Blog

Field Notes article

The Modernity of Witchcraft Asylum Claims


A line of refugees crossing the border of Hungary and Austria on their way to Germany. September 6th, 2015. Photo credit Mstyslav Chernov.

“The political and intellectual history of modernity,” writes historian Robert Orsi, “is also always a religious history.” However, as significant and diverse recent scholarship is now bringing to light, narratives around the political, intellectual, and religious history of modernity often serve not only to illuminate the past, but also to obscure it through the authorization of specific forms of experience and knowledge. 

This symposium, entitled “Decolonizing Narratives, Denaturalizing Modernity,” aims to highlight recent scholarship that complicates received notions around the history of modernity. While focusing on distinct temporal, geographical, and religious contexts, in their shared attempts to uncover histories hidden by the dominant discourses of modernity, the authors featured in this symposium uniformly challenge the naturalization of modernity’s emergence and indicate that that the history of modernity has always been (and remains) fundamentally contested. 

Modernity and Witchcraft

In Peter Geschiere’s now seminal work, The Modernity of Witchcraft, witchcraft discourse and the occult more generally in West Africa are presented as a flexible and ambivalent mechanism to consider and engage social change, and not a logically closed system of beliefs and practices in the manner described by earlier structural anthropologists. Witchcraft is highly important today because many individuals from different countries and communities on the African continent turn to forms of magic, vodou, juju, or the supernatural broadly understood to navigate the unsteady and inconsistent challenges of globalization. If Robert Orsi’s contention that the political history of modernity is also always religious history, it merits considering how this might extend to one of the most widespread and omnipresent religious forces and practices in Africa, namely witchcraft as a manifestation of the supernatural. Witchcraft accusations that surface in various guises in asylum claims, and how they are adjudicated and often rejected for various reasons such as not rising to the level of what is considered religion in European and North American immigration courts, provide one context to think about this issue.

In 2009, the adherents of a vodou priest (bokono) kidnapped Dopé (not her real name) in Cotonou, Benin, and brought her to the atikevodou shrine of Sakpata near Cové where she was imprisoned and raped. After several weeks, Dopé, an educated, married mother, escaped to her husband and then fled to the US to seek asylum. She believed her experiences were the result of her childhood betrothal as trokosi, a form of indebted curse exacted for her mother’s infidelity. Dopé’s supernatural narrative troubled her lawyers and they feared no judge would consider it credible. They reframed her claim by documenting misogynistic forced marriage practices, sexual assault, child abuse, child slavery and the widespread belief in levirate (widow remarriage to husband’s kin). Her lawyers chose gender violence arguments coupled with established precedent pertaining to slavery and trafficking as a strategy to avoid foregrounding the discussion of vodou, often considered a form of witchcraft by adjudicators (asylum-granting officials).

The Asylum Process and the Climate of Suspicion

Dopé’s experience, like those of other women whose testimonies I have been asked to evaluate as an expert witness in federal immigration court, is emblematic of legal strategies unfolding in response to the increasing securitization of migration described by Vicki Squire, and new technologies of adjudication my co-editor, Galya Ruffer, and I have explored elsewhere. Until the 1980s, refugee and asylum legal procedures operated within an informal climate of trust and applicants were generally presumed to be telling the truth. Customized research—such as expert testimony from scholars or professionals or medico-legal reports—was almost unheard of. Since the 1980s, however, significant global geopolitical changes have conspired to turn the refugee experience upside down. The refugee status determination process is now overshadowed by what Didier Fassin and Estelle D’Halluin refer to as a “climate of suspicion, in which the refugee or asylum seeker is seen as someone trying to take advantage of the country’s hospitality.”

What Paul Ricœur first called “hermeneutics of suspicion” characterizes asylum and refugee proceedings and gives rise to new technologies. One such technology, data referred to as “Country of Origin Information” or COI, has become central to the pseudo-scientific testing of asylum narratives, and increasingly it features in so-called “credibility assessments.” Adjudicators increasingly emphasize the importance of empirical research in establishing claimant credibility. Claims and counterclaims must be anchored by objective data, publicly sourced information, and arguments substantiated by scholarly evidence.

Country of Origin Information has emerged as a specialized knowledge category that attempts to answer, with empirical data, the central matter of refugee law: namely, who is a refugee? As Jean-François Lyotard explained, the burden resting on individual asylum seekers to prove claims that often cannot be documented is a “wrong,” but one that is “accompanied by the loss of means to prove the damage.” The temptation to stretch, embellish, or invent narratives that conform to asylum law is thus enormous. Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication barriers coupled with physical and psychological traumas add considerable complexity, making inconsistency part and parcel of the process of narration. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida explained, the borderline between “political” and “economic” refugees is very difficult to determine.

Asylum and the Supernatural

Recent scholarship on the supernatural in Africa—including, but not limited to practices described as magic, sorcery, and witchcraft—has returned to the distinction, first articulated by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, between external and somatic supernatural power. Peter Geschiere is one of several scholars to have observed that witchcraft, the preeminent folk terminology for the supernatural, is much more public in Africa today, and features in political and social debate. Witchcraft-driven violence challenges socio-political order with a variety of political and legislative outcomes. Witchcraft and sorcery, in Katherine Luongo’s words, “denote a continuum ranging from supernatural malevolence to supernatural healing.” Harry West has described how on Mozambique’s Muedan plateau the “world of sorcery” is “filled with shades of gray.” By contrast, however, according to Katherine Luongo, “no ambiguity about witchcraft or witches exists” in the “global arena of asylum.” Witchcraft operates as an “embodied capacity” to “harm” and it certainly does not engage the Refugee Convention’s religious protection. Luongo contends that in asylum claims, witchcraft has “an uncomfortable ahistoricity and an awkward detachment from institutions.”

Asylum-seekers are often uncomfortable divulging the full details of the supernatural realm, but generally speaking it is my experience that many are confident that their experiences mark them as constitutive of another Refugee Convention protected category, namely the “particular social group.” Asylum claims in which the supernatural is only one facet in a multidimensional case enable us to avoid entering into the rich but frustrating debate about what constitutes a distinct “social group” basis for asylum. Dopé’s story demonstrates how, in contrast with many adjudicators’ perceptions that “primitive beliefs” are the realm of the poor and illiterate, the supernatural is not confined to lower socio-economic echelons. Dopé, an educated, married mother living in Benin’s economic capital, Cotonou, but originally from the village of Cové, fled to the US after her traumatic experience. Dopé claimed she was kidnapped as an adult in her late twenties by adherents of a bokono and brought to his atikevodou (healing vodou) shrine of Sakpata, where she was imprisoned and repeatedly raped.

As indicated above, Dopé believed her experiences as an adult were the result of her betrothal as a child to a vodou shrine as a form of indebted inherited slavery (trokosi), a form of punishment exacted on her mother for her alleged infidelity. Dopé interpreted her predicament to be the result of her public disavowal of the trokosi obligations when she reached maturity. She had been raped and abused by her kidnapper’s brother multiple times as a child. But when she reached maturity, she simply walked from the compound and moved to Cotonou to begin a new life. Whereas the individual to whom she was betrothed had made no attempt to entice her to the shrine, after his death, his brother dispatched men to kidnap her, consistent with his understanding of levirate.

In Dope’s initial interview, the US asylum officer rejected the idea that educated, literate women practiced vodou. The Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services held that only the poor, rural, and illiterate would be involved in sorcery and magic. On appeal in immigration court, this decision was overturned. Whereas ritual enslavement and vodou confounded the first-level bureaucratic adjudicator, defensively resisting slavery, kidnapping, rape, and imprisonment—in a country where vodou is publicly sanctioned and where the state has designated a “National Voodoo Day”—constituted established grounds for social group persecution in the eyes of the immigration judge. Citing the constitution and the statutes of Benin that prohibit many practices attendant to slavery, but importantly make no mention of trokosi and vodounsi, sexual slavery, forced marriage (mariage forcé), and sexual assault in the context of marriage, the judge held that it remained the case that many women continue to be subject to the ‘Coutumier du Dahomey’ which treat them as legal minors and accord them limited rights in marriage and inheritance. Importantly, there was no evidence of enforcement of laws protecting women from some of these human rights violations. Dopé’s legal team thus successfully reassembled her narrative as that of a woman fleeing multiple backward, traditional misogynistic practices, at the center of which was a very violent form of forced marriage for which there was no plausible expectation of state protection.

Questioning Dominant Interpretations of Religion

It’s hard to understand why vodou remains so alien a concept to refugee adjudicators, particularly as the religious observance is so well documented by ethnographers and anthropologists. There is no shortage of lay and scholarly literature about the intrinsic importance of vodou and various other manifestations of animist belief and religious practice. And yet adjudicators remain resistant to interpreting persecution within the context of a vodou-based narrative as engaging the religious persecution protections enshrined in the Refugee Conventions; indeed, Orsi’s framework with which I began this blog post seem almost prophetic.

There are perhaps two reasons why vodou troubles refugee adjudicators. The first is the nature of the judiciary; for example in 2017 the UK judiciary remained composed of a majority of white males, although this is changing. Similar gender and racial dynamics can be found in many jurisdictions in Europe and North America. The second issue is the inherently conservative nature of refugee decision-making. No judge likes to be overturned on appeal. If a decision can be made based on existing and firmly established interpretation of the Refugee Conventions, there is a strong bias to avoid entering into discussion of matters that may raise the ire or the eyebrows of more senior judges or tribunal heads. Fortunately, both of these dynamics are subject to change over time, and I suspect in the near future attorneys representing other cases mirroring that of Dopé may not need to go to such lengths to achieve migrant justice.

Array
Benjamin Lawrance
Benjamin N. Lawrance was a visiting scholar at the Kroc Institute from 2017 to 2018. He is a graduate of Stanford University and University College London. He is a professor of history at the University of Arizona and studies comparative historical and contemporary slavery, human trafficking, cuisine and globalization, human rights, refugee mobilities, and asylum decision-making. While at the Kroc Institute, he worked on a book entitled Nations Inside Out: An African Refugee Grammar.
Field Notes article

Modernity, Women, and War: Struggles for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East


Photo Credit: Nisa Goksel. The Peace Mothers at the 8th of March 2014 (International Women’s Day) demonstration in Diyarbakır.
Photo Credit: Nisa Goksel. The Peace Mothers at the 8th of March 2014 (International Women’s Day) demonstration in Diyarbakır.

“The political and intellectual history of modernity,” writes historian Robert Orsi, “is also always a religious history.” However, as significant and diverse recent scholarship is now bringing to light, narratives around the political, intellectual, and religious history of modernity often serve not only to illuminate the past, but also to obscure it through the authorization of specific forms of experience and knowledge. 

This symposium, entitled “Decolonizing Narratives, Denaturalizing Modernity,” aims to highlight recent scholarship that complicates received notions around the history of modernity. While focusing on distinct temporal, geographical, and religious contexts, in their shared attempts to uncover histories hidden by the dominant discourses of modernity, the authors featured in this symposium uniformly challenge the naturalization of modernity’s emergence and indicate that that the history of modernity has always been (and remains) fundamentally contested. 

Modernity, Women, and War

How should we conceive of the relationship between modernist projects, women, and war in the Middle East? Studies of gender in the Middle East have argued that modernization processes have deeply shaped contemporary women’s identity formations and women’s movements (for a good discussion on the topic see Minoo Moallem 2005). Postcolonial feminist theorists like Moallem provide a wider critique of modernity as fundamentally linked to colonialism. My purpose here is to rethink the interrelated projects of modernity and colonialism through women’s struggles as I discuss how Kurdish women in the Middle East fight against the politics of war and violence. Their efforts suggest that new avenues for decolonization and modernity may be created wherein the role of women are radically re-imagined.

I believe that the main difficulty facing studies on women and gender in the Middle East revolves around developing a framework without relying on two premises: 1) the premise that the experiences of women from distinct national, ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds can be homogenized based on their identity as women; and 2) the premise that women’s status or oppression can be reduced to the centrality of Islamic and/or traditional forces (using, for example, dichotomies of “secular versus pious” or “modern versus traditional”). In addition, existing studies do not often take into account the co-constitutive relationship between recent wars in the region and modernity; how wars and modernity interact to affect women’s lives, as women take part in those wars in multiple positions; and how wars as contested sites of modernity and coloniality have transformed the gendered geopolitics of the region.

Let me briefly explain each of these two points. To begin with the first point, we know that feminist theorists with a postcolonial stance have long questioned the monolithic representation of women in the Middle East. According to this representation, women are often viewed as victims in some way—victims of “oppressive” Middle Eastern men; of colonialism; and/or of religious, traditional, and national powers. Feminist critiques effectively demonstrate that what we need to challenge is this homogenous and monolithic representation of women in the Middle East. This homogeneous perspective comes out of an approach that assumes Islam to be the key determining factor in women’s lives. This brings us to the second point, related to what Marnia Lazreg calls the “religious paradigm.” In this paradigm, which is dominant in the social sciences, women of “other” nations are perceived as yet-to-be-modern, for they are seen as trapped by religious/patriarchal dogmas and traditions. Postcolonial feminist debates challenging the centrality of Islam to existing analyses of modernity and women open up the ground for us to reconsider the interrelations among social, political, cultural, and religious forces that impact women’s lives, instead of explaining the status of women through Islam alone.

War and Colonialism

More importantly, another point I want to emphasize is the role of recent wars in the Middle East and how clearly they show the intersectional relationship between modernity and colonialism. This has been one of the main concerns of my own research on Kurdish women’s struggles for peace and democracy across borders. Wars in the Middle East cannot be understood if we merely base our analysis on the relationship between Islam and modernity. The link between modernity and coloniality is another paradigm to be considered when we discuss war-waging techniques in the Middle East. The perspective of Santiago Slabodsky becomes very useful here as he challenges Western modernity and its colonial foundations through a Jewish decolonial critique. Walter Mignolo, too, reminds us of the coupling of Western modernity and coloniality in President Bush’s statement referring to the U.S.’ wars in the region as “spreading democracy in the Middle East.” Democracy, progress, and peace are embedded into the rhetoric of modernity as much as a colonial logic is. Mignolo argues that this is indeed an extended endeavor to secure “the completion of the incomplete project of modernity” in the region (2007, 458). In this sense, any war waged in the name of “humanitarian” intervention is already part of a larger modernist and colonial enterprise. Particularly since 9/11, this nexus of modernity and coloniality has been a key site for the discourse of the War on Terror, the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continuing war in Syria.

While the discourse of spreading democracy to the Middle East goes hand in hand with the discourse of “saving women” who are seen as victims of Islamic fundamentalist powers, I see current wars as creating an ambivalent terrain that allows for actions that are particularly destabilizing to existing discourses. This ambivalent terrain of war and violence makes it difficult to categorize women either as victims or as agents, insofar as it allows for various alternative, creative, and revolutionary modalities of political conduct for women. Even though war, modernity, and colonialism are intricately linked in the Middle East, I believe that the context of war is crucial to the formation of alternative women’s movements and groups as well as to the alternative imaginations of modernity, which I will illustrate through two examples from my research on Kurdish women.

Alternative Women’s Movements

The first example I want to draw on is the Peace Mothers organization. This is a group of Kurdish women who mobilized in reaction to the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish guerrilla organization the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party). This war has been ongoing in Turkey since the late 1980s, alternating between temporary ceasefires or periods of peace and renewed outbreaks of violence. The Peace Mothers group is made up of the mothers of PKK guerrillas. They are visible members of protests in their characteristic white headscarves. These women pursue an end to the war across various national and international political platforms, whether in the streets or the Parliament. The Peace Mothers challenge and shift the boundaries of modern politics through their political participation as mothers. Furthermore, the figure of the Kurdish mother disrupts the image of the “modern woman” so long upheld by the hegemonic Turkish modernization project. The ideal Turkish woman citizen is represented as a mother and wife whose life “benefits” from the modernization project, circumscribed by the code of morality. In this project, mothers are responsible for raising patriotic, Turkish-speaking citizens. Kurdish mothers, however, often resist acting as breeders of Turkish national culture—for example, by speaking Kurdish and embracing Kurdish culture. In this context, the anti-war efforts of the Peace Mothers constitute a ground for claiming the right to be and to speak Kurdish. This stands in opposition to the supposed homogeneity of Turkey’s “modern” national community.

Photo credit: Shervan Derwish and Jack Shahine. Women remove their burqas upon crossing from ISIS-controlled territory into an area controlled by Kurdish fighters.

My other example is from just across the border from Turkey: the Kurdish women fighters in the Kurds’ resistance in Syria. At the time of the outbreak of war in Syria, we witnessed a proliferation of images of Kurdish women in the Western media. Cameras frame images of these Kurdish women smiling, carrying arms, casting off burqas, and smoking cigarettes. These women are portrayed as “modern,” “secular,” and “liberated”. In many of those photos, women cast off their burqas to show that they have been “freed” from IS upon entering Kurdish-controlled areas. These women, whether or not they carry arms, have become the “new” and “progressive” faces of the Middle East. Their fight against IS has been framed as a fight against “Islamic terrorism.” But outside of their supposed fight against “Islam,” the Western media has paid scant attention to the ideological side of these women’s struggle in Syria. In fact, Kurdish women define their fight as a women’s revolution, whose goal is the transformation of all segments of society, and the decolonization of their lands, their minds, their pasts, and their marginalized histories.

Even though the Peace Mothers in Turkey and Kurdish women in Syria continue to struggle, the international public has recently, it seems, lost interest in these Kurdish women. Why has this interest faded so quickly? I believe the answer to this question takes us back to the relationship between coloniality and modernity. Specifically, it returns us to the necessity of a postcolonial feminist perspective on such questions. Yet this interest and fascination with the struggles of Kurdish women is contingent on the Western eye. Indeed, the fetishizing, colonialist gaze is doomed to be short-term. The gaze of interest will inevitably find new objects of attention. To this fetishizing gaze, the acts of Peace Mothers and Kurdish women fighters might seem to juxtapose: one seeks peace and the other takes up arms. Yet both these groups struggle for the same ideal. Each works to build an alternate society by shattering the violent foundations of modernity. Each tries to create a non-colonial modernity and to reclaim modernity’s unfulfilled promise of peace and democracy. These women’s efforts for these goals lead us to ask: is it possible to imagine a modernity that is truly democratic and peaceful?

 

 

Further reading

Çağlayan, Handan. 2008. “Voices from the Periphery of the Periphery: Kurdish Women’s Political Participation in Turkey.” Presented at 17th Annual Conference on Feminist Economics, June 19-21, 2008 (Torino, Italy).

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1987. “Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case.” Feminist Studies 13(2): 317-338.

Lazreg, Marnia. 1990. “Gender and Politics in Algeria: Unraveling the Religious Paradigm.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 15(4): 755-780.

Lewis, Reina. 2004. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. London, New York: I.B. Tauris.

———. 1996. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. London and New York: Routledge.

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

———. 2007. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 449-514.

Moallem, Minoo. 2005. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

Moghadam, M. Valentine. 1999. “Revolution, Religion, and Gender Politics: Iran and Afghanistan Compared.” Journal of Women’s History 10(4): 172-195.

———. 2003 [1993]. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Üstündağ, Z. Nazan. 2005. Belonging to the Modern: Women’s Suffering and Subjectivities in Urban Turkey. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University.

Array
Nisa Goksel
Nisa Göksel recently earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University, Evanston. She also holds a graduate certificate from the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Northwestern. While at the Kroc Institute as visiting fellow from 2017-2018, she worked on two projects. The first was a book project based on her dissertation about the political mobilization of Kurdish women around peace, democracy, and women’s freedom. In the second project, she examined the participation of women in armed struggles in the Middle East.
Global Currents article

Modernity as Theater of the Absurd


Photo Credit: Gili Getz. IfNotNow march in Washington, DC, May 14, 2018.

This week’s symbolic opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, with attendance from high-ranking American officials and a visual background set portraying the merging of the American and Israeli flags, marked a terribly deadly day for nonviolent Palestinian protesters. Over 61 are now declared dead and almost three thousand more injured, and many may spend the rest of their lives with amputated legs, which (together with spraying tear gas from drones) reveals an operationalized military method to demobilize Gazans. It is not that there are no armed groups in Gaza, but the particular organizers of the protests chose nonviolence, signifying sensitization to the effectiveness—if not the morality—of this method of resistance. Still, how does one expect Palestinians to endure their occupation nonviolently?

The stories conveyed in the American stagecraft and, importantly, the stories silenced or omitted, reveal the U.S. to be actively fueling the conflict it claims to want to resolve and increasing the divide between non-Israeli Jews and Israeli Jews. In the Trump era, antisemites and Christian Zionists are co-positioned as moral authorities, delegitimizing the U.S. as an honest broker in the region. Questioning the honesty of the United States’ brokering is not new. What is new is how clear this argument has become given the juxtaposition of the carnage in Gaza and the pomp and circumstance in Jerusalem. This juxtaposition conveys the complexities of modernity through a specific set of discourses and practices. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation of Palestine cannot be understood without interrogating colonialism, orientalism, and antisemitism and how they relate to one another in narrating (Christian) modernity.

The indiscriminate violence against protesters in Gaza expressing their right of return, and the unilateral and provocative decision of Trump’s U.S. to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, only serve to deepen existing divisions, amplifying some narratives and silencing others. One narrative is most critically concerned with decades of Israeli occupation and the denial of Palestinian experiences of displacement. Relatedly, the many dead and injured people are often presented as faceless statistics, showing how entrenched colonial narratives about Israel and Palestine are. Palestinians, like other indigenous communities around the globe, appear to be both “ungrievable” and their dispossession instrumental for modernity as “progress.” Indeed, the siege on Gaza is a constant embodiment of coloniality as the constitutive dark side of modernity.  Another narrative is about the consolidation of an expansive conception of Jerusalem as pivotal for the Jewish-Israeli nationalist imagination. Religious messianic Zionism is as modern as the secular discourses of national self-determination and could have not come into fruition if it were not for multiple “secular” Israeli governments’ subsidizing of the settlement project in the territories occupied in 1967.

There are other less muscular and less ethnoreligious narratives of Israeliness. However, these are increasingly diminished in traction. In recent years, internal critics of the occupation have been marginalized with the intensification of censorship and the delegitimization of groups such as Breaking the Silence. That President Trump appears to have a high percentage of approval in the Israeli public denotes both the partisan nature of American policy in the region and the diminished capacity of the United States to act as an honest broker. It is not only that its policy decision to relocate the embassy cohered with Benjamin Netanyahu’s aspiration and his coalition’s ideological underpinnings. It is also the case that the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from an internationally ratified agreement with Iran is very much in line with Israeli agenda as articulated by Netanyahu and his political allies in Israel and the United States. Let us not forget Netanyahu’s effort to meddle in the deliberations in the House of Representatives, pleading with Congress to reject the Iran Deal in 2015. He now has what he was lobbying for.

The symbolic opening of the embassy amid destruction and death in Gaza also points to the silencing of suffering, routine violence, and military control over every facet of Palestinian lives. It allows one historical memory of Jewish suffering to trump and authorize others’ suffering and constant state of domination. This is the legacy of European Jewish modernity. The segregation, ghettoization, and eventual elimination of Jews is framed as a unique event, blinding Jews to the humanity and suffering of Palestinians whose displacement is so intertwined with the replacement of Jews in Palestine, and whose ghettoization in open air prisons such as Gaza presses upon us the terrible ironies of this modern narrative. But, memory, as argued powerfully by Michael Rothberg, does not need to be a zero-sum game. Holocaust memory too can be fruitfully decolonized.

The eruption in Gaza and the Jerusalem provocation also convey the coalescing of radicalization in Israel with the currents of Christian Zionism in the U.S. and their access to, indeed occupation of, the U.S. government, as indicated by the choice of pastors Robert Jeffers and John Hagee to offer benedictions and open the dedication ceremony of the embassy. Jeffers is infamous for his explicit anti-Muslim, anti-Mormon, anti-LGBTQI, and anti-Jewish statements. Hagee is likewise well known as the founder of Christians United for Israel. Both have theologized about pre-eschatological apocalyptic events in the Middle East. With the transfer of the embassy and the dissolution of the Iran Deal, they got the match they have been praying for and thus both offered words of praise to Trump as an instrument in their end-time drama.  The symbolic ceremony in Jerusalem embodied the merging of the cynical, ideological, and eschatological as well as Islamophobia (orientalism), Zionism, and antisemitism. Meanwhile, in besieged Gaza, Israeli forces demonstrated a profound disregard for human life.

Choosing these pastors to lend supposedly moral authority to the event illuminates what became clear for critical American Jews and other non-Israeli Jews: in the Trump era, antisemitism and Zionism can go hand in hand, with someone like Richard Spencer celebrating his euphemistically labeled alt-right as “Zionism for white people.” Indeed, they also go hand in hand with multiple other bigotries. Hence, the most hopeful story is the protests led by IfNotNow, the millennial-led movement of American Jews. They assert, first, that Occupation is “not my Judaism” (#NotMyJudaism) and that the embassy move is an act clearly designed to entrench the occupation. These young people are indignant about their leaders’ warm relationship with the clear consolidation of antisemitic strains of Zionism. They also know that Israel does not make them safer. On the contrary, antisemitism is on the rise and their leaders seem to be okay with this. Otherwise, how could they enable the theater of the absurd that unfolded in the ceremonial opening of the embassy in Jerusalem.

The relocation of the embassy, the carnage in Gaza, and the honoring (and vindication) of Hagee and Jeffers point not only to the discrediting of the U.S. as a broker of peace in the region. It also points to the changing dynamics between Jews and Israelis, and the complex interplays between antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Zionism. This moment offers unprecedented clarity of the Trump Administration’s partisan support of a particular ethnoreligious nationalist version of Israel. What was previously expressed more opaquely (i.e. American support of the occupation, the enduring settlement project, and Israeli militarization) is now unequivocally clear. This clarity deepens the parting of the ways among non-Israeli and Israeli Jews. It also paves the road for a paradigm shift in terms of modes of imagining cohabitation. With the discrediting of the American brokerage, we hear loudly the nails in the coffin of the two-state solution.

 

Array
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

Pondering Theodicy in Education City


Photo Credit: Javed Akhatar. Madrasa Discourses students in the Education City Mosque in Doha in December 2017.
Photo Credit: Javed Akhatar. Madrasa Discourses students in the Education City Mosque in Doha in December 2017.

How can old tradition serve new knowledge creation? From a theological perspective, what happens when science begins to see human beings as it sees other animals, plants, and even inanimate matter? To ponder these and similar questions, the Madrasa Discourses project 2017 winter intensive invited about 50 madrasa students and faculty from India and Pakistan to Doha, Qatar. For six days we were exposed to serious and interesting lectures, discussions, dialogues, and workshops on translating Islam across cosmologies.

On the first day, Professor Mahan Mirza, Lead Faculty at the University of Notre Dame for the project, revealed the agenda for the next week: “Not to tell you what to think, but rather just to think!” He drew our attention to the two notions of dhikr (remembrance of Allah) and the verses of fikr (imagination) in the Qur’an. His discussion centered on contemporary theological challenges through which he helped us to understand the link between faith and science. This has been a subject of study since ancient times, addressed by theologians, philosophers, and now scientists. While previously overlapping categories, religious scholarship and the practice of observation and experimentation are now often seen as distinct, with some characterizing the relationship as one of conflict, others describing it as one of contrast, and others proposing convergence (see Haught 2012). On the subject of death and immortality, modern science and modern culture have an entirely different take on life and death as compared to Islamic religious perspectives. The former don’t think of death as a metaphysical mystery, and they certainly don’t view death as the source of life’s meaning. Rather, for many modern people death is a technical problem that we can and should solve. Humans always die due to some technical glitch, for example, the heart stops pumping blood, cancerous cells spread in the liver, etc. These are all technical problems. And every technical problem has a technical solution that in the future can or must be solved (Harari 2015, 22-23)! Students engaged in small group discussions in the late afternoons on various prompts created by Professor Mirza. For instance: “What approach (conflict, contrast, or convergence) between science and faith is acceptable?”“Will modern science succeed in solving the puzzle of death?” “How may a-mortality challenge theology?”

Hermeneutics, history, and tradition were discussed the next day by Professor Ebrahim Moosa, Primary Investigator of the Madrasa Discourses Project and Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His session included textuality in Muslim imagination from authority to metaphoricity, and the intimacy of language and thought in Islam. He emphasized the hermeneutic circle that refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and non-verbal communication as well as presuppositions, pre-understandings, and semiotics (Mir et al. 2015, 113; see also McNamara 1994). Several of the concerns that grew out of his lecture became prompts for the afternoon session: “Does the language we use correspond to reality?” “What is the role of culture in language production?” “Why is it so difficult to translate concepts from one language to another?”

The third day, Professor Deen Mohammed, professor at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University and originally from Sri Lanka, talked about ethics and the ‘ulamā’s role related to contemporary problems and upgrading the capacity of theologians. Dr. Mohammed, who studied in a madrasa and a Buddhist monastery, explicitly highlighted the importance of Muslim ideology and introduced us to the ideas of Ghazāli and Shahāb ad-Dīn Suhrawardī. We also had the opportunity to hear from Professor Mohamed Khalifa, an Arab scholar also from Hamad Bin Khalifa University, who drew our attention to several topics, including the harmony between Christianity and Islam; the causes underlying the rise and decline of Islamic communities; the impact of colonialism on the Muslim world; environmental and sustainable development; why the ’ulamā do not talk about science and technology in Jumu’ah khutba (Friday prayer speech); and why do we not translate relevant scientific developments from European languages to our local languages.

These class discussions spilt over into the dining hall, cafes, and field trips.

Bringing the winter intensive full circle, Professors Waris Mazhari and Maulana Ammar Nasir, Madrasa Discourses Project Lead Faculty from India and Pakistan, respectively, talked of language, scripture, and interpretation on the fourth day. Their lectures helped us to understand that we are not alone in trying to reconcile our experiences, understandings, and social realities with our interpretations of the wahy (revelation). Great Muslim scholars, like Ghazāli in the past, also made efforts to reconcile Aql (reason) and Naql (text) and while doing so even faced similar kinds of challenges. They resolved these according to the realities and sensibilities of their own space and time.

The program culminated on the fifth day with Professor Rana Dajani, who discussed teaching evolution in the Muslim world and her strategies to reconcile Sharia norms (Islamic divine law) with the evolving international consensus on human rights, views based on scientific discoveries, and human experiences. During her lecture she stated that the theory of evolution and Islamic ideas are not mutually exclusive.

Photo Credit: Javed Akhatar. Dr. Ebrahim Moosa gives closing words after the Madrasa Discourses Winter Intensive in Doha in December 2017.
Photo Credit: Javed Akhatar. Dr. Ebrahim Moosa gives closing words after the Madrasa Discourses Winter Intensive in Doha in December 2017.

The sixth day wrapped up the winter intensive with summary presentations by the students and concluding remarks by our instructors and mentors. Professor Moosa concluded the intensive with the Urdu couplet of the famous poet Shakeel Badayuni, inviting students to not fear foreign influences, but rather find strength in their ability and culture, and use this strength to good ends (own translation below):

Merā azm itnā buland hai ki parā-e sholoñ kā Dar nahīñ

Mujhe ḳhauf ātish-e-gul se hai ye kahīñ chaman ko jalā na de

(My confidence in self is strong; I’m unafraid of foreign flames

I’m scared those sparks may ignite, that in the blossom’s bosom lay)

After six days of intense material and discussion, we were both mentally and physically exhausted. Our stay in “Education City” was, beyond doubt, a journey to comprehend questions of theodicy such as “how do old traditions serve knowledge-creation in modernity?” and realize their answers. We learned that many old Muslim traditions have never been opposed to modernism, novelty, and fresh interpretation. Moreover, these traditions did realize and comprehend the call for change and they performed their interpretations according to their space and time. Now the ‘ulamā of today, learning from the past, must act the same in accordance with today’s space and time.

We benefited from a variety of constructive ideas. Even if the program ended here, it would still be considered a resounding success for the deep reflection and personal transformation it engendered in us. Truly, it was an unbelievable journey of six days in “Education City”, Qatar, which we by no means are likely to forget.

Array
Javed Akhatar
Javed Akhatar was born and brought up in Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh). Currently, he is teaching at Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi. Akhatar graduated in the science stream from Kanpur University, and received his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Islamic Studies from Jamia Millia Islamia. His scholarly interests include Islamic Studies, Muslim education, world religions, and Islam in India.
Theorizing Modernities article

Modernities and Religious Identity and Difference


 

 

St Bartholomew's Church in New York City.
Photo Credit: Friscocali. St Bartholomew’s Church in New York City.

An important thread that runs clearly throughout the three responses to my book here, and through my book itself, concerns the fundamental human problem of identity and difference. How are we humans truly like each other in ways we can and must recognize and affirm and appreciate? And how are we genuinely different from each other in ways we must also acknowledge and respect? Humans expend massive energy trying to grind out answers to these thorny questions.

Scholars of religion do so when trying to honor the particularities of distinct religious traditions, sub-traditions, communities, and even individual religious experiences—while simultaneously struggling to name and describe a common subject matter, “religion,” that draws our shared focus of attention in a search for patterns across religious differences that may somehow signal something about our common human condition. But not only scholars wrestle with identity and difference. Much of the activity of everyday human life and of extraordinary social movements is also consumed with making sense of the pulls of identity and difference. With or to whom do we belong, and then who is the other, the not-us? Where do we find solidarity, and then who to us are strangers and rivals? What finally binds any of us humans together at any level, and then why and how do we resist being bound too tightly?

Scholars reflect different proclivities in these matters. Some are lumpers who see patterned commonalities, some are splitters who see distinctions. Sociologists tend toward the former by their disciplinary sensibilities, historians the latter. But it is impossible to escape the imperatives and reminders of either. While writing my book, a friend—a splitter—who graciously read the manuscript suggested cautiously that I limit my discussion to those religious traditions with which I actually had some expertise and not try to accomplish anything inclusive, much less universal. I understood. But I resisted. As a critical realist, I believe there is practiced in the real world, objective to our scholarly interpretations of it, a category of meaningful human activity that we call “religion,” and that we might as well get on with describing and understanding it as well as we can. That of course immediately requires acknowledging the massive differences that are evident within religion. Which religious hymns may rightly be paired with which others, for example, and why? What do we make of the fact that some religions have Creator Gods while others do not? The fundamental challenge of identity and difference always remains.

The same is true of lived human experience in modernity. Humans have struggled with problems of identity and difference forever, that is nothing new. We are driven by our basic biological, cognitive, and social human constitution. But modernity as a specific social formation dramatically accentuates the difficulties involved. The modern imperatives of identity become overwhelming at times, whether in modern nationalisms, state collectivisms, or totalizing mass-consumer capitalist lifestyle norms. The contradictory imperatives of difference likewise push to extremes in modernity, whether in radical liberal individualism, identity politics, or the democratization of genius’s obligation that every citizen have an equally valuable opinion to express on everything.

Photo Credit: Dan Nguyen. Wall Street in lockdown, September 2011. Trinity Church in the center, visible through security fencing.

Shifting the frame, we see a central problem as the contradiction in modernity between freedom and control, autonomy and discipline, self-assertion and acquiescence. What is modernity if not the life-or-death cry of “Liberty!”? Who is a modern if not the one who charts her own life path against all external constraints? Yet which of us moderns is not absolutely subject to the invasive eyes and hands of the state, the police, the military, the corporation? We are watched, controlled, disciplined at every turn. Modernity has indeed set “the individual” free while simultaneously perfecting the logistics of totalizing social control and discipline. Self-assertion and surveillance are modernity’s twins who will not stop fighting. In the end, the appearance of self-assertion will likely be coopted by the imperatives of surveillance, because the transcendent controlling interests of the owners of capital and the national security state will demand it, and because mass consumers are trained not to see and resist. Meanwhile, the long, agonistic process of the emergence, intensification, and recurrent mêlées generated by the contradictions of modern freedom and control will continue to write the developing script of human experience in the next decades.

All of this explains why modernity always has and will mean multiple modernities, not a singular modernity. The idea of the latter was an academic delusion generated by the Cold War. But we see now that one enlightened, democratic, capitalist, modern world order did not emerge from the collapse of communism. It could not have. Modernity is not simply a political and economic project, but more deeply a cultural one, in some ways a sacred or quasi-religious project. And the cultural project of modernity has never been internally stable, but contradictory, proceeding not as a unified all-systems-go, but deeply at odds with itself.

Liberty? Order? Freedom? Control? Autonomy? Centralization? Self-expression? Self-discipline? Self-affirmation? Surveillance? These are not “or” questions for modernity but “and” problems of modernity. And given our boundless human capacities for creativity and contradiction, obligation and objection, social solidarity and personal self-assertion, the kinds of concrete historical projects, movements, and institutions that modern actors will inevitably generate, live with, and die for will have the character not of singular unity but multiplicity, difference, and internal opposition.

Here we return to religion in modernity. Religion has of course played a leading role in the centuries of modern agonistic struggle over freedom and control, identity and difference. Precisely because religion possesses so many causal powers to shape people and the world, as I describe in the second chapter of my book, religion has not simply faded away into modern secular irrelevance. It is too potent at every level of human interest to have done that. Simply on the question of identity, for instance—meaning not only the matter of general shared similarities, but more specifically personal and social identifications: Who are my people? To whom do I belong?—religion is a key issue in every important economic and geo-political equation running today. And at the heart of those religious issues sits the unresolvable problem of human identity and difference, sameness and otherness, solidarity and exclusion. Thus, in ways that may previously have been opaque to us, highly diverse questions—such as, for example, which religious hymns might be well quoted together in scholarly texts, whether a Creator God is needed as the basis of mutual comprehension, or when we might attribute some outcome to the work of a superhuman power or not—reveal discernable patterns of underlying significance.

If we summarize our modern global problem as being about how to sustain minimal non-destructive coexistence if not actual self-interested cooperation in a radically pluralistic world in which globalization has liquidated most of the constraints of space-time, we continually return to the matter of identity and difference. What do we share? How are we different? And what practically does that mean? It may be that, far from becoming an irrelevant bygone in a secular age, religion proves, for better or worse, to be the telltale factor.

 

Featured Image: Wally Gobetz, on Flickr.com. “NYC – FiDi: Trinity Church.”

Array
Christian Smith
Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, Director of the Notre Dame Center for Social Research, Principal Investigator of the National Study of Youth and Religion, and Principal Investigator of the Science of Generosity Initiative. Smith’s scholarly interests focus on American religion, sociological theory, cultural sociology, adolescents and emerging adults, generosity, the philosophy of social science, and personalism.
Global Currents article

“Love” and “Punishment” for Muslim Others


Stand Up To Islamophobia One of a series of rallys around the UK in response to hate crimes against Muslims.
Photo Credit: Tim Dennell. Stand Up To Islamophobia. One of a series of rallies held on April 3rd, 2018 around the UK in response to hate crimes against Muslims.

The promotion of April 3 as “Punish a Muslim Day” brought considerable alarm and concern to Muslims in Europe and North America. It is unclear who created the flyers, which were circulated by mail to several predominantly Muslim communities in Britain in March of this year and spread to other countries soon after, but they are indicative of a climate increasing hate crimes and discrimination against Muslims and the increased volume of Islamophobic rhetoric in politics. In the face of Islamophobia’s reductive fear-mongering and will to collective retribution, it is tempting for liberals to invoke a love for the persecuted in their general humanity. However, coming to terms with the diffuse workings of Islamophobia reveals the limits of professing ecumenical allyship, and of the frameworks for distinguishing responsibility under the contemporary security state.

The “Punish a Muslim” phenomenon exemplifies the layering of conceptions of the other conceived within the imaginary of a community wronged. Purportedly appearing in Britain in March, a series of fliers declared their support for vigilante action against Muslims, ranging in reward from verbal harassment, to sexual assault, to acid attacks, to the destruction of Mecca. That the flier’s idiosyncratic presentation led some Muslim commentators and comedians to take it as a joke. It would indeed be difficult to judge its seriousness without knowing who made it, and on social media it could potentially call to anyone to find a Muslim at hand to punish. Crucially, it also does not state what Muslims had done to merit punishment. It rather presumes a world of real and imagined violences attributed to Muslims, of a general and inchoate sense of the problem of Muslim religious difference so often expressed in blunt and subtle forms.

The idea of Muslims’ shared culpability emerges strikingly in a recent essay by Bari Weiss, the New York Times’ opinion editor. The piece is noteworthy both for its proximity to the crude “Punish” phenomenon and for how it implies the same collective guilt with the apparent sobriety of a journalist’s report from the field. Weiss describes the brutal murder of Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, in Paris, which the president of France and other officials have called an anti-Semitic hate crime. After detailing other attacks by young Muslim men against older Jewish women, Weiss points to surveys that indicate disproportionate anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslims as opposed to France at large. Weiss does not state how a community’s prejudices implicate it collectively in the violent crimes of individuals. She does not ask what effects anti-Muslim sentiment in France has on the dispossession and marginalization of Muslims there, or the nation’s participation in the US-led war in Afghanistan that has led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths. The point here is not to propose a model to correctly parse personal and group culpability, but to consider why and how some complex situations of precarity and violence elicit the undifferentiated application of collective responsibility, while others do not. Contrast William Connolly’s descriptions of the assumption that black urban crime in the US is pathological to Talal Asad’s illustration that crimes committed within the work of the security state are only adjudicated individually, if at all (Connolly, 40-74; Asad, 20-38). These default accounts of collective and individual culpability are shaped by the imaginary of the confrontation of crime and terrorism, which Weiss marks with Muslim religious difference.

Weiss’ commentary on community relations in France evinces a view of global Muslim ritual danger. She notes several reports of the perpetrators of violent crimes pronouncing the Arabic formula of takbīr, that “God is greatest”. Takbīr is a fundamental part of the daily ṣalā prayers and a marker of Muslim soundscapes around the world. While Muslims do not all practice religion the same way, the takbīr is one of that practice’s clearest significations, audible practically anywhere among Muslims. Both in its specifically-Muslim sacredness and everydayness, Weiss is promoting a trope that Muslims’ address to the divine should inspire fear in others. The association of non-Christian religious ritual with shocking violence has an extensive colonial history. However, here Weiss pairs this sign of Islam with another universal, that of anti-Semitism itself, reconfigured in every generation, “the oldest hatred in the world”. Even if this is true, anti-Semitism is not present in all places and times equally, and its intensification in the recent centuries of modern European nation-building culminating in the Holocaust is obscured in Weiss’s imaginary of timeless forms of danger, in which those who “shouted” takbīr were “apparently animated by the same hatred that drove Hitler” (Mufti, 37-90).

Photo Credit: Aia Fernandez. Love and Peace Poster.
Photo Credit: Aia Fernandez. Love and Peace Poster.

Unfortunately, faced with a fear of Muslims that looks for complicity, guilt, and punishment in Muslim life anywhere, it is difficult to imagine liberal responses that move beyond the gestural. Leading up to April 3 media reports focused on the coalescence of opposition to the “Punish” discourse under the hashtag #loveamuslim. Because #love is reacting to #punish, it shares applicability to Muslims in aggregate, which is perhaps understandable. However, it also shows the limits of our present conceptual resources in countering Islamophobia, particularly in an “interfaith” context. For one, “love” as universal and transcendent has a distinct Christian patrimony, which while this does not present a problem in and of itself, it does not ask what non-Christians might want anti-prejudice undertaken with them to look like. Furthermore, “showing love” in the face of one potentially menacing manifestation of aggression does not yield up alternatives to the policies of targeted surveillance, entrapping prosecution, and intermittent warfare that keep marginalization, extremism, and Islamophobia in cycle together.

Non-Muslims who want to respond critically to the routinization of this kind of politics should begin not by presuming intimacy with our Muslim neighbors for the sake of showing our goodwill, but by first asking ourselves some questions. What forms of mutuality does pluralized common life require? How can we relate to others as individuals? How might we also make common spaces for others to constitute communities within and without us? How can we recognize and respond together to different forms of biological, socio-political, and historically-contingent vulnerability? How can we respond to violence with justice?

Array
Timothy Gutmann
Timothy Gutmann is a scholar of Islamic and East Asian intellectual histories, education, critical theory and postcolonial thought. He is completing his dissertation titled "Conscripting Traditions: Islam, Confucianism, Modernity" at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Field Notes article

Peace Does Not Grow in Isolation: Madrasa Discourses in Dialogue


Photo Credit: Qatar Foundation. Madrasa Discourses students visit the Doha Museum of Islamic Art in December 2017.

It’s 10am on a Sunday morning in October. The previous evening, I had stood on metal bleachers for three and a half hours to watch the Notre Dame football team beat USC in a sound victory. The student body is still recovering from the previous night’s festivities, and campus is quiet. I’m sitting outside to take advantage of one of the last truly warm days of the year. With my headphones in, I have one eye on my frantically scribbled notes and the other on my computer screen. A lively conversation is taking place, and I don’t want to miss a word. Today’s topic is genetic engineering.

“It’s not that it interferes with nature, or God’s will,” says Hafiz Rehman. He steeples his fingers beneath his nose, pausing before he continues. “It harms society. It changes the structure of the family.”

Photo Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT). Does gene editing allow us to edit out forms of suffering? Listen to CM’s “Out of the Lab” podcast episode for more.

“No, that’s not right,” responds Waqas Ahmad. His face fills the screen. He always leans slightly forward when he’s speaking. “It won’t change the family unit. This technology is worth the risk as long as the disease in question is fatal.” We have been speaking for nearly an hour. The conversation began with a brief introduction to the topic of CRISPR technology and then developed into a debate on the positive and negative aspects of using this technology to develop new treatments for diseases by editing patient genomes. This discussion is our sixth of the semester, and the rhythms of our conversation have developed to the point of familiarity. Interruptions occur less frequently, and there are fewer silences. I remember the difficulty of maintaining natural conversation in our first meeting, even when we were only introducing ourselves. Now we are able to debate the ethical nuances of a complex medical technology with ease. Some moments are even humorous. “I’m sure we’d all like to have been born smarter or more attractive,” Waqas says with a smile. Everyone laughs.

This component of the Madrasa Discourses project, the weekly discussions between Notre Dame undergraduates and madrasa students from India and Pakistan, proves the valuable role of relationships in facilitating transformational intercultural understanding. Many challenges appear in the course of pursuing these relationships, but the potential rewards are worth the obstacles that may arise as a result of this pursuit. Relationships are formed in conversation because “dialogues are transformational processes” that challenge participants to defend their ideas and find points of commonality (Botes 13). The ability to communicate with those of diverse backgrounds and cultures is a crucial skill for the peace activist. Sustainable peace must be upheld at multiple levels of society, from institutions to individuals. The concept of strategic peacebuilding includes dialogue as a critical component of the process. The ability to converse with others creates a dynamic that “redefines the norms that the actors follow in their interactions with each other, and demarcates the boundaries of their relationship” (Botes 8). Thus, the discussion element of the Madrasa Discourses is an important step toward the project’s goal of introducing new modes of thought to students from both the madrasa and Notre Dame.

My experience with the Madrasa Discourses project marked the first time that I had engaged in prolonged theological discussion with students who represented religious and cultural backgrounds that greatly differed from my own. Sometimes we struggled to understand each other, hindered by language and cultural barriers. At other times, we reached moments of true consensus. In our conversation on whether natural disasters were punishments from God, we all agreed that they were not. Our reasoning differed but our conclusion was the same. This semester, I have put a great deal of thought into the purposes of these discussions. I have tried to consider how they connect to the theories that I have explored in my peace studies classes. In a course on nonviolent action in social movements, I learned that social change stems from actors that “extend well beyond the polity to other institutional spheres and authorities” (Snow, et al. 7). The madrasa is one such institutional sphere, and it has a potentially critical role to play in the international drive toward peace. In our conversations, madrasa students often expressed interest in understanding the Western, and particularly the American, view of Islam. They also indicated their desire to change the negative stereotypes around Islam and its practices that they have seen in Western media. This is the work of the Madrasa Discourses, which seeks to broaden viewpoints and stimulate discussion and critical thinking.

The development of a mutual understanding between our diverse groups has allowed our interactions to flourish. The educational aspect of the project exposes madrasa students to scientific, historical, and theological theories that may not have featured in their madrasa curriculum. My own base of knowledge regarding Islam and my ability to formulate and critique the structure of an argument have similarly grown. This mutual development of ideas has shown me that productive interactions occur between parties that understand and are willing to learn from one another. Thus, the work of the Madrasa Discourses, practiced at a small scale with relatively few participants, illuminates the centrality of relationship building within the broader frame of negotiation and debate.

This specific focus on relationships is a central element of many peacebuilding theories, particularly conflict transformation. These “relationships represent a web of connections that form the broader context of the conflict” (Lederach 5). Therefore, in order for the dynamic of conflict to change, the interactions between individuals must change. The challenge is to identify the best way to provoke this change. Once again, I return to the idea that relationships are formed and changed in dialogue. Therefore, our goal should be to “minimize poorly functioning communication and maximize mutual understanding” (Lederach 6). I found that the work of this project was a continual struggle toward this goal. Occasionally I left discussions feeling that we had made substantial progress in pursuit of our mutual understanding of our separate perspectives. In our conversation on the ethics of artificial wombs, the madrasa students in my group acknowledged my belief that pregnancy could limit a woman’s ability to pursue positions of authority in her workplace. I myself was led to consider how artificial wombs might change our understanding of parenthood or human dignity.

Conflict transformation directly targets societal problems and views these “issues as an expression of the larger system of relationship patterns” (Lederach 9). As relationships change, so do social norms. I learned firsthand about how important it is to “develop a capacity to hear and engage the voice of identity and relationship” (Lederach 16). Our views are shaped by our backgrounds, and when these come into conflict we must consider how our underlying values stimulate such differences. One of the more discouraging discussions revolved around the rights of women in society. The students from India and Pakistan expressed their shared idea that women best contributed to society when they took on domestic roles and did not join the workforce. I struggle to understand this point of view, but I also realize that they do not view this role of women as being lesser than that of men. In their understanding, the two genders serve their community in manners that are different in kind but not in value. I still find myself reflecting on that particular conversation. It was our most contentious discussion, and I found little common ground to share with the madrasa students in the conversation. However, it is precisely due to these challenging conversations that relationships need to develop. We must navigate our differences if we wish to find sustainable peace.

Peace can only be reached through partnerships and coalitions. When analyzing the role of individuals and institutions in peacebuilding, it has been found that “none of these actors, considered in isolation from the others, has provided the conditions for a sustainable and comprehensive peace” (Lederach and Appleby 26). Therefore, relationships are necessary for peace. Specifically, relationships that constitute the “flowing together of people and processes who would not normally come together” are necessary for peace (Lederach and Appleby 27). It is in these interactions between unlike peoples that the foundations for positive new structures are laid. The Madrasa Discourses project represents an example of how dialogues between diverse individuals can lead to relationships that foster mutual understanding. In some cases, that understanding may even lead to friendship. At the conclusion of our conversation on natural disasters, I was about to end the meeting when Hafiz stopped me.

“I want to teach you an Arabic word that we can use to end our discussions from now on,” he said. “It’s inshallah. God willing.”

“Inshallah,” I repeated. “God willing.”

Array
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.
Theorizing Modernities article

Understanding Religion in Light of Shifting Practice


Photo Credit: United Church of Christ/Jessie Palatucci. UCC March and Action to Stop Deportations at Baltimore ICE Office. Rev. Traci Blackmon, Executive Minister for the United Church of Christ.
Photo Credit: United Church of Christ/Jessie Palatucci. UCC March and Action to Stop Deportations at Baltimore ICE Office. Rev. Traci Blackmon, Executive Minister for the United Church of Christ.

Christian Smith’s thesis on what religion is and how it works provides a useful framework for the study of religions in our changing, modernizing, and globalizing world. Its key merit lies in turning attention to the practices that constitute and sustain religions. Such practices, he rightly contends, motivate human beings, as individuals and societies, to turn to superhuman entities in order to obtain “goods.” This reality provides a focus on the religious and their practices, and not the theories that scholars love to build and debate.

Smith distinguishes his approach from others by emphasizing the critical realism that he brings to the discipline. He argues that contending theories are generally too positivistic, in the sense that they offer causal analytical paradigms for why and how humans turn to religion. Critical realism introduces a healthy dose of skepticism to the scholarly enterprise that explains, interprets, and generally attempts to control human social life through its production of knowledge. Smith’s approach places attention on what religious people do and why, and not what they might be doing in spite of themselves.

By putting the goods that emerge within religious traditions at the center, one can focus on religious ethics beyond principles or universal values. Such goods are shaped and sustained by rituals, myths, emotions, individual aspirations, and social communities. They generate values that sustain individuals and communities. The study of religions needs to pay attention to such goods, just as it does to identity, social cohesion, and power conflicts. Smith’s model assumes that these latter are all goods, but I am pointing to a particular sense of “good” that merits careful study within a larger framework of goods.

Photo Credit: United Church of Christ/Jessie Palatucci. UCC March and Action to Stop Deportations at Baltimore ICE Office
Rev. Kent Siladi, Conference Minister of the UCC Connecticut Conference.

Having placed practices and their desired goods at the center of the discipline, students of religion may then turn their attention to the formers’ transformation in the context of modern developments in politics, communication technology, or inter-cultural encounters. Such changes may be significant and obvious, or they may be subtle. Smith does not show this change as part of his thesis, but the possibilities emerge from the list of questions that he proposes for the study of religions in the appendix. For example, changing religious practices of a nation experiencing increasing diversity may provide an indication of how such new conditions are reflected and reshaped in practices. Some religious groups may turn attention to personal and individual goods, or focus on charity. Others might put up the barricades in closed religious meetings. Such adjustments and changes often occupy a significant amount of labor and commitment. Attention to practices and their desired outcomes may provide valuable insight into understanding religions and societies in changing times.

If the main labor of religion is to attain goods like ethics, social cohesion and power, then how and why do humans turn to superhuman entities? Smith rejects the rational economic model of human behavior, and introduces readers to a more complex understanding of attribution from cognitive theories. He places emphasis on persons that engage in such attribution, alone or with others. He does not explicitly rely on any model in this fast-changing field, but formulates a set of possible ways in which religious people attribute goods to superhuman entities. Smith’s discussion leaves no doubt that current theories of religion work with simple attribution theories that are no longer tenable.

Smith finds justification for superhuman attribution in religious behavior and practices. More than this, however, the history of religious practices offers a rich source of how cognition is reflected in public life and sustained in spite of criticisms directed at it. Modern criticisms of religions are a prominent feature of public life, but they often miss or ignore the complex attribution that Smith brings up in this book. This calls for rethinking the familiar models used to think of religion and public life: control, capitulation, co-optation, or rejection. They are often guided by simple and instrumentalist approaches to rationality that put the state in the center. They need adjustment and perhaps complete overhaul.

The value of Smith’s thesis may be further developed by paying careful attention to how and where such attribution is invoked and sustained in existing religious practices. Smith does not venture into this area, but his framework assumes religious discourses and patterns. When he writes on religious practices (prayers, etc.) or the patterns of attribution of goods to superhuman entities, Smith alludes to such discourses but does not develop them sufficiently. I believe that practices that are based on beliefs and assumptions of life are woven into a complex discourse in the way first suggested by Wittgenstein. These include verbal utterances, but also movements of the body, aesthetic frameworks and strategies, emotions and dispositions that constitute what Saussure called a langue. All of the signs form a complex system that makes it possible to articulate a practice (parole). Smith’s argument that these practices are directed at obtaining goods provides an important first step in what religious discourse (langue and parole) might be, and how it adjusts and changes over time.

The challenge of writing a theory of religion that fits all forms of cultural life regarded as religion can be daunting. Mostly, such theories serve an academic purpose which identifies an abstract or reified framework that is then difficult to identify and apply to religious traditions. Sometimes it seems that Smith is also engaged in this exercise. But I think his focus on practices and goods provides a useful paradigm for thinking about religion in general and also for thinking about particular religions as they change and confront challenges in the world.

Array
Abdulkader Tayob
Prof. Abdulkader Tayob holds the chair in Islam, African Publics and Religious Values at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has published on Islam in South Africa, modern Islamic Thought, and Islam and the History of Religions.
Field Notes article

In Pursuit of Our Aesthetic Past


Photo Credit: Qatar Foundation. Madrasa Discourses students at the Doha Museum of Islamic Art in December 2017.

Having grown up in a society that fails to appreciate beauty and often condemns its expressions as an act of evil, I am amazed by the dazzling history of Muslim civilization. I always wonder how Muslims, such as the scholars I have encountered in New Delhi and many other parts of northern India, can claim today to be the heirs of their predecessors if they do not value beauty as transcendent and divine with the same vigor and enthusiasm.

Appreciation of beauty stimulates imagination and innovation, and historically Muslims excelled at its expressions. They produced the finest architecture, music, calligraphy, and other crafts. It all began with Muslims setting their feet on the fertile soil of the cradles of ancient civilizations: Egypt, Persia, the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates, etc. They mingled old traditions with the new spirit of iḥsān, a comprehensive concept, writes Oludamini Ogunnaike, denoting the “sense of beauty and excellence—at once aesthetical, ethical, intellectual, and spiritual.” Their understanding of iḥsān drew from the verses of the Quran that give a big picture of the metaphysical beauty of God, and a scenic view of Jannah (Paradise) with its palaces sculptured from gems, surrounded by gardens, where streams of milk and honey flow. As many traditions including Islam assert, ‘God is beautiful and loves beauty.’ Religious inspiration is evident in the designs of the elegant monuments and mosques from Spain to Indonesia. The profound beauty of these structures and decorative art still evokes ecstasy in their beholders.

Ogunnaike defines Islamic art as ‘silent theology’ that successfully holds the picture of Islam intact against contemporary virulent propagandas. He further says, “To many, the silent theology of Islamic art can speak more profoundly and clearly than the most dazzling treatise, and its beauty can be more evident and persuasive than the strongest argument.” I would add to Ogunnaike’s point that past Muslim innovations in beauty serve as a source of inspiration and pride for Muslims even today.

However, some modern Muslim puritanical movements have challenged the role of beauty in Islam. The ideologues of these movements have fomented disregard of Islamic art among the ʿulamā and hence the masses. During my days of madrasa schooling, I heard some of my teachers and peers argue that art is not worth pursuing. It distances man from the remembrance of God and requires an excessive amount of money and resources, it is said. It is no surprise that Aurangzeb, a Mughal Emperor who did not appreciate art very much, is dearer to the ʿulamā than Shāh Jahān, the Emperor who built the Taj Mahal. Sufis are also discredited by these ʿulamā members for their practice of arranging musical gatherings for seeking aesthetic experiences in the presence of the Divine. These reductionist Muslims often view Islam as a sort of strictly ritualistic system and deprive it of its aesthetic heritage.

Photo Credit: Mohammad Rasheed. Pillars at the HBKU College of Islamic Studies.

My experience of Islam has been very diverse between the madrasa and the university. Practicing conventional or ritualized Islam in my days of madrasa schooling seemed very simple. After coming to the university, however, my awareness of Islam grew in complexity with my increasing familiarity with its history and the civilization it produced. My readings about historical and religious understandings of Islam suggested that there is a gap between the way Islamic civilization thrived in the past and how Islam is practiced today. I admire the Muslim genius and fellow citizens of other faiths who contributed to this civilization. But I am also disturbed when I read about the paintings depicting humans on the walls of Qusayr in Jordan built by Walid I, the Umayyad Caliph in the first century of Islam, contrary to the centuries-old fatwa condemning representational art and prohibiting images of living beings (p. 271). This fatwa drew its validity from the hadiths (prophetic traditions) that forbade representational art, considering it a grave sin.[1] The question was whether the Umayyads disregarded the prophetic traditions altogether or if they had a different understanding of them. Debates on representational art developed a new dimension after the invention of the camera. In the Indian subcontinent, the permissibility and impermissibility of photography is still among the most debated religious issues. I faced such contradictions throughout my study of Muslim history. The question was, who should I consider wrong? The conventional view maintained by the orthodox ʿulamā is to perceive the religiosity of the rulers who encouraged and patronized arts with suspicion.

My amazement with Islam deepened as I delved more seriously into the intellectual history of Islam. I found an opportunity to do this in the Madrasa Discourses program, directed by Ebrahim Moosa and Mahan Mirza, Professors of Islamic Studies both based at the University of Notre Dame. This program teaches madrasa graduates modern science and Western philosophy in such a way that the students may develop skills to answer the modern challenges posed to Islam. This past semester we had a long discussion on ‘tradition,’ imagining it as a long rope that connects the past to the present. To keep it going, the people of the tradition have to add new threads to this rope in their respective times. If the people treat tradition otherwise, it will lose its viability. Similarly, Islamic art is one among several threads of Muslim tradition. There is a sense of continuity and progress in it from the very onset up to the modern times. Many of the expressions of this art have been lost, but many are still extant and make us recall the ingenuity and sacredness of the tradition of Islamic art. The best way to perceive it is to experience it personally in art museums, musical concerts, and by visiting renowned sites and monuments.

As a part of the program, select madrasa-educated students from India and Pakistan had a chance to visit the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar during the winter intensive in the last week of December 2017. The museum is located on an artificial island flanked by two huge lawns with a bridge in the middle that connects the old city to the museum. We were told that the architectural design of this museum was inspired by the famous 9th century Ibn Tūlūn Mosque of Cairo. An exquisite edifice, this museum is often portrayed as an example of generating new threads into the old rope of tradition. Inside the museum, it was as if we were visiting our past. A collection of metalwork, glasswork, textiles, manuscripts, and ceramics are housed there representing Islamic arts throughout the centuries. Examining them closely, I admired the inspiration they drew from the world that they lived in and from the tradition with which they were entrusted. Artifacts in the museum such as colorful rugs and silks with figurative designs, griffins crafted on tiles or a sphinx-faced lusterware ewer were evidently the mixture of creative Muslim imagination with the local cultures and civilizations of the lands Muslims came to inhabit.

Photo Credit: Qatar Foundation. Madrasa Discourses at Doha Museum of Islamic Art.

I was surprised again, imagining the past to be so beautiful and so appreciative of arts in comparison to my present society. Questions troubled me: what was it that disconnected the vast majority of South Asian Muslims from this vibrant tradition? Why do we no longer show the same enthusiasm toward the spirit of creativity? Why do we fail to discuss and give due appreciation to aesthetics? There could be many reasons. I had a chance to discuss my concerns with Professor Ebrahim Moosa, who was with us at the time. I had already thought of an explanation for the dissonance I was experiencing: the recent dominance of a ritualistic and ahistorical understanding of Islam that was confined, in great part, to prayers only. I am not sure whether Prof Moosa agreed with my argument, as he added that Muslims no longer feel confident in performing creativity or talking about aesthetics as they did before. This may be one of the factors that killed Islam’s thriving artistic and aesthetic tradition.

Apart from the museum, we also witnessed an extensive display of magnificent architectural designs in the Education City in Doha. I think that Qatar has devoted much of its resources in reviving the aesthetic tradition of Islam and can serve as an example to Muslims of other nations. Muslims have historically seen beauty as sacred and tried to seek perfection in its expressions. Debates about aesthetics, arts, and erstwhile Muslim experiences should be introduced into madrasa education and students should be exposed to the historical meanings of their tradition. We should engage with the questions: What motivated many rulers and elites of Muslim society to patronize such arts, especially the representation of figures that were considered prohibited by orthodox scholars? Was it an act of indifference towards Islamic law or were there some historical and cultural impulses that led the practitioners and patrons of the arts to define the laws differently? There is a need to analyze the seemingly contradictory practices of past Muslims with the dominant contemporary orthodox Islamic tradition. This can help us understand the significance of art in the robust and cosmopolitan nature of Islamic civilizational tradition.

[1] Bukhārī mʿ Fathul Bārī, Vol 10, pp 314, 316, 323. The Hadiths are cited in Tasvīr ke Sharaʿī Aḥkām (The Rulings of Sharia about Making Images and Photography) by Muftī Muhammad Shafīʿ, published by Idāratul Mʿārif, Karachi, Pakistan

Array
Mohammad Ali
Mohammad Ali is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India. He is also a graduate of the Madrasa Discourses program.
Field Notes article
Kirsten Hanlon
Kirsten Hanlon is a Neuroscience and Behavior major at the University of Notre Dame, with a minor in Peace Studies. She joined the Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive in Kathmandu in July of 2017.