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Theorizing Modernities article

Forget Pinkwashing, its Brownwashing Time: Self-Orientalizing on the US Campus


A banner for the Columbia University Students Supporting Israel 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week: A Celebration of Semitism."
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. A banner for the Columbia University Students Supporting Israel 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week: A Celebration of Semitism.”

“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. 

It is the ninth week for me as a new professor at Columbia University. The move here from UCLA, where I taught for fifteen years, has been full of surprises, and not always of the kind one expects. But nothing prepared me for the sight I encountered recently as I crossed the main plaza of the college on the way to class to teach Edward Said’s Orientalism to a large group of MESAAS (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies) majors. I was thinking about how best to make them see the political relevance of Orientalism to our present-day reality, and just then, as if by divine intervention, I noticed a flyer: “Hebrew Liberation Week: A Celebration of Semitism.” Curiously I approached the plaza. After all, I was about to teach Said’s discussion of Semitism as an invented 19th century orientalist category and this seemed relevant. I soon faced three tall poles mounted with Israeli flags and was surrounded by about a dozen of young men and women wearing kaffiyehs (a checkered scarf, which has long been a symbol of Palestinian national liberation) that were blue and white (the colors of the Israeli flag). “Things don’t look right,” I noted to myself. But it was only when I noticed the bombastic billboards covering the borders of the plaza that the effect became truly chilling.

Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week" poster of a person in indigenous headdress with "Judah" written across the chest.
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week” poster of a person in Plains Indians-style headdress of a lion with “Judah” written across the chest.

First I saw a large portrait of a Native American wearing a traditional headdress, with the word “Judah” written across it.

Another banner, shown above, presented a group of men in indigenous dress with a bearded man in a tallith (a white prayer shawl worn by Jewish men) placed right in the center among them.

There is, of course, nothing wrong in suggesting an alliance between Jews and Indigenous people, and in the context of Jews living in Europe and elsewhere as “inside outsiders” and as part of internal European colonization (too much has been written about “The Jewish Question” for me to summarize here) it indeed makes sense to compare and point out similarities between the position of Jews as a fragile minority and the position of other oppressed groups, like the indigenous, colonized, enslaved, and more. However, placing such images underneath the Israeli flag makes them, at best, tasteless depictions of a pseudo alliance. Suggesting, as the posters do, that Jews have been driven out of their land (like indigenous people) and have finally returned to Israel–a trajectory that all indigenous people should unite behind–is a crude and cynical manipulation of (Jewish) history and a vulgar fabrication that not only makes no sense, but is also offensive in its use and abuse of indigenous peoples’ histories of oppression.

Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week" poster of Philippino-Israeli IDF soldiers.
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week” poster of Philippino-Israeli IDF soldiers.

Indigenous people are not the only ones exploited in this campaign, run by SSI (Students Supporting Israel). SSI is the new kid on the block of campus hasbara groups (only five years old) but this kid is well funded by the usual suspects. A notable amount of the $319,598 in 2015 contributions SSI reported on tax forms comes, for instance, from the Milstein Family Foundation, which also supports CAMERA, Stand with Us, Hasbara Fellowships, and other right-wing Israel advocates. The mission of SSI, as their webpage indicates, is “to be a clear and confident Pro-Israel voice on college campuses,” and for this mission, they even offer scholarships for students “to visit Israel and come back to campus ready for action!” Nothing on the webpage, however, mentions what SSI’s current campaign at Columbia University makes clear beyond all doubt: that the organization has decided to shamelessly appropriate histories, narratives, political symbols and imagery of indigenous people, Native Americans, Africans, and even Palestinians for the purpose of producing a fictitious, if colorful, narrative of Jewish indigeneity and self-Orientalization. By Self-Orientalism I mean, in this context, a certain instrumentalization of Orientalism and its stereotypes for the purpose of producing a figure of a modern Jew/Israeli who is at the same time ancient, biblical, Semitic, Oriental. This figure is in fact an updated and improved version of the early Zionist invention of the Occidentalized ‘New Jew.’ If the Occidentalized New Jew was said to bring European civilization and progress to the East, this updated version is no longer associating the Israeli Jew with the West and its promise of modernity and progress. On the contrary, the self-Orientalized Jew/Israeli embraces his/her position as the son/daughter of the East. He/she is the native indigenous of the east (Palestine, the biblical Holy-land, Israel) whose temporality expands from the biblical time to the present.

Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week" poster of Black and Brown IDF soldiers.
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week” poster of Ethiopian IDF soldiers.

As a bold background to the blue and white kaffiyehs being sold on location, there were posters covering the plaza, inundated with images of Brown and Black people and proud Israeli soldiers: Asians (children of mainly Filipin@ guest workers who became Israeli citizens and “won” the opportunity to serve in the Israeli army), Ethiopian Jews, Bedouins, and overtly joyful Druze. If yesterday’s message was that the Israeli army is welcoming of gays*, today’s message is that the IDF is a place where Brown, Black, African, and Arab people all feel happy. Together.

In addition to the soldiers, there are images of Arab-Jews (Mizrahim) who must not be forgotten, not again. Images of Yemeni families, perhaps making their way to the Promised Land, are shown on other banners.

Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week" banner of Yemeni family.
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week” banner of Yemeni family.

One must ask: why a “Brown people campaign”? Or: How did all the Israelis (or Jews, the campaign isn’t clear) become so Brown all of a sudden? (I ask as a very fair Polish Jew!) Why does an organization like SSI feel the need to “celebrate Semitism” and parade Ethiopians, Yemenites, and Druze in order to make historical claims of belonging and ownership? And why the sudden need to create the pretense of a coalition with the indigenous people in North America?

The answers are to be found in the logic of political tactic and not in the realm of a real existential identity transformation. In other words, Orientalism–which here functions also as self-Orientalism–is meant to do political work, masking settler colonialism with the language and images of nativism. But what is the political work of self-Orientalizing? What is gained by associating Zionism with the struggles of Native peoples and people of color? Correctly identifying past and present trends of the liberal and the radical left (the focus of indigenous rights, multiculturalism, and siding with the colonized and the oppressed) SSI disdainfully adopts these characteristics in order to unarm leftist critique. Indeed, if Israelis are indigenous people returning to their colonized lands, their political struggle must be considered valid and progressive.

SSI’s Semitic campaign is based on a simple but dangerous manipulation of historical facts. It abuses the historically ambivalent position of the Jew in the West as not-white-not-quite and the Orientalized modern biblical iconography of the Israelites as prototypical Orientals and Semites to create a narrative of a present-day political hallucination, according to which Jews are the colonized natives fighting for their land. If only this fantasy wasn’t so cynical, offensive and well-funded, we might have had a good laugh.

 

*Pinkwashing is a term by the growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation to denote Israel’s deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of progressive modernity symbolized by Israeli gay culture. See: Sarah Schulmann, “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’” Opinion, NYT, Nov 22 2011.

Further Readings:

Self Orientalization:
Grace Yan and Carla Almeida Santos, “China Forever: Tourism Discourse and Self-Orientalism” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 36, No. 2, (2009): 295–315.

Matthew Jaber Stiffler “Consuming Orientalism: Public Foodways of Arab American Christians” Mashriq & Mahjar 2, no. 2 (2014): 111-138.

Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism” History and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 4, (1996): pp. 96-118.

Plamen K. Georgiev. Self-Orientalization in South East Europe. Springer, 2012

Cultural Appropriations:
Yonatan Mendel and Ronald Ranta. From the Arab Other to the Israeli Self: Palestinian Culture in the Making of Israeli National Identity. Routledge, 2016

Nicholas Rowe “Dance and Political Credibility: The Appropriation of Dabkeh by Zionism, Pan-Arabism, and Palestinian Nationalism” Middle East Journal Vol. 65, No. 3 (Summer 2011): 363-380

Susan Slyomovics. The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

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

Religious Coexistence and Conflict: Reflections on Lombok


Photo Credit: Hansel and Regrettal. Pura Lingsar is a temple in Lombok, Indonesia, where both Balinese Hindus and Wektu Telu Muslims hold religious services.

Questioning Pluralism

The current populist ferment in the United States and Europe is, in part, a reaction against religious and ethnic diversity and the cosmopolitan elites who are seen to promote and benefit from it. What about Indonesia? Can pluralism be more than an elite project? To be sure, the archipelago has a long history of religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Our interest in pluralism is provoked, in particular, by the threat of ethnic or religious violence. In Indonesia, peaceful coexistence and cooperation have taken many forms. They do not, however, necessarily depend on taking pluralism as such to be a positive value. Appeals to that value by elites are not likely to gain traction on the ground if they are not informed by local knowledge. That means taking seriously ordinary people’s fears, ethical values, and cosmological beliefs.

 

Violence and Identities

Lombok is home to a Bali-Hindu minority, a Sasak Muslim majority who see them as past oppressors, and smaller numbers of Christian newcomers. The study by Mohamad Abdun Nasir for Contending Modernities asks a crucial question: when does violence not happen? This question rests on another: what conditions lead people on the ground to expect that there will be conflict? And when is violence due to religious difference, rather than, say, economic grievances or just plain criminality? As post-Suharto collective violence was confined to a few localities. Most of the country, including some of the most heterogeneous areas, remained peaceful: it is not so-called primordial identities alone that prompt conflict. Specifying which identities are relevant is not necessarily a straightforward matter. For instance, attacks on Chinese Christians might be about ethnicity, religion, or economics. Motives can change and so will the means of preventing violence.

Webb Keane presents at the Contending Modernities 2017 Jakarta Conference.

Indonesians are involved in both an expanded global imaginary and intensified localism simultaneously. State policies and religious reform movements have led to a hardening of religious boundaries that were once more permeable. In Lombok, for instance, accusations of shirk (polytheism) lead Muslims to abandon religious sites they once shared with Hindus. With contested elections, reified identities can become a way to organize blocs of voters, at the expense of more expansive nationalist sympathies. At the same time, when identities are understood in terms of religion, they can spawn transregional identifications. In Lombok, the 2000 riots were prompted by images of violence from Maluku, and some Muslims suspect local Hindus of conspiring with supporters from India.

 

Local Viewpoints

Jeremy Kingsley attributes both Lombok’s 2000 riots and the lack of violence during the gubernatorial election of 2008 to elite strategies. But this tells us nothing about the ordinary people who do or do not carry out the violence. Elites do not always get what they want—their manipulations must resonate with local life if they are to be effective. For instance, in times of stress, by means of pengajian (religious discussion groups) and sermons, Tuan Gurus (local religious leaders) may emphasize silaturrahim (keeping good relations with others). But do exhortations always work? Neighborliness and hostility are both sustained through everyday interactions, on which explicit discourses may have little impact (see Keane 2016). Even the canniest elite initiatives need to speak to ordinary folk if they are to get real uptake.

Among other things, this means taking religion seriously, not just as a political tool. Nasir reports that some Sasak worry that the very presence of Christian churches in a neighborhood will weaken the faith of the young. Given that Sasak are 93 percent of the population, where does this kind of anxiety come from—what makes it plausible? Much violence is a response to rumors—what are those rumors telling us about people’s fears? For example, according to Kari Telle, many Sasak fear Balinese rituals precisely because they consider them to have occult power (2009, 2014, 2016). From this perspective, rituals have real effects, just as amulets and mantras may convey invulnerability to members of a militia, something elites may not take seriously or even know about.

Violence, of course, is not always political or religious in nature. In Lombok, criminality has been rampant, prompting the rise of private militias. John MacDougall reports 25% of adult men belonged to one in 1998. Soon they were being mobilized for other purposes: Kingsley reports all Lombok militias have links to Tuan Gurus, who used them both to attack Ahmadiyah and to keep peace during the 2008 gubernatorial election. Given the threat of violence posed by such groups, Nasir observes that local officials end up ignoring the legal rights of minorities in the name of “peace keeping.” Displays of force, in an atmosphere of rumor, energized by social media, produce the expectation of violence. This is when the question of why violence does not occur becomes relevant.

 

Terms of Coexistence

Photo Credit: Jos Dielis. Detail on the Pura Lingsar Temple in Lombok.

Where does coexistence work? Nasir points to the everyday habits of neighborliness in urban Lombok, which are, however, under pressure from growing residential segregation. He also notes Christian and Hindu participation in Islamic festivals and other public events. But ritual can have contradictory effects. As Clifford Geertz argued long ago, some rituals are ambiguous enough that people who disagree about what it all means can still participate together. At its best, the result could be coexistence—even to the point of denying difference for the sake of a community. On the other hand, he also showed that public rituals may force people to make explicit their conflicting positions that might otherwise be ignored, exacerbating polarization. Nasir explains that one source of growing conflict in Lombok is the Joint Ministerial Decree on Houses of Worship of 2006. While acknowledging the existence of multiple religions when viewed from the encompassing perspective of the nation, the decree implies something quite different at the scale of village, neighborhood, or city where people carry out their daily lives. By spatializing religion, the decree reinforces the boundaries between groups, valorizes religious purification over social intermingling, and puts at a disadvantage those, like Lombok Christians, who have no specific localities to call their own, or others, like Hindus, whose temple affiliations are not necessarily bound to residential units. Although it recognizes plurality, the decree hardly encourages active practices of coexistence.

The language of pluralism may offer little in the way either of aspirational values or concrete habits to those who must find ways to live with one another. Nor does it necessarily provide a viable counterpoint to fear and rumor. During much of the 20th century, Indonesian nationalism trumped local identities, at least as an ideal toward which people could strive. If nationalism is now weakening as a positive value, what other basis for moral community might make coexistence across religious differences possible? It will take more than exhortations to achieve this; it will take change in people’s everyday habits of living together.

Array
Webb Keane
Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Anthropology. At the University of Michigan he is affiliated with the Social-Cultural and the Linguistic subfields in the Anthropology Department, as well as the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His writings cover a range of topics in social and cultural theory and the philosophical foundations of social thought and the human sciences, and include the recently published Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (Princeton University Press, 2015). In particular, he is interested in semiotics and language; material culture; gift exchange, commodities, and money; religion, morality, and ethics; media and public cultures. He is currently working on a project centered on religious piety, language, and media in Indonesian Islam and Euro-American secularism, with a special interest in semiotic transgressions such as blasphemy, obscenity, and defamation.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Role of Heritage and Tradition (Turāth) in the Search for Muslim Identity


Dr. Ebrahim Moosa delivers the keynote at the 2017 “Beyond Coexistence in Plural Societies” conference in Jakarta.

What is the place and role of the Arabo-Islamic heritage, known as the turāth, in contemporary society? Arabic and Islamic thought spilt a lot of ink on this question in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Tradition, in short, was viewed as a repository of identity and morality. The challenge for Muslim thinkers and practitioners in this time period was to come to grips with new forms of identity making in which the modern nation state played a significant role. Whether they liked it or not, modernity and the modern world arrived on Muslim doorsteps as an uninvited guest under colonization or as an invited guest of declining Muslim empires, when aspects of modernity were adopted by the Ottoman, Safavid or the Mughul empires.

A French parachute division marches through a street in Algeria in 1957.

Muslim identity became entangled with the identity of insurgent cultures as well as civilizations more powerful than theirs and which eclipsed their own. In other words, the Muslim narrative of morality became more complex with more ruptures, breaks and discontinuity than previously experienced. I am fully aware that in the Islamic past the cultural mixing of styles of thought emanating out of the Arabian desert sometimes conflicted with the subjectivities of say North African, African, Persian, Turkic, Malay and a variety of Asiatic peoples over the centuries. But in the past many societies who newly adopted Islam, in one way or another, became invested as actors and players in the making of the Islamic smorgasbord or the Islamic quilt. In the modern period, many Muslims felt that foreign cultures were dictating the nature of the cultural changes and they had little agency in determining their own fate.

The question was never about Arabo-Islamic or a purely Islamic heritage in isolation from the rest of the world. The debates about heritage, turāth, tradition, and Arab identity, and varieties of hyphenated Islamic identities such as Afro-Islamic, Euro-Islamic, Malay-Islamic, Indo-Islamic, Perso-Islamic were entanglements of cultures, symbol systems, multiple forms of meaning-making and lived-practices. These debates were not only limited to the Arabic-speaking world. People as far as Indonesia, Nigeria, central and southern Africa, North America and Europe have all participated in these debates actively or passively. Why? Because they are all part of ongoing Muslim identity debates, namely what is the good life for Muslims in terms of state-formation, governance, citizenship, education, laws and ethics.

Of course, different constituencies in the Muslim world addressed these issues and challenges on their own terms and with great variance. Those who framed the question as that of heritage, turāth, were often folks who espoused modern education and a modern identity. They used modern moral and ethical languages of inquiry to find solutions. They took the entanglement of cultures and civilizations seriously and saw this as an opportunity to remake Muslim cultures and the elements that constituted Muslim or Islamic civilization. Their archive was a much more diverse account of multiple strands of Islam in the past. Yet, to their traditionalist critics among religious orthodoxies, these modern educated folks tilted too far in the direction of the modern and abandoned essential elements of the past or historical tradition. Their flaw, as the Lebanese writer Yahya Muhammad[1] pointed out, was that they viewed the authority of tradition to be suggestive and indicative (tawjīhī). In the view of the modernists, not everything in the tradition was useable. Only those parts of the tradition that enjoyed the largest consensus and agreement historically made sense in the present. One major flaw of this group of modern educated elites was that they never really paid serious attention to the improvement of the political. In other words, as much as there were debates about questions of morality, gender and law, the question of political modernity in Muslim politics was seriously neglected. Status quo practices and patriarchal politics of the all-knowing rulers, authorities and their intellectual enablers continued. With that state of affairs, political accountability became non-existent as a value.

Another significant sector of Muslim intelligentsia were the religious scholars, ‘ulama, who explored these questions of identity from a different perspective. These were the people in the traditional institutions of learning like the famous Islamic universities in the Arabic speaking world, the pesantren of the Malay world, the madrasas of South Asia, the hawzas of Iran and Iraq or the madrasas of sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia. For them the tradition was constitutive (takwīnī) of Muslim identity, and morality was indispensable to self-making. But in this view, tradition was also an exercise of moral power by the custodians of tradition. The ‘ulama viewed the moral templates of the past to be sufficient and that tradition could be deployed in the present with minor modifications.

Boundaries of the Ottoman Empire in 1801.

Both the modern intellectuals and the traditional ‘ulama did not allow for a healthy mutual exchange. In fact, dialogue between rival perspectives was often non-existent or, when it did occur, took the form of excommunication, anathematizing and deeming the other as either anachronistic peddlers of tradition or lackeys of foreign and alien cultures. Meanwhile, the modern nation-state never facilitated serious and meaningful debate about the nature of Muslim identity. Identity questions were often politicized to create the most useful and compliant citizen who could conform to the will of the state. And these days the major identity project is to create sectarian loyalties and hatreds between Sunni and Shia adherents in different parts of the globe. Without careful nurturing and dedicated attention to the past as well as the present, tradition becomes an instrument of power, and a source of learned ignorance. Unless it is used with integrity and care, tradition becomes a site for pathological manifestations.

So let’s ponder what is at stake in this debate about heritage and tradition. At its core, the debate was about the role of the Islamic past in the making of the new and the present. In short, the question was one of identity and selfhood in late modernity. The question of identity is deeply enmeshed in rubrics as varied as questions of Islamic law, ethics, theology, philosophy, debates on religion in modernity (religious studies), Islamic revival, gender debates, education, environment, bioethics and personhood. Put differently, the question centers around the moral anthropology and the moral theology of what it is to be a human person. Actors such as Muslim revivalists, activists in political Islam, Muslim modernists, traditionalists, feminists and gender activists as well as those exploring the complex debates in human sexuality have all had a say in these matters.

For tradition to play a role in Muslim majority societies that are searching for authentic commitments and strong identities, the very idea of tradition ought to be linked to lived experience. One of the major challenges to sustaining tradition in Muslim societies is to configure precisely how to cultivate intelligible literacies of tradition. Tradition cannot merely be the simple adherence to a past practice without understanding its moral relevance and its place in policymaking and politics today.

 

(This blog was drawn from a keynote address delivered at the Contending Modernities “Beyond Coexistence in Plural Societies” Conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, on July 10th.)

[1] Yaḥyá Muḥammad, Al-Qaṭīʿa Bayna Al-Muthaqqaf Wa Al-Faqīh: Dirāsa Maʿrifīya Tastahdifu Ibrāz Jawānib Al-Qaṭīʿa Bayna Al-Binyatyan Al-ʿaqliyatayn-Almuthaqqaf Wa Al-Faqīh (Muʾassasa al-Intishār al-ʿArabī, 2001).

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Ebrahim Moosa
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
Theorizing Modernities article

Eternal Enmities: A Jewish Decolonial Re-Evaluation of Western Altruism


Photo courtesy of Kenneth Lu, “SFO #noban Protest–Jan 29, 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. 

The photo of two children of different religious backgrounds protesting side by side inside the Chicago O’Hare airport on a cold January 2017 morning was enthusiastically ‘liked,’ ‘posted,’ and ‘re-tweeted’ thousands of times on social media. The context of this intercultural encounter was not random. The new political juncture had created networks of racialized populations facing immense pressure. The travel ban against Muslims, the ICE raids targeting Latinxs, and the attacks against Asians in public spaces had become normalized as part of a new tragic reality. Even the Jewish Community Centers, institutions largely incorporated into liberal white society, suffered a string of bomb threats. A number of these communities launched struggles that paralleled those of pre-election movements against anti-Black racism (Black Lives Matter) and Native invisibilization (Standing Rock).

In this volatile context, two parents, one Jewish and one Muslim, joined the protest against the travel ban on January 30th at Chicago’s largest airport with their kids, Maryam and Adin. During this protest, the kids, who were riding on their parents’ shoulders, encountered one another and exchanged gazes full of deep solidarity. The picture of two “immemorial enemies,” one wearing a hijab and the other a yarmulke, engaging in a true act of comradeship quickly captivated the imagination of the Facebook/Twitter/Instagram market. A young man from California wrote “Only in America,” while a middle-aged woman from New York pleaded “we should learn from these innocent children.” The picture represented what a large part of the Western liberal population needed to see: that even in the most challenging moments, the U.S. was still symbolized by pure and innocent individuals able to start a life beyond ancestral enmity.

It is not surprising that those practicing a liberal reading rejoiced at the image. They saw in it the true spirit of the American system: the altruistic and progressive incorporation of difference into a national community able to self-correct its past injustices. Furthermore, the “land of the free,” the ultimate consummation of Western ideals, is the ideal space to leave behind ancient hatreds. There may be no better example of this than a re-encounter between Muslim-Arab and Jewish populations that have been (allegedly) murdering each other since Biblical times. This hatred, however, is far from eternal. It is, on the contrary, a very recent fabrication of the same altruistic West that now intends to mediate among the parties, portraying itself as the only neutral ground for reconciliation. The question is, then, whether the perpetrator and beneficiary is the best candidate to solve the problem it created.

Photo Credit: Christopher Rose. The Synagogue of Santa Maria la Blanca in Toledo, Spain, was forcibly converted to a church decades before the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in the late 1400s.

This is where a Jewish decolonial critique of Western modernity, in conversation with other voices, can offer its two cents. A new world came into existence in 1492 with a process that led to European accumulation of capital and a self-appointed epistemological privilege following the conquest, forced conversion, genocides, and/or enslavement of Jews, Muslims, native peoples, and Africans. Veiling the newly acquired resources that enabled the nascent West to launch industrial and political revolutions, this system started dividing into two groups the populations whose resources were being stolen. On the one hand “people with no religion,” largely representing “Native” and “Black” populations, and on the other, “people with the wrong religion,” generally characterizing Jews and Muslims. This division became a core component of coloniality, or the patterns of domination developed during colonial times that transcend time and space and continue until the present day.

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century both groups suffered increasing racialization. The “people with no religion” were categorized as people with no history, civilization, or development. The system, then, altruistically offered them the evasive possibility of saving themselves by erasing their past and accepting their alleged cultural or biological inferiority. Even in current political discourses, the intention of helping “inner-cities” escape their underdevelopment attests to how coloniality is very much alive. The “people with the wrong religion” were described as “being stuck” or “having a regressive” history, civilization, or development. Since theirs was an alternative, erroneous system, they were portrayed as threats to civilization. The longevity of this narrative in the U.S. was evident in the Communist Jew represented by the Rosenbergs yesterday and in the banned Muslim today.  

In the nineteenth century, imperialism elevated some minorities above the general Muslim population to dismember one of the last non-Western powers, the Ottoman Empire. In the Jewish case European powers were aided by Jewish continental communities who were eager to prove they could erase their uncivilized past and earn citizenship in their own European context. Importing the history of Western anti-Semitism to narrate the history of Arab Jews, colonial powers justified their conquest, altruistically pretending to “save” not only Christian but also Jewish populations from the “regressive” forces of Islam (and Jewish Arabs from their own “underdevelopment”). While this strategy was premodern, coloniality added a fundamental twist. If before modernity genocides were perpetrated to “altruistically” save Christians (the Crusades), in modernity this narrative was mobilized to rescue others from alleged barbarism: Natives from human sacrifices, Africans from cannibalism, and now Jews. Western altruism seems to have recurring ends.   

Photo Credit: Roy Cheung. “Blue on Blue.” Many Muslims and Jews found refuge in the city of Chefchaouene, Morocco, after fleeing Spain in the late 1400’s.

What this narrative obscured is that Jewish history in Muslim-ruled lands was far from identical to the Jewish experience in Christian Europe. This does not mean there were no problems, but Jews were an integral part of the social fabric of Muslim-Arab/Berber societies and this conviviality was present well beyond the sometimes over-romanticized experience of el-Andalus. For over a millennium Jews lived among Muslim populations within a clear protected legal structure (dhimmi and then zimmet). Several Jewish communities have had a continuous presence in the region, refuting the Christian myth of the “wandering” Jewish existence as a punishment for the rejection of Christianity. Under the auspices of the Ottoman rulers, Jews who escaped Christian persecution (starting but not limited to the fall of Granada in 1492) commonly found refuge among Muslims. By the seventeenth century major cities in the Ottoman Empire had Jewish majorities or a distinctive presence.

It is not a coincidence that even with the gradual erasure of Arab Jewish history, Jews at large were still being accused by Western luminaries of having an “Oriental Spirit,” portrayed as a “Palestinian Race” or looking like “Asiatic Refugees.” Edward Said points out the connection between anti-Semitism and Orientalism, and Ella Shohat explains how the same logic was applied to Arab Jews. Despite the efforts to split Jewish and Arab populations, the connection between them endured. In the late nineteenth century it was a Jew (Yaqub Sanua) who coined the slogan “Egypt for Egyptians;” during the Holocaust, Albanian Muslims quintupled their Jewish populations hiding refugees; and on the eve of the postcolonial struggle in Morocco, Sultan Mohammed V called for an anti-colonial “Jewish-Muslim-Berber” alliance. This bond came to be broken only in 1948 (or during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis) with the ultimate naturalization of Jews as Westerners in Israel, the US, and eventually the rest of the world. The “eternal” enmity, then, was a colonial fabrication built on altruistic discourses that are less than 180 years-old (more realistically, 70 years-old).

A Decolonial Jewish re-evaluation of narratives of eternal enmity can shed light upon the perverse altruism of the Western project. While witnessing Neo-Nazis shouting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, some may feel nostalgic for liberalism. However, we need to evaluate whether the roots of this discourse are not already contained in the colonial manipulation of racialized populations. Liberal altruism may well be the problem and not the solution. The Jewish-Muslim case is one of many that invite us to unveil what has been hidden, contest what has been naturalized, and move beyond modern/colonial liberal narratives.  

 

Further Reading

Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).  

Gil Z. Hochberg, “‘Remembering Semitism’ or ‘On The Prospects of Re-Membering the Semites’” Re-Orient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies 1.2 (Spring 2016): 192-223.

Ramon Grosfoguel, “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism in the Four Genodies/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century” Human Architecture 11.1 (2013). http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol11/iss1/8

Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

Salman Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonisation and the World Order (London: Jurts, 2015).

Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine and Other Displacements (London: Pluto Press, 2017).

Santiago Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (New York: Palgrave, 2015).

Array
Santiago Slabodsky
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
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.

Array
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.

 

Array
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.

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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.