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Field Notes article

Beyond Coexistence: Pluralism in Indonesia


Photo Credit: Marc-André Jung. Stupas of the Borobudur Buddhist temple in Yogyakarta at sunrise.

Where better to study radical pluralism than Indonesia? Beyond its legal frameworks, this democratic country of hundreds of sub-national ethnic groups, over 300 native languages, and six official religions and many more unofficial ones offers a rich living exercise in “engaging fellow citizens across social and ethical divides.”[1] While the ethno-regional tensions that gripped the country after the fall of Suharto have been largely quelled, two decades into democracy, the country faces new challenges to tolerance and identity. The sentencing on blasphemy charges of Ahok, Jakarta’s governor from 2014-2017, and asymmetric citizenship for non-Muslim Aceh residents since 2001 are just a few examples of the debate tearing through the Indonesian political and social fabric: What is the role of religion in public life?

The Contending Modernities Authority, Community, and Identity (ACI) in Indonesia working group gathers six research teams working on different facets of this question. On July 10th and 11th of 2017, the six teams convened at the Syarif Hidayatulla State Islamic University of Jakarta (UIN) for the conference “Beyond Coexistence in Plural Societies.” Organized by Contending Modernities (CM) and UIN’s LP2M Institute for Research and Community Service, researchers, religious scholars, and civil society partners came together to consider the lessons and questions Indonesia offers, both for its own future and for other diverse societies.

As the group develops its conference papers, CM has invited Indonesianists present at the conference to share their reflections on the conversations, particularly around the following guiding thoughts. We will be publishing their essays over the next several weeks.

Must We Value Pluralism to Coexist?

How do we approach and understand pluralism? What might be some pitfalls of using the concept of pluralism to engage questions of governance and tolerance?

By some readings, pluralism encompasses both non-violent interactions between distinct groups living in the same territory and the legal and political systems that permit autonomy to minorities. While some societies with representative political systems value the equitable protection of minority civil and political rights, all place some limitations on minorities (e.g. polygamy in the USA or same sex relationships in India). Yet what of majoritarian communities that do not value the right of minorities to exercise their identity, be it religious worship or speaking their own language? Can minority communities constrained by unequal, second-class citizenship truly be said to “coexist” with their majoritarian compatriots? Is there a difference between coexistence and a tenuous and constantly re-negotiated ability to maintain a minority identity in a territory?

It’s also possible to have enduring and plural social coalitions grounded on intolerance. Does our understanding of pluralism, and the normativities applied to the concept, blind us to some complex interactions between communities while lifting up others?

What Are the Foundations of Pluralism?

What sources of authority, such as theological and political convictions and practices, both open and close spaces for coexistence?

The ACI Indonesia working group explores the beliefs, structures, and leadership that legitimize pluralist and inclusive modes of belonging, on the one hand, and exclusivist community identities on the other. Many conference participants pointed to new divisive electoral campaign practices and the virulence of social media, above all, in driving the exclusivist politicization of religion. What sources of authority bolster pluralism, and how do they relate to those which silo communities and spur violence?

Can Inequity Be “Tolerance”?

How should we define tolerance, especially in a context of agonistic plurality? The challenges posed by majoritarian politics on modes of citizenship, including along lines of gender and sexuality, were readily apparent in the workshop presentations.

Much like the concept of coexistence, conditions of stark political inequality raise questions about how we employ the notion of social “tolerance.” For example, Christians and Hindus in Lombok are permitted freedom of belief, but are severely and often totally constrained in their ability to build places of worship by laws that allow the majority Muslim community to maintain control over authorizing new churches and temples, and even religious celebrations. Indonesian “tolerance” towards minorities is often mentioned, yet this degree of majoritarian control of public displays of minority identity disfigures the concept into its Orwellian mirror image. What are the limits of “tolerance,” and at what point are we really facing expressions of intolerance?

 

We invite you to read the upcoming essays in the series, and access the conference program for more information.

 

[1] Hefner, “Civic Normativities: Lessons from Indonesia on Citizenship and Deep Plurality,” presented at the “Beyond Coexistence in Plural Societies” conference on July 10th, 2017.

Array
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.
Theorizing Modernities article

Muslims and the Making of America


Woman wears US flag as head scarf during No Muslim Ban protests.
Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston. A woman wears a US flag as a headscarf to protest the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban on January 28, 2017.

“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. 

In the current political climate in the United States, Muslims are the most marginalized religious community. There are numerous misconceptions about American Muslims. One is that we (I self-identify as both a Muslim and a scholar of religion) are relative newcomers to the United States. Another is that we haven’t contributed anything of value to what it means to be American. A third is that at best American Muslims are un-American, and at worst they are actively seeking to overthrow the government and bring in the rule of Islamic law.

My new book, Muslims and the Making of America, begins with this deliberately provocative sentence: “There has never been an America without Muslims”. The first Muslims documented in the United States were slaves of the Spanish conquistadors. One of them died in what is now New Mexico in 1539, some 80 years before the Pilgrims arrived. Then came the transatlantic slave trade, where an estimated 10% of slaves from West Africa were Muslim. To take only one example, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, also known as Job ben Solomon, was brought to Annapolis in 1730. His story was told in a narrative published in London in 1734 by Rev. Thomas Bluett. In 1734, George Washington, the “Father of our Country”, was a two-year old toddler, and across the Atlantic people were reading about a Muslim slave in the colonies. And like the presence of Muslims from the very beginning, the founding mythology of our country ignores the genocide of the native population, and the enslavement of Africans who literally helped to build this country.

After slaves, Muslims came as immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. The first mosque in America is probably the one in Biddeford, Maine, built in 1915 by Albanians who had come to work for a local textile mill. That’s important to remember, that Muslims were sometimes brought here to work. Not that they came looking for work, but that they were recruited and brought here, in short that they were invited.

The history of our country is a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious one. But that history is often not told. In Muslims and the Making of America, I tell some of this history, which of course is a religious history as much as it is a social history. It is also a shared history. And that for me is important. We are connected to each other, to each other’s stories. From Edward Said, I learned the line from the poet Aimé Césaire: “there is room for all at the rendezvous of victory.” I think we do this when we retell our stories as shared stories, not telling our single stories as if they were the only ones.

Shepard Fairey, “Greater Than Fear,” published with permission from Amplifier.org.

One example of this connection came on January 27, 2017, when a week after his inauguration, President Trump ordered that the United States ban travelers and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen). He did this at 4:42 p.m., almost at the end of the business week, after making comments that morning for International Holocaust Remembrance Day that made no mention either of the Jews or of anti-Semitism. Thousands of people protested the ban at airports across the country in the following days. I flew back to Los Angeles from Washington, DC, on January 29, and those protests were quite powerful to see, people standing up for Muslims not just or only as refugees or immigrants, but as Muslims. That was extraordinary. What has also been amazing to see is the response from the American Jewish community. They have been at the forefront of the protests, both because they know that the commandment that is repeated more than any other commandment in the Torah is to not oppress the stranger, and because they know with the painful history of the Holocaust of where the road of prejudice and intolerance ends. Moreover, just as hate crimes against Muslims continue to rise, so too in 2016, over half of the hate crimes committed against a religious group in America were against Jews. The actions of the Trump administration have brought together Muslims and Jews in a way that I have never seen in my twenty years of living in America.

On the academic side of things, we have the concept of intersectionality, which for me is best expressed in the words of the blessed John Berger, who in a 2002 essay wrote the following:

“Most analyses and prognoses about what is happening are understandably presented and studied within the framework of their separate disciplines: economics, politics, media studies, public health, ecology, national defence, criminology, education, etc. In reality each of these separate fields is joined to another to make up the real terrain of what is being lived. It happens that in their lives, people suffer from wrongs which are classified in separate categories, whereas they suffer them simultaneously and inseparably.” (From “Where Are We?”, in Hold Everything Dear (Pantheon Books: 2007, p. 44).

We need to better understand our connections, both between our disciplines, and among ourselves.

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Amir Hussain
Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on Islam, American Muslims, and world religions. His most recent book, Muslims and the Making of America, was published by Baylor University Press in October 2016. From 2011 to 2015, Amir was the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the premier scholarly journal for the study of religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Pious Fashion: Designing Modern Muslim Citizens


Photograph by Monique Jaques, June 15, 2015

“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. 

Robert Orsi’s assertion that the political history of modernity is also always religious history is one of the organizing ideas of this symposium. What might this idea mean for our understanding of a religious tradition as it applies to practices of piety like the use of modest clothing? Specifically, what role does the politics of modernity have in shaping the assumptions about the significance of Muslim women’s dress?

Let’s start by defining tradition. I like historian Marilyn Robinson Waldman’s argument that it is a mistake to see tradition as in opposition to modernity, as merely a depository of old ideas that impede change. She proposes instead we regard traditions as modalities of change, as a way for a society to cope with innovation by allowing it to become accepted and normalized. By this definition religions are traditions, but so too is modernity or versions of modernity. So our question becomes, how does the process of interaction of various ways of coping with change, in this case in Islamic and modern ways, affect Muslim women’s dress? How is “piety” a received notion that helps Muslims deal with a variety of pressures of modernity, including globalization, national development, consumption, and sexual politics?

In my recent book, Pious Fashion, I investigate Muslim women’s modest clothing in three locations—Iran, Indonesia, and Turkey—in order to describe the wide range of meanings conveyed by what women wear. As the comparison of three locations makes clear, when piety is deployed to assist with these processes of adjustment within various cultures, it results in a diversity of practice and belief both within and between communities. And that diversity is shaped as much by local politics as Islam. Muslims’ lives, it turns out, are not completely dictated by religious dogma or law.

This means that although some Muslim women have covered their heads since the time of the Prophet, understanding the significance of this practice today requires a look at recent political histories. Take the three countries discussed in my book: Iran, Indonesia, and Turkey. They all became nation-states in the last hundred years. As part of their respective nationalist awakenings and subsequent nation-building, the boundaries between Islam and the state were established and redrawn, often as part of negotiations between colonizer and colonized. And since Muslim women were regarded as the receptacles and conveyers of tradition, they bore the brunt of the burden of national projects aimed at reforming Islam. The headscarf, as the most visible symbol of Muslim women, became the target of political agendas that often had very little to do with Muslim women themselves. Depending on the location, pious fashion was required (Iran), regulated (Indonesia), or banned (Turkey) as the state pondered what forms of Islam and modernity it wanted to promote or suppress.

Photograph by Monique Jaques, March 13, 2013

These three locations can be understood to reflect three distinct encounters with modernity, that are today reflected in clothing trends in each location. Styles of pious fashion in Tehran show us that the modern Iranian woman might be willing to live by rules not of her own making, but that she also demands the right to interpret those rules. As a consequence, hijab turns out to be not a single form of dress: rather, it includes a range of styles from the full-body covering of traditional chador to tailored short overcoats and headscarves. In some sense, any woman wearing pious fashion participates in the physical and visual segregation of men and women in public, thus reinforcing a gender ideology that supports patriarchy. But some styles are interpreted as expressing allegiance to the current regime, whereas others are viewed as politically subversive, pushing back against state attempts to regulate public morality and presentation through a dress code. Over three decades after the Iranian revolution, hijab still needs to be enforced, evidence that attempts to refashion the female citizen from above have not been entirely successful. In fact if anything, pious fashion has served to display diversity among Iranian women—whether that diversity is based on identity, class, or political aspirations.

In Indonesia, the government’s vision of the modern woman has always involved ideas about her presentation and comportment in public. But for most of the last hundred years, sarong-style skirts and blouses were the clothes officially promoted by the government. That changed dramatically three decades ago when the popularity of jilbab–as pious fashion is locally called–skyrocketed after Suharto resigned. As young, college-educated women increasingly adopted pious fashion, it became a sign of a cosmopolitan woman. In addition, since a headscarf and modest outfit were not historically part of Islamic practice in this country, women were free to wear these items to express a thoroughly modern identity that is entirely compatible with national development and progress.

Muslim women’s clothing in Turkey has been connected with the complex conversation about national identity. The ideal modern Turkish woman does not aspire to strict secularism anymore, even if she does understand herself to be European. She can have a strong Muslim identity, reflected in a specific style of modest dress referred to as tesettür. The prominence of pious fashion in Istanbul is a sign of the waning of the European forms of secularism that dominated much of Turkish politics in the twentieth century. In many ways, wearing pious fashion is a more politically radical act here than in the other two locations, because it involves a turning away from Turkey’s Kemalist legacy.

Muslim men are also required to dress modestly: to cover their bodies at least from the navel to below the knee and to avoid other forms of exposure, like extremely tight clothing. What is most notable about Muslim men’s fashion in the three countries I discuss in Pious Fashion is the widespread adoption of Western dress norms, such as trousers, shirts, and jackets. Men in these locations are almost as covered as women, so in that way their dress is also modest. But men’s clothing does not have to be “pious” in the same way. Men’s clothing is the marker of the nation’s power and modernity; women’s clothing is the marker of its morality, honor, and ethnic identity. In fact, one reason the modern male Muslim citizen can dress in standard Western clothing is because the modern woman at his side is still dressed in local, religiously encoded, garb.

 

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Elizabeth Bucar
Elizabeth Bucar, Associate Professor Religious Studies at Northeastern University, is a religious ethicist who studies gender, emergent technologies, and moral transformation within Islamic and Christian traditions and communities. Bucar's latest project, Pious Fashion, argues that Muslim women are leveraging the attention put on the public presentation of their bodies through specific clothing choices to become important local creators, arbiters, and critics of norms and values. Bucar's additional publications include The Islamic Veil: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld Publications, 2012) and Creative Conformity (Georgetown University Press, 2011), and co-editor of Ethics in a Time of Globalism (Palgrave, 2012) and Does Human Rights Need God? (Eerdmans, 2005). 
Theorizing Modernities article

Dignity is Not Power Blind


How can a society that values human dignity simultaneously perpetuate cultural and structural violence? In practice, the dignity and personhood of some are valued over others. The question may be, then, how to apply dignity in a normatively inclusive and egalitarian way.

Panelists Atalia Omer, Professor at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Notre Dame Law School Professor Doug Cassel, Georgetown University Professor Charles Villa-Vicencio, and Kroc Institute Professor Ebrahim Moosa all considered “whose dignity matters” at the “Politics of Dignity” panel on October 9th, 2017. Held at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the event was co-sponsored by Contending Modernities and the Center for Civil and Human Rights. We invite you to watch the recording below.

 

“Each human being has intrinsic worth and we all have value, we all have the right to be treated with respect” began Doug Cassel, drawing on the work of Gerald Neuman and Christopher McCrudden. Charles Villa-Vicencio went further: “human dignity means the fundamental transformation of human structures…. A radical commitment to all people across the planet.”

This dignity takes many forms, beyond the “western Christian” sanctification of individual dignity, which has made its way into secular conversations as autonomy, as Ebrahim Moosa noted. Dignity may take communal forms, and it may be rooted in the religious, ideological, and cultural. “What are the uses and abuses of this concept?” Moosa asked. “What are the ideological, political, and practical implications of dignity?”

“Dignity” entered into international human rights diction with the UN Charter, as a response to the horrors of WWII, and later with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity.” Cassel detailed “three circles of [legal] meaning” for the concept: firstly, that all human beings have this value; secondly, dignity as a moral justification for universal bans on outrageous practices such as genocide; and third, dignity in relation to questions of identity and the pursuit of life. When it comes to the final category, courts will often recognize there is dignity on both sides of the courtroom and dignity may operate as a limit on rights—the free speech of a speaker versus the security and social integrity of the recipient of hate speech or slander. Societies weight such rights and (in)dignities differently, as do they their recipients.

“Dignity was a moral currency prevalent in many cultures” throughout history, Moosa told the audience. Yet these same societies practiced slavery and sexual and racial discrimination. “These days,” he continued, “it is the dignity of the new tribe, the nation state. In other places, male dignity eclipses female dignity, industrial dignity eclipses communal agrarian dignity.” How can we understand these contradictions?

Photo Credit: Nicholas Roberts. Atalia Omer presents at The Politics of Dignity.

Power, suggested Moosa and Atalia Omer. It is the “dignity of the home team,” the dominant power group, as Moosa put it, amidst that of those with less (or no) dignity: the “ungrievable.” Cultural and moral practices, political and economic structures, offer only some people dignity and full personhood. Villa-Vicencio expanded: “if our God is an austere and indomitable God with biases towards one group against another, then sooner or later we will behave exactly as that God behaves. If we perceive the other as ‘less’ than they should be, we [will] have every right to go out and correct the situation.”

Indeed, as Omer noted, the panel was held on “Columbus Day,” alternately known as “Indigenous People’s Day.” The celebration of the Spanish “discovery” of the “new” world and simultaneous papering over of centuries of genocide of native peoples and slavery by Europeans starkly illumine the “dynamics of de-humanization that have rendered some humans ‘ungrievable.’” Drawing from Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, and W.E.B. Dubois’ travel to a Nazi-razed Warsaw ghetto, Omer considered what dignity meant for lives that “cannot be lost or destroyed because they are already lost and destroyed…they can be forfeit because they are framed as already forfeit, as threats to human lives, rather than lives in need.” These “ungrievable” lives are interconnected through modes of oppression and mechanisms of resistance. If we are to apply dignity as a “natural” right, rather than a political right for select few, we must “examine the power dynamics of dignity through an epistemology from the margins.”

In closing, Villa-Vicencio warned that we may all be more on the margins that we presently imagine. We face the threat of total extinction as a species from nuclear war, or mass starvation due to dramatic global warming. Those now most on the margins will feel this—and in the case of climate change, already do—first. It is a test of our integrity and ultimately, our ability to survive, whether we recognize their equal “grievability” and step forward with the kind of cultural transformation necessary to not only recognize them, but act on the structures that hold them “forfeit” in the first place. For this, Villa Vicencio urged us to dig through the “rubble” of discarded traditions of our faiths down to the “liberatory” core: the radical commitment to justice, and goodness, and one another.

Array
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

The Sky’s Many Colors


Photo Credit: Alice Treuth. Skyline from Boudhanath stupa with prayer flags.

Americans often assume that everyone understands the world the way that we do. We believe that our thoughts, perceptions, and ideas are universal. Instead, as I learned at the Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive in Kathmandu, individuals have their own perceptions, informed by past experiences, culture, society, politics, education, gender, family, religion, and history, to name a few. Perceptions are not unvarnished reality, but rather are colored and vary as a result of these experiences.

As an American, I may think that the color of the sky is light blue and believe that everyone perceives the sky as light blue. But, on the contrary, someone else from another society may have a distinct cultural understanding of the same sky. Someone on the top of Mount Everest may perceive the sky as dark blue because of his or her position at a higher altitude (where the atmosphere thins, giving way to the darker, blacker color of space). At the same time, someone at the North Pole may perceive the sky as blue, green, and red as the Northern Lights illuminate the sky, while someone else from Zabol, Iran may perceive the sky as gray, due to the thick pollution in that city. Before going to Nepal, I thought everyone saw the sky as light blue. During the trip, where I had intense and deep conversations about religion, secularism, gender, politics, education, societal norms, and culture with students of Islam from India and Pakistan, my world radiated with unexpected color; I discovered that the sky was not only blue, but consisted of a wide spectrum. My sky was not everyone’s sky and their sky was not my sky. Many ideas and perceptions I thought to be universal were not and such ideas varied more than I had imagined.

Photo Credit: Alice Treuth. Jebraune Chambers and Treuth pose at the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu.

While some students progressed from their community’s norm, believing that women should be given more rights in society, many of the students understood a woman’s roles as confined to the home for her protection. She should not work outside the home, which often (but not always) prevents her from acquiring the same level of education as the man due to his (and not her) role as a provider for the family. Only some of these Madrasa students encouraged their wives to pursue an education at an institution, although not all wives elected to do so. Needless to say, as a zealous lover of learning and a diligent female student at Notre Dame, these conceptions were foreign to me. There is nothing I want more than a family, but I also strive to be a learned, contributing member of society and a co-provider for my family. Moreover, the concept that women’s confinement in the home was for their protection was irreconcilable to me. Being an athlete at Notre Dame, I was taller than all of these madrasa students and probably stronger than some of them. How could they possibly protect me?

Only a few years older than I, many Madrasa students were married while I am nowhere near getting married. Many of their marriages were arranged, and only a few were joined in “love marriages,” as they termed them. Though I was aware of the concept of assigned marriages, I have only been personally exposed to “love marriages.” In fact, the term “love marriage” was new to me,  as I had previously thought all marriages functioned as “love marriages.” Nonetheless, these students fostered closer relationships with family than I have with my own.

Contrary to the foundational American value of “separation of church and state,” many madrasa students had strong perspectives on governmental requirements, believing that religion should not be separate from government. Some students believed that a secular society was dangerous and potentially immoral. A number believed that Islamic law, not the principles of other faiths, should guide government, because, they said, Islamic law alone could guide the morality of citizens and promote ethical behavior (unlike a secular government).

Photo Credit: Jebraune Chambers. Treuth and Pakistani student Hafiz Abdul Rehman during a course break.

It is crucial to understand that these differences provided learning opportunities instead of distance and division, and served as opportunities to enhance cultural awareness. With differences in opinions, ideas, and perspectives, both madrasa graduates and Notre Dame students benefitted from listening to each other’s points of view and discussing these ideas together. I believe that the madrasa students learned about involving women in education and employment from us, about religious tolerance, especially in government, as well as some cultural norms such as how to discuss and interact with U.S. or western women. Furthermore, I believe that the madrasa students could learn more about questioning from us, specifically about their religion and its interpretations. As Americans, we tend to question everything: politics, societal norms, gender norms, race relations, religion, and what our parents tell us, to name a few, and I think they would benefit from doing the same in pursuance of forming their own interpretations, opinions, and ideas. Lastly and among other things, I also encourage their learning for the sake of learning, for the joy of gaining knowledge, especially in non-religious studies.

At the same time, it is equally important, if not more important, to consider what we Americans can learn from these students. While some of the women’s roles and the prevailing marriage norms seem outdated and senseless to me, there are positive ideas about the familial structure that we could learn from them. We could learn how to cultivate stronger relationships with our parents, both as children and as adults. We could learn how to be responsible from a young age and how to take greater care of our families. Furthermore, we could learn how to be impassioned about expanding our frames of reference by asking profound questions, adding intelligent comments, and enthusiastically discussing course material outside of the classroom. We could also learn how to persevere with the educational opportunities we have been provided in America, especially in the face of adversity. We often times take for granted how easily accessible and common education, specifically secondary education, is in America, by comparison.

The opportunities for learning and teaching on the trip were endless, and I have only mentioned a few of the many lessons I learned. Exposure to opinions, cultures, and ideas very different from my own caused me to introspect: How important do I consider my family? How can I be more enthusiastic about learning? How can I question my own ingrained beliefs and values? The madrasa graduates demonstrated how to make religion a central priority in my life and how to question my own religion and its common interpretations. They taught me how to accept other people from other societies and fully recognize their ideas even when I did not personally agree with them.

Photo Credit: Alice Treuth. Stairs up to Boudhanath stupa.

Simply because cultural expectations and perspectives between groups were different did not mean that either group was right or wrong, but rather that because of our experiences, we perceived the world differently. Through my conversations with the Madrasa students, I gained insight into their culture, religion, and way of life, as well as into the shockingly numerous similarities we share. Even though we practice different religions, originate from different societies, and have different outlooks on life, the similarities we discovered encouraged honest and meaningful conversation. In the differences we found learning opportunities instead of distance. With an open mind we can all learn to understand others who may, at first glance, seem very different from ourselves, but upon a closer look (and with an open mind) are much more similar to us than we would have imagined.

The sky is universal. We all live under the same sky on the same planet in the same atmosphere and yet our understanding of the sky can be slightly different. We all perceive everything differently because of our own cultural, societal, religious, educational, familial, political and historical experiences in our own countries and in our own geographies. Our perception of the world is colored by these experiences, just as our perception of the sky is slightly transformed based on these same experiences. Some may see the sky as blue, some as green, a few as multicolored, and others as grey. These differences are not insurmountable and can act as valuable learning opportunities, leading one to learn from others and question his or her own opinions. Yet even with these varied perceptions of the sky, there is something uniting about living under the same starry roof. There is a shared humanity to be found in us all living under this sky. Our similarities are stronger than we tend to acknowledge, which has the potential to strengthen us in our shared human experience. By recognizing our similarities as being stronger than our differences, we are able to unite with the similarities in common humanity and allow the differences to become learning opportunities. Intercultural understanding can be facilitated by experiences like this one, where persons from other cultures and societies interact closely and share their opinions openly in a discussion. As the world becomes more globalized, we all need to recognize the different skies that persons around the world perceive, but also appreciate the common sky under which we all live.

Array
Alice Treuth
Alice Treuth is majoring in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, with a minor in Science, Technology and Values as well as Education, School and Society. She joined the Madrasa Discourses project for the July 2017 Summer Intensive in Kathmandu.
Field Notes article

Facing Down Intolerance: Sharing Madrasas in the USA


Photo Credit: Alaina Anderson. Seven Notre Dame undergraduates joined Madrasa Discourses students in Kathmandu, Nepal. Here they pose in a temple courtyard with a Pakistani madrasa graduate: (L-R) Sumera Rabia, Jebraune Chambers, Maggie Feighery, Alaina Anderson, Nabila Mourad, Kirsten Hanlon, Molly Burton, and Alice Treuth.

“How was Nepal? What exactly were you doing there?” Since I’ve been back in the United States, I’ve struggled to answer these questions. There’s no simple and cohesive answer to describe all of my experiences at the Madrasa Discourses Kathmandu Summer Intensive. What is even harder is trying to explain the context the madrasa graduates are coming from and the need for the Discourses project without reinforcing many people’s perspective that Islam lends itself to extremism and fundamentalism. As soon as I try to describe madrasas (Islamic seminaries), with their intense focus on the Qur’an and often outdated syllabi, I can see some people solidifying their ideas that madrasas create terrorists or all Muslim communities are ultra-conservative at best. I have to rush to explain the warm welcome I received as soon as I arrived, how I was immediately treated as a sister, how every one of the madrasa students wanted to hear the Notre Dame girls’ opinions in discussions, and explain that madrasas are not breeding grounds for terrorism. My incredible time at the Kathmandu Summer Intensive introduced me to many amazing, kind scholars as well as to the strengths and weaknesses of their education. I was able to understand the need to update the framework in which Islam is interpreted and studied around the world in a fuller context because of the people I met and the stories I heard. This juxtaposition of an education system in need of reform and incredibly intelligent scholars is hard to explain, especially when you mix in a currently (and unfortunately) politically charged subject like Islam.

Photo Credit: Alaina Anderson. Re-Entry to the United States, Los Angeles Airport.

I’d like to share all of my experiences, good and bad, but worry about how my stories will be interpreted hold me back at times, fearing I will inadvertently solidify simplistic, anti-Muslim views. The vast majority of my friends and family are very tolerant, open-minded people who choose to see the good in the world. It’s easy to tell them what happened in Nepal without trying to use a filter or without needing to overemphasize the good things. However, there are some people that I’m close to that are not as open. For example, I have a family member who, while she is a good person, has been previously misinformed and has unfortunately stuck to that misinformation. So, with her, it has been great sharing the many good things that happened. However, as soon as I start trying to explain the importance of the project, she cuts in and asks if madrasas create a lot of terrorists or if Muslim societies are typically fundamentalist. Even after I assure her that the answer to both of those questions is a definite no, she seems suspicious. As soon as I start talking about my frustrations with a lot of the gender discussions that took place in Kathmandu, I can practically see her more negative view of Muslim cultures hardening.

A few nights after my return, the topic of my trip to Nepal came up, and this family member mentioned that one of the participants from the Madrasa Discourses sent her a friend request on Facebook. Her first thought was, “ISIS.” When she told me that, I had to force myself not to walk away from her mid-conversation. I was shocked and repulsed that someone in my own family could say something like that. I hate that there are people out there whose minds immediately jump to terrorism when they see bearded and/or traditionally dressed Muslims, but it kills me that someone so close to me could think this, even after I had explained how wonderful all of the Madrasa Discourses participants were. It’s so hard for me to change my family member’s mindset. I try to balance out the negatives by pointing out the need for change but also trying to explain the good intentions behind them. For this, I always return to my conversations on gender with Hafiz Abdul Rehman (Hafiz), with whom I formed a strong friendship.

Hafiz is a fairly quiet Pakistani school teacher. He’s a devout Muslim who joined these Discourses to learn about different approaches to the Islamic faith. He’s one person I know will bring the things he learns through the Madrasa Discourses back with him to share with others. He is a kind person to the core, is eternally well-meaning, and has so much love to give to the world. I had some amazing conversations with Hafiz the first couple of days, and he really helped me understand the madrasa graduates’ perspectives on the day the lectures focused on gender equality and social inclusion. While I did not agree with his (and most of the other madrasa students’) stance on gender “equality” or how women and men should be seen, he never got annoyed at my many questions. He heard me out every time, and he really tried to understand what I was saying and where I was coming from. In return, he helped me to see that the gender roles in their society help to create strong family units and are upheld by many out of a sense of love and respect. He liked to tell me, “people think we don’t love women in our society. But I think it is that we love women more than men.” He would cite passages in the Qur’an where Mohammed talks about how a mother’s love is unmeasurable or how the mother is most worthy of “good companionship,” even three times over the father. He shared his belief that the separation of men and women and women’s modest dress was to protect women. He told me, and I really feel he believes, that his society values women so much that it wants to protect and provide for women. He explained that the reasons women need to stay home are to raise the children and run the household; he used to laugh at that part and tell me, “really, the women are the bosses of the men, Alaina.” He said that men had to go work in order to give money to their parents and then to their wives. Through all of my conversations with Hafiz, it was very hard for me to voice my disagreements, not because he didn’t let me (he welcomed the opportunity to hear another opinion) but because I knew that everything he did and believed came from a place of love and respect.

Photo Credit: Jebraune Chambers. Madrasa Discourses students Waqas Khan and Hafiz Muhammad Bilal photograph the Kathmandu skyline.

These are the things that I want to share with people. I want to show them that even the negative aspects of my experience (like my frustrations with many madrasa graduates’ beliefs about gender dynamics) had positive parts. Most of the time, I found that participants perpetuated these lifestyles out of a place of love. Other times, it seemed that lifestyles continued because of a lack of understanding of other viable options or because they didn’t know how to challenge the status quo. Back in the US, my struggle is that some people stop listening after they hear that traditional or gender-segregated lifestyles are being perpetuated in the madrasa graduates’ communities. (By the way, these lifestyles are culturally grounded and vary vastly among Muslim societies globally.) I can’t figure out how to reach people with an anti-Muslim bias in an effective manner. For some, I choose only to share the positive aspects of my experience. For others, I allude to some of my frustrations surrounding certain conversations in Kathmandu without going into detail. But really, I want to tell everyone the whole story. And, to me, the positives of my Nepal story vastly outweigh the negatives. Yes, there is a huge need for change and for updating, as I learned, but there is also so much good and so much love that I encountered. There is so much in my Nepal experience that gives me hope for the future and for a positive change and updating in Islamic scholarship/madrasa education, however quickly or slowly it may happen.

I loved my Nepal experience. I’m not going to say that I enjoyed the entire thing, the food was sometimes unrecognizable and I put my foot in my mouth far too many times to claim constant enjoyment, but overall, the feelings I take away from my two weeks in Nepal are love and enlightenment. I learned so much, and I met so many incredible, impressive people. I want to share this experience, this entire experience, with others. The fact that I will come across more intolerant or misinformed individuals is a given. Thus far, I have not found an easy way to break open that dialogue with those individuals, but I hope that the more I share my experience, the easier it will be for me to navigate those tricky conversations with a cool head. Sharing my experience has already helped my family member see a little better the world the madrasa graduates I met live in, and I’d like to think that little by little, my stories will help others become more understanding, too.

From left to right, Pakistani Madrasa Discourses students Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Tayyab Usmani, Zaid Hassan, Hafiz Muhammad Bilal, Lead Faculty Ammar Khan Nasir, and students Hafiz Muhammad Rasheed, Waqar Ahmed, and Hafiz Abdul Rehman on a cultural field trip in Lalitpur (Patan), outside of Kathmandu, Nepal.
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Alaina Anderson
Alaina Anderson is pursuing majors in psychology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. She joined the Madrasa Discourses project for the 2017 Kathmandu Summer Intensive.
Global Currents article

The Social Fabric of Jerusalem: Memories in the Wake of Christian Exodus


Photo Credit: Stephanie Saldaña. A Palestinian Muslim woman lights candles in front of the icon of St. George at the feast of St. George/al-Khidr in Lod. During the festival, Muslims revere Khidr, who is mentioned in the Quran as a wise guide of Moses, while Christians honor St. George, the patron saint of Palestinians, bringing olive oil down to his tomb beneath the church. The festival is one of the last shared Muslim-Christian festivals in the region, and marks the end of the olive harvest.

Last Easter I set out to explore some of the holiday traditions that are in danger of disappearing in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the local Christian population has been declining so rapidly that it is now estimated to be only around two percent of the city’s total population. Not knowing where to start, I approached someone whom I knew from experience would able to enlighten me: my neighbor of seven years, Mazen Ahram, a Muslim Sheikh and Islamic scholar.

While to someone unfamiliar with Jerusalem it might seem counter-intuitive to ask a Muslim leader for information about Easter, this would not be surprising at all for many old Jerusalemites. Sheikh Mazen’s family traces its lineage to the Prophet Mohammed, and arrived in Jerusalem along with Omar ibn Khattab in the 7th century when Muslims first took control of the city from the Byzantine Empire. As a result, his family had been in contact with the Christians of Jerusalem for more than 13 centuries, passing the stories of those encounters down from generation to generation.

I found Sheikh Mazen Ahram sitting behind the counter of his small shop in East Jerusalem, where he works when he is not at the al-Aqsa Mosque. My question sent him into a long, nostalgic trip to his childhood living outside of the walls of the Old City in the early 1950s. Every year, he and his Christian neighbors dyed Easter eggs together using the peelings of red onions, which naturally colored the eggs. His grandmother was well known for her skill in painting eggs, and she had a collection of painted, blown out eggs on her shelf.

Even I was surprised at how central the Christian Easter holiday was to his childhood as a devout Muslim. The local tradition states that after Muslim armies conquered Jerusalem, Omar ibn Khattab refused to pray inside the city’s main church, insisting that his followers would want to turn it into a mosque if they saw him pray there. He prayed just across from it instead, and today the Mosque of Omar stands across from the Holy Sepulcher commemorating the gesture. Local Palestinians know that two Muslim families keep the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where tradition holds that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead—those families are still entrusted with opening and closing the church daily.

Sheikh Mazen told me that when he was a boy, every Holy Saturday he went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to wait for the Holy Fire to appear. The tradition among Orthodox Christians in Jerusalem says that a holy fire was lit at the moment of Jesus’ resurrection inside of the tomb each year, and thousands would wait with candles for the flame to emerge from the tomb and to be passed around. As a boy, Mazen couldn’t afford a fancy lantern, and so he would carve out the peeling of a thick Jericho orange, place a candle inside, and wait for the flame. He then carried the fire from the holy tomb back home.

Photo Credit: Stephanie Saldaña. A lantern made with a hollowed out orange and Easter eggs colored with red onion peels.

I took notes. That Holy Saturday, I waited for the Holy Fire like thousands of other Christians, and when it arrived I placed it in a candle inside of the rind of an orange. Sheikh Mazen was right; it worked like a charm. Our eggs that year were painted with onion peels.

I tell these stories because the disappearance of Christian communities in the Middle East, long warned of by local Christians, has become a startling reality. Iraq has lost two thirds of its Christian population since 2003. An estimated one third of Syrian Christians have fled during the country’s civil war, though possibly more. Those outside of the region may view the discussion as alarmist; those in the region, who saw ancient communities of Jews almost entirely vanish from the fabric of life in countries such as Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in the last decades, know that it is entirely possible for a community to be there and then to be gone.

Yet most discussions of this crisis focus on what this means for Christians. This is understandable; as the community that is leaving, they are obviously the most heavily impacted. Nonetheless, over more than a decade of living in the Middle East, I have noticed how much the disappearance of Christians also impacts many Muslims I know in the region. During Christmas, a Muslim friend commented on Facebook about how much he missed seeing Christmas decorations in Jerusalem in the way he had when he was a child. I recently interviewed a Syrian refugee named Mouiad from the city of Daraa, who spoke of the relationship with Christians that he had before the war, when they would often fast for one another’s holidays. He often visited Christian shrines to Mary with his friends, a practice that was not uncommon. Though he had brought very little with him when he fled to Jordan, he wanted to show me one thing he had: a copy of the Bible in Arabic, kept on his shelf alongside the Quran.

Still, rarely have I come upon a public discussion of what the migration of Christians from the Middle East will mean for the Muslim communities who have lived with them for centuries. Many of these communities have based their identities on what it means to be people of faith living within pluralistic societies, and how they live with Christians has become an integral part of who they are as Muslims. Perhaps we need to talk about the Middle East in the same ways in which we talk about fragile ecosystems. When a plant or an animal disappears, we take it for granted that the entire ecosystem around it will be impacted. Living species come to depend upon one another over time; the disappearance of one can devastate another.

We often forget that human communities form the same deep relationships over centuries, and that what impacts one community cannot be discussed in isolation. This seems to me to be particularly true of Palestinian Muslims and Christians. This summer, two Israeli policemen were shot and killed by two Palestinian citizens of Israel at the entrance to the al-Aqsa Mosque/Temple Mount. Israel installed metal detectors as a response, setting off large scale demonstrations by Palestinians who argued that Israel was disrupting the status quo over who has authority over religious sites in the Old City of Jerusalem. Palestinians prayed in the streets, refusing to enter the mosque compound as long as metal detectors were in place.

While thousands prayed in the streets that week, it was one photo that was shared repeatedly by Palestinians on Facebook. It was a photo of a Nidal Aboud, a Palestinian Christian who joined the line of prayer, a cross visibly around his neck, and read from his bible as those Muslims around him prayed.

For Palestinian Muslims, sharing that photo was a way for them to express their belief that Palestinians were protesting not due to religious but political objections, and that the issue of status quo was one that concerned all Palestinians, not only Muslims. Though the Palestinian Christian was only one among thousands, he became an essential part of how Muslims told the story of that historical moment.

In the past, there have been many examples of Palestinian Christians serving as an integral part of the telling of Palestinian history, be it literary critic Edward Said, or the prominent politician Hanan Ashrawi. Even today, at a moment in which Christians are fleeing from the Middle East in historic numbers, a Palestinian named Yacoub Shaheen, the son of a Syrian Orthodox Christian carpenter from Bethlehem, won the hugely popular singing competition Arab Idol in 2017, by a landslide. He celebrated by singing a Palestinian nationalistic song; it was not long before he began advocating for Palestinian hunger strikers in prison. He makes a point of sending holiday greetings to Muslims on his social media.

Photo Credit: Stephanie Saldaña. A Muslim woman celebrates the feast of al-Khidr/St. George, while in the background a young boy plays in a costume of St. George. Traditionally, Christian mothers who cannot become pregnant pray to St. George, promising to name their children after him and to bring them to his tomb dressed in costume every year on the feast day.

On a more personal level, Sheikh Mazen told me how much the disappearance of Christians in Jerusalem has pained him, taking the time to mention every former neighbor by name. He has never forgotten the 1967 war, when his father’s tailor shop was located on the front line of the fighting between Israel and Jordan. Fearing he would lose everything, his father stored all of his sewing machines and inventory in the nearby Franciscan convent of the White Sisters for the duration of the fighting. Everything survived: he credits the nuns with saving his family’s livelihood.

What do these small holiday greetings mean, or these stories of candles lit and feast days shared, of holy books carried out of war and a single man who prays among thousands, in the larger scheme of things? As not only Christians, but other minorities disappear from the Middle East, how will it affect the world left behind, which will increasingly lose its diversity? How will the loss of these deep, if sometimes fraught relationships between faiths also affect those who leave?

That remains to be seen. But perhaps it is time to widen the conversation.

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Stephanie Saldaña
Stephanie Saldaña received a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College and a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. Now a resident of Jerusalem, Saldaña teaches at the Honors College for Liberal Arts and Sciences, a partnership of Bard College and Al-Quds University. She has written two books, The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith and A Country Between: Making a Home Where Both Sides of Jerusalem Collide, and is the founder of Mosaic Stories, a project to preserve the threatened cultural heritage of the Middle East through research and storytelling. 
Field Notes article

Identity and Truth as Tools for Peacebuilding


Photo Credit: Kirsten Hanlon. Madrasa Discourses students join Notre Dame undergraduates in a walk through Kathmandu, Nepal. L-R: Md Zeeshan, Nabila Mourad, Kirsten Hanlon, Molly Burton, Margaret Feighery, Ghulam Rasool, and Alaina Anderson.

As I entered the Yatri Hotel conference room, the site of the Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive program, I was taken aback by the unique environment I was about to inhabit for the next fifteen days. Here I was, a female nineteen-year-old Catholic undergraduate student, surrounded by Indian and Pakistani men, and one Pakistani woman, each possessing advanced degrees in Islamic Studies. How would we bridge our interfaith and intercultural divides to engage in meaningful conversation?  How could I be an active participant in discussions about Islamic theological renewal when I had so little experience with the subject?  I feared I was in over my head.

Little did I know these religious and cultural differences would enrich the program rather than hamper it. The more divergent our views were on a topic, the more we learned from one another. Slowly but surely, friendship and trust replaced wariness and doubt. As each day passed conversations grew in complexity, and the significance of personal identity and “truth” became increasingly apparent.

Photo Credit: Kirsten Hanlon. Dr. Leela Prasad lectures at the Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive.

The concept of identity in the modern world implies intersectionality. We are defined by our genders, nationalities, religions, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, sexual orientations, castes, and many other aspects of our lives. The interactions I had with the madrasa graduates clearly displayed the varying weights that these identity markers hold for different individuals. For most of these students, religion is at the core of their identities. It impacts how they view current events, structure their family lives, make moral decisions, and interact with others. Their common Muslim identity is more important than their distinct Indian and Pakistani nationalities, allowing them greater understanding in these intercultural dialogues. While my Catholic faith is a part of my identity, it plays a less significant role in how I approach the world. My code of ethics is more informed by my life experiences than the Bible, and I would likely connect more easily with a Protestant American than a Catholic Argentinian. The centrality of religion in how these students define themselves influences their views on politics, gender roles, and scientific findings.

The importance of Muslim identity was most apparent in our discussions of social inclusion in Nepal. Towards the end of our first week in Kathmandu, we had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Prakash Bhattarai about his work with the Centre for Social Change and the Association of Youth Organizations in Nepal. During a question and answer session, I was surprised by how focused the madrasa graduates were on delineating the role of Muslims in Nepali society. Although Dr. Bhattarai, a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies, had mentioned how Muslims fit into the caste system in Nepal, often as members of the oppressed Dalit caste, it was far from the heart of his presentation. In any case, students responded with questions about Muslim persecution, whether seats are reserved for Muslims in the Parliament of Nepal, and Nepal’s Muslim population.

The movement of conversation away from policy changes that promote gender equality, improved literacy, and communal harmony towards the current state of affairs for the Muslim minority in Nepal seemed counterintuitive to me. With all the knowledge that Dr. Bhattarai had to share about effective political and social change to bring about greater religious coexistence, why limit the conversation to a discussion of one faith’s prosperity? As a female Peace Studies major, I would not have thought to direct my attention to the welfare of the Catholic minority in Nepal when this lecture could teach me so much about a broader successful social inclusion movement. However, my faith is not at the center of my identity, as it is for many of the madrasa graduates. This experience attuned me to the impact that our identities can have on how we approach opportunities for learning and which narratives we are drawn towards hearing and telling.

The greatest conceptual and cultural challenge I faced during this intensive program stemmed from our differing ideas about “truth.”  On our first day of the program, both the madrasa graduates and Notre Dame students were given the opportunity to pose a question towards the group. One madrasa graduate said, “As Muslims, we believe the Qur’an is the Divine Truth, what do you think it is?”  This difference in perspective was the greatest stumbling block for me in many of the critical conversations we had over the course of the summer intensive. How could I convey my confidence in scientific truths without dismissing their adherence to the Qur’anic texts?  For example, I discussed the importance of natural science education with one student who shared that he had chosen to study biology as part of his secondary education. We bonded over our fascination with genetics and discussed the theory of evolution. To my surprise, he said that despite his knowledge of the subject, he could not accept evolution as truth because it directly contradicts the creation story in the Qur’an. I asked whether he could accept evolution as the means by which God created the first humans, as many Christians now believe, rather than a negation of God’s involvement in the process, but he insisted that the Qur’an is clear and literal in its explanation of the creation of Adam, the first human being. I struggled to come to terms with this standpoint considering the personal experience that this student had with the surmounting evidence supporting evolution. Our disagreement on this issue could not be resolved without one of us adjusting our opposing views on the literal interpretation and infallibility of the Qur’anic verses.

Photo Credit: Kirsten Hanlon. Discussions on identity, religion, politics, and gender continued long past class times. Here Hanlon and Ghulam Rasool  discuss over dinner.

As I sought explanations for this unswaying faith in Scripture over the course of the program, one common justification came to light: The Qur’an is constant, but science and modernity are always changing. Many of these students believe that the Qur’an and Sunnah are the only certain sources of truth, given directly to man by God, and that any other source of knowledge is prone to human error. The verses of Scripture will never change, but researchers will update theories and make new findings on a regular basis. Why should Muslims doubt their stable sacred texts when there is already so much flux in the theories of the modern world? I found this point difficult to debate without challenging the literal inerrancy of the Qur’an, but perhaps that challenge is exactly what I was there to provide. The Madrasa Discourses program aims to facilitate harmony and understanding between traditional Islamic thought and modern scientific and social realities. This goal cannot be accomplished without difficult conversations and confrontations with contrasting perspectives of truth. I hope that presenting my simultaneous belief in modern science and Catholicism allowed the madrasa graduates to reconsider their interpretations of Scripture and recognize the consistency that can exist between modernity and religion.

I left Kathmandu with an intense appreciation for the conversations I had with peers, scholars, and professors. As excited as I was to continue our interfaith and intercultural dialogue throughout the coming year through the Madrasa Discourses Research Lab, I felt that the future of this theological renewal project was largely out of my hands. It was the responsibility of the madrasa graduates to bring the changes we discussed back to their communities to bring about conciliation between tradition and modernity.

Just a week after returning from Nepal, my perception that I played only a supporting role in this journey was challenged by a homily given at my local parish. The priest spoke about how we must stay on the straight and narrow path given to us by God in the face of changing social realities, stating that we may not agree with Church teachings, but we do not get to decide what is right in this world. I was amazed by the similarities between this homily and the Islamic viewpoints, as expressed by the madrasa graduates, that we had been discussing during the intensive. I realized that theological renewal is not limited to the Islamic faith. While there may be more contentions between Islam and modernity, Catholicism certainly has room to grow in its acceptance of modern realities and updating of Scriptural interpretation. In fact, strictly literal readings of the Bible still occur within certain sects of Christianity, so this issue of renewal extends beyond the Islamic faith. As my peers in India and Pakistan are working towards updating their tradition, I will do the same in my faith community. I am confident that the Madrasa Discourses project will play a major role in relieving the tension between religion and modernity, and I am so grateful to the Madrasa Discourses team, Notre Dame International, and the John Templeton Foundation for the opportunity I was given to take part in this work.

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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.
Field Notes article

The Tragedy of Otherness


Photo Credit: Alice Treuth. Kathmandu Skyline, July 2017.

A little more than a week into the Madrasa Discourses summer intensive in Kathmandu, I sat on the balcony of our hotel overlooking the Kathmandu Valley while catching up on the readings for the day’s lecture. After eight days of intense material and discussion, I was both mentally and physically exhausted. The students from India and Pakistan, graduates of Islamic instructional schools called madrasas, asked what seemed to be nonstop questions. About the West, about Christianity and Catholicism, about living in such a secular state, about the average American’s opinion of Muslims, about the American political system and our new president, and how I felt about the conflicts in the Middle East. I felt tested in my knowledge of the things I suspected I should know most intuitively: my country, my daily life, and the faith I was raised in for 20 years. As one of the first Americans these madrasa students had ever encountered and conversed with, I felt an enormous pressure to be a positive but accurate representative for the impossible-to-represent demographic of “American.”

I was particularly excited for that morning’s lecture and discussion. Dr. Leela Prasad, a professor of religious studies at Duke University, would be talking about “religion” and the “everyday” in a world of plural cosmologies. I did not yet know exactly what she meant, but I knew I was intrigued. The first reading was a section of a book by Ramchandra Gandhi titled “Advaita: Meditations on the Truth of India,” and as I read through these profound and thoughtful words about the ancient Hindu philosophy, I stopped on one sentence that dwelled in my mind for the remainder of the intensive, and ever since. “Tragedy”, Ramchandra Gandhi writes, “lies in our regarding anything or anyone as ‘other’ than ourselves” (70).

ND students Jebraune Chambers, Maggie Feighery, Nabila Mourad, and Kirsten Hanlon on a field trip to cultural sites in the Kathmandu Valley.

This statement called for immediate reflection. It had been easy, before this point, to see only the things that made the Americans, the Indians, and the Pakistanis different. We preferred to eat at different times; we had different conceptions of punctuality; we had so many questions for each other about the differences in our cultures, our daily lives, our states, and our faiths. But remove this idea of “otherness” and how are we the same? One similarity was readily apparent: we are all students. We all want to learn. As many questions as the Madrasa graduates asked me, I asked them. I learned, in two short weeks, more about India, Pakistan, eastern education, and Islam than I could have hoped or imagined. I thought about how easy it was to talk to them. Despite some difficulty understanding each other’s accents, every single graduate’s English skills impressed me, and they were not in the least bit intimidating. They responded to what seemed like the most basic and naïve questions I asked with patience, genuine warmth, and kindness. We had immense respect for each other, and this was vital for the more difficult or tense conversations we had.

A majority of the time, however, our conversations were lighthearted and humorous. We shared classic jokes from one another’s childhoods with each other, and it was rather refreshing to tell “why did the chicken cross the road” to someone who had never heard it before. We talked about each other’s families and how much we all missed them. We bonded over how new and different Nepali culture was to all of us, and we all took selfies as we toured incredible sites of the beautiful and culturally rich country.

I thought about the first evening, when I met the only non-American female in the program, sporting a face- and form-covering niqab and abaya. She referred to me as her “new sister.” This was the attitude she, and every Madrasa graduate, carried with them throughout the program. So as I sat on that porch, reflecting on how this ancient Hindu concept of Advaita had relevance in the experiences of Americans, Indians, Pakistanis, Christians, Muslims and students in Kathmandu, Nepal, I felt immense gratitude. It became increasingly clear to me that we really were much more similar than different. We are all trying to find our place, and our guiding principles and purpose, in a world that seems plagued with political unrest and senseless violence. In an increasingly secular and pluralistic world, coexistence is the goal for many peace builders. This experience made clear that not only is tolerance possible, so is harmony.

None of this can be achieved, however, if we hold to this idea of “otherness.” The simplest and most effective way to challenge it is to have personal interactions with people from different countries, cultures, and faiths. In these interactions, our similarities seem much stronger than our differences, and as a result it is easier to talk honestly and constructively about the barriers we face on our way to living in a peaceful world. Every person is unique, but we have a shared humanity stronger than our individual identities which makes communication possible. Two short weeks was nowhere near enough time to address any of the problems we faced in a complete manner. But we began conversations about secularism, modernity, “truth,” pluralism, authority, and gender equality that will continue throughout the year. I have already experienced a change in my own thinking and approach to peace building. When we see one another as human, our differences no longer seem insurmountable. I arrived in Kathmandu nervous, unsure of what to expect from 25 strangers of India and Pakistan who lived very different lives and studied and practiced a faith I knew little about. I left two weeks later after saying goodbye to my 25 new brothers and sisters and headed back to Notre Dame with renewed hope in intercultural and interfaith dialogue as a means for peace.

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Margaret Feighery
A South Bend native, Maggie is pursuing her studies in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She joined the Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive in Kathmandu in July 2017.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Dangerous Hope of Visceral Lament: A Response to Lynch, Ocobock, Cavanaugh and Maluleke


Photo Credit: Josep Casas. An abandoned building near Bukavu, DRC.

My gratitude to Kyle Lambelet, for organizing this CM book symposium and for inviting professors Bill Cavanaugh, Cecelia Lynch, Tinyiko Maluleke, and Paul Ocobock to review and comment on my Born from Lament. To them I am extremely grateful for having taken the time to read and to respond to Born from Lament. I am very much humbled by the generosity of their reviews and for the many positive comments and sentiments of praise for the book’s argument, style and structure. That all the commentators praised the book as providing a fresh, provocative and unique contribution to scholarship in general and African theological scholarship in particular is in great part due, I think, to its the methodology of portraiture, which as Maluleke notes, lends “the narrative of the book the correct cadence, the right density of argument, as well as the necessary depth of inquiry.” While on the whole the reviews are celebratory, they also raise a number of critical issues. Maluleke, in particular, questioned whether the text engaged with the rich plurality of theological discourses across Africa. Instead of responding to each of the critical elements one by one, I thought it might be best for me to highlight five key features of Born from Lament. Doing so allows me not only to rehearse some conclusions regarding the book’s unique contribution, but also to respond to the critical issues raised by the reviewers.

1. Beyond dichotomies

Both Cecelia Lynch and Bill Cavanaugh are right that attending to the visceral register of lament allows one to glimpse the possibilities of a new form of sociality (politics) that disrupts the conceptual dichotomies imposed by “modernity”: politics/religion, public/private, secular/religious, state/church, and to these binaries, I would add ‘individual/community’, ‘modern/traditional,’ male/female, and Catholic/Protestant. What is reflected in the lives of the individuals whose portraits I develop is a politics of excess (“excess of love”) that is neither modern nor traditional, Catholic nor Protestant. In this connection, Maluleke is wrong both factually (to claim that I attend only to Catholic actors and neglect non-Catholic actors: Angelina Atyam is a born again Evangelical; David Kasali is a Pentecostal pastor of the Africa Inland Church), but also conceptually, to imagine that the politics of this ‘excess of love’ can still be defined through the traditional registers of denominational confines. It is this excess that also partly provides a response to Lynch’s question (whether the excess of love is for Christians alone or also for non-Christians), and to Ocobock’s question as to whether lament is a personal experience with God alone, or something performed within the expansive community network. What I hope is revealed through the different portraits is not only how suffering and violence shatters communities, but also how lament (as resistance to this shattering) generates a community of compassion and an agency of advocacy on behalf of suffering others. In this way, the expansive community generated by lament disrupts the usual binaries individual/community, Christian/non-Christian. Accordingly, what I find particularly telling of the different portraits is that precisely because they are grounded within their particular convictions, the communities they form display a radical sense of hospitality and inclusiveness that explodes and reconstitutes the boundaries of ‘who are my people.’

2. Redefining politics beyond Denmark

In Born from Lament, I argue that what the visceral experience of lament (Jeremiah, Jesus and Munziriwa) is about is the very heart of politics. The goal of their lament and protest is not simply to call politics to make room for the visceral (to appear now and again); it is not simply for politics to become more just, more caring or more democratic; they call for a re-definition (re-invention) of politics itself. Lynch is thus right to note that my project is far more radical than that of William Connolly, in that I am concerned about the ontological and epistemological foundations of a non-violent society. What Born from Lament seeks, and to a great measure succeeds in doing, is to reveal that the “foundation” of this politics of non-violence lies in unfathomable depth of human suffering and the solidarity (with God and with others) that this experience of can generate. This is where my project is fundamentally at odds with Paul Gifford’s celebration of Denmark as the telos of Africa history. Gifford’s Denmark is the epitome of the “officially optimistic society” (Douglas Halls), whose optimism is grounded in a refusal to embrace/accept suffering and thus the political possibilities that could, as Archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa would put it, be seen only by eyes that have cried. Cavanaugh is right: my trouble with Gifford’s Denmark (as telos) is that it lacks eschatology. The latter would not celebrate the kind of disenchantment that Gifford proposes; but rather for a re-enchantment of our political imaginations so as to connect our mundane efforts to something deeper, something beyond and outside us.

3. The necessity of the theological

This might be the reason, and this is my third point, why a theological register might be necessary to attend to the visceral lament in our lives. If the portraits of lament in Born from Lament serve as critique of the forms of politics that are grounded on violence, which in Africa takes the form of the wanton sacrificing of the poor and weak in the self-aggrandizing libido dominandi of Africa’s political elites, they also point to the limits of secular politics, which is driven by technology and seeks to deny the experience of human suffering (thinking here again of Gifford’s “Denmark”). Embracing the reality of suffering as part of our creaturely existence and basis of our sociality also involves recognition that Africa, indeed the world, needs salvation, which lies beyond even our best efforts. Often enough it takes the visceral shattering of lament to realize this simple, but profound (i.e. saving) truth. Writing as a theologian, I was interested to trace the logic of this claim in the lives of those individuals who claim to be Christian. But if the portraits helped to confirm that only God can save, they also confirmed that not any type of God, but a particulate kind of God—an intimate, vulnerable God, a God who is born in the gash of human history—has come to dwell among us, revealing not only the depths of God’s love, but also new possibilities out of suffering with us. These new possibilities, born from suffering, include a politics of com-passion and non-violent solidarity. Whereas I am not qualified enough to make a claim that it is similar logic that is underway in the painful journeys of the non-Christian or non-religious, I am concerned that abstracted from this rich ontology, this theological matrix, lament can easily turn into a strategy (similar to ‘mediation’ and ‘reconciliation’). This, I suspect, is the same worry that Ocobock is voicing in noting the danger of  ‘stripping’ lament of its theological mooring and making it an item in the toolbox of peacebuilding strategies created by states and nongovernmental organizations. Pointing to the theological grammar of lament and attending to the inner logic of the experience of pain and suffering in the world might be one unique contribution of the theologian-peacebuilder.

4. Descriptive haste or descriptive attention?

While Maluleke credits Born from Lament for coming “close to adding a wholly new dimension of theology in Africa” (he particularly finds my use of poetry, poetic prose and metaphor riveting, and my biblical exegesis impressive and commendable), he nevertheless raises two critical concerns, which I want to respond to in these last two paragraphs. In the first place, he accuses me of ‘descriptive haste’ in claiming that no theological account of hope exists in Africa. Such a claim, he notes, overlooks the rich history (75 years) of published modern African theology, particularly the impressive contributions of African women theologians. Maluleke is right to note that I do not engage or cite African women scholars on the topic of lament. It is not that I am not familiar with the impressive work of African Women Theologians coming from the Circle and beyond. Elsewhere, I have noted that one of the hopeful developments of African theological exploration is the work of women theologians who ‘with passion and compassion’ protest and resist the forms of patriarchy and oppression within both church and society (see my Stories from Bethany). In hindsight, though, I should have engaged some of their literature, especially in my discussion on the need and urgency of hope in Africa, if only to acknowledge their theological quest grounded in lament. Moreover, there are many elements that I share with the likes of Mercy Oduyoye, Nyambura Njoroge and other members of the Circle, notably the attention to story, and the use of poetry, song and metaphor—all of which call for a more explicit connection between my work and the work of African Women theologians. But where I think that my work not only provides a much needed complement to the work of African Women theologians, but also goes deeper, is in the portraits of women that I provide (Atyam, Barankitse, Nyirumbe) which allow the reader to glimpse the liberative internal logic of their faith commitments and the agency that results from this. My work also makes explicit the theology of hope that is at work in the struggles of women like Barankitse, in ways that Oduyoye, Njoroge, and others that call for women’s voice to be heard do not. It is the method of portraiture that allows for this explication of hope, which by allowing me to attend to thick, irreducible particularities of the individual character, ironically also make it possible to make generalizations.

5. East Africa and beyond

Finally, this last point is connected to another criticism from Maluleke, who accuses me of making grandiose claims and generalizations about the continent. Since the portraits I paint are all drawn from the East African region, he suggests that a more appropriate subtitle for the book should be “The Theology and Politics of Hope in Selected Countries of East Africa and of the Great Lakes Region.” I am aware of the ideological and philosophical problems (thanks to Mudimbe and others) associated with the label “Africa”, but I do not see how modifying the title would change much, for even Maluleke’s suggested title involves generalizations about “countries” and the “Great Lakes Region.” Atyam is located in Lira, which does not represent Uganda. Nor is Kasali a representative of the DRC; he operates in Beni, which is very different from Kinshasha. All is to say that generalizations are inevitable. But this is where the true gift of portraiture lies, namely, in allowing one to attend to the historical and contingent details of a story, in a manner that reveals broad themes and general patterns. Portraits are not case studies. Rather, portraiture provides a method of investigation that allows the researcher to listen not only to the story of the individual portrait, but for a story beyond that. Thus, while my portraits are embedded in particular geographical and historical locales in the East African sub region, the story and theology that they reveal is beyond East Africa, in fact, beyond Africa. What the portraits of Born from Lament reveal is a theology and through that theology the possibility of a non-violent politics of solidarity and compassion born out of the deep experience of suffering in the world.

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Emmanuel Katongole
Katongole, a Catholic priest ordained by the Archdiocese of Kampala, is a core faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Previously, he has served as associate professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke University, where he was the founding co-director of the Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation. He is the author of books on political theology, the Christian social imagination,  and Christian approaches to justice, peace, and reconciliation. His most recent book is Who Are My People: Love, Violence and Christianity in Subsaharan Africa (2022).