Photo Credit: Global Partnership for Education. 5th grader in class in Mamakoffikro, Côte d’Ivoire, December 2015.
My previous blog focused on grassroots understandings of modernity in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) that emphasized the dimensions of “change” and “novelty” related to western influence on local patterns of life. Gender reform is another major concept of my current research. The cornerstone of contemporary gender theories is the idea that in any society, gender roles and categories are not given but constructed, and hence can be deconstructed as well. I dwell on the state’s working definition which shapes state gender policies today in Côte d’Ivoire. I take it for granted that “gender” reforms are a “modern” concern in the context of Africa, again if modernity is taken here to encapsulate western influence on local practices. The point I want to make is that, although Côte d’Ivoire embraces gender equality concerns, the state concept of gender does not include the LGBTQ community and focuses mainly on closing the gender gap between men and women instead.
Distribution of Power
Although structured by both matrilineal and patrilineal systems of kinship, like most West African societies Côte d’Ivoire is predominantly patriarchal in the distribution of power between men and women. It is generally assumed that in patriarchal societies women are ruled by men, but a differentiated approach to gender power relationships reveals a much more complex picture in Africa. Even though it is true that men hold more power than women in society, this is not the case in all sectors of social life. For example, regarding political power, the Baoule—a major Akan sub-group found in Côte d’Ivoire—venerate as their founding ancestress a female figure called Queen Abla Pokou who they claim led them from present-day Ghana to their current location. She then became their first ruler and was succeeded by another woman, Queen Akoua Bony, who ruled them from 1730 to 1760 before men took over the kingdom. The kingdom has lasted three centuries and has been ruled by twelve sovereigns, including three women. The third woman, Queen Monique N’ga Tanou, was consecrated in August 2017, taking the name Nanan Akoua Boni III.
Photo Credit: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations. Women and children at social services event in Côte d’Ivoire, 2013.
Some have argued that in pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Africa, gender differentiation and hierarchies were less rigid and therefore more flexible than those inherited from Islam, Christianity, and colonial legal systems that current gender reforms seek to correct. Africa, like many other parts of the world, has a long way to go to close the gender gap. But overall, as the data of the 2017 Global Gender Gap Report suggests, Africa is making progress, with some countries even doing far better than most Western countries. The best performance on the continent is that of Rwanda, which is ranked 4th in the world. Also doing well are countries such as Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana. The 2017 Global Gender Gap Report ranks Côte d’Ivoire 133rd out of 144 countries evaluated. Its overall score suggests that although Côte d’Ivoire is closing the gender gap in areas such as education and health, it still has a long way to go on the economic participation of women and their political empowerment.
Focus on Women
Let us now consider the state construction of gender and how it impacts social and economic empowerment.
Côte d’Ivoire’s major public policy document articulates gender policy as follows:
An approach to development which aims at reducing social, economic, political, and cultural inequalities between men and women, between boys and girls. It reveals injustices and discrimination which are encouraged or tolerated in various social contexts, very often against women. These include, among other things, opportunities, obligations, and rights awarded to any individual (man or woman) within a society. A policy that integrates the notion of gender is a policy that comparatively analyzes the situation of men and women, identifies the sources of inequality between the sexes, and attempts to reduce them. Gender is also defined as all the implicit or explicit rules that govern the relationships between man and woman on the basis of different values, responsibilities, and obligations.1
In terms of gender policy innovation in the last decade, the focus has been on the empowerment of women. To enhance the economic and political participation of women in public life, a Compendium of Female Competences project was launched in 2011 and has led to the production of a Directory of Competent Women in various domains. The concern about the economic empowerment of women is behind the creation in 2012 of the special “Fund for Women in Côte d’Ivoire” to facilitate the access of women to microloans. A Plan for the Implementation of the National Gender Policy was released in 2014 as well as a Roadmap for the Implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). But it is in the sector of education that much progress has been noted because education is seen a major driver of empowerment for women. The General Census of 2014 indicates that the rate of illiteracy in Côte d’Ivoire is about 56.1% of which 49.3% are men and 63% are women.
It is evident that the Ivoirian state gender policy does not include any concern about the forms of sexual orientation that characterize the LGBTQ community. Although the emergence and visibility of LGBTQ identities is still a hotly debated issue in Africa, heterosexuality remains the norm both institutionally and in collective representations. The question of the existence of homosexuality in precolonial Africa is highly debated in the public sphere, including among scholars. Whatever the case, the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa was instrumental in giving some visibility to African homosexuals as they came to be classified among the highly vulnerable groups requiring special attention. The Ivoirian Penal Code does not explicitly criminalize homosexual acts, but Article 360 in its second paragraph accentuates sanctions against public indecency involving people of the same sex. Although there are no laws in Côte d’Ivoire which explicitly criminalize homosexuality, LGBTQ Ivoirians can be targets of various forms of violence because of their sexual orientation, especially when they strive for more visibility.
The state concept of gender in Côte d’Ivoire does not include the specificity of the LGBTQ community. As an Ivorian member of this community rightly puts it, “In Côte d’Ivoire, the conception of gender is limited to the binary opposition male/female, the equality of man and woman. But they [state policy makers] should understand that the concept of gender is broader and evolving. So the national document on gender has a lot of deficiencies from this respect.”(Interview, Member of the LGBT community, Lesbian Life Association, Abidjan, 2017). This raises questions about the inclusivity of the state construction of gender.
[1]Framing of “Gender” in the Ministère de la Famille, de la Femme et des Affaires Sociales, 2009. Document de Politique Nationale sur l’Egalité des Chances et le Genre, Abidjan.
Photo Credit: Miguel Discart Photos. World Cup 2018–Belgium vs Japan. Notice Moroccan flag in center.
A video circulating on Facebook shows a crowd of men standing in front of a cafe cheering and dancing to the rhythms of a darbouka, a Moroccan tambourine. The video was shot in Molenbeek, one of Brussel’s nineteen communes, which recently gained international notoriety due to the implication of a few of its residents in international terrorism. Yet in this context, the commune was the setting for a more joyful event. A crowd of men of Maghrebi origin danced and sang while waving the Belgian flag as cars drove along, honking to the rhythms of the dancers. The crowd was celebrating Belgium’s advance to the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup—a historic event for the country, which had only reached that stage one time earlier when the team around the legendary Jean-Marie Pfaff managed to make it to the semi-finals of the World Cup in Mexico in 1986. But there are important differences between the team that qualified in 1986 and this one, differences which also explain why large parts of Molenbeek were celebrating this historical achievement. With the presence of Belgian-Moroccan star players Marouane Fellaini and Nacer Chadli, in addition to two players of Congolese descent, Romelo Lukaku and Michy Batshuayi, the composition reflected the highly diverse demographic realities of the Belgian metropoles. Furthermore, this victory comes at a moment when intense tensions about migration run through the country, providing a welcome counter-narrative to the doom and gloom scenario that prevails in the rhetoric of the leading nationalist political elites.
Photo Credit: Erik Drost. Romelu Lukaku at the Cleveland FirstEnergy Stadium, 2013.
Analysts have often held ambivalent views on the potential that soccer, and sports in general, have in overturning existing power imbalances and racial hierarchies within societies. The overrepresentation of ethnic-cultural minorities in various sports is not a novelty. Like other professional circuits, such as music, sports have traditionally been one of the spheres through which racialized minorities could progress and gain a degree of fame, wealth, and social mobility. One of the reasons often advanced to explain this overrepresentation of minorities in sports is the way in which it comfortably confirms, rather than disturbs, racial hierarchies and stereotypes: Black or Arab men are primarily seen as productive bodies, with entertainment value. This is also why many have warned against mistakenly seeing a diverse national football team as a sign of tolerance or inclusion. The victory of France in the 1998 World Cup, with a team coined “Black, Blanc, Beur” [beur meaning Arab in slang], did not stop the political advance of the National Front a few years later, nor did it stand in the way of rampant anti-Muslim rhetoric and strong secularist measures targeting veiled women that continue to this day. Furthermore, figures like Zinédine Zidane were even hailed as examples by some commentators of the success of the French model of laïcité and assimilation. Born to an immigrant father from Algeria, Zidane does not display an explicit identification with Islam. Another danger looms in the uncritical celebration of football as a carrier of diversity, in that players of foreign descent are only hailed when they are heroes, but are immediately castigated when they fail. The same football star, Zidane, who achieved a quasi-divine status in football and was celebrated as a model of integration, went overnight from hero to savage (Arab) during the historic confrontation with Italian player Materazzi in the World Cup final of 2006.1
There are, however, reasons to also consider another side of this story, particularly when it comes to the Belgian national team and the celebration of it. Due to its fragmented political and social history, Belgium never successfully managed to tell a coherent national story about itself. And it is precisely this absence of a unified national project that allows for a triumphant recuperation of national symbols by ethnic minorities and expressions of difference that are otherwise marginalised.
Since its establishment in 1830, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Napoleonic empire and as a result of a mobilisation of a Catholic and Francophone elite who were unhappy to live under the tutelage of a Protestant Dutch monarch, the small kingdom of Belgium, with its 11 million inhabitants, has been beset by a never-ending succession of tensions around language, religion (Catholic/secular), and economy—with postcolonial migration being the newest addition to the historical fault lines identified by the Belgian sociologist Luk Huyse. Most of these migrants are descendants of workers who came to the country after the Second World War from Italy, Spain, Morocco, or Turkey. The nineties saw another wave of immigrants, mostly political refugees from Belgium’s former colonies in Africa’s Great Lakes region (Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda). The result is a highly diverse reality where metropoles like Brussels, which are home to players like Fellaini, Lukaku, or Batshuayi, have become minority majority cities where Arabic eclipses Dutch as the most used language after French. This multicultural composition of the country sits uncomfortably, however, with the prevailing models of inclusion which, in contradistinction to France or the UK and the US, are not unified into a single national model. In Flanders, a region where separatist and nationalist parties represent more than one-third of the electorate, an ideology of linguistic and cultural purism prevails. The Francophone part of the country is, in turn, highly influenced by the French model and puts more emphasis on secularism, although its various attempts to inscribe laïcité in the national constitution have so far failed.
Photo Credit: Кирилл Венедиктов. Michy Batshuayi during the England-Belgium World Cup match, 2018.
Yet, and to the dismay of many, the players of the national team do not neatly abide by any of these scripts—just like many of the postcolonial minorities in the country who are currently challenging Belgium’s colonial legacy and white imaginary. On the evening that Belgium managed to secure a position in the quarterfinals, after an impressive come-back against Japan, Michy Batshuayi circulated a video recorded in the dressing room where he congratulated, in French with some Moroccan terms, the ‘draries’ for the victory, emphasizing the sentiment with expressions of ‘wallah’ [I swear in the name of Allah] and ‘shukran’ [thank you]. The word ‘drari’ [literally: boys] is a Moroccan word used in vernacular language to designate street kids, and has turned into a popular concept within youth culture, just like ‘wallah.’ Referring to the exploits of his teammates Chadli and Fellaini who were vital to Belgium’s win, Batshuayi’s performance reflects the importance of these ethnic and religious markers and the many linguistic crossovers found in youth culture across the ethnically diverse Belgian metropoles. Belgian flags, with the green star of the Moroccan flag added to the Belgian tricolour, circulated as a joke, as did the hashtag #valeurajoutée (added value): a response to the controversial Federal State-Secretary of Migration and Asylum Theo Francken, who openly wondered in 2011 what the added value of Moroccan or Congolese migrants was for the country. A similar event occurred after Belgium qualified for the semi-finals last Friday: Liège-born Nacer Chadli thanked his fans on his Facebook account, concluding with the words, “Allah is the greatest.” In a context where such a formulation, and in particular its Arabic variant (Allah-u Akbar), has become linked with violent extremism, and where public expressions of religion are met with suspicion, this public declaration of faith probably raised more than one eyebrow. And in a recent interview with The Players’ Tribune, star striker Romelu Lukaku opened up about his experiences of racism in Belgium, declaring that he would be surprised to find a single black person who hasn’t faced racism in the country, and challenging the general climate of suspicion that exists towards minorities and migrants in his birth country.
The so-called ‘golden generation’ of Belgian players is exceptional in several ways. Not only does it excel in technical skills and team play, but more importantly in the way it echoes many of the cultural and political developments within the country, not the least of which is the growing outspokenness of the descendants of postcolonial migrants who, by sharing their experiences of racism and openly challenging some of the prevailing colonial narratives, seek to carve out a space of their own. This also partially explains the immense enthusiasm and overwhelming support they elicit throughout the country. Each of the players seems, in his own way, to shed light on different compositions of Belgium, some of which does not conform to the more dominant nationalist or highly secularist narratives in the country.
A few weeks after the 22 March 2016 attacks in Brussels, the Federal Interior Minister Jan Jambon declared in an interview with the Belgian daily De Standaard that “a significant part of the Muslim community was dancing in the streets after the attacks.” His words prompted many angry reactions in the press with people denouncing these statements as an instance of fake news and demanding evidence for these claims while accusing the interior minister of polarising the country at such a sensitive moment. While the Interior Minister failed to substantiate his claims and never apologised for his statements, the expression “Muslims are dancing in the streets” has turned into a parody to mock the Interior Minister. So too with the dancing Molenbeekois who, through their dances and songs, were seen by many as reclaiming this victory as also theirs.
Photo Credit: Ebenezer Obadare. Christ Embassy Ibadan North “Night of Bliss” poster with comedians Buchi and Bishop Chikancy among others.
Dilemmas
Over time, Nigerian Pentecostalism has taken on many of the externalities of popular culture in Nigeria, creating a unique composite of spirituality and secular entertainment. This enfolding of Pentecostalism and popular culture is one of the more fascinating aspects of the continued evolution of Nigerian Pentecostalism. What accounts for this joining at the hip? What socio-cultural and economic dynamics are at work here? Whither the imperative in Nigerian Pentecostalism to outsource the work of inspiration to performers and jesters? What light does this convergence of the spiritual and the profane throw on both?
My answers to these questions fall under three not necessarily distinct rubrics, but before offering them, I will supply two vignettes to demonstrate the phenomenon.
Vignettes
In October 2015, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Lagos Province 20, was in the middle of preparations for a three-day outdoor crusade, and Pastor Toyin Ogundipe, who is also professor of Botany at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), needed a personality who could be relied upon to galvanize the audience. After weighing his options, Pastor Ogundipe decided that popular Fuji musician, Alhaji Wasiu Alabi, better known as Pasuma (or “Paso” for short), was the ideal candidate for the job, and he rang him up. Although a Born Again Christian, Pastor Ogundipe, a lover of Fuji music, apparently saw nothing wrong with inviting Pasuma, a practicing Muslim and one of the most famous faces in the Nigerian entertainment industry, to come and fire up a Christian audience. Pasuma would later confirm as much in an interview, pointing out that during the telephone conversation with Pastor Ogundipe, the latter had brushed aside his initial rejection of the invitation by reassuring him that all he needed from him, Pasuma, was to “come there… so we can get one or two or three people to change their lives. We want to use you to change some people’s hearts” (10:55).
Although Pasuma and Pastor Ogundipe clinched a deal, the crusade would not go ahead as planned, for hardly had the poster of the event featuring, among other things, a large picture of Pasuma sporting his trademark dark glasses gone into circulation when it ran into a storm of criticism. Most of the criticism centered on the propriety of inviting into the “sacred space” of a church “crusade” a “Special Guest Artist” who (1) happens to be a practicing Muslim, and (2) whose music is notorious for its profanity and ribaldry. As criticism mounted, the RCCG hierarchy intervened quickly by canceling the planned crusade and suspending the errant pastor.
As it happens, Pastor Ogundipe was not the first pastor of a major Pentecostal church to invite a secular artiste to, as it were, light up his congregation. In April of the same year, Senior Pastor Bolaji Idowu of Harvesters International Christian Church Center, Lekki, Lagos, had drawn flak for inviting emerging singer-songwriter Korede Bello to perform his hit song, ‘God Win,’ to the congregation in celebration of Easter Sunday. Of the many condemnations of Pastor Idowu, the angst-ridden statement by US-based Pastor Olusola Fabunmi of the RCCG, City of Faith in Maryland, went farthest in summarizing the concerns of those worried by what they saw as the latest instance of the church’s seemingly inexorable surrender to “the world”:
But it’s written here, that when we chose (sic) the way of the world, we have clearly chosen our paths; becoming an enemy of God. Please, there must be a clearly defined boundary of who sings, and/or ministers in churches. Some of the questions that come to mind are: is he born again? Sanctified with the spirit of God and baptized in the Holy Spirit? Also, let’s ask ourselves, what’s even the purpose of people singing in churches and Christian concerts? …. So I believe very strongly that one major purpose of choristers or Psalmists singing is to prepare the minds and hearts of the people for the word of God.
Since these two incidents, and for all the widespread condemnation, the entanglement of Nigerian Pentecostalism with Nigerian popular entertainment has in fact intensified. For instance, during field research in Ibadan in the summer of 2017, I observed that popular artistes were represented on a significant number of billboard advertisements for Pentecostal church events. In some of them, the entertainers in question were, like the aforementioned Pasuma, described as “Special Guest Artistes.” Like visual prompts intended to arrest the gaze and tantalize the prospective attendee (this being Nigeria, I often wondered whether some of the artistes in those advertisements were even aware of their presence in them), other billboards carried only the images of popular entertainers without any information as to their specific roles in the advertised events. The odds of sharing the pew with WizKid1 next Sunday? What better way to find out than to be physically present at Sunday service?
Gospel Comedy
Photo Credit: Ebenezer Obadare. Poster for hybrid church-comedy program featuring gospel entertainer Olarewaju Bolaji (Big B) and comedians Woli Arole and Woli Agba, among others.
Furthermore, and in a notable deepening of the trend, not only is it gradually becoming de rigueur to invite standup comics to perform at regular Sunday services (a practice that, similar to the invitation of Pasuma and Korede Bello, has drawn fire from a section of the Christian community)2 a new sub-genre of Nigerian comedy known as “Gospel Comedy” appears to have taken form. The leading names in this emerging comic form are, in no particular order Woli Agba (real name Ayo Ajewole), Akpororo (Jephthah Bowoto), Mazi Prosper, Bishop Chikancy, Buchi (Onyebuchi Ojieh), M.C. Crucsio, Woli Arole (Bayegun Oluwatoyin), DA 13thDisciple (Adefuwa Oluwagbemiga), Gee Jokes (Adejobi Omogbolahan), and Aboki 4 Christ (Olufemi Michael). By definition, if not practice, Gospel Comedy crystallizes the emerging convergence of Pentecostalism and popular culture in Nigeria. And because they are self-confessed Christians, hence speaking from within the fold, gospel comedians, unlike “regular” comedians, appear to enjoy greater artistic license regarding otherwise theologically sensitive material. As a matter of fact, such is their desire to emphasize the primacy of their identities as Born Again Christians that many of them (Woli Arole for instance) typically preface their commencements with the caveat that “I am not a comedian.”
Propositions
I propose the following explanations.
I.
One explanation is that such is the inherent permissiveness, some would say promiscuity, of Yorùbá metaphysics, that such an embrace could not be avoided. There is solid literature on the subject, notably the late sociologist J.D.Y. Peel’s oeuvre, which locates this permissiveness in the dynamic copresence of three religious traditions (Islam, Christianity, and indigenous Orisa) in the Yorùbá space and imagination. In a recent study, I drew on this scholarly tradition to argue that a culturally mandated amity among otherwise competitive religious traditions is a major explanation for Muslim adoption of Pentecostal devotional and evangelistic repertoires in western Nigeria. The point is that given the power and widespread acceptance of this metaphysics, the extension of an invitation to a popular entertainer who happens to be a Muslim is not the singular act of transgression it would appear to be at first glance. Nor is there any obvious contradiction in a Born Again Christian like Pastor Ogundipe being partial to Fuji music as many Yorùbás, Muslim and Christian, are. Indeed, not only has the Fuji scene always been the best place to judge the vitality or otherwise of popular culture as conducted in Yorùbá,3 the music itself has played an outsize role in the liberalization of the Yorùbá public sphere. One conclusion from this is that, in extending an invitation to Pasuma, Pastor Ogundipe was unwittingly validating two facts, one cultural, the other sociological.
The cultural fact is that although both the pastor and the entertainer profess allegiance to two different faiths, they remain, culturally speaking, sons of the same mother. Further, Pastor Ogundipe was validating the sociological fact of Fuji’s undoubted eminence as the most innovative form of popular music in contemporary western Nigeria. While a full development of this observation falls outside the ambit of this discussion, I note in passing that over time, and in part through a process of steady appropriation that is classic Yorùbá, Fuji music has transcended its religious origins in urban working class Muslim Ramadan ritual to become a transnational, class-neutral, crossover secular genre. As a crossover genre, not only has it internalized the Yorùbá idea of Jesus as a cultural figure for multi-purpose social invocation, which means that Christian songs of appeasement for heavenly intervention have been assumed into its repertoire; it has taken full advantage of Jùjú’s decline as a Yorùbá musical form.4 Pasuma is, if nothing else, the very emblem of this transition, arguably the most successful crossover artiste in the contemporary Nigerian music industry. Hence the appeal—Fuji’s and Pasuma’s—to Pastor Ogundipe. Nothing, it seems, not even Pentecostalism, a force of nature in its own right, can resist the propulsive energy of Fuji.
II.
A second explanation has to do with the specific character of Pentecostalism itself, especially as a form of mediation “taking place” in a public sphere underwritten by liberalization and commercialization of the media. Anthropologist Birgit Meyer’s astute observation regarding Ghanaian Pentecostalism’s transgressiveness applies to the Nigerian context: “Relatively undisturbed by the state, but all the more indebted to the emerging image economy, Pentecostalism has spread into the public sphere, disseminating signs and adopting formats not entirely of its own making and, in the process, has been taken up by popular culture. In the entanglement of religion and entertainment, new horizons of social experience have emerged, thriving on fantasy and vision and popularizing a certain mood oriented toward Pentecostalism” (308). Similarly, in his work on Malawi, anthropologist Rijk van Dijk shows how Pentecostal ideology unwittingly created “the space to experience witchcraft in terms of mockery, laughter and amusement” (99). In Nigeria, and as I have argued elsewhere,5 the incorporation of Pentecostalism into popular culture is indicated by, among other things, the celebrification6 and eroticization of the figure of the pastor; the appropriation of media technologies by Pentecostal churches; and the conversion of many popular entertainers to Pentecostalism (cf. anthropologist Jesse Weaver’s work on the religious conversion of comedians and musicians in Ghana), resulting in the further blurring of the boundaries between secular and religious entertainment. Significantly, not only are popular entertainers converting to Pentecostalism; in an emergent trend, a growing number of retirees from the Nigerian movie industry, Nollywood, are taking up pastoring. The list of retired movie stars who are now bona fide pastors of Pentecostal churches includes Eucharia Anunobi-Akwu, Ernest Azuzu, Kanayo O. Kanayo, Zack Orji, Larry Koldsweat, and Liz Benson. One result of all this, especially the appropriation of media technologies, is the transformation of the religious landscape across the African continent. A more directly relevant effect is what Hackett describes as the facilitation of “homogenizing cultural flows” (258). The mutual interpenetration of Pentecostalism and popular culture in Nigeria sits against this all-important backdrop.
III.
Photo Credit: Ebenezer Obadare. The Redeemed Evangelical Mission (TREM) Potter’s Place program poster featuring comedians Gee Jokes and DA 13th Disciple.
A third explanation for the convergence of Nigerian Pentecostalism and popular culture is the commercial imperative, i.e., the need by churches to adapt to the changing conditions of an intensely competitive religious marketplace. One effect of the success of Pentecostalism as the dominant form of Christianity in Nigeria and several key African countries is the sheer explosion in the number of churches. As Pentecostalism has exploded, so also has its appetite for space, as historian Olufunke Adeboye demonstrates in her analysis of Pentecostal appropriation of public spaces like nightclubs, hotels, and cinema halls in Nigeria. I propose (1) that the identified success of Pentecostalism has led to a glut in the supply of “religious goods,” and (2) that Pentecostal churches’ cultivation of popular culture, as illustrated by the overture to popular entertainment figures, is in part explicable by the logic of competition in a saturated religious marketplace. I argue that because the supply of what Robert B. Ekelund, et al., describe as “assurances of salvation” arguably now exceeds its demand in the Nigerian religious market, churches, especially Pentecostal churches, are forced to come up with all manner of “product differentiation” innovations in order to either hold on to loyal patrons (existing members of the congregation) or attract new customers. This is why, for instance, the billboard advertisement of the RCCG Lagos Province 20 that I referred to at the beginning not only features an image of Pasuma, but also tantalizes prospective attendees with “gift items” like flat screen televisions, motorcycles, mass transportation tricycles popularly known as “Keke Marwa” or “Keke NAPEP,” and electric power generators. A related and no less plausible argument is that, in a context of serious and persistent economic deprivation, “assurances of salvation” are no longer enough to draw crowds to church; accordingly, churches have to offer other products (entertainment, commodities, etc.) in addition to their core product.
Summary
The intertwining of Pentecostalism and popular culture in Nigeria is a complex phenomenon, and the foregoing is merely a sketch and a preliminary attempt to offer an explanation. While Pentecostalism is a global phenomenon, the power of local inscription means that general hypotheses must be advanced with caution. In the Nigerian Yorùbá world, a pragmatic cultural disposition gives rise to a Pentecostalism that is accepting of popular culture, generating new spiritual and artistic forms that warrant scholarly analysis.
End Notes
[1] Popular Nigerian entertainer. Real name Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun.
[2] The most vocal critic of this practice is Pastor Mike Bamiloye, founder of the Mount Zion Faith Ministries. See for instance http://naijachurchnews.com/bamlioye-condemns-pastors-invite-comedians-church-events/ Accessed June 3, 2018. Interestingly, as dramatist, actor, producer, owner of a television station—Mount Zion Television—and pioneer in the Nigerian Christian film industry, Bamiloye arguably played a leading role in introducing Nigerian Pentecostalism to popular culture.
[3] I thank Tade Ipadeola for this insight.
[4] Jùjú’s slow decline is due to many reasons, and awaits a full accounting. My tentative guess is that the decline owes in part to the conversion of one of Jùjú’s leading exponents, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, to Pentecostalism in the early 1990s, marking the importation of Jùjú into “the mainstream of Christian music” (see Kalu 2007, 25). Crucially, the importation was facilitated by the fact that in its basic identity as a form of popular culture, Jùjú was essentially “Christian”. If my guess is right, Jùjú is a victim of Pentecostalism’s success, insofar as Pentecostalism further blurred the line between Jùjú and Christian Gospel music.
[5] Ebenezer Obadare, “The Charismatic Porn-Star: Social Citizenship and the West African Pentecostal Erotic” Citizenship Studies, 22(6), 2018. Forthcoming.
[6] As opposed to ‘celebritization.’
Further Reading:
Olufunke Adeboye, “A Church in a Cinema Hall? Pentecostal Appropriation of Public Space in Nigeria” Journal of Religion in Africa, 42(2): 145- 171, 2012.
Rijk van Dijk, “Witchcraft and skepticism by proxy: Pentecostalism and laughter in urban Malawi” In Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, ed. Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (London: Routledge, 2001).
Olivier Driessens, “The celebritization of society and culture: Understanding the structural dynamics of celebrity culture” International Journal of Cultural Studies16(6): 641- 657, 2012.
Robert B. Ekelund, Robert F. Herbert, Robert D. Tollison, The Marketplace of Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006).
Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Charismatic/Pentecostal Appropriation of Media Technologies in Nigeria and Ghana” Journal of Religion in Africa, 28(3): 258- 277, 1998.
Ogbu Kalu, “The Big Man of the Big God: Popular Culture, Media, and the Marketability of Religion” New Theology Review, May 2007, pp. 15-26.
Birgit Meyer, “Impossible representations: Pentecostalism, Vision, and Video technology in Ghana” In Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, eds. Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Ebenezer Obadare, “The Charismatic Porn-star: Social Citizenship and the West African Pentecostal Erotic” Citizenship Studies, 22(6), 2018. Forthcoming.
Ebenezer Obadare, “The Muslim Response to the Pentecostal Surge in Nigeria: Prayer and the Rise of Charismatic Islam” Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 2/1: 75- 91, 2016.
Jesse Weaver Shipley, “Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana” Cultural Anthropology, 24(3): 523- 552, 2009.
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington, D.C.; a fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute of Theology, and contributing editor of Current History. Author and editor of numerous books on religion and politics and state and civil society in Africa, Obadare’s most recent work is Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender and Sexuality in Nigeria (Notre Dame Press, 2022). He is editor of Journal of Modern African Studies, published by Cambridge University Press.
Photo Credit: Steve Wilson. Crossroads in Hampshire, UK.
“To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads” Gloria Anzaldúa
How do you know you are alive?
I have asked myself and others this somewhat unusual question, and “breathing,” “thinking,” “feeling one’s heartbeat,” and “relating to others” are among the answers I have received. These empirical responses align with Descartes on the importance of thinking to human experience, summarized in his famous quote “I think therefore I am” (2005:51). However, they also show a larger spectrum that includes sensorial, somatic, and relational aspects. As vital as thinking is for human existence, it is also important to acknowledge that it does not encompass life in its fullness.
Descartes’ famous saying, and the way subsequent generations have appropriated and developed it into what is referred to as modernity, poses many problems for peace. Using rationality as the main premise for identifying life prioritizes beings and things that can be rationally understood. In modernity, this rational understanding is restricted to things susceptible to mathematical or logical explanation, employing a conception of science that is mechanistic, quantitative, Eurocentric, and secularized (Martínez Guzmán 2000: 52). Peace, therefore, is understood as a singular and absolute concept, a predictable outcome of calculated steps. This leads to the troublesome view of peace as a product of universal applicability, developed by neutral experts, which could be exported to supposedly unpeaceful people in civilizing and development projects. The violent consequences of such projects attest the problematic premises upon which this concept of peace is based.
A modern understanding of peace, based exclusively on rationality, falls short in offering multifaceted perspectives of the world and appropriate tools to navigate it. This understanding stems from the observation that there are opposites in the world (Dietrich 2012). From the need to make sense of and thrive among these oppositions emerges the strategy of categorizing opposites and evaluating them. One is given precedence over the other, resulting in distinctions such as good and bad, right and wrong. Repression and suppression of difference results in the grueling effort to reach a self-referenced yet delusional ideal of goodness, righteousness, and purity.
One consequence of this logic is the exclusion of others who do not think like “I” do. Modernity’s use of reason as the premise to identify life, or to acknowledge the right to existence, lays aside a whole range of beings which do not correspond to its definition of thinking. Nature is seen as devoid of consciousness and therefore exploitable to serve the lives of beings who think. Furthermore, this logic lays aside all those human beings who do not share “my” thinking or abide by “my” worldview. Considering that this “I” is restricted to a normative combination of identities, it devalues groups considered as others, such as women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, some ethnicities and nationalities, and lower income classes. Intersectionality shows even more complicated nuances of this logic of exclusion. The consequence then is similar to that befalling nature: exploitation and an existence that serves the normative “right” identity, the one against which all other existence is referenced.
In the same vein, when thinking is elevated as the only valid source of knowledge, other ways of knowing are suppressed. Sensing, feeling, intuiting, and witnessing (Koppensteiner 2018) are denigrated as irrational and unscientific. Besides losing touch with the richness of human experience, the supremacy of thinking prevents balancing and complementing reason with insights coming from the body, the heart, intuition, and spiritual inspiration. Such balance contributes to an awareness of relationality and the interconnectedness of life. Without balance, the problematic combination of the claim to absolute truth, a rejection of otherness, and the striving for purity may reach extremes and threaten difference altogether (Koppensteiner 2009).
Scholars and practitioners of feminist, gender, and critical race theory have long engaged in questioning the self-righteousness and rigid categorizations of dominant discourse, denouncing violent structures and calling for change. They have developed deep reflections on the causes and structures of violence, questioning systems of oppressive power, and holding violent narratives accountable. This has been of vital importance for peace work. They have called attention to deeper dynamics of violence going on underneath mainstream conflict intervention models and contributed to breaking the modern monolithic interpretation of peace. This rupture found echo in the field of peace studies with the acknowledgment of many and imperfect peaces (Dietrich and Sützl 1997, Muñoz 2006).
Authors such as hooks (1984), Crenshaw (1995), and especially Anzaldúa (1999), to name a few, delved into the exploration of the uncertainties, fears, and suffering of human experience on the margins. My experience with these texts has been painful but also inspiring, as they showed that an investigation of the power dynamics and potentialities within them may open space for tapping into power contained in vulnerability and in the intersections of difference and belonging. In this process, alternatives develop, revealing a potential for different forms of relating, anchored to the vulnerability of an open-ended and constantly shifting subject (Echavarría 2008).
This call for exploring relationality in the processes of changing and being changed that accompany human interaction resonates with a transrational understanding of peace (Dietrich 2012). The transrational approach does not deny or transcend rationality, but crosses through it, integrating reason while weakening its harmful tendencies of absolutism with an emphasis on relationality. Therefore, it invites a twist[1], a reworking of modernity’s split between nature and culture, body and mind, observer and observed, us and them (Dietrich 2012). Twisting this split involves more than simplistic inclusion. It is not about a work of goodness, of integrating people from the margins to the center, while divisive dynamics remain untouched. It involves enlarging the landscape of perception, engaging with people in open relationality, and questioning the different roles that perpetuate violence, including one’s own. It involves shifting the ways power, love, and politics are understood and enacted. It involves acknowledging not only the academy as a locus of production of knowledge, but also schools, political and communal gatherings, and personal experiences. It involves dialogue among thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting, and witnessing, and dialogue among people with different worldviews.
Twisting this split and healing the wounds derived from it requires hard work, and a profound change in structures and cultural behaviors that perpetuate it. However, this is not an endeavor that is out of reach. It begins with changes in the way each person perpetuates violence, transforms her conflicts and relates to others, and more frequently opens and holds spaces that enable experiences of intra- and interpersonal peace. In a transrational perspective, peace is available as a potential within human beings, who are embedded in the pulsating relationality and connectedness of life. Therefore, while acknowledging the gifts and risks of rationality, it is important also to sustain the energetic remembrance of interconnectedness, or as Anzaldúa suggests: being crossroads in the borderless fabric of relationality.
[1] Wolfgang Dietrich derives the term twist from Gianni Vattimo’s verwindung. Distinct from overcoming, twisting refers to a process of deriving reflections while recollecting, taking into consideration earlier experiences (201).
Further Reading:
Anzaldúa, G. (1999) Borderlands = La frontera. The new mestiza. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Koppensteiner, N. (2018) ‘Transrational Methods of Peace Research: The Researcher as (Re)Source’ in Transrational Resonances. Echoes to the Many Peacesedited by Josefina Echavarría, Daniela Ingruber and Norbert Koppensteiner, 59-81, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Paula Ditzel Facci is a facilitator and lecturer in the Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and in the Graduate Diploma in Conflict Transformation and Peace Studies with emphasis on Emotional Balance at the Peace and Mind Institute, Brazil. She holds a PhD in Peace, Conflict and Development from Universitat Jaume I, Spain, and was a visiting research fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Previously, she worked with educational and social projects in the development field in Brazil. Her research interest is on methods to elicit conflict transformation, with a focus on dance and movement. Email: paulafacci@gmail.com
Photo Credit: John Seitz. Cleric-inspired fashion at the Heavenly Bodies exhibit.
The dominant templates for the designs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibit come from two different Catholic figures, the church’s ordained men (the clergy) and its angels. These two groups belong to what the curators call the “earthly” and the “celestial” hierarchies of Catholic tradition. The “heavenly bodies” in question are both ‘up there’ above and ‘down here’ below. The treatment of the first of the hierarchies, the celestial, is somewhat limited in the exhibit. This group—made up, according to Pseudo-Dionysius’ rendering, of the Councilors, Governors, and Ministers of Heaven—is represented at the Met mainly by its lowest-ranking members, the angels. The curators explain in the exhibit’s wall text that angels “feature most prominently in the imagination of fashion designers” because they “function as guides, protectors, and messengers to humans.” They have been a staple of Catholic art over the centuries. Borrowing from these referents, the exhibit includes a choir of angles standing far above the floor of the main hall. An adjoining hall features another cluster of angels. One or two angel-like figures hover over doorways, other impressively winged angels occupy prominent positions. They are gendered, almost exclusively, female.
Photo Credit: John Seitz. Met Heavenly Bodies exhibit.
But the real emphasis of the exhibit rests on pieces inspired by the church’s earthly hierarchy—a group that the curators tell us is made up of priests (of different ranks and religious orders), bishops, cardinals, and popes as well as “nuns and monks” who have elected a “deliberately modest position” (they leave out deacons). The existence of this clear earthly hierarchy is a boon to the fashion designers, who capitalize on the church’s eagerness to use dress to “reflect and reinforce divisions based on rank and gender.” A good number of the designs reference the habits of women religious, particularly habits that were more commonly worn before the late 1960s. More prominent, however, are pieces inspired by priests’ liturgical wear, items that have remained a steady presence in Catholic life, with some modest changes, up to the present day. Not only do the exhibit’s main rooms bristle with cleric-inspired clothes, but the entire collection on loan from the Vatican, pieces designed mainly with ritual functions in mind, consists of the couture of the ordained, specifically various popes. Hierarchy, and specifically the earthly hierarchy topped by clerics, could hardly be more central.
The exhibit, in other words, is about power as much as it is about beauty. More precisely, it is about the ways beauty inflects power. The question then becomes what kinds of power the exhibit marshals or interrogates and to what ends.
Visual Culture and the Power of Vestments
Photo Credit: US National Archives. Father (Major) Edward J. Waters, Catholic Chaplain from Oswego, New York, conducts Divine Services on a pier for members of the first assault troops thrown against Hitler’s forces on the continent. Weymouth, England. June 6, 1944.
There may be a clue in U.S. religious history. In recent years I have spent time viewing photographs from the Second World War. There too, priestly clothing featured prominently in the stories the image makers were telling. One of the most common visual motifs of the war featured a robed priest—often with arms aloft in the moment of consecration during the mass—surrounded by military equipment, especially weapons, jeeps, tanks, and ships. There were obvious reasons for a focus on priests as part of the U.S. effort to promote its cause during the war. Priests offered a clear signal of “religiosity,” a crucial part of the narrative that aimed to distinguish the Allies from their supposedly irreligious or anti-religious enemies. Priests lent an aura of moral righteousness to the U.S. cause, offering reassurance both of the justice of the war and the eternal security of those fighting it. Priests also allowed image makers to tell a story of U.S. religious pluralism.
The priests-at-war motif served other ends as well. These results can be discerned in part by reading Catholic responses to the images they saw being produced by the U.S. propaganda machine: they could not get enough. Military and civilian photographers put Catholics at center stage in the war effort, and Catholic image makers—editors of Catholic journals, books, and pamphlets who often drew on the storehouse of images made available by the government—loved what they saw. Based on the commentaries and captioning they developed to accompany the images, Catholic writers were particularly fixated on the intersection of “heavenly” bodies and objects—priests and the things they carried and wore—with military objects. To be sure, Catholics weren’t just imagining these overlaps. Photographers emphasized them as well through the formal decisions of their art. Led in this way, Catholic writers particularly relished these intersections, routinely pointing them out to readers who might not be aware that they were viewing, say, a mass being said atop an altar jury-rigged out of an ammunition box.
Photo Credit: US Marine Corps. US Navy Chaplain O. David Herrmann preparing to hold religious service for US Marines on Saipan, Mariana Islands, June 24, 1944; note wrecked Type 95 Ha-Go light tank used as altar.
War photographers showed U.S. Catholics to themselves in the context of global war. Catholics took those images and leveraged them into stories about the sublime resonance and holy solemnity of their distinctive ways of being religious. The specific materiality of Catholic ritual life was made to absorb, leaven, and sanctify modern means of death and destruction. Catholic objects, and especially Catholic priests, were not irrelevant remnants from a superstitious past, but potent mediators of sanctifying grace in a terrifying world. The war images gave Catholics a way to think their Catholicism in the midst of a destructive and shifting modern context.
A Mirror of the Church: Sex and Spirituality
Heavenly Bodies is likewise a vehicle for showing Catholics to themselves. This time the salient context is not war. The exhibit instead positions Catholic bodies and their special objects amid three volatile cultural touchpoints of signal importance to the church: gender, sex, and spirituality. First, the exhibit takes place amid widespread challenges to inherited rigidities around gender within and around the church. The case for resuscitating women deacons within the church recently gained attention when Pope Francis directed a commission to explore the issue. Non-Roman Catholics, a good portion of whom differentiate themselves from the Roman church mainly through their support for the ordination of women, have stirred up recent waves of scholarly and popular analysis. On questions of sexuality, a recent publication by exhibit consultant and popular author Fr. James Martin, S.J. raised storms within sectors of the church for its call for a caring ministry for and conversation with LGBTQ Catholics. The clerical sexual abuse crisis has not really abated, and continually reopens discussion of the sex lives of priests, with some wondering whether celibacy and the historic silences and repressions of seminary and rectory can be blamed for producing men willing to exploit their power over the vulnerable. Others have seen fit to conflate sexual abuse with homosexuality, thus creating a scapegoat out of gay priests and pushing silence about sexuality deeper into the fabric of the church. More widely, the exhibit takes place after the success of popular media exploring sexual orientation and gender identity, including television shows like Transparent, which dives into the life of a trans woman and her family. The exhibit also rests within the context of heightened awareness about the sexual exploitation of women by men, including accusations against the star of Transparent, Jeffrey Tambor.
Photo Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gallery View, Medieval Sculpture Hall.
“Spirituality” stands as the third dominant context within which “Heavenly Bodies” must be understood. An oft-cited Pew study from 2015 revealed that there are nearly half as many people in the country (9% of the total adult population) who consider themselves former Catholics as those that call themselves Catholic (20% of the total adult population). Another 9% are characterized as “cultural Catholics.” One might look at this positively, and note that 38% (45% if you count those married to Catholics) of adult Americans have been substantively shaped by the Catholic tradition. But interpretations have tended in the other direction, toward handwringing about decreasing affiliation. A rise in the number of people claiming no religious affiliation at all (23%) has aggravated such concerns. Again, the statistics might be misleading since the so-called “nones” definitively have “some” religion in the form of “belief in God” (61%), an affirmation that religion is “very important” to them (13%), and “daily prayer” (20%). But downward trends in these numbers since 2007, and high rates of disaffiliation among Millennials (in comparison with other generations at the same age), have heightened a popular sense that spirituality is supplanting religion. Indeed, if my classrooms at a Catholic university are any indication, the idea of being “spiritual but not religious” has had tremendous staying power. This notion permeates the exhibit (and the history of modern museums) as well. At the press tour before the official opening of the exhibit, the curator, Andrew Bolton, remarked that most of the featured designers were themselves Catholic, although not necessarily actively practicing. Bolton also remembered his own Catholic upbringing, but made no comments about his current relation to the tradition.
It is in these contexts—heightened scrutiny of rigid norms of sex and gender as well as the increasing feeling that religion is faltering before “spirituality”—that the exhibit reveals Catholics to themselves. What they will see, particularly the implicit pairing of official and imagined clerical clothing, has the effect of a kind of funhouse mirror which rather than distorting reality, brings latent or suppressed elements to the fore.
Showcasing a Countercultural Tradition
In this case, Catholics are being shown subversive sides of the tradition vis-à-vis U.S. masculinity, femininity, and idealizations of spiritual autonomy. In simpler terms, Catholics will see the ways the church is gender fluid, sexually playful, and resolutely hierarchical. Unlike many in the church, the designers do not shy away, but embrace and even make a virtue of the abiding anti-Catholic barb about a feminized priesthood. This observation, dating back probably to the beginning of the priesthood itself, has long entertained and riled the church’s critics (from inside and out) who see clerical men—celibate and yet with special access to both men and women’s deepest secrets—as disruptive to gender norms. Martin Luther was famous for reviling the non-procreative priesthood as contrary to nature and God’s law. Other critics of the priesthood have seized particularly on priests’ clothing, especially the long cassock and liturgical chasuble, to suggest that a fundamental perversion of standard sexual norms is woven into the church’s hierarchy (see Gary Wills’ Why Priesthood? A Failed Tradition, 25-27). The designers play with these kinds of gendered expectations, borrowing from priestly cassocks worn in the tradition only by men, for example, to dress a manikin with an Ava Gardner shape. A white and gold get-up topped by a tall mitre—the kind that would only be worn by a pope—rests on a form with an impossibly girdled waist and rounded bosom (Rihanna reinforced the look at the Met Gala). The prominent militant Catholic in the exhibit is Joan of Arc, a visionary woman famous for wearing men’s clothing in her pursuit of a role in the defense of France during the Hundred Years’ War. Ordained and vowed men, as well as vowed women, have long been told that they give up sex and the procreative family in order to be married to Christ or the church itself. In keeping with this standard, the mystical tradition, of course, routinely takes readers into saints’ erotic encounters with Jesus. In these ways at least, as Mark Jordan and Anthony Petro have also helped us see heterosexuality, gender rigidity, and sexual prudishness are norms that are not actually normative in the church.
Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Digital Composite Scan by Katerina Jebb. Mitre of Pius XI (reigned 1922–39) Italian, 1929. Courtesy of the Collection of the Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, Papal Sacristy, Vatican City.
Neither is spiritual autonomy. The tradition, the exhibit reminds us, is resolutely mediated, the opposite of “spiritual” in that it establishes specific and reserved hierarchical pathways through which one unites with God. This interpretation pushes back slightly against the interpretation offered in the exhibit’s curatorial framing. The exhibit’s subtitle, “Fashion and The Catholic Imagination,” borrows from the great sociologist-priest Andrew Greeley, and frames the exhibit as part of the church’s confirmation that God’s grace is available, potentially at least, through everything in creation. This spiritual reading of Catholicism is certainly woven into the tradition. But the centrality of Holy Communion and Confession as means of grace offers a competing notion. In ordinary circumstances these sacraments are required, and themselves require priests. Surrounded by clerical clothes and prominent talk of hierarchy, visitors to the exhibit encounter a profoundly mediated tradition, not a tradition of independent searching, God in all things, and spiritual autonomy.
They see, in other words, another strikingly countercultural feature of the Roman Catholic tradition. While corporate boardrooms and political offices make gestures toward gender inclusivity, the Roman Catholic priesthood resolutely denies it. And even though the theology of priests has moved fitfully toward collaborative, inclusive, and horizontal models over the last one hundred years, the fact remains, in the words of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), that priests’ ordination still impresses upon them a “sacred power” to “teach and rule” in a mode that is different from lay Catholics’ authority “in essence and not only in degree.” And this is still the way Catholics tend to experience priests; for better or worse, they add solemnity and sacred presence to any situation, they are not like “us.” This elevation, of course, is deeply resented, easily ridiculed, and readily abused. But it is also, as the wartime photos aver, deeply desired.
This desire for religious hierarchy, the fascination with and even need for divine intermediaries who stand apart from everyday people, is one of the most revealing lessons of the Heavenly Bodies exhibit. The Gala, where elite invitees walk the red carpet in front of the museum while sporting exhibit-inspired clothing of their own, is thus not at all out of step with the religious nature of the exhibit, but profoundly in keeping with it: they are not unlike priests in their elevation, their supposed transcendence of everyday life, their access to power, and their constant proximity to our adulation, derisions, and rejection. The fashions show Catholic (and Catholic-adjacent) people the abiding resonance of the idea of priesthood.
Photo Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gallery View, Cuxa Cloister.
In all of these revelations, the exhibit is restrained and relatively modest. There was even more room for play with the undersides of Catholic life had the curators wished to explore them. It is reasonable to assume that cooperation with the Vatican and the support of the Archdiocese of New York helped keep radically excessive themes in check. But this restraint has not stopped some interpreters from criticizing the exhibit as either unseemly in its embrace of church luxury or sacrilegious in its playful appropriations of sacred realities. What these critiques miss, and what I myself missed in my initial reactions to the exhibit, are the ways in which the collection offers Catholics a chance to think about their tradition, to see themselves anew, in a contemporary context of spiritual, sexual, and gender fluidity.
John C. Seitz is a scholar of U.S. religion. He serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and as an Associate Director for the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston’s Parish Shutdowns (Harvard, 2011) and of academic articles about the Roman Catholic priesthood in the U.S., U.S. Catholics in the Second World War, and the study of religion.
A line of refugees crossing the border of Hungary and Austria on their way to Germany. September 6th, 2015. Photo credit Mstyslav Chernov.
“The political and intellectual history of modernity,” writes historian Robert Orsi, “is also always a religious history.” However, as significant and diverse recent scholarship is now bringing to light, narratives around the political, intellectual, and religious history of modernity often serve not only to illuminate the past, but also to obscure it through the authorization of specific forms of experience and knowledge.
This symposium, entitled “Decolonizing Narratives, Denaturalizing Modernity,” aims to highlight recent scholarship that complicates received notions around the history of modernity. While focusing on distinct temporal, geographical, and religious contexts, in their shared attempts to uncover histories hidden by the dominant discourses of modernity, the authors featured in this symposium uniformly challenge the naturalization of modernity’s emergence and indicate that that the history of modernity has always been (and remains) fundamentally contested.
Modernity and Witchcraft
In Peter Geschiere’s now seminal work, The Modernity of Witchcraft, witchcraft discourse and the occult more generally in West Africa are presented as a flexible and ambivalent mechanism to consider and engage social change, and not a logically closed system of beliefs and practices in the manner described by earlier structural anthropologists. Witchcraft is highly important today because many individuals from different countries and communities on the African continent turn to forms of magic, vodou, juju, or the supernatural broadly understood to navigate the unsteady and inconsistent challenges of globalization. If Robert Orsi’s contention that the political history of modernity is also always religious history, it merits considering how this might extend to one of the most widespread and omnipresent religious forces and practices in Africa, namely witchcraft as a manifestation of the supernatural. Witchcraft accusations that surface in various guises in asylum claims, and how they are adjudicated and often rejected for various reasons such as not rising to the level of what is considered religion in European and North American immigration courts, provide one context to think about this issue.
In 2009, the adherents of a vodou priest (bokono) kidnapped Dopé (not her real name) in Cotonou, Benin, and brought her to the atikevodou shrine of Sakpata near Cové where she was imprisoned and raped. After several weeks, Dopé, an educated, married mother, escaped to her husband and then fled to the US to seek asylum. She believed her experiences were the result of her childhood betrothal as trokosi, a form of indebted curse exacted for her mother’s infidelity. Dopé’s supernatural narrative troubled her lawyers and they feared no judge would consider it credible. They reframed her claim by documenting misogynistic forced marriage practices, sexual assault, child abuse, child slavery and the widespread belief in levirate (widow remarriage to husband’s kin). Her lawyers chose gender violence arguments coupled with established precedent pertaining to slavery and trafficking as a strategy to avoid foregrounding the discussion of vodou, often considered a form of witchcraft by adjudicators (asylum-granting officials).
The Asylum Process and the Climate of Suspicion
Dopé’s experience, like those of other women whose testimonies I have been asked to evaluate as an expert witness in federal immigration court, is emblematic of legal strategies unfolding in response to the increasing securitization of migration described by Vicki Squire, and new technologies of adjudication my co-editor, Galya Ruffer, and I have explored elsewhere. Until the 1980s, refugee and asylum legal procedures operated within an informal climate of trust and applicants were generally presumed to be telling the truth. Customized research—such as expert testimony from scholars or professionals or medico-legal reports—was almost unheard of. Since the 1980s, however, significant global geopolitical changes have conspired to turn the refugee experience upside down. The refugee status determination process is now overshadowed by what Didier Fassin and Estelle D’Halluin refer to as a “climate of suspicion, in which the refugee or asylum seeker is seen as someone trying to take advantage of the country’s hospitality.”
What Paul Ricœur first called “hermeneutics of suspicion” characterizes asylum and refugee proceedings and gives rise to new technologies. One such technology, data referred to as “Country of Origin Information” or COI, has become central to the pseudo-scientific testing of asylum narratives, and increasingly it features in so-called “credibility assessments.” Adjudicators increasingly emphasize the importance of empirical research in establishing claimant credibility. Claims and counterclaims must be anchored by objective data, publicly sourced information, and arguments substantiated by scholarly evidence.
Country of Origin Information has emerged as a specialized knowledge category that attempts to answer, with empirical data, the central matter of refugee law: namely, who is a refugee? As Jean-François Lyotard explained, the burden resting on individual asylum seekers to prove claims that often cannot be documented is a “wrong,” but one that is “accompanied by the loss of means to prove the damage.” The temptation to stretch, embellish, or invent narratives that conform to asylum law is thus enormous. Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication barriers coupled with physical and psychological traumas add considerable complexity, making inconsistency part and parcel of the process of narration. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida explained, the borderline between “political” and “economic” refugees is very difficult to determine.
Asylum and the Supernatural
Recent scholarship on the supernatural in Africa—including, but not limited to practices described as magic, sorcery, and witchcraft—has returned to the distinction, first articulated by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, between external and somatic supernatural power. Peter Geschiere is one of several scholars to have observed that witchcraft, the preeminent folk terminology for the supernatural, is much more public in Africa today, and features in political and social debate. Witchcraft-driven violence challenges socio-political order with a variety of political and legislative outcomes. Witchcraft and sorcery, in Katherine Luongo’s words, “denote a continuum ranging from supernatural malevolence to supernatural healing.” Harry West has described how on Mozambique’s Muedan plateau the “world of sorcery” is “filled with shades of gray.” By contrast, however, according to Katherine Luongo, “no ambiguity about witchcraft or witches exists” in the “global arena of asylum.” Witchcraft operates as an “embodied capacity” to “harm” and it certainly does not engage the Refugee Convention’s religious protection. Luongo contends that in asylum claims, witchcraft has “an uncomfortable ahistoricity and an awkward detachment from institutions.”
Asylum-seekers are often uncomfortable divulging the full details of the supernatural realm, but generally speaking it is my experience that many are confident that their experiences mark them as constitutive of another Refugee Convention protected category, namely the “particular social group.” Asylum claims in which the supernatural is only one facet in a multidimensional case enable us to avoid entering into the rich but frustrating debate about what constitutes a distinct “social group” basis for asylum. Dopé’s story demonstrates how, in contrast with many adjudicators’ perceptions that “primitive beliefs” are the realm of the poor and illiterate, the supernatural is not confined to lower socio-economic echelons. Dopé, an educated, married mother living in Benin’s economic capital, Cotonou, but originally from the village of Cové, fled to the US after her traumatic experience. Dopé claimed she was kidnapped as an adult in her late twenties by adherents of a bokono and brought to his atikevodou (healing vodou) shrine of Sakpata, where she was imprisoned and repeatedly raped.
As indicated above, Dopé believed her experiences as an adult were the result of her betrothal as a child to a vodou shrine as a form of indebted inherited slavery (trokosi), a form of punishment exacted on her mother for her alleged infidelity. Dopé interpreted her predicament to be the result of her public disavowal of the trokosi obligations when she reached maturity. She had been raped and abused by her kidnapper’s brother multiple times as a child. But when she reached maturity, she simply walked from the compound and moved to Cotonou to begin a new life. Whereas the individual to whom she was betrothed had made no attempt to entice her to the shrine, after his death, his brother dispatched men to kidnap her, consistent with his understanding of levirate.
In Dope’s initial interview, the US asylum officer rejected the idea that educated, literate women practiced vodou. The Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services held that only the poor, rural, and illiterate would be involved in sorcery and magic. On appeal in immigration court, this decision was overturned. Whereas ritual enslavement and vodou confounded the first-level bureaucratic adjudicator, defensively resisting slavery, kidnapping, rape, and imprisonment—in a country where vodou is publicly sanctioned and where the state has designated a “National Voodoo Day”—constituted established grounds for social group persecution in the eyes of the immigration judge. Citing the constitution and the statutes of Benin that prohibit many practices attendant to slavery, but importantly make no mention of trokosi and vodounsi, sexual slavery, forced marriage (mariage forcé), and sexual assault in the context of marriage, the judge held that it remained the case that many women continue to be subject to the ‘Coutumier du Dahomey’ which treat them as legal minors and accord them limited rights in marriage and inheritance. Importantly, there was no evidence of enforcement of laws protecting women from some of these human rights violations. Dopé’s legal team thus successfully reassembled her narrative as that of a woman fleeing multiple backward, traditional misogynistic practices, at the center of which was a very violent form of forced marriage for which there was no plausible expectation of state protection.
Questioning Dominant Interpretations of Religion
It’s hard to understand why vodou remains so alien a concept to refugee adjudicators, particularly as the religious observance is so well documented by ethnographers and anthropologists. There is no shortage of lay and scholarly literature about the intrinsic importance of vodou and various other manifestations of animist belief and religious practice. And yet adjudicators remain resistant to interpreting persecution within the context of a vodou-based narrative as engaging the religious persecution protections enshrined in the Refugee Conventions; indeed, Orsi’s framework with which I began this blog post seem almost prophetic.
There are perhaps two reasons why vodou troubles refugee adjudicators. The first is the nature of the judiciary; for example in 2017 the UK judiciary remained composed of a majority of white males, although this is changing. Similar gender and racial dynamics can be found in many jurisdictions in Europe and North America. The second issue is the inherently conservative nature of refugee decision-making. No judge likes to be overturned on appeal. If a decision can be made based on existing and firmly established interpretation of the Refugee Conventions, there is a strong bias to avoid entering into discussion of matters that may raise the ire or the eyebrows of more senior judges or tribunal heads. Fortunately, both of these dynamics are subject to change over time, and I suspect in the near future attorneys representing other cases mirroring that of Dopé may not need to go to such lengths to achieve migrant justice.
Benjamin N. Lawrance was a visiting scholar at the Kroc Institute from 2017 to 2018. He is a graduate of Stanford University and University College London. He is a professor of history at the University of Arizona and studies comparative historical and contemporary slavery, human trafficking, cuisine and globalization, human rights, refugee mobilities, and asylum decision-making. While at the Kroc Institute, he worked on a book entitled Nations Inside Out: An African Refugee Grammar.
Photo Credit: Nisa Goksel. The Peace Mothers at the 8th of March 2014 (International Women’s Day) demonstration in Diyarbakır.
“The political and intellectual history of modernity,” writes historian Robert Orsi, “is also always a religious history.” However, as significant and diverse recent scholarship is now bringing to light, narratives around the political, intellectual, and religious history of modernity often serve not only to illuminate the past, but also to obscure it through the authorization of specific forms of experience and knowledge.
This symposium, entitled “Decolonizing Narratives, Denaturalizing Modernity,” aims to highlight recent scholarship that complicates received notions around the history of modernity. While focusing on distinct temporal, geographical, and religious contexts, in their shared attempts to uncover histories hidden by the dominant discourses of modernity, the authors featured in this symposium uniformly challenge the naturalization of modernity’s emergence and indicate that that the history of modernity has always been (and remains) fundamentally contested.
Modernity, Women, and War
How should we conceive of the relationship between modernist projects, women, and war in the Middle East? Studies of gender in the Middle East have argued that modernization processes have deeply shaped contemporary women’s identity formations and women’s movements (for a good discussion on the topic see Minoo Moallem 2005). Postcolonial feminist theorists like Moallem provide a wider critique of modernity as fundamentally linked to colonialism. My purpose here is to rethink the interrelated projects of modernity and colonialism through women’s struggles as I discuss how Kurdish women in the Middle East fight against the politics of war and violence. Their efforts suggest that new avenues for decolonization and modernity may be created wherein the role of women are radically re-imagined.
I believe that the main difficulty facing studies on women and gender in the Middle East revolves around developing a framework without relying on two premises: 1) the premise that the experiences of women from distinct national, ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds can be homogenized based on their identity as women; and 2) the premise that women’s status or oppression can be reduced to the centrality of Islamic and/or traditional forces (using, for example, dichotomies of “secular versus pious” or “modern versus traditional”). In addition, existing studies do not often take into account the co-constitutive relationship between recent wars in the region and modernity; how wars and modernity interact to affect women’s lives, as women take part in those wars in multiple positions; and how wars as contested sites of modernity and coloniality have transformed the gendered geopolitics of the region.
Let me briefly explain each of these two points. To begin with the first point, we know that feminist theorists with a postcolonial stance have long questioned the monolithic representation of women in the Middle East. According to this representation, women are often viewed as victims in some way—victims of “oppressive” Middle Eastern men; of colonialism; and/or of religious, traditional, and national powers. Feminist critiques effectively demonstrate that what we need to challenge is this homogenous and monolithic representation of women in the Middle East. This homogeneous perspective comes out of an approach that assumes Islam to be the key determining factor in women’s lives. This brings us to the second point, related to what Marnia Lazreg calls the “religious paradigm.” In this paradigm, which is dominant in the social sciences, women of “other” nations are perceived as yet-to-be-modern, for they are seen as trapped by religious/patriarchal dogmas and traditions. Postcolonial feminist debates challenging the centrality of Islam to existing analyses of modernity and women open up the ground for us to reconsider the interrelations among social, political, cultural, and religious forces that impact women’s lives, instead of explaining the status of women through Islam alone.
War and Colonialism
More importantly, another point I want to emphasize is the role of recent wars in the Middle East and how clearly they show the intersectional relationship between modernity and colonialism. This has been one of the main concerns of my own research on Kurdish women’s struggles for peace and democracy across borders. Wars in the Middle East cannot be understood if we merely base our analysis on the relationship between Islam and modernity. The link between modernity and coloniality is another paradigm to be considered when we discuss war-waging techniques in the Middle East. The perspective of Santiago Slabodsky becomes very useful here as he challenges Western modernity and its colonial foundations through a Jewish decolonial critique. Walter Mignolo, too, reminds us of the coupling of Western modernity and coloniality in President Bush’s statement referring to the U.S.’ wars in the region as “spreading democracy in the Middle East.” Democracy, progress, and peace are embedded into the rhetoric of modernity as much as a colonial logic is. Mignolo argues that this is indeed an extended endeavor to secure “the completion of the incomplete project of modernity” in the region (2007, 458). In this sense, any war waged in the name of “humanitarian” intervention is already part of a larger modernist and colonial enterprise. Particularly since 9/11, this nexus of modernity and coloniality has been a key site for the discourse of the War on Terror, the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continuing war in Syria.
While the discourse of spreading democracy to the Middle East goes hand in hand with the discourse of “saving women” who are seen as victims of Islamic fundamentalist powers, I see current wars as creating an ambivalent terrain that allows for actions that are particularly destabilizing to existing discourses. This ambivalent terrain of war and violence makes it difficult to categorize women either as victims or as agents, insofar as it allows for various alternative, creative, and revolutionary modalities of political conduct for women. Even though war, modernity, and colonialism are intricately linked in the Middle East, I believe that the context of war is crucial to the formation of alternative women’s movements and groups as well as to the alternative imaginations of modernity, which I will illustrate through two examples from my research on Kurdish women.
Alternative Women’s Movements
The first example I want to draw on is the Peace Mothers organization. This is a group of Kurdish women who mobilized in reaction to the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish guerrilla organization the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party). This war has been ongoing in Turkey since the late 1980s, alternating between temporary ceasefires or periods of peace and renewed outbreaks of violence. The Peace Mothers group is made up of the mothers of PKK guerrillas. They are visible members of protests in their characteristic white headscarves. These women pursue an end to the war across various national and international political platforms, whether in the streets or the Parliament. The Peace Mothers challenge and shift the boundaries of modern politics through their political participation as mothers. Furthermore, the figure of the Kurdish mother disrupts the image of the “modern woman” so long upheld by the hegemonic Turkish modernization project. The ideal Turkish woman citizen is represented as a mother and wife whose life “benefits” from the modernization project, circumscribed by the code of morality. In this project, mothers are responsible for raising patriotic, Turkish-speaking citizens. Kurdish mothers, however, often resist acting as breeders of Turkish national culture—for example, by speaking Kurdish and embracing Kurdish culture. In this context, the anti-war efforts of the Peace Mothers constitute a ground for claiming the right to be and to speak Kurdish. This stands in opposition to the supposed homogeneity of Turkey’s “modern” national community.
Photo credit: Shervan Derwish and Jack Shahine. Women remove their burqas upon crossing from ISIS-controlled territory into an area controlled by Kurdish fighters.
My other example is from just across the border from Turkey: the Kurdish women fighters in the Kurds’ resistance in Syria. At the time of the outbreak of war in Syria, we witnessed a proliferation of images of Kurdish women in the Western media. Cameras frame images of these Kurdish women smiling, carrying arms, casting off burqas, and smoking cigarettes. These women are portrayed as “modern,” “secular,” and “liberated”. In many of those photos, women cast off their burqas to show that they have been “freed” from IS upon entering Kurdish-controlled areas. These women, whether or not they carry arms, have become the “new” and “progressive” faces of the Middle East. Their fight against IS has been framed as a fight against “Islamic terrorism.” But outside of their supposed fight against “Islam,” the Western media has paid scant attention to the ideological side of these women’s struggle in Syria. In fact, Kurdish women define their fight as a women’s revolution, whose goal is the transformation of all segments of society, and the decolonization of their lands, their minds, their pasts, and their marginalized histories.
Even though the Peace Mothers in Turkey and Kurdish women in Syria continue to struggle, the international public has recently, it seems, lost interest in these Kurdish women. Why has this interest faded so quickly? I believe the answer to this question takes us back to the relationship between coloniality and modernity. Specifically, it returns us to the necessity of a postcolonial feminist perspective on such questions. Yet this interest and fascination with the struggles of Kurdish women is contingent on the Western eye. Indeed, the fetishizing, colonialist gaze is doomed to be short-term. The gaze of interest will inevitably find new objects of attention. To this fetishizing gaze, the acts of Peace Mothers and Kurdish women fighters might seem to juxtapose: one seeks peace and the other takes up arms. Yet both these groups struggle for the same ideal. Each works to build an alternate society by shattering the violent foundations of modernity. Each tries to create a non-colonial modernity and to reclaim modernity’s unfulfilled promise of peace and democracy. These women’s efforts for these goals lead us to ask: is it possible to imagine a modernity that is truly democratic and peaceful?
Further reading
Çağlayan, Handan. 2008. “Voices from the Periphery of the Periphery: Kurdish Women’s Political Participation in Turkey.” Presented at 17th Annual Conference on Feminist Economics, June 19-21, 2008 (Torino, Italy).
Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1987. “Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case.” Feminist Studies 13(2): 317-338.
Lazreg, Marnia. 1990. “Gender and Politics in Algeria: Unraveling the Religious Paradigm.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 15(4): 755-780.
Lewis, Reina. 2004. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. London, New York: I.B. Tauris.
———. 1996. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. London and New York: Routledge.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
———. 2007. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 449-514.
Moallem, Minoo. 2005. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Moghadam, M. Valentine. 1999. “Revolution, Religion, and Gender Politics: Iran and Afghanistan Compared.” Journal of Women’s History 10(4): 172-195.
———. 2003 [1993]. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Üstündağ, Z. Nazan. 2005. Belonging to the Modern: Women’s Suffering and Subjectivities in Urban Turkey. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University.
Nisa Göksel recently earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University, Evanston. She also holds a graduate certificate from the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Northwestern. While at the Kroc Institute as visiting fellow from 2017-2018, she worked on two projects. The first was a book project based on her dissertation about the political mobilization of Kurdish women around peace, democracy, and women’s freedom. In the second project, she examined the participation of women in armed struggles in the Middle East.
Photo Credit: Gili Getz. IfNotNow march in Washington, DC, May 14, 2018.
This week’s symbolic opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, with attendance from high-ranking American officials and a visual background set portraying the merging of the American and Israeli flags, marked a terribly deadly day for nonviolent Palestinian protesters. Over 61 are now declared dead and almost three thousand more injured, and many may spend the rest of their lives with amputated legs, which (together with spraying tear gas from drones) reveals an operationalized military method to demobilize Gazans. It is not that there are no armed groups in Gaza, but the particular organizers of the protests chose nonviolence, signifying sensitization to the effectiveness—if not the morality—of this method of resistance. Still, how does one expect Palestinians to endure their occupation nonviolently?
The stories conveyed in the American stagecraft and, importantly, the stories silenced or omitted, reveal the U.S. to be actively fueling the conflict it claims to want to resolve and increasing the divide between non-Israeli Jews and Israeli Jews. In the Trump era, antisemites and Christian Zionists are co-positioned as moral authorities, delegitimizing the U.S. as an honest broker in the region. Questioning the honesty of the United States’ brokering is not new. What is new is how clear this argument has become given the juxtaposition of the carnage in Gaza and the pomp and circumstance in Jerusalem. This juxtaposition conveys the complexities of modernity through a specific set of discourses and practices. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation of Palestine cannot be understood without interrogating colonialism, orientalism, and antisemitism and how they relate to one another in narrating (Christian) modernity.
The indiscriminate violence against protesters in Gaza expressing their right of return, and the unilateral and provocative decision of Trump’s U.S. to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, only serve to deepen existing divisions, amplifying some narratives and silencing others. One narrative is most critically concerned with decades of Israeli occupation and the denial of Palestinian experiences of displacement. Relatedly, the many dead and injured people are often presented as faceless statistics, showing how entrenched colonial narratives about Israel and Palestine are. Palestinians, like other indigenous communities around the globe, appear to be both “ungrievable” and their dispossession instrumental for modernity as “progress.” Indeed, the siege on Gaza is a constant embodiment of coloniality as the constitutive dark side of modernity. Another narrative is about the consolidation of an expansive conception of Jerusalem as pivotal for the Jewish-Israeli nationalist imagination. Religious messianic Zionism is as modern as the secular discourses of national self-determination and could have not come into fruition if it were not for multiple “secular” Israeli governments’ subsidizing of the settlement project in the territories occupied in 1967.
There are other less muscular and less ethnoreligious narratives of Israeliness. However, these are increasingly diminished in traction. In recent years, internal critics of the occupation have been marginalized with the intensification of censorship and the delegitimization of groups such as Breaking the Silence. That President Trump appears to have a high percentage of approval in the Israeli public denotes both the partisan nature of American policy in the region and the diminished capacity of the United States to act as an honest broker. It is not only that its policy decision to relocate the embassy cohered with Benjamin Netanyahu’s aspiration and his coalition’s ideological underpinnings. It is also the case that the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from an internationally ratified agreement with Iran is very much in line with Israeli agenda as articulated by Netanyahu and his political allies in Israel and the United States. Let us not forget Netanyahu’s effort to meddle in the deliberations in the House of Representatives, pleading with Congress to reject the Iran Deal in 2015. He now has what he was lobbying for.
The symbolic opening of the embassy amid destruction and death in Gaza also points to the silencing of suffering, routine violence, and military control over every facet of Palestinian lives. It allows one historical memory of Jewish suffering to trump and authorize others’ suffering and constant state of domination. This is the legacy of European Jewish modernity. The segregation, ghettoization, and eventual elimination of Jews is framed as a unique event, blinding Jews to the humanity and suffering of Palestinians whose displacement is so intertwined with the replacement of Jews in Palestine, and whose ghettoization in open air prisons such as Gaza presses upon us the terrible ironies of this modern narrative. But, memory, as argued powerfully by Michael Rothberg, does not need to be a zero-sum game. Holocaust memory too can be fruitfully decolonized.
The eruption in Gaza and the Jerusalem provocation also convey the coalescing of radicalization in Israel with the currents of Christian Zionism in the U.S. and their access to, indeed occupation of, the U.S. government, as indicated by the choice of pastors Robert Jeffers and John Hagee to offer benedictions and open the dedication ceremony of the embassy. Jeffers is infamous for his explicit anti-Muslim, anti-Mormon, anti-LGBTQI, and anti-Jewish statements. Hagee is likewise well known as the founder of Christians United for Israel. Both have theologized about pre-eschatological apocalyptic events in the Middle East. With the transfer of the embassy and the dissolution of the Iran Deal, they got the match they have been praying for and thus both offered words of praise to Trump as an instrument in their end-time drama. The symbolic ceremony in Jerusalem embodied the merging of the cynical, ideological, and eschatological as well as Islamophobia (orientalism), Zionism, and antisemitism. Meanwhile, in besieged Gaza, Israeli forces demonstrated a profound disregard for human life.
Choosing these pastors to lend supposedly moral authority to the event illuminates what became clear for critical American Jews and other non-Israeli Jews: in the Trump era, antisemitism and Zionism can go hand in hand, with someone like Richard Spencer celebrating his euphemistically labeled alt-right as “Zionism for white people.” Indeed, they also go hand in hand with multiple other bigotries. Hence, the most hopeful story is the protests led by IfNotNow, the millennial-led movement of American Jews. They assert, first, that Occupation is “not my Judaism” (#NotMyJudaism) and that the embassy move is an act clearly designed to entrench the occupation. These young people are indignant about their leaders’ warm relationship with the clear consolidation of antisemitic strains of Zionism. They also know that Israel does not make them safer. On the contrary, antisemitism is on the rise and their leaders seem to be okay with this. Otherwise, how could they enable the theater of the absurd that unfolded in the ceremonial opening of the embassy in Jerusalem.
The relocation of the embassy, the carnage in Gaza, and the honoring (and vindication) of Hagee and Jeffers point not only to the discrediting of the U.S. as a broker of peace in the region. It also points to the changing dynamics between Jews and Israelis, and the complex interplays between antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Zionism. This moment offers unprecedented clarity of the Trump Administration’s partisan support of a particular ethnoreligious nationalist version of Israel. What was previously expressed more opaquely (i.e. American support of the occupation, the enduring settlement project, and Israeli militarization) is now unequivocally clear. This clarity deepens the parting of the ways among non-Israeli and Israeli Jews. It also paves the road for a paradigm shift in terms of modes of imagining cohabitation. With the discrediting of the American brokerage, we hear loudly the nails in the coffin of the two-state solution.
Photo Credit: Javed Akhatar. Madrasa Discourses students in the Education City Mosque in Doha in December 2017.
How can old tradition serve new knowledge creation? From a theological perspective, what happens when science begins to see human beings as it sees other animals, plants, and even inanimate matter? To ponder these and similar questions, the Madrasa Discourses project 2017 winter intensive invited about 50 madrasa students and faculty from India and Pakistan to Doha, Qatar. For six days we were exposed to serious and interesting lectures, discussions, dialogues, and workshops on translating Islam across cosmologies.
On the first day, Professor Mahan Mirza, Lead Faculty at the University of Notre Dame for the project, revealed the agenda for the next week: “Not to tell you what to think, but rather just to think!” He drew our attention to the two notions of dhikr (remembrance of Allah) and the verses of fikr (imagination) in the Qur’an. His discussion centered on contemporary theological challenges through which he helped us to understand the link between faith and science. This has been a subject of study since ancient times, addressed by theologians, philosophers, and now scientists. While previously overlapping categories, religious scholarship and the practice of observation and experimentation are now often seen as distinct, with some characterizing the relationship as one of conflict, others describing it as one of contrast, and others proposing convergence (see Haught 2012). On the subject of death and immortality, modern science and modern culture have an entirely different take on life and death as compared to Islamic religious perspectives. The former don’t think of death as a metaphysical mystery, and they certainly don’t view death as the source of life’s meaning. Rather, for many modern people death is a technical problem that we can and should solve. Humans always die due to some technical glitch, for example, the heart stops pumping blood, cancerous cells spread in the liver, etc. These are all technical problems. And every technical problem has a technical solution that in the future can or must be solved (Harari 2015, 22-23)! Students engaged in small group discussions in the late afternoons on various prompts created by Professor Mirza. For instance: “What approach (conflict, contrast, or convergence) between science and faith is acceptable?”“Will modern science succeed in solving the puzzle of death?” “How may a-mortality challenge theology?”
Hermeneutics, history, and tradition were discussed the next day by Professor Ebrahim Moosa, Primary Investigator of the Madrasa Discourses Project and Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His session included textuality in Muslim imagination from authority to metaphoricity, and the intimacy of language and thought in Islam. He emphasized the hermeneutic circle that refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and non-verbal communication as well as presuppositions, pre-understandings, and semiotics (Mir et al. 2015, 113; see also McNamara 1994). Several of the concerns that grew out of his lecture became prompts for the afternoon session: “Does the language we use correspond to reality?” “What is the role of culture in language production?” “Why is it so difficult to translate concepts from one language to another?”
The third day, Professor Deen Mohammed, professor at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University and originally from Sri Lanka, talked about ethics and the ‘ulamā’s role related to contemporary problems and upgrading the capacity of theologians. Dr. Mohammed, who studied in a madrasa and a Buddhist monastery, explicitly highlighted the importance of Muslim ideology and introduced us to the ideas of Ghazāli and Shahāb ad-Dīn Suhrawardī. We also had the opportunity to hear from Professor Mohamed Khalifa, an Arab scholar also from Hamad Bin Khalifa University, who drew our attention to several topics, including the harmony between Christianity and Islam; the causes underlying the rise and decline of Islamic communities; the impact of colonialism on the Muslim world; environmental and sustainable development; why the ’ulamā do not talk about science and technology in Jumu’ah khutba (Friday prayer speech); and why do we not translate relevant scientific developments from European languages to our local languages.
These class discussions spilt over into the dining hall, cafes, and field trips.
Bringing the winter intensive full circle, Professors Waris Mazhari and Maulana Ammar Nasir, Madrasa Discourses Project Lead Faculty from India and Pakistan, respectively, talked of language, scripture, and interpretation on the fourth day. Their lectures helped us to understand that we are not alone in trying to reconcile our experiences, understandings, and social realities with our interpretations of the wahy (revelation). Great Muslim scholars, like Ghazāli in the past, also made efforts to reconcile Aql (reason) and Naql (text) and while doing so even faced similar kinds of challenges. They resolved these according to the realities and sensibilities of their own space and time.
The program culminated on the fifth day with Professor Rana Dajani, who discussed teaching evolution in the Muslim world and her strategies to reconcile Sharia norms (Islamic divine law) with the evolving international consensus on human rights, views based on scientific discoveries, and human experiences. During her lecture she stated that the theory of evolution and Islamic ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Photo Credit: Javed Akhatar. Dr. Ebrahim Moosa gives closing words after the Madrasa Discourses Winter Intensive in Doha in December 2017.
The sixth day wrapped up the winter intensive with summary presentations by the students and concluding remarks by our instructors and mentors. Professor Moosa concluded the intensive with the Urdu couplet of the famous poet Shakeel Badayuni, inviting students to not fear foreign influences, but rather find strength in their ability and culture, and use this strength to good ends (own translation below):
Merā azm itnā buland hai ki parā-e sholoñ kā Dar nahīñ
Mujhe ḳhauf ātish-e-gul se hai ye kahīñ chaman ko jalā na de
(My confidence in self is strong; I’m unafraid of foreign flames
I’m scared those sparks may ignite, that in the blossom’s bosom lay)
After six days of intense material and discussion, we were both mentally and physically exhausted. Our stay in “Education City” was, beyond doubt, a journey to comprehend questions of theodicy such as “how do old traditions serve knowledge-creation in modernity?” and realize their answers. We learned that many old Muslim traditions have never been opposed to modernism, novelty, and fresh interpretation. Moreover, these traditions did realize and comprehend the call for change and they performed their interpretations according to their space and time. Now the ‘ulamā of today, learning from the past, must act the same in accordance with today’s space and time.
We benefited from a variety of constructive ideas. Even if the program ended here, it would still be considered a resounding success for the deep reflection and personal transformation it engendered in us. Truly, it was an unbelievable journey of six days in “Education City”, Qatar, which we by no means are likely to forget.
Javed Akhatar was born and brought up in Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh). Currently, he is teaching at Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi. Akhatar graduated in the science stream from Kanpur University, and received his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Islamic Studies from Jamia Millia Islamia. His scholarly interests include Islamic Studies, Muslim education, world religions, and Islam in India.
Photo Credit: Friscocali. St Bartholomew’s Church in New York City.
An important thread that runs clearly throughout the three responses to my book here, and through my book itself, concerns the fundamental human problem of identity and difference. How are we humans truly like each other in ways we can and must recognize and affirm and appreciate? And how are we genuinely different from each other in ways we must also acknowledge and respect? Humans expend massive energy trying to grind out answers to these thorny questions.
Scholars of religion do so when trying to honor the particularities of distinct religious traditions, sub-traditions, communities, and even individual religious experiences—while simultaneously struggling to name and describe a common subject matter, “religion,” that draws our shared focus of attention in a search for patterns across religious differences that may somehow signal something about our common human condition. But not only scholars wrestle with identity and difference. Much of the activity of everyday human life and of extraordinary social movements is also consumed with making sense of the pulls of identity and difference. With or to whom do we belong, and then who is the other, the not-us? Where do we find solidarity, and then who to us are strangers and rivals? What finally binds any of us humans together at any level, and then why and how do we resist being bound too tightly?
Scholars reflect different proclivities in these matters. Some are lumpers who see patterned commonalities, some are splitters who see distinctions. Sociologists tend toward the former by their disciplinary sensibilities, historians the latter. But it is impossible to escape the imperatives and reminders of either. While writing my book, a friend—a splitter—who graciously read the manuscript suggested cautiously that I limit my discussion to those religious traditions with which I actually had some expertise and not try to accomplish anything inclusive, much less universal. I understood. But I resisted. As a critical realist, I believe there is practiced in the real world, objective to our scholarly interpretations of it, a category of meaningful human activity that we call “religion,” and that we might as well get on with describing and understanding it as well as we can. That of course immediately requires acknowledging the massive differences that are evident within religion. Which religious hymns may rightly be paired with which others, for example, and why? What do we make of the fact that some religions have Creator Gods while others do not? The fundamental challenge of identity and difference always remains.
The same is true of lived human experience in modernity. Humans have struggled with problems of identity and difference forever, that is nothing new. We are driven by our basic biological, cognitive, and social human constitution. But modernity as a specific social formation dramatically accentuates the difficulties involved. The modern imperatives of identity become overwhelming at times, whether in modern nationalisms, state collectivisms, or totalizing mass-consumer capitalist lifestyle norms. The contradictory imperatives of difference likewise push to extremes in modernity, whether in radical liberal individualism, identity politics, or the democratization of genius’s obligation that every citizen have an equally valuable opinion to express on everything.
Photo Credit: Dan Nguyen. Wall Street in lockdown, September 2011. Trinity Church in the center, visible through security fencing.
Shifting the frame, we see a central problem as the contradiction in modernity between freedom and control, autonomy and discipline, self-assertion and acquiescence. What is modernity if not the life-or-death cry of “Liberty!”? Who is a modern if not the one who charts her own life path against all external constraints? Yet which of us moderns is not absolutely subject to the invasive eyes and hands of the state, the police, the military, the corporation? We are watched, controlled, disciplined at every turn. Modernity has indeed set “the individual” free while simultaneously perfecting the logistics of totalizing social control and discipline. Self-assertion and surveillance are modernity’s twins who will not stop fighting. In the end, the appearance of self-assertion will likely be coopted by the imperatives of surveillance, because the transcendent controlling interests of the owners of capital and the national security state will demand it, and because mass consumers are trained not to see and resist. Meanwhile, the long, agonistic process of the emergence, intensification, and recurrent mêlées generated by the contradictions of modern freedom and control will continue to write the developing script of human experience in the next decades.
All of this explains why modernity always has and will mean multiple modernities, not a singular modernity. The idea of the latter was an academic delusion generated by the Cold War. But we see now that one enlightened, democratic, capitalist, modern world order did not emerge from the collapse of communism. It could not have. Modernity is not simply a political and economic project, but more deeply a cultural one, in some ways a sacred or quasi-religious project. And the cultural project of modernity has never been internally stable, but contradictory, proceeding not as a unified all-systems-go, but deeply at odds with itself.
Liberty? Order? Freedom? Control? Autonomy? Centralization? Self-expression? Self-discipline? Self-affirmation? Surveillance? These are not “or” questions for modernity but “and” problems of modernity. And given our boundless human capacities for creativity and contradiction, obligation and objection, social solidarity and personal self-assertion, the kinds of concrete historical projects, movements, and institutions that modern actors will inevitably generate, live with, and die for will have the character not of singular unity but multiplicity, difference, and internal opposition.
Here we return to religion in modernity. Religion has of course played a leading role in the centuries of modern agonistic struggle over freedom and control, identity and difference. Precisely because religion possesses so many causal powers to shape people and the world, as I describe in the second chapter of my book, religion has not simply faded away into modern secular irrelevance. It is too potent at every level of human interest to have done that. Simply on the question of identity, for instance—meaning not only the matter of general shared similarities, but more specifically personal and social identifications: Who are my people? To whom do I belong?—religion is a key issue in every important economic and geo-political equation running today. And at the heart of those religious issues sits the unresolvable problem of human identity and difference, sameness and otherness, solidarity and exclusion. Thus, in ways that may previously have been opaque to us, highly diverse questions—such as, for example, which religious hymns might be well quoted together in scholarly texts, whether a Creator God is needed as the basis of mutual comprehension, or when we might attribute some outcome to the work of a superhuman power or not—reveal discernable patterns of underlying significance.
If we summarize our modern global problem as being about how to sustain minimal non-destructive coexistence if not actual self-interested cooperation in a radically pluralistic world in which globalization has liquidated most of the constraints of space-time, we continually return to the matter of identity and difference. What do we share? How are we different? And what practically does that mean? It may be that, far from becoming an irrelevant bygone in a secular age, religion proves, for better or worse, to be the telltale factor.
Featured Image: Wally Gobetz, on Flickr.com. “NYC – FiDi: Trinity Church.”
Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, Director of the Notre Dame Center for Social Research, Principal Investigator of the National Study of Youth and Religion, and Principal Investigator of the Science of Generosity Initiative. Smith’s scholarly interests focus on American religion, sociological theory, cultural sociology, adolescents and emerging adults, generosity, the philosophy of social science, and personalism.
