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Freedom of Speech? Palestine as an Exception


Contending Modernities Introduction:

Weeks before Civil Rights icon Angela Davis was to be honored for her unflagging commitment to human rights, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) rescinded the February 2019 award, due to concerns that Davis’ support of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement had been challenged as “anti-Semitic.” In the struggle against modern day racism and oppression, solidarity for Palestinians had yet again been set aside—by a Civil Rights institute no less—as the “exception”: a site of injustice that only one identity group—Jews—might legitimately mobilize for or even discuss, and even then under great stigma. In the past few days, Davis has since been reconfirmed for the award by BCRI, and Michelle Alexander’s “Time to break the silence on Palestine” editorial has placed the issue squarely in the public eye—for the moment.

A year ago, on April 9th-11th, 2018, students from Columbia University and Barnard College held an “Academic Freedom Week” responding to the persecution of progressive academics. Below we share the lecture given on the first day by Columbia University professor and panelist Gil Hochberg on “The Palestinian Exception” (to freedom of speech). In her critique of the forms of censorship performed and enforced by pro- and anti-Zionist Jews and allies, Hochberg identifies the intrinsic narcissism of measuring “real” and “good” Jewish identity with the yardstick of the Palestinian “question.” Discourse and action defining the contours of Palestinian survival become circumscribed to Jews speaking from within Jewish resources about the politics of solidarity—by whom, for whom?—while other identity groups are relegated to a status as secondary allies or excluded from these conversations altogether. As Davis noted, how to navigate these complicated, layered questions of identity, authenticity, and solidarity is a question that strikes at the very heart of the indivisibility of justice.

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April 9, 2018
Columbia University

1.  Anti Semitism/Anti Zionism

News doesn’t last long. A quick flipping through the online news sites of Fox News, CNN, ABC but also the New York Times, LA Times and lesser-known papers today reveals that the latest crazed attack on Gaza has already been forgotten. Hardly even mentioned. News moved elsewhere: to Syria, back to Trump and his kids, back to all sorts of questions and places. There is nothing surprising about this, of course. It takes a lot for Palestine to “enter” the news and it is almost impossible for it to stay there. Part of it is simply “news fatigue“ (how many times can you read or see the same thing, witness the same atrocities when nothing follows in the form of actual political change?). But part of it is of course the strong Israeli lobby and the sad bitter and perhaps inevitable “mix” of the Palestinian question with the longer and stronger (in terms of its impact) Jewish question, translating always to the ghost of anti-Semitism: new or old, real or not.

It is by now become a cliché to argue that a critique of Israel, or of Zionism, is anti-Semitism. I say a cliché because this argument is used time and time and again to silence criticism against the Israeli state, the occupation of Palestine, or Zionism as an ethnic-national principle of separatism that is undemocratic by definition (I remind you of the then Knesset member Ahmad Tibi’s brilliant phrasing: “Israel is Jewish and democratic: it is democratic for the Jews and Jewish for the Arabs”).

It is really a tiring argument that I trust many are tired of debating. Many have combated it before so I do not want to spend the whole time doing so again. Let me say a few words about this twisted logic and then move on to what I believe needs to be part of the next step of our public conversations about censorship and the Palestinian exception.

Anti-Zionism, like Zionism, like any -ISM, can take many forms. It can become or take the form of anti-Semitism, and so can Zionism. But there is absolutely nothing inherent in the critique of Zionism as a principle, or the critique of the state of Israel, that is anti-Semitic. The suggestion that any expression of anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is an indication of severe paranoia at best, and a manipulated rhetoric at worst. Unless we agree that Jews are by default hated and that anti-Semitism is a mode of collective subconscious; there is no logic to the argument that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

At times this crude logic takes a particularly vulgar turn, making the entire discourse of freedom in Palestine out to be mask for anti-Semitism. This is a perverse argument that suggests that caring for Palestinians and their wellbeing is somehow really about hating Jews and seeking their destruction.

The issue with this zero-sum game (one is either for and against Jews or Palestinians), is not just that it is so limited but that it is further used as an effective silencing machine, time and time again.

Attack on Gaza, 2018, as presented by IDF. Photo Credit: The Israel Project, from IDF image.

Indeed, the so-called ‘new anti-Semitism’ associated with the critique of Israel or Zionism is used by Israeli state officials, the IDF, and many supporters of Israel to explicitly justify state terror and protect Israel from international and domestic condemnation.

What Israel is fighting, the image at right seems to suggest, is anti-Semitism, represented by the Palestinian flag hugging the swastika. The two are the same. One hugging the other.

This tactic, which aims at silencing critique of occupation, state terror, racism, separatism, and other similar violations, is directed strategically. It aims at Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labor Party, for example, but not at Richard Spencer or Steven Bannon. And it is perhaps most effectively used in attacks against Jewish critics of Israel or Zionism, with the goal, as Judith Butler has noted, not just to silence critique but “to cause pain, to produce shame, to isolate and identify a political position with a personal pathology.”

Jews who criticize Israel or Zionism are thus said to be “self-hating” sell outs, in short: “bad Jews.” And as we shall see, there are bad Jews and good Jews, and real Jews, and all kinds of Jews, all aligned around in different positions vis-à-vis the question of Palestine.

2.  Good Jews, Bad Jews

Let me pause for a second and share a bad joke with you. And I warn you in advance of its poor taste. But it is nevertheless quite funny in a dark, bitter way. Or perhaps it is funny because it is in such bad taste, as is often the case with pessimistic jokes. It goes something like this: Why is the Palestinian question really a Jewish question? Because only Jews talk about it, and when they do it is mostly in order to argue among themselves about who is the better Jew.

I introduce this joke which is bitter and funny because it is at once a sad joke about the Palestinian ordeal, which supposedly no one but the Jews care about, and about the Jews who care about Palestine and Palestinians primarily because whatever they say about Palestine determines how they are viewed “as Jews.”

Caption: “Antizionism is simply a thinly veiled seemingly more ‘socially acceptable’ form of antisemitism. They are one and the same.” Photo Credit: The Israel Project, 2017.

In short the joke captures the irony of history: the inevitable collapse of the Palestinian question into the Jewish question, only that in the 21st century, this historical inseparability, about which Edward Said wrote so thoughtfully, has become somewhat of a farce. Now that the so-called “Jewish question” has no current political urgency, its dominance in framing the question of Palestine has become primarily an anachronistic, narcissistic, and essentialist question about what makes a good Jew.

And here we see how much power the question: “Is Zionism anti-Semitism?” has had at least since the early 2000s. I remind you of Lawrence Summers’ words, published while he was president of no less than Harvard University. Addressing what he saw as dangerous growing anti-Zionist sentiments among intellectuals, he wrote back in 2002:

Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.

Here of course we see the complete collapse between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. One is the other. Therefore it also means that one cannot be “for the Jews” or “with the Jews” or a “good Jew” if one is anti-Zionist because if one is anti-Zionist one is (in effect or intention) an anti-Semite.

Responding forcefully to the implied accusations, Judith Butler published her defense of anti-Zionism a year later, in 2003. What is important to notice is the manner by which Butler’s response to Summers centered on undoing the tie between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, primarily by undoing the misguided identification of Zionism with Judaism. I quote from Butler:

What do we make of Jews such as myself, who are emotionally invested in the state of Israel, critical of its current form, and call for a radical restructuring of its economic and juridical basis precisely because we are invested in it? It is always possible to say that such Jews have turned against their own Jewishness. But what if one criticizes Israel in the name of one’s Jewishness […] precisely because such criticisms seem ‘best for the Jews’? Why wouldn’t it always be ‘best for the Jews’ to embrace forms of democracy that extend what is ‘best’ to everyone, Jewish or not?

But what does it mean to criticize Israel in the name of one’s Jewishness?

For Butler this means to develop an understanding of Jewishness itself as a non-identitarian project. In her book Parting Ways she writes: “being a Jew implied taking up an ethical relation to the non Jew.” This definition allows her to elaborate a discourse of “Jewish ethics” that is based on Jewish diasporic existence and history as one that ultimately leads to co-existence with non-Jews, and hence as radically different than the Zionist formation of Israel as a “Jewish State.”

The idea of basing one’s critique of the state of Israel on “Jewish sources,” “Jewish ethics” and “Jewish history” is also a tactic and position promoted by Jewish Voice for Peace. Indeed, one of their principles as outlined on their website reads:

We are inspired by Jewish traditions to work for justice and such work is part of our own liberation. We work to build Jewish communities that reflect the understanding that being Jewish and Judaism are not synonymous with Zionism or support for Israel.

I fully appreciate these efforts and think that as responses to accusations of internalized anti-Semitism and self-hatred these are effective strategies. They are also effective in combating the monopoly Zionism claims over Judaism. But this discourse of “Jewish ethics” has its limits as well, and I want to draw attention to these limits, not as a sign of my disagreement with Butler, JVP or others, as much as an expression of my sense that we must become more carefully attuned to how discourses on the left also function as censorship. These discourses also limit what we can say, how we can say it, and who can say what—for Jews and non-Jews—when we talk about Palestine.

Now, let’s face it. I am speaking partially, not only, but partially, as a Jew. Perhaps I am even here as a kosher guard (always good to invite a Jew when discussing Zionism, anti-Semitism, and Palestine). I by no means am implying that the organizers of the event had such intentions in mind. But I also don’t want to ignore this position from which I am speaking which is a position that comes with specific expectations, privileges, and limitations when it comes to speaking about Palestine.

I cannot but speak from this position, which is already over-determined in this context, but I try, very hard, to also speak across it. Because I come to the question of Palestine, to the question of our ability or inability to speak about Palestine, not just in relation to the censorship imposed on us by the right and by academic institutions, but also by the censorship imposed, directly or less so, by the left. When it comes to the question of Palestine, to the question of speaking about Palestine, or the question of who is allowed to speak about Palestine and how, the left has generated some clear frameworks of policed discourse that I find almost as problematic as the attempts to shut down the discussion about Palestine altogether by the right. One such frame is the one I call the “good Jew, bad Jew” framework. It sets the expectation for Jews to speak as Jews and mobilize “Jewish ethics,” thus inevitably turning the question of Palestine into a Jewish question and a question which is ultimately about Jews.

Protest against US supported Israeli bombings and invasion of Lebanon. Photo Credit: Danny Hammontree, 2006.

Of course the need to distinguish Zionism from Judaism, in light of Israel’s speaking in the name of the Jews, and as a Jewish state, is very important. But that work, I believe, is now mostly done. I am also quite wary of the language of authenticity (“real,” “true,” “authentic”) because it ends up functioning as yet another wall of censorship and identity regulations, once again in the name of “what makes a real Jew”—an essentializing discourse that renders one’s political views about the state of Israel and the occupation of Palestine in exclusively Jewish terms.

The question I generate for us (for some of “us”) today is: Do we want to go on playing the “good Jew, bad Jew” game? Do we need to play the “good Jew, bad Jew” game when we simply want to voice our resistance to state terror, military occupation, and racial segregation?

I end here, leaving you with the words of Mahmoud Darwish. Not with a poem, but with words he shared in an interview held in Amman back in 1996 with the Israeli literary critic and poet, Helit Yeshurun. At the time he was waiting for his permit to return home to Palestine:

Do you know why we, the Palestinians, are famous? Because you are our enemy. Interest in the Palestine problem comes by way of interest in the Jewish problem. . . If our war had been with Pakistan, no one would have heard of me. So we are unlucky that our enemy is Israel, which has so many sympathizers in the world, and we are lucky that Israel is our enemy, because Jews are the center of the world. You have given us defeat, weakness, and publicity.

These words are provocative. They are meant to be. And to take them seriously, I think, is to begin to reconsider and rethink the idea of what it means to be speaking “as a Jew” or from a “Jewish position” or about “Jewish ethics” when speaking or trying to speak about Palestine. Can a Jew speak about Palestine, about the atrocities that take place in Palestine, not as a Jew? Can she speak in the name of solidarity, not in the name of authentic Jewishness or Jewish ethics? Can the question of Palestine ever become something that isn’t already and essentially a Jewish question?

Caption: “Palestinians Collect Belongings from Gaza Ruins.” Photo Credit: United Nations Photo, 2014.
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Gil Hochberg
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, the modern Levant, Semitism, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema and art. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives, and the production of knowledge.
Theorizing Modernities article

Border-Crossers: Interrogating Boundaries through Bodies


Ollagüe-Uyuni border between Chile and Bolivia. Photo Credit: Francisco Javier Argel, 2013.

The first panel at the Ansari Institute’s inaugural conference brought to the fore a core issue in global politics today: the issue of migration. Alicia Turner (York University), Erin Wilson (University of Groningen), William Canny (U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops), and Atalia Omer (University of Notre Dame) provided us with perspectives into different aspects of forced migration that are located at the intersection of modern nationalisms, racisms, and the presence of global religions.

Rooted in her studies of the genocide of the Rohingyas of Myanmar, Alicia Turner prompted us to question the normative hegemony of borders and to identify the ‘silenced victims’ of the construction and enforcement of borders. Turner eloquently disclosed the intertwining relations between the hegemonic establishment of ‘modernity’ with the formal and informal presence of borders whose sole goal is to maintain control over knowledge production, and thus, over the differentiated ‘valuations’ of humanity. In the context of modern binaries, ‘humanity’ is a reward that can only be attributed to those who are within the border. Meanwhile, those who find themselves outside of the border only serve as ‘others’ to affirm the hegemonic selves of the former.

One epistemological goal of modern hegemonic binaries is to produce an illusion of neat and categorized history, in which ‘us’ and ‘them’ are easily differentiated from each other. This illusion works to sustain a façade of hegemonic stability and erases the inhumane realities of lives outside the border. In other words, those who live outside of the border not only pose a threat to their counterparts within the border, but also pose a significant threat to the order of life itself. Hence, as elaborated by Erin Wilson in her presentation, the acts of ‘border-crossing’ from outside the border into the border have always been designated a ‘crisis’ with all of its senses of danger and unpredictability. The acts of moving from one geopolitical locality to another by marginalized others—acts that are otherwise seen as ‘normal’ when they are taken by White ‘Western’ bodies—become an affront to the supposedly peaceful, normalized way of life maintained by the illusion of modern hegemonic binaries.

Furthermore, William Canny assessed the readiness and contribution of Catholic institutions and organizations in dealing with the issue of forced migration. One important point that deserves further discussion from Canny’s presentation is the problem of insularity among Catholic institutions in responding to the many forms of forced migration. The absence of a strong cooperative network among Catholic institutions has led to siloed and fragmented humanitarian work. A cohesive and systematic network is needed to effectively respond to the issue at hand. The same problem can be found in other major religious institutions around the world and has significantly weakened religious-based responses toward the protection of displaced people, immigrants, and refugees in general. In addition, the stated problem also presents a hurdle to tapping into global religious networks as a resource for the advocacy of the rights of migrants.

All of those different facets of the issue of forced migration were elaborated further in Atalia Omer’s rejoinder and response. Omer illuminated the violent underbelly of modernity by interrogating the contours of exclusivism that come with the erection of borders and boundaries. In addition, inspired by the conference of ‘Bandung of the North’ (Saint-Denis, May 4th-May 7th, 2018), Omer called for the construction of socio-political alliances of decolonized experiences in the Northern Hemisphere.

Views of the Nogales border wall from the north side.
Views of the Nogales border wall from the north side. Nogales, AZ. Photo Credit: Peg Hunter, 2018.

Another important point that was highlighted in Omer’s rejoinder concerned the ‘securitization of religion’ by the modern institution of the ‘nation-state.’ In this ongoing process of securitization, the presence of religion in public space is seen as yet another example of ‘boundary-crossing’ in which secularism is a norm and religiosity is an exception at best, and a threat at worse. Such a process can be seen clearly in the rise of Islamophobic policies in the US and many parts of Europe where Islam, and by extension Muslims, are relegated to a position of threat to the ‘cultural integrity’ of both regions, whatever that means. In addition to the violent implications against the marginalized-religious other, ‘securitization of religion’ also results in a skewed perspective where state-sponsored violence is justified due to the normativization of secular violence and the demonization of religious-based violence.

What we can infer from this panel is an interlocking presence of borders that are created out of political, racial, and religious differences and are employed to justify violence on marginalized others. These borders are then sustained and legitimated through the hegemonic presence of the ‘nation-state’ as the arbiter of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ violence. If there is one thing that ties these phenomena, it is the fact that the political, racial, and religious markers that compose those borders are also etched and negotiated on the bodies of the marginalized others as ‘border-crossers.’

A Way Forward?

What is left rather unexplored from the conversation on religions and forced migration in the panel are two key areas. First, there is the question of the ways in which external borders are projected onto the bodies of ‘border-crossers.’ Second, I question what alternative forms of plural and hybrid embodiment exist that can be used as models for thinking about the constructedness and fluidity of boundaries.

In this context, looking into how the bodies of women of color accommodate, resist, and reconstruct the various ‘borders’ that are imposed on them would be a fruitful endeavor to undertake. As a case in point, in many discourses surrounding bad/good Muslims in the US (which also automatically translate into bad/good immigrants), one’s decision to wear hijab or not wear hijab is intrinsically associated with one’s position within or outside certain borders. When a Muslim woman wears a hijab, she is both the icon of ‘oppressive Islam’ and the ‘ideal’ figure of the Muslims’ ‘faith.’ Meanwhile, when she does not wear a hijab, she is an ‘enlightened’ (good) Muslim who embraces the mythical gift of ‘agency’ from the ‘Western world,’ and also at once a traitor to her own community of Muslims. In other words, the borders are not only located out there in physical, socio-political, and conceptional forms, but also within the liminal bodies that are located at the forefront of ‘border-claims.’ On the one hand, this fact shows the pervasiveness of patriarchal paradigms that exploit women’s bodies as a benchmark of patriarchal morality. On the other hand, it represents a liminal capacity inherent in women’s bodies that could serve as a model for a microcosm of plurality in today’s world.

Another contemporary example of the fluidity of the ‘liminal self’ can be found in the lives of many Southeast Asian female migrant workers whose jobs as domestic caretakers reflects the hybrid role as ‘mothers’ (to their own kids back at home) and as ‘surrogate mothers’ (to the family that they take care of). This intersectional and violent experience is created in the ‘borderland’ between home and host countries, but is rooted in one embodied experience of motherhood. What the hybrid roles of female migrant workers show is a mode of being that takes on boundaries (with all of their violence) as a site in which to live through the shifting constitutions of selfhood. Using terminology from Muslim feminist theologian Sa’diyya Shaikh, the Southeast Asian female migrant workers are living up ‘moments of resistance’ in which deconstruction of the boundaries is not what counts, but rather their creative survival.

When it does not pose any danger towards the women themselves, the fluidity of borders within the bodies of women of color represents an appreciation of a plurality of living in which borders and boundaries have lost their exclusivist contours. Aware of the violence performed on them by hegemonic boundaries, many women of color embrace the beautiful mess of liminality in which they construct alternative spaces defined by multiple identities. In this context, ‘religion’ functions as one of the languages with which their creative survival is expressed. It serves as a locus for those ‘moments of resistance’ due to its capacity to deconstruct hierarchies and advocate for humanity in the name of the Divine. It is to such hybrid modes of belonging that we must anchor our hopes in a time where ‘humanity’ is seen as a privilege accorded only to those who live inside the border.

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

Sustainable Resources: Reimagining Our Relationship with the Earth


A global warming-affected farmer in Peru whose village is dependant on the Ausangate glacier. Photo Credit: Oxfam International, 2009.

With the United Nations climate change panel recently releasing a report that stated limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius “would require rapid, far reaching and unprecedentented changes in all aspects of society,” the Ansari Institute’s panel on “Sustainable Habitats: How Religions Can Repair Unsustainable Environments,” proves timely. While we are used to hearing scientists, economists, and politicians weigh in on the environment, it is less common to turn to religious traditions as potential collaborators. Nosheen Ali (Aga Khan University), Daniel Castillo (Loyola Maryland), and Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (University of Buffalo) showed the rich resources these traditions can bring to the conversation. One commonality that ran across each presentation was the importance of reimagining the relationship between humans, other animals, and the earth. Given that we are now in the age of the anthropocene—climate change brought about by human actions—such reimaginings are key for developing a sustainable relationship with the earth.

Daniel Castillo raised dual concerns from the Catholic tradition: how can the life of faith inform both the preferential option for the poor and the option for the earth? Castillo drew our attention to the reality that these two concerns are intimately interlinked: those who will suffer the most from the earth’s rising temperatures are those in the Global South who do not have the economic resources to shield themselves from the effects of climate change. Turning to the Hebrew scriptures, Castillo rejected the harmful anthropocentrism that has arisen in response to the Genesis 1 narrative of man having dominion over the earth. He instead emphasized Genesis 2:15, which calls humanity to cultivation and care. Castillo argued that the symbolic vocation in Genesis 2 is the gardener who lives out the imago dei (image of God) through love of God, neighbor, and the earth. Cultivation and care extends toward both neighbor and the rest of creation, emphasizing our embeddedness within these relationships.

Glacier ceremony celebrating Christ and spirit of the mountain, as part of the Qoyllur Rit’i. Photo Credit: Sebastien Lafont, 2008.

Nosheen Ali spoke from an Islamic perspective and the context of her fieldwork in Shimshal, Pakistan. Ali noted that policies focused on sustainability have become entrenched in the very capitalist system responsible for creating environmental degradation in the first place. We can learn from the people in Shimshal who, because of their view that nature is sacred, have developed forms of human labor that can complement the processes of nature. Yet, Ali noted, often this sacred view of nature is “denied legitimacy in mainstream notions of science.” She underscored the importance of making space for ecology as a spiritual concept. Ali then considered the history of asceticism in Islam, describing Baba Farid (1173-1266), a revered Sufi spiritual leader, who believed a practice of anti-accumulation was essential to his religious life. An ecological spirituality combined with an emphasis on anti-materialism offers a model for sustainable human practices.

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo presented her ethnographic research with impoverished Peruvians who “draw on indigenous traditions to collaborate with sacred, sentient landscapes.” Bacigalupo presented the Peruvian workers’ divinization rituals as a form of resistance against the extractive resource industry. They believe the natural world has its own moral agency and argue that we have angered the earth. This has led to a movement, amongst some Peruvians, demanding the recognition of the legal personhood of nature. Bacigalupo argued that this approach to nature as a sacred, sentient landscape has led to new models of mobilization against climate change.

These three scholars show us that ecological spirituality as an embodied practice has the potential to reorient our relationship with the earth. Practices of caring for a garden, cooperating with nature, and extending solidarity beyond human persons to the rest of the natural world foster a vision of a relationship with the earth grounded in kinship rather than extraction. This allows the human person to see herself as not only embedded in the human community but also in the broader community of the earth and all creatures.

Yet, as we recover and/or develop these ecological, spiritual practices, Ali warned us to guard against universal solutions. Each ecosystem has unique features, and so each community will need to develop their own ways of cooperating with nature. In the words of the American poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry, the over-emphasis on “Think Big,” such as macro-level planning, policies, and laws, has blinded us to the power of “Think Little” and the creative possibilities that emerge when we fully engage in our own backyard and community. Religious actors, traditions, and resources can also help to further develop this point. For instance, within my own Catholic tradition, Pope Francis has emphasized that we require a “lifestyle and spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm,” because technical expertise can only provide, at best, a partial solution to climate change (Laudato Si’ #111). Pope Francis calls for an “ecological conversion” within each of our communities (Laudato Si’ #219). While public policies and laws are important, for Ali, Berry, and Pope Francis these measures alone won’t save us. We must also foster ways of thinking little within our local communities, which as a collective have the transformative power to impact climate change.

St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Memphis, TN. Photo Credit: Gary Bridgman.

The Ansari Institute’s panel offers an important starting point for thinking about religious resources for combating climate change. Moving forward, it is important that panels like this attend to intersectionality at a deeper level. While the intersectionality between the environment and the poor was highlighted, other points of intersectionality, like gender, deserve more attention. During the question and answer period, Harvard Divinity School professor and Director of the Religious Literacy Project Diane Moore raised concerns to Castillo that the same Genesis 2 text being used to safeguard the environment has also been used to suppress women. For example, Genesis 2:18 states: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Historically, this has been used to justify a hierarchical relationship between men and women. The same text used to support a relationship of care with the earth has also been used, in one prevalent reading, to justify the subordination of women. In our attempts to correct a harmful tradition of anthropocentrism, can we use a text that has been used to discount women’s equity?

For the feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, we must address both forms of oppression together because “the subjugation of women has formed the symbolic basis for the subjugation of the earth.” This means that work in ecotheology must also attend to gender. In the case of Genesis 2, the ecotheological reading of the human person as a gardener that images God by nurturing the earth must be in conversation with feminist theological interpretations of Genesis 2 that challenge sexist readings of the text. Otherwise, we risk realizing justice in one dimension only to undermine it in another.

The stakes of incorporating an intersectional lens are more than theoretical; there are substantive practical implications as well. For example, recent studies have shown that women are disproportionately affected by climate change, particularly in communities where they also lack equal access to other resources such as education and economic opportunities.  Given this reality, it is necessary to think about how religious resources and ecological spiritualties interact with gender as well as other pertinent issues such as racism and decolonization. Indeed, such a process is necessary in order to build a spiritually informed, holistic vision of climate justice.

 

Suggested Further Readings:

Theology and Ecology across the Disciplines: On Care for Our Common Home. Edited by Celia Dean-Drummond and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser. London, UK: T&T Clark, 2018.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Moore, Niamh. “Eco/Feminism, Non-Violenc and the Future of Feminism.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 10, no. 3 (2008): 282-98.

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Marie-Claire Klassen
Marie-Claire Klassen is a PhD Candidate in Theology with a minor in Peace Studies at Notre Dame. Her research utilizes theological ethnography to study Palestinian liberation theology. She is currently a Dissertation Year Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Theorizing Modernities article

Welcoming Complexity Together


US border wall meets the Pacific in Tijuana.
US border wall meets the Pacific in Tijuana. Photo Credit: Jonathan Macintosh, 2009.

What role does religion play in promoting the flourishing of the individual, community, and environment? How can the “metaphysical anguish and ontological delight” that allows us to “cross,” in the words of Ansari Institute Director Tom Tweed, between life stages and through space mobilize resources and structures for holistic human development? The inaugural conference for the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion at the University of Notre Dame, held on the 25thand 26thof October, 2018, took a close look at the ambivalent role of religion in the present-day migration and ecological crises, as well as in the public discourses of media misinformation. In this series, we cover the event in essays by University of Notre Dame doctoral students Lailatul Fitriyah, Marie-Claire Klassen, and Khan Shairani.

The genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar. Global North depictions of “good” and “bad” Muslims. Irreversible climate change. Each panel recognized the complicity of religions in structures of violence, be it through the construction and upholding of subjective boundaries of belonging that participate in and reinforce modern orientalist and nation-state divisions; or through the undergirding of an anthropocentrism that has given carte blanche to the despoiling of the water, earth, and air on which we all depend. With the emergence of the modern nation-state and international economic system, religious traditions—simultaneously siloed beyond the public sphere and folded into the modern imaginary of the nation as ethnically-cum-religiously homogenous—have absorbed and furthered these exclusivist formations. The fact that churches are among the most segregated places in the United States is a glaring example. In her essay, Lailatul Fitriyah explores the layering of borders not just without but also within, or on, the bodies of policed “border-crossers,” sharing the scenario of Muslim women of color navigating and contesting boundaries of national and religious expression.

Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion Inaugural 2018 Conference Poster.

At the same time, religions provide “powerful narratives of history and the universal,” that offer alternate understandings of human community and trajectory, as noted by panelist Erin Wilson (University of Groningen). Religious language and values can be used to make visible and contest cultural and structural violence, challenging, for example, the underlying worldview of the modern nation-state system through alternate readings of community (who deserves to belong?) and human worth (which identities are valued most highly?). By some readings, certain religious and social histories may create orientations, even obligations, towards forms of solidarity that supersede modern boundaries. But to build peace, religious actors “must claim a normative platform,” Diane Moore (Harvard University) argued, “rather than pretend to be neutral.” The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s refugee resettlement efforts come to mind, emerging out of Jewish experiences of seeking refuge and evolving to support refugees of all backgrounds. Laudato Si’ resoundingly critiques the modern economic system and how it assigns value.

Could religion’s most powerful positive contribution to flourishing be to promote a generative understanding of complexity? Panelists put forth examples of the ways in which religious teachings could disrupt existing assumptions, invoke empathy, and give legitimacy to new ways of knowing and being. In her essay, Marie-Claire Klassen relays religiously- and spiritually-grounded re-orientations of the relationship between human and earth, including, in one case, the attribution of sentience to the landscape.

These efforts face an uphill struggle as they seek to question the frames through which society subconsciously operates; the “air” we breathe. The media can play a destructive role in this sense, reifying broadly accepted discourses like “religious violence” without exploring how religious identity is both internally multifaceted and interwoven with other social, cultural, and political markers, as Khan Shairani notes. In addition, the changing nature of religious authority, a topic of particular interest here at Contending Modernities through our “Authority, Community, and Identity” working groups, may change the playing field, as orthodox forms of religious expertise and knowledge transmission fade or splinter, and new actors take the stage deploying novel modes of authorization and communication. Complexity, and, as audience member Caesar Montevecchio (University of Notre Dame) commented, ambiguity, can be troubling; they require a predisposition or openness towards uncertainty. Perhaps, Tweed closed, our aim should be to construct communities that welcome complexity, together.

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Dania Straughan
Dania is Program Manager at the Contending Modernities research initiative, where she oversees operations and contributes to program development. Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies. She is active in efforts to establish restorative justice pathways in her local community, and volunteers to advance grant making for community-led social cohesion programs globally. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Field Notes article

Theology and Contingency in a Modern World


Madrasa Discourses student Farheen in the temple district of Kathmandu, July 2018.

The Madrasa Discourses 2018 summer intensive brought together a diverse and vibrant group of people in an intellectually stimulating environment in Nepal. The participants—who included madrasa graduates from India and Pakistan, students from South Africa and the University of Notre Dame, and faculty members from India, Pakistan, the United States, and South Africa—helped bring different perspectives to discussions on the challenging issues of Islamic legal tradition and gender justice, human nature and the body, conflict and peacebuilding, pluralism and inter-faith dialogue, and Muslim responses to modernity.

For instance, how did the medieval mercantile society define and value different bodies? Under what legal assumptions could one buy, sell, own or manumit another human? How was the full or partial tamlik (ownership) of another’s body legally thought about? How many kinds of ownership were there? How did these assumptions shape what we have inherited as Islamic law? And, do modern Muslims share those assumptions? Some of these questions kept us thinking during the three days of lectures and discussions with Dr. Saadia Yacoob from Williams College, USA. Most of us had never heard of the term tamlik, while others had read it in the madrasa without giving it much thought. However, this term, when it cropped up in Yacoob’s lecture, became a focus of long discussions and a cause of acute discomfort for many. The readings assigned by Dr. Yacoob were a collection of dense and nuanced texts on Islamic law, including Sexual Violation in Late Antique Near East by Hina Azam, excerpts from Her Day in Court by Maya Shatzmiller, 11th century jurist Al-Sarakshi’s Kitab al-Mabsut’s portion in which he writes about zina (adultery) and legal accountability and Kecia Ali’s article from Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender and Pluralism. Why, then, did only a single concept, tamlik, elicit unending explanations and discussions from the participants from India and Pakistan?

Azam’s piece on sexual violation in the pre-Islamic period in the Middle East discusses two competing systems of ethics—propriety and theocentric—that shaped legal thinking on sexual violation and women’s autonomy across various legal systems, including Ancient Mesopotamian laws, Mosaic and Rabbinic laws, Roman and Christian laws and pre-Islamic Arabian customs. Propriety ethics regarded “sexual violation of females as primarily a property crime, akin to usurpation—the unlawful taking of another’s possession for one’s own use—or abduction—the unlawful removal of live property from the control of its owner” (p. 24). Propriety ethics views sexual violation as a crime of a man against another man; therefore the remedy consists of the violator paying the wronged party, that is, the father or husband of the woman, as compensation for his loss. Theocentric ethics, on the other hand, regarded sexual violation as a transgression against God, that is, a sin. Theocentric logic therefore required physical punishment of the violator, rather than simply a monetary compensation for the theft of female sexual and reproductive capacity. Legal thinking about the female body reflected a tension between the two types of ethics that co-existed in varied combinations in ancient Middle Eastern legal texts, which formed the context for Islamic legal discourses on the topic later on. Maya Shatzmiller discusses the monetary value assigned in Islamic legal discourse to different bodily functions such as intercourse, breastfeeding, pregnancy, and taking care of the young (pp. 93-117). First intercourse, that is, the consummation of marriage, triggers property rights of mahr (dower) and nafaqa (maintenance) for the bride, while pregnancy triggers property rights of the unborn child.

Al-Sarakshi’s text is one of the Hanafi legal positions on the punishment accorded to a man and a woman engaged in zina (adultery) in different scenarios of legal accountability and consent (pp. 54-55). The case of a mature and sane woman involved in a consensual illicit sexual act with a mature and sane man led to both being punished. If the woman does not consent, is a minor, or is insane, she is not punished but he is. However, if the man is insane or a minor and therefore not legally accountable he is not punished, but interestingly, the woman also goes unpunished. Al-Sarakshi reasons that since the primary doer in the sex act is a man (the woman being the locus) she cannot be punished if he is not. Moreover, in any of the above scenarios, the man is being punished for committing adultery whereas the woman is punished for making herself available and therefore facilitating adultery. Dr. Yacoob assigned this reading to tease out the assumptions about human sexuality at play in legal rulings and to point out that if these assumptions are taken away, the internal logic of the laws crumbles. Therefore, religious texts are not interpreted in a vacuum by the jurists, but with some presumptions that shape the legal rulings.

Madrasa Discourses students view a video at the 2018 Dhulikhel Summer Intensive.

Finally we turned to Kecia Ali’s argument that in Islamic jurisprudence, “the overall framework of the marriage contract is predicated on a type of ownership (milk) granted to the husband over the wife in exchange for dower payment, which makes sexual intercourse between them lawful” (p. 165). Marriage, as understood in Sunni schools of Islamic law, therefore is an exchange of exclusive sexual access to the wife in return for dower (mahr) and her continued sexual availability in return for financial support (nafaqa) by the husband. A husband’s right to unrestricted sexual access to his wife also allowed him to control her mobility. The idea of ownership contained in these terms used in juristic discussions on marriage prompted a large number of responses from the Madrasa Discourses summer intensive participants. Many tried to explain that tamlik really doesn’t mean ownership or that there are different kinds of ownership, that a husband’s ownership of a wife is different from the way one owns an inanimate object or a slave, and also that modern Muslims don’t think about their wives as their possessions. One participant shared how a friend’s joke about owning his wife caused a lot of uproar in the families on both sides, due to which he had to apologize to his wife. This whole discussion, and the discomfort around the term tamlik, is precisely what Ali pre-empts when she argues that this way of thinking about marriage is “unthinkable today for the majority of Muslims” (p. 165).

By the end of Dr. Yacoob’s session, heads were spinning, both because none of the participants had thought about Islamic law in this perspective, but also because it was liberating and scary at the same time. It was paradigm-shifting to recognize that in the formative period of Islamic law, gender norms were the outcome of human interaction with the texts, and different presumptions or approaches to the texts could have and did lead to different legal rulings. This liberates Muslims to rethink Islamic legal tradition. This rethinking, however, is not going to be smooth or painless. It requires a constant struggle with oneself and one’s beloved tradition, one’s identity and the political realities of Muslim communities around the globe that shape popular discourses and attitudes.

 

References

Ali, K. (2006). Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: The Necessity for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Law. In O. Safi, Progressive Muslims on Gender, Justice and Pluralism (pp. 163-189). Oxford: One-World Publications.

al-Sarakhsi. Kitab al Mabsut. Beirut: Darul Marifa. (الجز اللتاسع من كتاب المبسوط لشمس الدين السرخسي, دار المعرفة, بيروت-لبنان)

Azam, H. (2015). Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence and Procedure. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Shatzmiller, M. (2007). Her Day in Court: Women’s Property Rights in Fifteenth-century Granada. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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Talha Rehman
Talha Rehman is a PhD Candidate at the department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She is a participant in Madrasa Discourses curently in her third and final year in the course. Her academic interests involve Islam and gender justice, science, multiculturalism and religous pluralism.
Global Currents article

Madrasa Discourses Equip Tomorrow’s Islamic Scholars with Scientific Literacy


Re-posted from Religion News Service, published December 4, 2018.

Madrasa and Notre Dame students particpate in a discussion during the Kathmandu Summer Intensive program of Notre Dame’s Madrasa Discourses in July 2017, in Nepal.

(RNS) — When Waqas Khan, a 29-year-old Pakistani, graduated from his madrasa in Karachi, he felt disillusioned.

Though he had earned top grades throughout his education, he felt confused about the role of religion and Islamic scholars in the 21st century. “I could not connect the learned knowledge with the world I am living in,” Khan told Religion News Service. “I needed to know what I am missing but I could not.”

Then he met Ebrahim Moosa, and the dots began to connect.

Moosa, a South African, had felt similarly disenchanted after graduating from the one of the most esteemed madrasas in the Muslim world, the famous Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama seminary in Lucknow, India. His curiosity pushed him to get a certificate in journalism, which led him to report on his native country’s struggles over apartheid.

He then pivoted toward academia, earning degrees at the University of Cape Town before moving to the United States to teach Islamic studies at Stanford, Duke and Notre Dame University in Indiana.

Those experiences, Moosa told RNS, helped fill in the critical gaps in his madrasa education and convinced him to help other highly but narrowly educated Muslims. In 2015, Moosa founded the Madrasa Discourses, a program of study based at Notre Dame that connects madrasa graduates — students like Waqas Khan — with the scientific and philosophical questions traditional madrasas often skip.

Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

Madrasa is the Arabic word for a school of any kind but most often refers to Islamic seminaries, usually attached to mosques. They are invaluable, said Moosa, author of the 2015 book “What Is a Madrasa?” as “repositories of Islamic tradition.” But some orthodox Muslims, he says, “make an idol out of tradition, without recognizing that tradition is an active thing.”

Studying with Moosa and his colleagues, Khan said, has allowed him to understand “difference of perspectives.”

Moosa’s initiative, funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, is now in its third year and has taught more than 80 students at Notre Dame and at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India, and GIFT University in Gujranwala, Pakistan.

The effort is meant to benefit the madrasas themselves as much as it is their students. The ulema, or the world’s body of Islamic scholars, were once intellectual and spiritual leaders within Muslim societies. Today, Moosa says, they are rapidly losing their moral authority as their madrasa educations have left them out of touch with the times.

The Madrasa Discourses aim to curb the “armchair theology tendencies,” in the words of coordinator Mahan Mirza, of today’s madrasa scholarship by bringing it into dialogue with modern intellectual currents.

Imparting basic scientific literacy is therefore critical.

Moosa, who considers himself primarily a theologian, leans on experts with scientific backgrounds to help participants understand scientific history and processes.

His colleague Mirza, a Notre Dame professor who leads the Contending Modernities program, helped design the curriculum and teaches online every week.

Mirza, with religious studies degrees from Hartford Seminary and Yale University, has studied mechanical engineering in Texas. Mirza has also served as the dean of faculty at Zaytuna College, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college, where he taught Arabic-Islamic studies and the history of science.

Those who come to the program from traditional schools have little to no scientific literacy. “Some of them might perhaps know what the periodic table or an atom or an electron is,” Mirza said. “But we start with next to nothing.”

Pakistani student Waqas Khan shares with the conference highlights from the discussion his table had been having on the topics of the day.

Their knowledge of classical Islam’s long engagement with philosophy, reasoning and science, he said, gives them a strong grounding on which to build. “Those kinds of things are already integrated into practical theology,” Mirza explained. “But students don’t really recognize them as science anymore, because they consider them part of the Islamic intellectual tradition.”

The Madrasa Discourses team uses what it calls an “elicitive” approach. “We work from within the tradition and help them recognize the scientific reasoning already embedded within the tradition,” Mirza said.

That, Moosa told RNS, is the key breakthrough: “Once our participants understand that Islamic history is not static, that this is a history of growth and development and alteration, it makes them very comfortable.”

Learning about figures like Ibn Khaldun, an Arab historian who died in 1406 and is considered a founder of the social sciences, “rattles their cages.”

In the second year of the three-year course, the students participate in roundtable discussions with local scientists and compare texts from Islamic and Western science and philosophy. They are given readings that depict how Islamic intellectual history is constructed and debated.

One important conceptual framework for the second-year course is the notion of “Big History,” a recent academic trend that looks at the development of the universe and humankind in terms of large patterns instead of culture-by-culture, politically focused events.

For Waqas Khan, the biggest mental shift was understanding evolution. Before arriving at Notre Dame, he didn’t believe it was real. Now, he said, he sees it as a “significant scientific concept.”

Not everyone walks away from Madrasa Discourses having done a 180 on their beliefs. To the program’s organizers, that’s perfectly fine.

“You’re not going to get any answers in this program,” Mirza said. “But you will get a lot of questions. And we want to make sure that you understand these questions.”

The aim is not to prove, for example, that evolution is true. The point is to explain what a scientific theory is, so that madrasa graduates can no longer dismiss evolution as “just a theory.” Many madrasa-trained thinkers, said Mirza, regard scientists who traffic in theories as “incompetent goofballs” playing guessing games.

Once participants begin to appreciate that complexity, Mirza said, “they start asking, ‘What does this mean for creation? How are we supposed to think about this theologically?’” Mirza said.

“But that’s where our work stops. Because they are the ulema, they are the scholars, and that’s why we invited them,” said Mirza.

Mahan Mirza leads the Contending Modernities program at Notre Dame. Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

At that point, Mirza tells his charges, “Hopefully now you can develop a culture where you begin to engage these questions — and perhaps come up with some answers.”

Some Muslim scholars and madrasa leaders have criticized the Madrasa Discourses, questioning why Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, should be so concerned with reforming madrasa education. “There’s a concern that this is some kind of a neocolonial project,” Mirza said.

But Moosa and Mirza say they have no desire to impose any Orientalist Western reform on the madrasas. They point out that the project’s local faculty in India and Pakistan are drawn from the prestigious Jamia Hamdard and Al-Sharia Academy, respectively, and that they have buy-in from community leaders.

“We’re asking these questions and thinking about these concepts together” with Muslim communities, said Mirza. “We’re learning and struggling together rather than making a top-down attempt to unsettle everything.”

The proof, perhaps, is in the pride Waqas Khan now takes in his traditional education. Before working with Madrasa Discourses, Khan said, he had begun wishing he had studied at a typical university instead of Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi, the traditional madrasa he attended. But working with Moosa helped him realize the value of his Islamic education.

“Now I think that in a society like mine it is good to have both educations, traditional and conventional,” he told RNS. Working with scholars like Mirza and Moosa, he said, helped him “to connect them both and how to understand the religion in our time.”

Fellow participant Zaid Hassan, who lives in Gujranwala, agreed. While at Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi, where he completed his studies in 2015, he felt satisfied with all that he learned in madrassa, although he noted that his “heart was sometimes troubled with the seeming impracticality of these teachings in the real world.”

He says he is therefore grateful to Madrasa Discourses for introducing him to a new way of thinking, one that is entrenched in the Islamic way of thought but is open to a multitude of perspectives.

But learning this way of thought, Hassan told RNS in Urdu, “has given birth to new burden, a feeling of a great weight on our shoulders.” Because moving forward with the concern of “harmonizing religion to the new modern society” in conversation with the world around him is no easy task, he said.

 

Originally published on Religion News Service on December 4, 2018.

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Aysha Khan
Aysha Khan is a Boston-based journalist reporting on American Muslims and millennial faith. Her newsletter, Creeping Sharia, focuses on Muslims in the U.S. Previously, she was the social media editor at RNS.
Field Notes article

Layering Patterns of Authority

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Women at a bakery in Adamawa, Cameroon. Photo Credit: UN Women

What is the relationship between gender and authority in different religious communities in Cameroon? Our project addresses the intersection of women, religion, and ways of being modern in the nation-wide Catholic Women’s Association, a small group of Muslim women who meet regularly in Yaoundé, and a Muslim and “traditional” village in the Adamawa region of the country. But this question immediately raises additional ones, because no “community” is hermetically sealed for examination by the external gaze.

Any discussion of patterns and practices of authority within these communities, therefore, also needs to take into account the relations of authority, intended or unintended, between these communities and outside actors, especially with a) the state, b) the humanitarian world of nongovernmental organizations, and c) given our research, interactions with members of our team. Each of the communities we address in our project has had different levels of interactions with these actors, and with us. We also note that no one is a completely passive agent in any of these relationships.

Logo of the Catholic Women Association (CWA).

Our previous essay for Contending Modernities explored some of the structures of authority within Catholicism, as well as some of the dynamics in the Catholic Women’s Association (CWA) in Cameroon’s capital city of Yaoundé. We begin with a short update on additional research in Bamenda (in the Anglophone part of the country), before describing our visit with Muslim communities. A visit to Bamenda demonstrates that women of the CWA take great pride in their work in several domains: providing the sole Catholic women’s entity that crosses the Anglophone-Francophone linguistic divide (in a context of an Anglophone secessionist demand), developing a center at the Bamenda headquarters to assist women in need with classes in sewing and computers (which we plan to make a contribution to), and working within the national electoral system.

One of us attended an annual meeting of one of the district associations, in which CWA members celebrated their accomplishments for the year, hosted a priest as speaker, and broke into small groups to address important questions for the upcoming elections. Lines of authority appear to be fairly firm between clerics and laypersons; the lay womens’ groups each have a priest who acts as a kind of mentor to the group, and in turn clerics respect the women elected to significant positions in the organization. This is a group in which the leadership tends to be both highly professionalized (in terms of the procedures of the organization and the professions of women in the group), and well-established within the Catholic hierarchy of the country.

In the small group of Muslim women in Yaoundé, the founder of the group is also its de facto leader: she brought the group together and plays a large role in making it work, both in its religious component (the women meet regularly to study the Qur’an and also to learn Arabic with a small rotating group of imams and instructors), and its mutual assistance component.

The women of the Muslim group of Yaounde and their instructor, Oussa, at a Koran study group.

Regarding the latter, the women have tried several projects to supplement their income, including growing food on a small plot of land, making therapeutic black soap, and most recently, making laundry soap and a juice beverage from a local plant.

Most of these projects became possible because of relations with government authorities. Many civil society and women’s groups usually go to the state first for technical, financial, or logistical support. For this group of Muslim women (located in the capital and central region of the country), relations with the state occur in several ways. The women, for example, take part in a number of activities sponsored by the Ministry for the Promotion of Women and the Family, as well as by the Ministry of Social Affairs. These government ministries fund such local groups to work with affected populations through establishing and administering centers “for the promotion of women and the girl-child.” Through these centers, marginalized women can train for jobs as seamstresses or for eventual employment in the restaurant, hotel, or information industries, to help them become more independent. These women, however, also frequently take the initiative to propose projects of their own to gain support from both national and local government authorities.

The decision-making regarding which small enterprises to propose appears to be fairly democratic in the group, with ideas coming from various women of different ages. Different patterns of authority influence whether or not each of these schemes work: for example, the plot to grow food was abandoned because husbands did not want their wives to travel outside of the neighborhood to the site (thus, intra-familial, gendered lines of authority); the black soap-making was abandoned because the woman who was to train the group first implied that she would provide her services without charge, then decided to set a fee that was too high for the women to pay (the power of an external “expert” authority to control the terms of assistance). The laundry soap and juice efforts, however, appear to be successful thus far. (We note that we are providing support for this initiative through our Contending Modernities grant, but we have set no conditions regarding what projects the women engage in with the funds.)

The leaders of the Muslim women’s group of Yaounde and a member of the research team show the soap made by the women of the group.

In Cameroon, there are numerous channels for women’s and civil society groups to work with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Humanitarian and development NGOs often go through state authorities to obtain contacts within the populations they want to serve based on their missions and objectives. Sometimes, however, individuals or groups in need of such services also approach NGOs directly. Either way, of course, such relationships do not always succeed. Indeed, there are cases where local groups do not want to cooperate with NGOs, especially when these organizations press for changes to local traditions that they are not prepared to tolerate. Evidence from two research trips thus far indicates that this is the case for the group of traditional Muslim women in the Adamawa region. For example, the NGO CARE conducted one project to bring clean water and another to increase women’s autonomy in the community. The second project ran into problems because only a small number of women signed up to participate, most likely because the project itself challenged the patriarchal character of authority in the community. This example raises two interrelated issues with NGOs: NGOs often condition aid on the participation of a certain percentage of the population in the project; but in failing to reach this number, NGOs also obstruct their own goal of providing services to a group that needs assistance.

The dynamic at work between these actors is interesting on several levels: when marginalized women in given milieus seek to enter into a relationship with humanitarian organizations, thus benefiting from NGO “modernization” programs, they are opening themselves to a kind of alterity, a voluntary inscription into a process to try something new that might improve their living conditions. For example, on our first visit to the Adamawa Muslim group, several of the women noted that they enjoyed working with a previous NGO who taught them knitting, because it allowed them to do something to earn money as well as learn about things outside of their community.

At the same time, as is well-known, humanitarian and other external actors can bring ideas, programs, pressure, and funding for changes that are too radical for those they wish to “help,” although in this case it appears that men and women view these changes differently. It is important for our project to try to discern these patterns and nuances.

We are gaining a greater appreciation for pre-existing structures of authority in these groups, as well as members’ assumptions about authority within our own group of researchers. While we cannot completely overcome the professor/student hierarchy, we now realize that our interlocutors assume there is a stronger division of authority and decision-making within our group than (hopefully) exists. We hope to demonstrate our joint decision-making to these groups of women as well as develop ways to allow for joint ideas and processes to develop with them in our research. We realize that we are one more entity—although not as influential as the state or NGO authorities—that can mobilize resources that affect the internal dynamics driving these communities, and that this fact requires continued reflexivity on our part. Our notes in this post reflect some of our findings on multiple lines of authority within these communities as well as between them and the state, NGOs, and ourselves. We anticipate that these reflections in addition to ongoing research will raise additional questions about conceptualizations of authority and gender in religious communities.

One of the princes with us and the women in the community.

The Adamawa group is one of the most interesting for our analysis of lines of authority. We are still assessing a recent research trip by three members of our team, but here note two features of the group from a previous trip last fall. First, gendered relations are both clear within the community and possibly changing slightly—the (male) princes were our primary interlocutors, although they took us to the women’s compound (of the community leadership) to have an initial conversation about our research with some of the women. The princes interpreted for us, also prodding the women to feel free to speak to us about their concerns. We did not press very much, however, thinking that a subsequent trip, in which the two graduate student members of our team (one woman and one man) were invited to stay in the community, would provide less abrupt means of interacting. Second, both women and men in this community appeared to be eager for input from external actors. The princes, for example, told us of methods they had heard to fatten cattle and make other agricultural “modernizations,” and the women remarked that they enjoyed the training of a previous NGO that came through to teach them how to crochet, because it gave them something productive to do that also earned money. Unlike Yaoundé, this community’s ties with outside NGOs have diminished because of its propinquity to the North. Often exaggerated fears of Boko Haram activity have made many NGOs reluctant to work in the region. However, fear of insecurity is not the only explanation for the absence of NGO’s in the village, although the risk is real. (Indeed, the border with the Central African Republic is only a few kilometers away and many incidents of hostage-taking as well as attacks on villages have been recorded.) There is also the extent of the community’s closure to this category of actors, especially when it comes to interventions targeting women. These organizations are seen as elements of disorder in the religious sense of the word. On an ad hoc basis, some outside groups can be admitted. This is the case for the Peace Corps which is very active in the Northern part of the country. One of its representatives has been working in the village for more than a year and has been providing technical and material support in livestock farming to the community. However, she is essentially exclusively in contact with men in her work. It can be inferred that NGOs involved in the community are either not particularly interested in the local women (this appears to be the case of Care International) or are not able to gain meaningful access.

In sum, there are several layers of authoritative practices—gendered, religious, political, financial, external—within these communities. But it would be a mistake to focus only on particular gendered aspects without also examining the authority exercised by external actors, of which we are one. In subsequent work, we will explore in more detail the implications of the intersections of these lines of authority, along with their relationship to issues of community and identity.

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Dairou Bouba
Dairou Bouba is a researcher in Political Science. A graduate of the University of Yaoundé II-Cameroon, his research interests are focused on topics related to cross-border insecurity, terrorism, conflicts, public action and public policies, gender, authority and community. The security issue was at the heart of his research paper on the theme: "L'action publique de lutte contre l'insécurité transfrontalière au Cameroun : analyse des mécanismes sociaux de gestion de la crise terroriste à l'Extrême- Nord." Bouba has conducted international surveys in the North of Cameroon on religion, power and modernity.
Tatiana Fouda
Fouda Ange Tatiana is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Yaounde II in Cameroon. Her research focuses on political behavior, mobilization and collective action, as well as questions of citizenship and political commitment. She is part of the ACI Cameroon project team as the field survey administrator.
Cecelia Lynch
Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is an expert on international relations, religion and ethics, humanitarianism, and civil society, and has researched and published extensively on topics related to peace, security, international organization, globalization, humanitarianism, and religion. She co-edits the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) Blog, at www.cihablog.com.
Nadine Machikou
Nadine Machikou is Professor of Political Science and researcher at the Center for Studies and Research on Political and Administrative Dynamics, University of Yaounde II. She is also Director of the Center for Studies and Research in International and Community Law (CEDIC). After a thesis on the construction of decision support in health policies and studies on the political economy of public reforms and the evaluation of public policies in various fields, her work has been oriented towards religious and symbolic uses of power.
Field Notes article

Beyond ‘Hearsay’ Or: Hearing and Learning to Say ‘Assalamu Alaikum’


Kathmandu, Nepal at sunset. Photo Credit: Mike Behnken.

Before I departed for the Madrasa Discourses intensive in Kathmandu, my dad gave me a gift, a copy of his favorite book, The Razor’s Edge. This book tells the story of an American man, Larry Darrell, who chooses to forsake all worldly material possessions in favor of seeking sainthood, enlightenment, and the true meaning to life. Although Larry travels to India to find his “true self,” my dad thought it was perhaps close enough of a cultural experience with which to send me off. There was one rather long quote in the beginning of the book that immediately jumped out at me and stuck with me for the remainder of the trip:

“For men and women are not only themselves, they are the region in which they are born, the city or apartment or farm in which they learn to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are and these are the things that you can’t come to know by hearsay.”

One of the core principles of Catholic Social Teaching I have encountered at Notre Dame stresses the vital importance of recognizing the life and dignity of every human person. As Catholics, we passionately believe that all people are created in the likeness and image of God and should be respected as such. With this principle in mind and The Razor’s Edge in hand, I exited the plane with an open heart and a desire to learn the things about people that cannot be learned from hearsay.

Throughout my two weeks in Nepal I was blessed to forge wonderful new relationships with people from India, Pakistan, South Africa, Germany, the U.S, and Nepal. Of all of these new friendships, none were as strong as those which I had with my roommates. My two roommates, sisters-in-law from Pakistan, broke down the misconceptions that I had about Islam. These misconceptions are ones that seem to be very prevalent in the U.S.—the narrative that all Muslims are terrorists and that Muslim women are restricted by men in everything that they wish to do. My roommates taught me that Islam is a faith of mercy and grace but just like every faith, radical actors can twist it to inflict horrible pain upon others.

Students Haya Majeed and Elizabeth Boyle chat after class at the July 2018 Dhulikhel Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive 2018. Photo Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service.

The first thing that my roommates taught me was the traditional greeting among Muslims, “Assalamu Alaikum” which translates to “peace to you.” The common response to this greeting is, “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam” which translates to “and unto you, peace.” This exchange was immediately all too familiar, nearly identical to one that I utter in a Church every time I celebrate Mass. The one stark difference between my utterance of these phrases and my roommates’ was that I never wished peace to others outside of the confines of the church, outside of eyesight of Christ in the Tabernacle. I always held Christianity to be a faith led by a search for eternal and earthly peace, but the reality is that Islam as I experienced it may present peace in an even more vivid way. I thought it was quite wonderful that every interaction between the Madrasa students that I witnessed began with this exchange—an exchange of well wishes and a way to share your faith in God with others.

My roommates and I would stay up all hours of the night debating American politics, the concept of “love” marriages versus arranged marriages, college life in the U.S, and of course, faith. It did not take too extensive of an exegesis of the Bible and the Quran for us to realize that our two faiths really are not that starkly different. Every day we pointed out more similarities between our two faiths, and so soon enough the question emerged: Why does society tell us that we are two polar opposites? It was at this point that I remembered the words from The Razor’s Edge, that you cannot know the things that make people who they are by hearsay. It became apparent that my perception of Muslims up until this point had all been hearsay.

I had never been to a mosque before this trip, nor had I ever seen traditional Muslim prayer. Growing up in New York City after September 11, 2001, the narratives about Islam that were shared with me my entire life were ones of extremism and terrorism. Yet the Islam I encountered in Kathmandu is a faith of peace, mercy, and grace, just as we like to believe that Christianity is. If the tides had been turned and Christianity had been labeled the “terrorist” faith, how would the world look and how would I have responded?

My roommates and I realized that the only way people of our two faiths would begin to work together is when the barriers built on misconceptions and media distortion are broken down. Rather than being separated by a wall of hearsay, we must learn to walk on the same path of spiritual, philosophical, scientific, and global inquiry that is paved by the acceptance of cultural and religious diversity.

Student Momina Khan takes in Kathmandu at the July 2018 Summer Intensive. Photo Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service.

The incredible women that I met at Madrasa Discourses challenged my notions of what it means to be a feminist, an advocate for others, and a woman of faith. My roommates and I talked at length about the issues that we are passionate about and the ways we think we should resolve them. For example, on and off campus, I am engaged in advocacy work regarding Title IX and campus sexual violence. I have always used my Catholic faith as my motivation for wanting to devote my time to helping others live a safer, more equitable life. Similarly, to me the concept of the burqa as a symbol of freedom and liberation was completely novel, but began to make more sense after I listened to my roommates more over the two weeks.

In many advocacy communities in the United States, including some with which I am involved, faith is often not spoken about.  Because faith has been used as a weapon against people and their self-identification in the past, many advocates disregard faith as a conduit for advocacy work and in turn disregard those advocates who wish to use their faith to promote their cause. Similar to the advocacy community more generally, proponents of feminism in the U.S. often shun religion, as many people view religion as a practice particularly restrictive to women. Through our discussions, I realized that I—and my roommates in Kathmandu—lie at the crossroads of these different approaches to advocacy. I was so grateful that we could have such an open conversation about faith, activism, and feminism, and I left Nepal with a desire to dive into my faith deeper and to explore the role of women in halting the spread of hearsay that causes us to distort our vision of each other.

As I sat on the plane from Kathmandu to the U.S., I opened up my copy of The Razor’s Edge and turned to that quote that started it all. I smiled, knowing that this experience had truly taught me that I cannot live a life based on hearsay. Rather, I must engage with others no matter how different their backgrounds may seem to mine. It is only when we are willing to become vulnerable, to let our guard down, and to let in the thoughts and experiences of others that we will truly learn how to reflect God towards each other.

To my wonderful roommates, who taught me what it actually means to be a Muslim and how faith can be a powerful tool for uplifting the voices of women and challenging the one-sided narrative of other cultures, I wish to you, Assalamu Alaikum.

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Elizabeth Boyle
Elizabeth Boyle is a junior political science and peace studies major from Long Island, New York. She had the opportunity to travel with the Madrasa Discourses team to Nepal this summer and continues to research with Professor Mahan Mirza this year. Outside of school she works as a virtual intern for USAID and as a Policy and Advocacy Organizer for the national advocacy organization, Know Your IX.
Global Currents article

The Shabbat Massacre Is Not Merely About Religion


Vigil after shooting in the Tree of Life Synagogue, October 27, 2018. Photo Credit: Governor Tom Wolf.

On Shabbat service in Tree of Life Synagogue on an autumn day in Pittsburgh, 2018, 11 people were murdered by a white, Christian, racist, antisemitic, middle-aged man. He justified the massacre as a defensive action against infiltration by elements foreign to the boundaries of his “virtuous” community. Populist nationalisms always thrive on the language of authenticity and purity. The latter opens wide doors and paves clear paths to exclusionary and eliminatory practices. The Pittsburgh massacre exposes the complex ways in which religion participates in boundary and border construction.

American nationalism is intrinsically religious by virtue of its Christian content and valences (e.g. “American is a Christian Nation”; National Motto: “In God we Trust”; “America as a New Israel”; the vocation of American Exceptionalism). In its contemporary manifestation, it is “Christian” by virtue of appeals to a Christian ethnicity which is predominantly white. It is a communal demarcation, regardless of actual degrees of religious literacy and practice. Analytically interpreting questions pertaining to religion and modernity always requires us also to examine race, gender, and other classificatory mechanisms associated with matrices of control and domination as they transmogrify over time and in different locations.

The horrors of Tree of Life’s bloody Shabbat illuminated the intersections of racism, xenophobia, and hyper-deregulation of gun laws. These are combined with anti-refugee rhetoric and antisemitic and anti-Muslim dog whistling. The killer in Pittsburgh targeted Tree of Life because of their connection to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helps to resettle refugees and asylum seekers from Central America.  He perceived this as a threat, one further inflamed by rhetorical fear-mongering from the very top of the U.S. political system and mobilized across radicalized and radicalizing social media platforms. He received this messaging as urgent, and demanding urgent measures.

Two interrelated critical points press themselves to the foreground. First, as a variety of commentators and Jewish public intellectuals underscored, the bloody Shabbat culminated a week filled with hateful acts against Democratic political figures as well as all-too-ordinary targeted attacks against marginalized and racialized communities. The violence exposes the complex interrelation between race, religion, and nationalist discourses—in this particular instance that of Trumpism.

Some interpreters underscored how the construction of Jewish people as whites in America—coupled with what James Baldwin referred to in an earlier era as their “moral choice” to become white—explains the apparent privileging of the lives lost at Tree of Life. They are “grievable.” Their senseless deaths appear heinous rather than routine. They give rise to widespread, shared lament.

Other interpreters emphasized an ever-expanding moral clarity.  An increasing number within the American Jewish community experience this clarity when faced with the coalescing of antisemitism and Zionism within the framework of white nationalism. This coalescing is explicit in the admiration of Zionism as a model of the kind of ethnoreligious nationalism the suit-and-tie spokesperson of white nationalism, Richard Spencer, envisions in America. Clearly, there is no room for Jews there.

Such coalescing became clear, to highlight just one example, with the Trump Administration’s invitation to explicitly antisemitic religious leaders as speakers at the relocated American embassy in Jerusalem. The same honored guests are also on record as verbally assaulting Muslims, the LGBTQI communities, and other vulnerable groups. This challenges the Jewish establishment’s position on Israeli policies and Israel’s location as the pivot of American Jewishness. It challenges the Jewish Zionist mythology and redemptive narrative positing Israel as a safe haven and telos of Jewish history. It reveals the historically embedded modalities in which religion participates in constructing communal lines and other boundaries of belonging, non-belonging, and potential alliances.

Pittsburgh in mourning after shooting in the Tree of Life Synagogue. Photo Credit: Governor Tom Wolf.

The coalescing of antisemitism, white nationalism, and Zionism therefore, ironically, exposes how the claimed equivalency between criticisms of Israel and antisemitism facilitated an embrace and/or tolerance of antisemitic Zionists whose rhetoric and mainstreaming in the U.S. during the elections of 2016 quite clearly made Jewish people less safe. Antisemitism comes entangled with anti-Muslim or Islamophobic discourses, and this reality is even clearer in juxtaposition to a discursive effort to manipulate Islamophobia and orientalist underpinnings to authorize support of Israeli policies against Palestinians.

Yet other interpreters stress the grassroots acts of American Muslim solidarity and the profound meanings generated by multiple interfaith vigils in key cities across the U.S. while others revisit the need to engage in cross-learning among potential allies in the social movement against racism of the histories, manifestations, and shapes of antisemitism, classically and in modernity. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, for example, broadened its original scope from Jewish refugees to all refugees decades ago, recognizing Jews’ historical obligation to help others in need as they once were.

These sites of interreligious or intercommunal acts of solidarity from the grassroots lead us to the second point the Shabbat massacre illuminates, and which I have already alluded to throughout this exposition. Any effort to isolate and ghettoize “religion” as faith contained in houses of worship or in other demarcated spaces—including a domesticated discourse of American religious pluralism—glosses over the complex and intersectional dynamics participating in the construction of identities and their imaginings, as well as the potentiality of their reimagining. The moral clarity some Jewish people are now experiencing is born of their realization, captured in the killer’s apparent motives, that their safety is bound up with the treatment of all the other minority groups and marginalized communities. The fate of the 11 of Tree of Life is deeply entangled with the killing of African American shoppers in Kroger earlier that same week in Kentucky. All those deaths result from the construction of communal boundaries through exclusionary and selective appeals to Christian belonging and racial categories. Likewise, the boundary construction exercise that employed race and Islamophobia to consolidate the imagining of Jews as white—which continues to authorize an ethnocentric interpretation of Jewish liberation and geopolitical borders embodied in Israelism—is crumbling. Its crumbling exposes the intricate links between antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiments and the potential paths for ally-ship and co-resistance that Muslims, Jews, and others can—and must—articulate against racialized and exclusionary national discourses that employ particular interpretations of Christianity to draw boundaries and close borders.

The Shabbat massacre is not only a hate crime. It is also the latest expression of racialized Christian construction of boundaries. It requires that we grapple with the interrelations and intersections of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish discourses in producing and reproducing white Christian nationalism in the U.S. and in other contexts normally referred to as the “modern west.”  The latter, once again, is revealing its constitutive dark sides.

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

“Faith-by-Birth”? Community and Religious Identity


Confirmation at St. John the Evangelist Church in Goshen, IN. Photo Credit: St. John Evangelist-CC.

I am Catholic because my mother lost her driver’s license when I was seventeen.

That is not the entire truth. I am Catholic because my parents are Catholic because their parents are Catholic. I was baptized before I could crawl, a three-month-old baby who slept through Easter Mass and the sacrament that followed. I was sent to Catholic grade school because my parents had attended Catholic grade schools. I chose a Catholic high school because I liked its performing arts program. I applied to Notre Dame on a whim.

For much of my life, my relationship with my faith was lukewarm. I studied for theology tests and attended the occasional Mass. I prayed when I needed something. I didn’t question my beliefs because I didn’t spend much time dwelling on them. This changed during my junior year of high school, when I began preparing for confirmation. I attended biweekly classes in the church basement to discuss topics that I had been exposed to all my life. Yet the tone of the conversation had changed for me. I knew that after participating in this sacrament, I would be recognized as an adult by the Church. I would no longer be able to claim that I was Catholic through my parents’ choice alone.

I didn’t know if I wanted to continue in this faith. I disagreed with several of the Church’s teachings and practices, and I questioned my role as a participant in an institution whose complicated legacy carried persistent negative effects. At the heart of my indecision lay doubt. I didn’t know if I believed in God. I thought that the Gospels were great stories, but I wasn’t sure if they were anything more. My conflicted journey toward confirmation reached its climax while I was on a weekend retreat, a requirement for the sacrament. The retreat leaders were unwavering in their faith and unwilling to discuss reform within the Church. I decided that confirmation was not the right choice for me. I planned to tell this to my mom when she picked me up the next day.

However, my mother had misplaced her driver’s license over the weekend, which meant that my dad was the one to pick me up. My family decided that they would all go with him, and we would get lunch afterward. When I walked out of the retreat building and saw both my parents and my brother in the car, I hesitated. On the journey home, I thought about all the time that had been spent on the confirmation process by myself, my parents, and my sponsor. I didn’t voice my doubts. One month later, I was confirmed.

Nearly three years after that car ride, I sit with my computer and notebook in a quiet area of my dorm. I am talking with madrasa students about the subject of religious conversion and desertion, a continuation of the previous week’s discussion. In some respects, the madrasa students’ religious histories reflect my own. They were all born into Muslim families. They have all pursued religious education, though their study of theology has been much more rigorous than my own. They quote the Quran and cite the Hadith in constant support of their arguments.

Dhulikhel Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive 2018. Photo Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service.

“In the Quran, it is said that we should not disdain others just because they do not follow our path,” Manzar Imam, a student from India says. Our conversation on apostasy has broadened to become a reflection on interreligious relations. Manzar continues, “In Islam there is no basis for discriminating against other religions.”

Waqas Khan, a Pakistani student, pushes back against this claim. “Islam does not allow for conversion,” he says. “Islamic law places restrictions on non-Muslims.” He does not believe that Islam alone is vulnerable to these biases. “Every religion considers itself superior to all others,” he says.

This point speaks to some of my own uncertainties regarding my faith. I have often felt like a passive Catholic, someone who was born into my religion and has done little to explore other faiths. I ask the madrasa students in my dialogue group, all of whom are Islamic Studies scholars, whether they have studied other religions with any intensity. They have not. I think that my doubts regarding my beliefs stem in part from the randomness of faith-by-birth. How easily might I have been born a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Buddhist? I struggle to comprehend the historical atrocities that have been carried out in the name of religion when the grounds for belief always appear so tenuous.

Of course, it is overly simplistic to view religion only in this negative light. The benefits of belonging to a faith are considerable, and the existence of religious groups does not in itself create conflict. Without groups, most individuals would be isolated, unloved, disoriented, [and] relatively unproductive” because within those groups we find the interpersonal bonds that we seek to create (Meyers 1999, p.324).

This sentiment is expressed in our discussion on apostasy. Usman Ramazan argues that the creation of categories is not problematic. “The problem is how we act toward other categories of people,” he says. As Rasheed Naseer points out, “Religion is not the only means of discrimination among peoples.”

I have acquired a more nuanced view of the benefits and dangers of religious practice over the past two years at Notre Dame. When I decided to participate in the Madrasa Discourses, I was most interested in the program’s focus on intercultural discussions of science and philosophy. After a year of leading these dialogues, I have come to understand that our religious backgrounds have shaped our perspectives and informed our opinions in every conversation. We found connections to religion in every topic we discussed, from amortality to social media. In some cases, these connections arose from explicit questions that addressed morality and compatibility with one’s faith. However, we often found ourselves discussing religion even when it had not been overtly introduced in the conversation.

From these discussions, I attained an understanding of Islam that I could not have acquired in a textbook. We did not have the advanced theological debates of which these madrasa students are capable, but nevertheless I find that my perspective has grown. My understanding of how these students viewed robot priests and anti-aging technology greatly informed my perception of Islam. I witnessed how they structured their arguments, and how they challenged me to defend my own beliefs. I found myself providing a “Catholic perspective,” even as I explained my tenuous connection to my faith.

Dhulikhel Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive 2018. Photo Credit: Shrestha Digital Photo Service.

I made this connection clear in our discussion on religious conversion. After I shared the story of my confirmation, as well as the current doubts and uncertainties that linger in my beliefs, Faiza Hussain discussed her own exposure to faiths outside of Islam. She compared her current life in Germany to her upbringing in Pakistan and explained that she had no contact with other faiths while she was growing up. In Germany she met many individuals who followed different faiths with varying degrees of devotion, along with those who had converted to their current faith, and those who had left religion altogether. Speaking of Pakistan, Waqas Khan concluded, “When living in a country that is 98% Muslim, it’s really complicated to consider changing religions. We belong to our community.”

The Madrasa Discourses project has brought me into contact with intelligent, passionate students who are motivated to critically engage with new ideas. My discussions with these students have greatly contributed to my personal understanding of faith and my own relationship with Catholicism. I used to consider myself a passive Catholic because I did not fully understand the role that religion has had in shaping my most fundamental beliefs. I too have always belonged to a religious community, and my Catholic education has greatly influenced how I view myself and my place in the world. I have come to understand that my moral perspective has been shaped in large part by my faith. This newfound understanding has not entirely changed my relationship with religion. I am still often frustrated with and critical of the Church. I still have moments of doubt. Before participating in these conversations, I thought that these moments defined me. After having the opportunity to think deeply and critically with these students, I have been able to more thoughtfully consider the root of my beliefs, the choices I have made regarding my faith, and what it means to be Catholic in the world today.

 

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Sydney Schlager
Sydney Schlager is an International Economics and Peace Studies student at the University of Notre Dame. She participated in the one-credit Madrasa Discourses Peace Research Lab course through the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in the fall of 2017.