosophy, which is valuable, relevant, and interesting for all who partake in the reading. ND students are also invited to help with other aspects of the project based on their availability on an individual basis. For example, a team of three students is working with the CM program manager to make the MD curriculum accessible to the wider public on the Internet.
In addition to the online classes, there are three major activities the program undertakes: production of instructional videos, convening of summer and winter onsite intensives, and publication of a website in Urdu, Tajdīd. The motto of the journal is “where religion meets new knowledge.” The site presents articles and blog posts from students, guest writers invited to address topics of relevance, translations of English language material into Urdu, updates from events and activities related to Madrasa Discourses, and a discussion forum where readers can comment on the website content. The journal was launched in October, 2017 and is managed jointly by the faculty team in India and Pakistan, with Dr. Waris Mazhari, the lead faculty from India, as the editor. The content of the journal is designed to align closely with the material being covered in the curriculum, allowing conversations from our controlled classroom environment to spill over into the wider community of madrasa scholars.
A screenshot from Tajdīd.
The video modules produced by MD are designed as instructional aids for the online classroom. In the first year, MD produced eight videos. The first is a project trailer that has been published on the CM website.[45] Three videos accompany the first semester on “Conceptualizing the Past,” while four videos help us to “Contextualize the Islamic Theological Tradition.” Modules three and four are each introduced by a preview trailer, and the research year is introduced by a video featuring graduate students and young scholars sharing their insights into how to form research questions from different fields of inquiry: history, political science, sociology, theology, and peace studies. These videos involve interviews, animations, conversations, and commentary from experts at Notre Dame, including Ebrahim Moosa and Mahan Mirza from the MD project, Hussein Abdulsater from the department of classics, Celia Deane-Drummond from theology, and Scott Trigg from the history and philosophy of science.
Turning to the onsite intensives, MD brings all participants together twice a year for face-to-face interaction, dialogue, and intensive engagement with a variety of intellectual topics to broaden their intellectual horizons. We have met twice in Nepal for two-week intensives in the summer, and once in Qatar in the winter at the College of Islamic Studies in the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha’s Education City. A second meeting is planned for this winter at the same location in Doha. Topics have included religion, modernity, secularism, and fundamentalism (Scott Appleby), gender equity and social inclusion (Shubham Amatya and Prakash Bhattarai), anthropology, ethics, and plural cosmologies (Leela Prasad), liberal citizenship and the challenge of human rights (Mohammad Fadel), science education and the theory of evolution (Rana Dajani), contested political theologies (Ebrahim Moosa), language, scripture, and interpretation (Ammar Khan Nasir and Waris Mazhari), theology in an age of acceleration (Mahan Mirza), Islamic law and gender (Saadia Yacoob), new horizons of moral imagination (Gerald McKenny), Mulla Sadra’s alternative cosmology (Mahmoud Youness), narrative theology and scriptural reasoning (Jason Springs), and intersectionality and faith-based action for peacebuilding (Atalia Omer). These intense sessions are accompanied by dialogue sessions between the madrasa participants and Notre Dame students where individuals from diverse backgrounds find ways to work through their differences while forging at the same time deep human connections. True to the theory of strategic peacebuilding, the deeper human bond that develops through friendly interaction in a safe space enables participants on both sides to appropriate their differences within a deeper framework of trust that is the bedrock of sustainable peace.
After the first two years of the Madrasa Discourses program, we see sufficient evidence to think the program will continue in some form into the future. The most tangible outcome of the project will be the curriculum of the first two years, the written reports of the research projects in the third year, and a vibrant online journal and discussion forum. If the research activities are even modestly successful, they will be formidable pieces of scholarship that will create a buzz in the madrasa scholarly circles within South Asia and perhaps beyond. Given the global reach of the South Asian madrasa community with Darul Ulooms (another word for Madrasas) present all over the world, including in the West, we hope to thereby initiate a long overdue conversation amongst the ulama on the vital issues of theological change, science, law, and society. Translations of the research papers from Urdu into Arabic and English would extend the conversations to the madrasa scholarly community beyond South Asia.
Credit: Mahan Mirza. Madrasa Discourses students and a Notre Dame peer discuss the day’s lecture below. Conversations on religious identity, politics, secularism, science, and gender spilled over into all activities, as students eagerly engaged in what for many was a unique experience of open exchange with new philosophies, traditions, and people.
The curriculum that we are developing is designed to transform the intellectual culture of traditional Islamic thought. The curriculum can be used by individuals, groups, and institutions, and adapted to local needs and contexts. In time, the curriculum may be translated into different Islamicate languages such as Urdu, Persian, Turkish, or Malay. Faculty from Notre Dame may support the program through instructor training (“teaching the teachers”), leading workshops or intensives of the program in different parts of the world, and convening participants periodically in conferences and symposia to develop research agendas and further the production of new theological knowledge in light of new scientific knowledge. If funding is available, a small cohort of instructors from around the world could participate in a year-long residential program at Notre Dame where they are exposed to research methods in different disciplines, participate in residential life in a leading American university, and engage in Madrasa Discourses seminars on campus. As a capstone project, Residential Madrasa Fellows could design programs with texts and methods to suit their respective local contexts. What better place to house such a transformative educational program than at the Keough School at Notre Dame?
While our future plans remain aspirational, and while the madrasa participants work on their own research projects, the core faculty of MD are also working on research papers that they hope to compile into a research volume. A symposium anticipated for spring/summer2019 will invite scholars to respond to drafts of these papers. A select array of responses will also be incorporated into the final volume, which can model the kind of conversation we hope that MD will generate into the future. Instead of merely provoking and challenging, as the curriculum does, this book will also offer some answers, with the following caveat: renewal of religious thought may not result in a single answer at all. Renewal may provide a set of contending responses in creative tension with each other. MD, then, provides a forum not for us to come to agreement, but to elevate the level of our disagreements. That is how living traditions always are: rich, diverse, and in internal dialogue around the great questions of their time.
*Reposted from The Maydan. This paper was originally written as an internal report to update colleagues at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute about the project (Jan, 2018). Parts of the paper appeared previously in a presentation at the Notre Dame Islamic Studies Colloquium on “Religious Renewal in an Age of Quantum Weirdness” (April, 2017) and at a conference on “Islamic Education in Europe” hosted by the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo (Sep, 2017).
[1] A “madrasa” literally means “place of study.” In the South Asian context, it refers to institutions of religious education and formation.
[2] Elaborate bios of the core faculty are available online here.
[3] This thesis is spelled out clearly in Ebrahim Moosa’s What is a Madrasa? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
[13] Although students receive a copy of Collingwood’s Idea of History as supplementary reading, we discuss the philosophy of history through the introductory chapter of Robert M. Burns and Hugh Rayment-Pickard’s (Eds.) Philosophies of History: From Enlightenment to Post-Modernity, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2007), 1-31.
[22] This is a well-known and well-authenticated prophetic report.
[23] See the wording in the second amendment to the Pakistani constitution: “A person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of The Prophethood of MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him), the last of the Prophets or claims to be a Prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him), or recognizes such a claimant as a Prophet or religious reformer, is not a Muslim for the purposes of the Constitution or law.” One should note that this amendment also carries implications for the ‘unorthodox’ minorities such as the Ahmedis in Pakistan.
[24] Paraphrasing Nasser Rabat’s sentence: “Arabness was thus presumably subsumed within Islam.” On Arabs and Arabness.
[24] See Ibn Ashur’s Treatise on Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah (IIIT, 2013) where he distinguishes between the prophet’s different identities as prophet and lawgiver: “The Companions clearly distinguished between the commands of God’s Messenger that ensued from his position as legislator and those that did not. Statements or actions ensued from God’s Messenger in the following capacities: legislation, issuing edicts (fatwa), adjudication, political leadership of the state, guidance, conciliation, advice to those seeking his opinion, counseling, spiritual inspiration, teaching high and lofty truths, disciplining, and non-instructive ordinary statements,” 4.
[36] Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation, 5th Edition, (University of Chicago Press, 1991); this is the first volume of the originally fifty-four volume set of the Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952.
Mahan Mirza was appointed teaching professor and executive director for the Keough School's Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion on July 1, 2019.
An Islamic studies scholar and expert on religious literacy, Mirza brings extensive pedagogical and administrative experience to his roles at Notre Dame, including serving as dean of faculty at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college. Prior to his appointment as Executive Director of the Ansari Institute, Mirza served as the lead faculty member for Notre Dame's Madrasa Discourses project, which equips Islamic religious leaders in India and Pakistan with the tools to confidently engage with pluralism, modern science, and new philosophies.
Mirza holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. from Hartford Seminary, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University. He has taught courses and lectured on Arabic-Islamic studies, western religions, and the history of science, along with foundational subjects in the liberal arts, including logic, rhetoric, astronomy, ethics, and politics. He has edited two special issues of The Muslim World and served as assistant editor for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (2018).
He is a fellow with the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the Keough School and continues to serve as an advisor for Madrasa Discourses.
