Blog

Theorizing Modernities article

Nourishing Hospitality: Jolyon Mitchell Interviews Mona Siddiqui

and
Photo Credit: Jeanne Menjoulet. “Berlin Refugees Welcome”.

MITCHELL: You have recently published Hospitality in Islam. Why did you write the book?

SIDDIQUI: I wanted a theme that would resonate with a bigger audience, so it wasn’t just aimed an Islamic audience, it was really aimed at the very fact that we are now re-thinking hospitality in our political and social context. But I really wanted to go back to the theological roots of hospitality, because so much of my recent writing has been an interface between Christian and Muslim traditions. I thought: how can I structure a book that can appeal to both Christian and Muslim audiences, while also thinking about hospitality as not just something that we do, but hospitality as an attitude?

MITCHELL: What do you see as your central argument?

SIDDIQUI: That hospitality is a blessing but that it’s also a burden and that there are limits to hospitality. It’s very easy to say theologically that hospitality should be limitless but as soon as you start looking at the history of hospitality you see that there is always an etiquette and parameters to hospitality. Hospitality is not the same as generosity, and I think people tend to get these things mixed up. Of course, all of these concepts play off of each other, but hospitality, if done well, does need parameters. I think we’ve lost sight of that.

MITCHELL: What do you see then as the parameters of hospitality?

SIDDIQUI: Well, for example Al-Ghazali talks about the duties of the host and the guest, that there are duties that are mutually bound. The host can open the door to the guest, but the guest should also know how to behave. Now this is just a microcosm of one area of hospitality, but it makes one consider: how do you broaden that up to political rhetoric? Well, if you go to visit a country, or if you become accepted by a country as a refugee or through asylum, there are obligations as well as to how you integrate into that society, because the host has done their bit in welcoming you. Although, the book is not really meant to be a political comment even though I do look at Derrida and all the people who talk about limitless hospitality. It’s not really a social-political comment; it’s more an invitation to think about the various concepts around hospitality.

MITCHELL: It’s fascinating how you extrapolate from minor practices more major significance. Do you see that movement going on throughout the book?

SIDDIQUI: It’s more that the quote from Derrida, the hospitality ethics and ethics as hospitality, is something that we’ve stopped thinking about. In fact, how we are with one another lies at the root of not only our personal relationships but at the very fabric of society. It’s what creates society. Institutions and civil society are based on relationships; they’re not just based on structures.

MITCHELL: Would you say the actual process of writing the book changed how you viewed and understood hospitality?

SIDDIQUI: I think I learned a lot from one or two writers, in terms of sentences like: “If we think about hosting like getting a house ready, well, a house is never ready.” But actually if you just let people into your life, then you can always be ready for that. But the reason the book was triggered was because of a friendship I had with a young White Christian male. As we were eating, it dawned on me that there are things in our lives and in our relationships, that transcend ritual, ethics, law, and the boundaries of our own religious tradition, and those are the most elusive aspects of life which need exploring.

MITCHELL: Was there any part of this book that made you change your mind?

SIDDIQUI: The chapter on divine hospitality was a challenge. You have the Eucharist in Christian theology which is a very obvious and deep symbol. You don’t have that equivalent in Islamic tradition. So, how to consider how we think about divine hospitality, bearing in mind that most Christians, when they talk about hospitality, see the face of Christ in hospitality? It is a Christ-centered concept. If you do not have an equivalent in the tradition, where do you find a parallel? It was a bit of an eye opener for me to realize that I had never thought about the delights of paradise as heavenly hospitality.

MITCHELL: I was interested by how you handled the Abraham story, learning from the different perspectives provided. It’s quite surprising—the Abraham story is quite different between the two traditions—there’s fear in it.

SIDDIQUI: That’s right. The reason I put that in is because Abraham is now used as a short-cut to talk about interreligious—as if somehow Abraham is at the roots and therefore we can’t talk about the differences around Abraham himself. So, I wanted to look at the differences, partly because it’s so powerful in the Hebrew Bible but also in the later traditions around the Qur’an. Who were these strange men? Were they angels? Was God himself present? Why did they not eat? The Biblical Abraham story is quite different. Part of my fascination with the comparison is to say that, actually, in so much of the religious literature—not just in ethics, but theological and philosophical—you have similar vocabulary, but the vocabulary takes you into different directions completely. You have similar names like Abraham and Moses, but their stories are different. The legacy they leave behind is different. So, for me there are meeting points, but it’s the difference in the stories that is interesting.

MITCHELL: If you were to highlight the significant differences in those stories of understanding hospitality, what would they be?

Photo Credit: IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation. “Aleppo, Azez”. Children run through the rubble.

SIDDIQUI: The stories are almost motifs to start the conversation. For example, I was speaking to somebody recently who is a philosopher, and he was looking for that ultimate Islamic virtue. I said, “What would that be in your eyes?” He’s not Muslim. And he said, “Oh, generosity.” But generosity is not the same as hospitality and this led me to a whole literature on generosity which I haven’t quite found in other religious traditions. Not because it’s Islamic, precisely because it’s pre-Islamic, it’s been woven into Islamic societies. Generosity wasn’t just the act of giving; it’s the most noble thing that you could do. Because in the harsh desert environment, if you weren’t generous to your guests or to the stranger, the stranger would die.

MITCHELL: You talk about the stranger there, and it’s intriguing how that is woven into your argument. What I am trying to understand is how the stranger, how your understanding of the stranger, might inform interreligious conversations.

SIDDIQUI: The concept of stranger isn’t in the Qur’an itself. The stranger is, I think, quite a biblical concept. The stranger is to be feared. The stranger is unknown territory. You don’t know the stranger; you don’t know the language of the stranger. I don’t tend to think of the stranger like that, partly because of my own roots coming from another land and possibly being a stranger here (though when you’re that young you don’t realize it). I don’t see the world in terms of strangers. That doesn’t mean to say I see the world as friends, but the world isn’t full of strangers who will do something bad.

MITCHELL: In schools one of the phrases you probably know is “stranger danger.”

SIDDIQUI: And what we are finding is that most of the dangers we face in our lives come from our families—not from strangers. Whether it is child sex abuse, whether it is marital rape, whether it is domestic violence, these are coming from within our domestic situations. The stranger is there as somebody, in a way, that encapsulates all of our fears, but, actually, our fears are being misplaced—our fears are much closer to home.

MITCHELL: How would your insights on strangers inform debates regarding Islamophobia?

SIDDIQUI: I think the focus on Islam in Europe and the United States to some extent is again bringing up old tropes about Islam and Christianity. I have always said that there are issues within Muslim communities that need to be addressed for the last two decades. I knew that ultimately some of these issues would catch up with other [non-Muslim] people who would say: “Muslims are fundamentally different from us”. So, it is not the stranger aspect of the Muslim himself; it’s the fact that he is seen now as an antithesis to Christendom. And, although we don’t talk about Christendom, the West is often conflated with Christianity. The Muslim doesn’t just represent the medieval threat; the Muslim represents a threat to secularity itself.

MITCHELL: What would you say that your book on hospitality contributes to those discussions?

SIDDIQUI: I would hope that people would think hospitality is not a virtue without limits. It’s not an absolute virtue: it demands a certain commitment. It’s a doing word. You have to do things for it to be sustainable. I have always argued and I will still argue that any minority community that goes to a different country—or anyone who is born as a minority and says, “Well, I am British by birth”—still will feel at odds with the wider society simply by being a part of a minority community. To what extent you let that define who you are, and to what extent you say that there are always going to be certain differences which you can live with—it’s what you can give to the wider society, in as much as you can give, that should matter. So, you should be defined by your giving rather than by what is being taken away from you.

MITCHELL: What would you say to the critic that says that hospitality is hopelessly ideal and that the reality is that we do need to have walls to protect ourselves?

SIDDIQUI: In this age of globalization and borderless nations in some ways with internets, how can you have walls to protect yourself? Our biggest fears are fears that we have in our imagination. They’re not really about the person on the street. It’s the thought that ‘so and so’ can do something to me. That doesn’t take away from the real threats of various things. But actually, there are all kinds of threats out simmering away that we never hear about, and they may come from all areas of society. We have to decide what proportion of our lives we want to spend obsessing over one particular threat as opposed to the other stuff that’s going on. I don’t think it is an ideal.

MITCHELL: How might your work on divine hospitality inform conversations across divided communities?

SIDDIQUI: At the end of the day, again, I quote Ghazali, that in death the only thing you take with you is your good deed. Everything else you leave in the grave, but the good deeds stay with you. Islamic tradition has a huge literature on this, you know, that if you do good, that’s blessing incurred on your parents who have deceased. There is a sense that goodness is inherited and passed back as well.

MITCHELL: It’s interesting to reflect on hospitality as the basis of all relationships in regards to distant suffering. Obviously, the media is bringing suffering which is far away close to us, but it also blocks us; it’s a barrier as well. And I suppose there is part of me that wonders, to what extent hospitality can be expressed to places and peoples who are experiencing distant suffering, whether that is Aleppo, or South Sudan, or Gaza City.

SIDDIQUI: I think it’s very easy to become desensitized to all of this because images are there all of the time. On the other hand, I think we shouldn’t underestimate human generosity and the desire to do good when people see suffering. I think Christine Pohl said it that we are far more consumed with distant suffering than the suffering that is taking place at our doorstep. And I think it is how you balance both. I don’t think that you can just focus on one.

MITCHELL: It’s striking to think how hospitality actually trains us beyond the practice of compassion fatigue, and the imagination of compassion fatigue.

SIDDIQUI: It’s a duty. Towards the end I think it’s Henri Nouwen who said that this is not just some tea and biscuits hospitality; this is sacred duty, and all duty is hard. So, any reciprocity, any reciprocal relationship, has a level of duty in it.

MITCHELL: What do you see as the resources within Islam, within Sunni Islam in particular, for nourishing those wanting to practice daily acts of hospitality?

SIDDIQUI: Probably in the institution of charity, which is so intrinsic. Zakat institutions feed into charitable organizations, people pay so much into any charity. I think Muslims have some of the highest rates of charity giving, because they see it as the best of their faith.

MITCHELL: So I suppose partly behind the resources is that it’s clearly a hard thing to do. It’s a duty, and duty sometimes is a hard thing to do. When I think about resources, I think about other kinds of practices, like spiritual practices that can drive people towards being more outward-looking.

SIDDIQUI: I think of prayer, and I think of migrations themselves. The Hajj is a major pilgrimage, but people do the lesser pilgrimages. Part of the reason that people do these pilgrimages is actually a renewing of their soul. We need to do something hard and demanding to find our faith again and to find what we can do for others in a community. So, all the resources that take you back from the individual to the community reawaken the sense of mutual obligations.

MITCHELL: Thank you very much indeed for your time.

SIDDIQUI: Thank you, a pleasure.

 

Note: This transcript has been edited for the purposes of the blog.

Array
Jolyon Mitchell
Jolyon Mitchell is a Professor specializing in Religion, Violence and Peacebuilding with special reference to the Arts, at New College, the University of Edinburgh.
Mona Siddiqui
Mona Siddiqui is a Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at New College, at the University of Edinburgh.
Theorizing Modernities article

Hospitality and Empire


Photo Credit: European Commission DG Echo. “Kawergosk 1” Refugee Camp, with Syrian Refugees. 2014.

By publishing Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name, the University of Edinburgh theologian Mona Siddiqui has made available a rich resource for thinking about hospitality from within the Islamic tradition. Moreover, using a comparative framework, the book connects her skillful readings of Islamic texts to the Jewish and Christian traditions, underlining important congruencies and contentions. In many ways, the book itself is premised on a rhetoric of hospitality. As she puts it in the interview, “It’s not really a social-political comment; it’s more an invitation to think about the various concepts around hospitality.” In the concluding paragraph of the book, Siddiqui writes, “The stranger and the traveller [sic] are still there in the form of refugees and migrants, except now they are identified through the political language of our age” (242-3). Hospitality and Islam aims to offer a new theological resource to these debates without claiming an explicitly political position.

The interview has mitigated some of that bet-hedging, clarifying at least two arguments that promise to bridge theology and policy, without demonstrating how exactly to build that bridge or proving its necessity. The first argument is that hospitality is not meant to be easy and immediately beneficial to the host, but it is “a sacred duty.” As Siddiqui notes in the introduction to her book, this is neither an entirely new assertion nor one that is immediately practically applicable (7). Second is that the guest must “behave” in a manner becoming of the guest/host relationship. This is where Siddiqui pivots outward from Al Ghazali’s prescriptions about the guest/host relationship, gesturing from the micro-level towards the macro, from adab literature on “manners and virtuous behavior” (34) to issues of “integration” within so-called host societies. This is also where the how and why questions become inescapable, at the risk of making us pesky guests of her generous scholarship.

Consider her use of the language of reciprocity, matching rights with responsibilities: “Well, if you go to visit a country, or if you become accepted by a country as a refugee or through asylum, there are obligations as well as to how you integrate into that society, because the host has done their bit in welcoming you.” It is troubling to think of tethering universal human rights to civic responsibilities to specific nation-states or, worse yet, to assimilation to imagined communities through such moralizing rhetoric. Of course, the international system of asylum applications, the criminal justice system, and whatever remains of the beleaguered welfare state all already operate in a similar logic, demanding that the needy demonstrate that they are “deserving.” The compensatory benefits of adding a further religious dimension to moral narratives of benevolent “hosts” under the threat of unscrupulous “guests” are not clear. Will calling hospitality a “sacred duty” and urging societies to shoulder its burdens “in the name of God” make up for the dangers of delineating duties for those brutalized by the same systems that have made the “hosts” at home in capitalist modernity? Or does it merely replicate and update Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”: “No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper, The tale of common things.” Except this time, within this new muscular, postcolonial hospitality, the erstwhile settler gets to play gracious host.

Photo Credit: Jonathan McIntosh. “Caution Economic Migrants”. At the US-Mexican border near Tijuana.

All this brings two further questions. First, and perhaps the most obvious: how useful can “hospitality” be as a concept with which to think through contemporary crises of immigration and statelessness? Here the answer is complicated not just by the gap between the logic of “the moral person” and the logic of “the legal person” as Siddiqui underlines in the book (7), but also by the historical purchases of “home-making,” the right of return, and what Anzaldúa has called the “fear of going home” in the postcolonial world (Anzaldúa, 42; see also Stoler; Kaplan; Le Espiritu). Given the extensive transnational feminist literature on the imbrications of the imperial with the domestic, the host/guest and host/stranger relationships and the very concept of home must be deeply historicized and problematized before they can operate as more than mere metaphors naturalizing global inequality.

The second, and perhaps more interesting, question relates to the impulse in the contemporary Western milieu that has made scholars mine the concept of hospitality in this way. Siddiqui, after all, is offering resources in part as a response to the proliferation of discourses on “hospitality” and “tolerance” in Europe during the most recent refugee crisis. Perhaps the rhetorical operations performed around such concepts with pre-modern, sacred roots and echoes tell us about Europe’s own identity crises as “the empire comes home” (Webster). At the very least, these discourses mark a panic regarding the perceived and real failures of the “secular” language of human rights, the rule of international law, and the system of nation-states—failures that are hardly news to the average denizen of the so-called “developing world.” This then is a story of contending modernities indeed: the new scholarly life of “hospitality” is a way station on the search for “pre-modern” knowledges that must be made to serve the present. Siddiqui’s offering from within the Islamic tradition is gracious indeed. What will the intellectual wayfarers do with it?

Array
Perin Gürel
Perin E. Gürel is associate professor of American Studies and concurrent assistant professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017), explores how Turkish debates over “westernization” have intersected with U.S.-Turkish relations in the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Turkish Literature, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a second book project on the impact of U.S. political discourses on Turkey-Iran relations from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Gürel is also faculty fellow for the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Expanding the Conversation on Hospitality in Islam


Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston. “Refugees Welcome” at Dulles Airport, January 2017.

The interview “Nourishing Hospitality,” conducted by Jolyon Mitchell with author and scholar Mona Siddiqui, is not only a useful introduction to Siddiqui’s book Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name (2015), which I have previously reviewed, it also serves as a companion piece that provides further context and texture to what is already a timely and accessible work. The exchange further grounds the book by drawing into the conversation new valences to everyday experiences, like the feeding of others or traveling to new places, and making connections to the various forms of suffering underlying today’s headlines, whether in Syria, Palestine, or elsewhere.

As I read through the interview, several of Siddiqui’s responses prompted me to pause and reflect further. For instance, when asked how the book changed her mind, Siddiqui replies: “The chapter on divine hospitality was a challenge. You have the Eucharist in Christian theology which is a very obvious and deep symbol. You don’t have that equivalent in Islamic tradition.”

Upon reading this, my mind immediately began to reel through the various rites and symbols of Islam to see if there was indeed anything that might be considered a proper “equivalent.” Of course, determining equivalency is a subjective enterprise. All too often the quest for analogues privileges European Christian categories of analysis. Studies revealing this disparity abound.[1] Siddiqui’s framing of the “challenge” seems to participate, perhaps inadvertently, in this dynamic. While her answer of the “delights of paradise” is intriguing, it is more properly a soteriological ideal, rather than a symbolic ritual like the Eucharist. When considering the symbolic universe of Islam my thinking went to ṣalāh or the daily ritual prayer, perhaps inspired by the recent and strong scholarship on symbolic practice, especially Marion Katz’s Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice. While this rite might be conventionally thought of as an act performed in solitude, it represents a relational reality between the human being and God. Prayer, after all, is always done to God. The stations of ṣalāh, in which the precant transitions through the different postures of prayer (standing, bowing, sitting, and prostration) mark what must be accomplished for the proverbial guest to earn the hospitality of the host. In this regard, a sincerely performed prayer embodies both the entreaty and its acceptance, the guest and the host, the human servant and God. Framing the inquiry along these lines might prove fruitful for further reflections on the nature of divine hospitality in Islam.

Later in the interview, the conversation turns to the religious significance of the stranger. At this point Siddiqui states that “the concept of stranger isn’t in the Qur’an itself,” at least not in an explicit manner. The conventional religious language associated with the stranger is sparse in the scripture. I would not cede, as she does, that the stranger is “quite a biblical concept.” An argument can be made that the stranger is also an Islamic concept as my own Muslim theological writings have increasingly made apparent to me. One need only turn to the hadith literature that seeks to preserve the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad to find fertile ground for strangers, strangerhood, and strangeness. For the sake of brevity, I will cite only two prophetic reports to make my point. Found in numerous hadith collections, but perhaps made most famous for its mention in al-Nawawī’s renowned collection of forty hadith, the Prophet Muhammad reportedly said:

 

            “Be in the world as though you were a stranger or a wayfarer” (122-3, Hadith 40).

 

In this hadith the stranger (gharīb) is not merely a person of encounter. Rather, as the hadith indicates, strangerhood is a mantle to assume and a disposition to foster with respect to life in this world. Our home, the hadith implies, lies in a life and world beyond this one. Elsewhere, the Prophet Muhammad goes a step further and equates the faith of Islam itself with strangeness (gharīb). The hadith scholar Ibn Rajāb al-Ḥanbalī cites the following hadith at the beginning of his treatise Kashf al-kurba fī waṣf ḥāl ahl al-ghurba:

 

“Islam began in strangeness and it will return to strangeness just as it began, so blessed are the strangers.”[2]

 

Strangerhood and strangeness are not merely conceptual foils, but asserted in a decidedly central manner here. Strangeness is invoked to point out that Islam goes against the grain. There is something powerfully subversive, or at least interventionist born by these prophetic sayings.

Let it be clear, however, that the points that I have raised above do not mark a disagreement with Siddiqui. Her reflective investigation into hospitality as a theological virtue is important. The work marks a helpful starting point of consideration. My interventions are intended as indications as to how the conversations and ideas developed in her incredibly insightful work might be extended and continued in the wider theological discourse. I invite Siddiqui to consider how other themes and religious symbols might deepen, redirect, or subvert altogether the ongoing conversations between modern faith traditions, especially in light of the power disparities that all too often underlie these exchanges.

 

[1] See for example Richard King’s critique of the discourse on “religion” and “mysticism” in the context of South Asia or Brent Nongbri’s wider ranging historical analysis.

[2] The translation is my own. A different translation of this hadith appears in Ibn Rajab al-Hanbalī & Abū Bakr al-Ajurrī, The Journey of the Strangers, translated by Abu Rumaysah (Birmingham: Daar us-Sunnah Publishers, 2009), 32.

Array
Martin Nguyen
Dr. Martin Nguyen, Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University, is an Islamic studies scholar and Muslim theologian. His work revolves around Islamic ethics, theology, spirituality, Qur’anic studies, and the intersection of race and religion. He is currently writing on global mass displacement and modern structural racism from an Muslim theological vantage. Among his books is Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination (2019) and An American Muslim Guide to the Art and Life of Preaching (2023), which he edited and revised with the late Imam Sohaib Sultan at Princeton. More about Prof. Nguyen’s work can be found at https://drmartinnguyen.com
Field Notes article

The Ambivalence of Modernity Seen from Abidjan


Photo Credit: Njambi Ndiba. “Mornings in Abidjan”. People gather to read the newspaper.

In his recent post, “The Pastor as Sexual Object”, Ebenezer Obadare rightly suggests that the rise of the authority of the Pentecostal pastor in contemporary Africa should also be understood against the background of the decline of other authorities. Focusing on the demise of the authority of the intellectual, he holds that the Pentecostal pastor “now occupies what once was the academic’s spotlight as authority on economic, political, and cultural matters, to such an extent that today, even the academic tends to genuflect to his (i.e. the pastor’s) authority.” As the present contribution also shows, besides the intellectual there are other authority figures who have lost ground in favor of the Pentecostal pastor. During fieldwork in the city of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, we asked our interviewees, most of whom were educated urban dwellers fluent in French and either Christian or Moslem, how they thought of modernity and what images they associated with this category (one even scholars have a hard time defining). Our informants, whose voices are echoed here, lament the decline of parental authority and blame “modernity” for it. As Obadare’s piece notes, what we are witnessing in Africa is not necessarily the disappearance of authority figures in favor of individual freedom, but the emergence of parallel sources of authority competing with traditional ones for social control. We are attempting to capture popular representations of modernity within the framework of the Contending Modernities project and the views echoed here about the ambivalence of modernity cut across religious denominations

The overarching images that emerge from the data include those of “change” (“la modernité c’est le changement”) and “novelty” (“la modernité c’est quelque chose de nouveau” or “pratiques nouvelles”) characterized as both positive and negative and associated with various aspects of social life. One informant sums it up as follows: “modernity is change—the difference between the vision of our forefathers and that of our children today. It is adaptation to current life; it is about new practices”. The baseline here seems to be the “ways of living of our forefathers” that some refer to as “tradition”, which can risk “essentializing” the ways of the “forefathers” by denying them the same historicity accorded to modernity. Indeed, as historians have shown, pre-colonial Africa was as familiar with change as any human society and should not be equated with stability. Some simply describe modernity as “social change” (“changement social”) or as “change of mores” (“changement de moeurs”). But the object of change is not confined to ways of being, thinking, or doing. It is also extended to material, scientific, and technological innovations seen as an essential component of modernity. Science and technology are perceived as the embodiment of modernity. Particular references are made in the interviews to new technologies of communication and information and to new means of transportation which have accelerated the circulation of people and goods and reconfigured how people inhabit space and time.

But modernity is not only about change. It is also seen by interviewees as people’s “ability to adapt” to these changes (“vivre avec son temps”). One is described as “modern” if he or she is open to change, to novelties. For one informant, “[m]odernity has to do with something new suited for our times” (“adapté à notre temps”). For another “modernity is living with one’s time, adapting to the evolution of time and space”. In other words, new times, new ways of living, and new material goods call for adaptation either by embracing them or resisting them. In the words of one interviewee, “modernity is change in present-day society; this change is positive and negative.” For believers, religious norms seem to play a key role in the selective embracing of modernity.

Regarding the “positives” of modernity, informants mentioned, among other things, the development of new technologies which have improved people’s living conditions and made life easier in many respects. Many speak of “improvement of daily living conditions” and of the evolution of “laws governing African realities”. Here, change is described in terms of progress: “modernity is progress—something added onto; that which is new”. Besides new technology, other celebrated imports of modernity referred to by interviewees include western schools and the promotion of the rights of vulnerable categories such as women and children. In the words of one informant, “Modernity has allowed women to express themselves as men”. It is seen as a key factor in growing consciousness about human rights, especially those of vulnerable categories such as women, children and sexual minorities.

But this “redefinition” of the role of women in society is not welcomed by everyone. And here begins the trial of modernity that we primarily focus on in our research: how the revision of the family code has been received by various religious constituencies in the Ivory Coast. Indeed, in the interviews, modernity is also variously associated with “curse”, “debauchery”, “social disequilibrium”, “depravation of mores”, “loss of parental authority”, “reconfiguration of family relationships”, “neglect of religious norms”, “new conceptions of marriage”, “the revolt [i.e. insubordination] of women”, “evolution of sexual practices”, “individualism”, etc. What seems to stands out from this non-exhaustive list of the charges levelled against modernity is the weakening of parental, male, and family authority in favor of individual freedom or new forms of authority. For some, the weakening of parental authority is responsible for the demise of “good education” since parents are no longer allowed chastise their children. One informant expresses his regrets in this way: “[t]oday, children oppose the choices of their parents, and this was not the case in the past. Children claim to have rights: which rights? It is modernity.” Another adds: “the rights of children; you can no longer scold a child, let alone discipline him or her”.

In short, less parental authority seems to imply more individual freedoms leading to what some describe as the “uprooting of the youth” illustrated, for example, by indecent dressing: “Men and women [no longer] dress in a way that is worthy of religion, and hence the punishment from God,” laments one informant. Modernity is seen not only as occasioning the weakening of traditional forms of family life but also as favoring the emergence of news ones such as gay marriage, described by many as “deviant.” As one informant puts it: “modernity is debauchery with regard to marriage: in the past, a man married a woman; today people of the same sex get [married]. This not normal”. What we have here is a good illustration of the ambivalence of popular representations of modernity. It is partly embraced for its scientific and technological wonders, but also partly associated with moral decline especially with regard to family and sexual ethics. Hence the hermeneutic value of the concept of “multiple modernities”: “modernity, if it ever was a single entity, has gone in innumerable and often unanticipated directions…Since modernity has not led to the wholesale convergence of societies and cultures, it is plain that there is nothing particularly ‘natural’ or inevitable about it. Modernity is not simply the logical outcome of an inevitable unfolding of structures and ideas” (Moore and Sanders, 12).

Array
Ludovic Lado
Ludovic Lado, S.J., is the director of Centre d’Etude et de Formation pour le Développement (CEFOD) in N’Djamena, Chad. His publications include Catholic Pentecostalism and the Paradoxes of Africanization (Brill, 2009); Le Pluralisme Religieux en Afrique (PUCAC, 2015); and Towards an Anthropology of Catholicism in Africa (forthcoming).
Global Currents article

Prayer in Action: Supplication and Prayer in a Time of Crisis


Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson. “Open your mind. Open your heart. Protester with placard at London’s anti-Trump ban demo.”

The current plight of Muslims and other minorities in the United States of America could be regarded as a kairos moment: a felicitous moment to reflect on the crisis that we are faced with, and also an opportune moment in which supplication and prayer can be central means for individuals and communities to find hope and solace. The outpouring of solidarity elicited over the past few months, as witnessed in interfaith prayer services, heartfelt expressions of compassion, and the practice of welcoming the stranger, accentuates the possibilities that can emerge from a time such as this.

Supplication and prayer hold great value in Islam and other religions and are an integral part of the life of the conscientious believer. They are means of communication and dialogue with God and something that conscientious believers constantly pursue.

In the secular age we live in, supplication and prayer seem to have lost their efficacy and charm. Yet the impulse to pray is one of the most innate of human behaviors—especially during times of crisis—albeit in different ways depending on one’s tradition. Prayer keeps us real and humble by making us realize that even though our human agency is important, there are factors in our lives that are beyond our control. This is not to say that we simply pray and wait for miracles to fall from heaven—because prayer without action is imprudent, for human beings shall have that for which they strive (Q53:39).

Prayer is the consciousness of spirit and it is a powerful tool that can be used to influence social change. In fact, I believe that our efforts as social justice activists become more meaningful if they emerge from a spiritually purified and a non-avaricious heart. Without a solid spiritual foundation, social justice activism can unwittingly become a self-fulfilling quest for egomania, self-enrichment, and the feeding of the base desires of the carnal self. In Islam we see this challenge expressed in the notion of jihad al-nafs, which is, in mystical traditions of Islam, the greatest form of jihad. It is the spiritual struggle to purify the soul and refine the disposition. The enduring challenge facing the person of faith who is committed to social justice struggles is how to maintain the mizan, i.e. a healthy balance between individual spiritual growth and purification and more traditional methods of frontline social justice activism.

Prayer to Overcome Intolerance

The highest form of prayer embraces the other. It is the most powerful and holy thing one can do. The Islamic and Christian scriptures highlight the importance of embracing difference and loving the other. In the Christian tradition at the last judgment, Jesus (pbuh) separates the sheep from the goats and says to those sitting at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you welcomed me.” When they inquire as to when they did this, Jesus answered: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:11-40, NRSV). In the Islamic tradition, there is a similar prophetic tradition (hadith) and the Qur’an echoes a similar sentiment, that when the oppressed are fed and cared for, it is also for the love of God (Q76:8-9).

By entertaining strangers we recognize that we are all created in the image of God and we are continually lifted up by the love that abounds. This love that is fostered through struggle, solidarity and action is what Paulo Freire refers to as “radical love.” According to Freire, radical love is “never about absolute consensus, or unconditional acceptance, or unceasing words of sweetness, or endless streams of hugs and kisses. Instead, it is unconstructed, rooted in a committed willingness to struggle persistently with purpose in our life—and to intimately connect that purpose to what it means to be human” (34). Simply put, radical love is about a peaceful, empathetic and courageous commitment to the other.

Too often we have a distortion of spatiality, a separation of my group and myself from the other. This promotes troubling agendas and it is what I like to call “sectarian justice.” I have written elsewhere that, as a Muslim scholar, I find myself instinctively drawn to the biblical text of Hebrews 13:2: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained strangers unawares.” From the vantage point of semantics, it is striking to note that the Greek equivalent of the English “entertain strangers” is philoxenia. The first element of the word is philo, which means love or friendship and thus the passage means more than hospitality. Philoxenia is therefore not merely a sentimental response to the “other,” but truly a “love of strangers” as opposed to its antonym xenophobia, which translates as “fear or hatred of strangers.”

Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson. “Silence is compliance – A protester with a message standing on a window ledge in Whitehall.”

It is philoxenia that I have found expressed in the outpouring of solidarity with the Muslim community during this time of crisis. I have been inspired and deeply moved by the deluge of support and solidarity that the Muslim community has received from their American neighbors. The example of the Jewish rabbi who visited the imam of the burnt down Texas mosque and offered him the keys to the synagogue for Muslims to pray in was truly inspirational and perhaps unprecedented. Every Friday we have had large numbers of people from various faiths joining our congregational service at the Islamic Center of Michiana, Indiana. Furthermore, I have been invited to pray at an Interfaith Service of Solidarity with Refugees and the Muslim community at St. James Episcopal Cathedral in South Bend, Indiana, as well as other interfaith events. This is an expression of prophetic theology, where religion sees its role as witness to its values and highest ideals in the social realm. This form of theology is distinct from state theology and church theology in the South African Kairos document, which challenges state-sanctioned discrimination and violence as well as church complicity during the apartheid years.

Even as I seek to live by a prophetic theology with a spirit of philoxenia by participating in the weekly Friday congregational prayer services at the Islamic Center of Michiana, and by joining protests and interfaith services of solidarity, it has been a difficult personal decision since I am not a US citizen. However, I took the decision to be active and present during this crisis because I am a peace studies scholar, a Muslim religious leader, and a nonviolent activist, and I am compelled to speak out against the growing threat of Islamophobia, racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and all other forms of assault on the dignity of others.

I see the current charged political atmosphere in the US as a kairos moment—a moment of truth and of opportunity—an opportunity that if seized upon, may transform the US into a more vibrant democracy and a more just and caring society.

Array
A. Rashied Omar
A. Rashied Omar earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an M.A. in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he is now a core faculty member. Omar’s research and teaching focus on the roots of religious violence and the potential of religion for constructive social engagement and interreligious peacebuilding. He is co-author with David Chidester et al. of Religion in Public Education: Options for a New South Africa (UCT Press, 1994), a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015), and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (Macmillan Reference USA, 2016). In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as Imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and an advisory board member for Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa.
Field Notes article

Land and Authority in Postcolonial Cameroon


Photo Credit: His Royal Majesty the Fon of Njirong. View of landscape of Mbawrong.

Sonny Okosun’s song, “Papa’s Land,” released in 1977, is about the dispossession of Africans from the land by colonists. Four decades later, land and land acquisition continues to be a major social, economic, political, and religious staging ground for contending modernity in postcolonial Africa. In fact, studies from different parts of Africa today demonstrate that land, more than ever before, has become an important commodity. Our project examines a land dispute between the Njirong and Ntumbaw villages of the Ndu sub-division of Donga Mantung in the northwest region of Cameroon. These two neighboring villages have lived together for generations and are interconnected in many ways. They share religious institutions: one Catholic church, one Baptist church (though now there is a Baptist Church in each village), one mosque, and the traditional rites that protect land in both villages was performed by the Nsingong (a traditional society charged with stewarding the land) of Njirong Village. The villagers intermarried and in spite of the conflict still have only one government recognized market in Ntumbaw village. Fulani cattle headers lived in Ntumbaw, but during the dry season, they moved their cattle to the low lands of Mbawrong in Njirong Village, because there was an abundance of grass and water for the cattle.

Then the residents of Njirong Village started growing rice at Mbawrong in the late 1960s. It is alleged that the Chief of Njirong invited the chief of Ntumbaw to join him in cultivating rice. The Ntumbaw Chief hesitated, but later sent his own villagers down to Mbawrong to cultivate rice. The Chief of Njirong reportedly designated a plot of land within Njirong territory, bordering Ntumbaw lands, for the Ntumbaw villagers to cultivate. It is alleged that Ntumbaw farmers at Mbawrong then annexed that piece of land and claimed ownership of the land. Since 1974, the land dispute has disrupted social, family, economic, and spiritual relationships between the two villages, which are both members of the Warr Family of the Wimbum community in Donga Mantung Division. In 2004, in accordance with the 1974 Land Law of Cameroon, the Senior Divisional Officer of Donga Mantung convened a Land Consultative Committee, also called a Land Commission, to settle the dispute. Both parties made submissions to the commission and after hearing from the neighbors of Njirong and Ntumbaw, the commission ruled that the land at Mbawrong belonged to Njirong Village. However, in an unusual move, the commission granted the villagers of Ntumbaw permission to continue to grow rice and work on the farms on the condition that they acknowledged that the Chief of Njirong is the landlord and also refrain from working on their farms on the sacred day of Njirong. Sacred days in Wimbum villages are also called “native Sunday”, because that day is a holy day according to traditional religion. The people of Ntumbaw continued to work on the farms, but rejected the ruling of the commission. Tensions continued to mount between the two villages, and at some point, Njirong villagers reported that Ntumbaw was mounting an economic boycott of Njirong, since Njirong’s access to the rest of the Sub Division passes through Ntumbaw. It was also alleged that Ntumbaw wanted to sell portions of the land they had annexed. But tensions burst into open violence when Mr. Shey Evaristus Nganjo of Njirong was ambushed on June 12, 2013 by some members of the Ntumbaw community and attacked with a machete, leaving him fatally wounded. He died on his way to the hospital. Other members of the Njirong community were wounded in the same attack, including a physically challenged man, Mr. Etienne Ntami, whose fingers were cut off. The senior divisional officer imposed a curfew in response to this violence, and deployed members of the armed forces and police to keep the peace. Several people were arrested and some were charged in court for the crimes. Following the conflict, the senior divisional officer ruled again that all people from Ntumbaw working at Mbawrong were no longer permitted to do so as a group, but that individuals who wanted to cultivate rice must first apply for the Chief of Njirong’s permission.

This crisis reflects some of the key questions animating the Contending Modernities Authority, Community, and Identity working groups. First, it is a conflict of authority in a postcolonial state and therefore evokes all the transformations that African countries have gone through in the imperial and post imperial age. Second, there are three sources of authority in tension here. There is the traditional Wimbum authority, namely the chiefs who are custodians of the land on behalf of the ancestors. In 2001, the chiefs of both villages poured libation (the ritual of calling on the ancestors by pouring wine on the land and invoking the name of the ancestors to respond). Both sides claim that their ancestors agreed with their position on the matter because they accepted their offerings in the form of libation. The second area of authority is religious authority. Islamic and Catholic leaders have generally been sympathetic to the village of Ntumbaw since most of them are members of Ntumbaw. Both religious communities and their leaders as well as the Baptist churches at Ntumbaw and Njirong have been involved in discussions and continue to seek ways of achieving reconciliation. It is not clear to us if their attempts at peace and reconciliation have been coordinated with traditional authorities.

Finally, the third and most consequential level of authority is the leadership of the state of Cameroon represented by local administrators such as the senior divisional officer, the divisional officer, and the forces of law and order whom they have deployed several times to halt violence in this land dispute. There are several things here which we will unpack in the future. The land law of Cameroon authorizes the divisional officer to mediate land disputes and he can call a land consultative commission to hear submissions from disputed parties and that commission then rules on who owns the land. The senior divisional officer used the provisions of that law to call a commission in 2004, and based on submissions from the two villages and their neighbors that commission determined that the disputed land at Mbawrong belongs to Njirong. The committee based their judgment on the history of the region, ancestral claims, and testimonies of neighbors and oral historical accounts. The commission also took into consideration that Njirong village carried out the rituals that protect the land in both villages. As such, this decision and the Cameroonian land law take religious ritual into account in addition to secular activities and documents. As articulated in the work of Charles Taylor, this ruling operationalizes a broad view of secularity which does not limit religion.

The village of Ntumbaw continues to contest the decision of the land commission of 2004, arguing that Njirong is not listed in many official government documents, such as minutes of meetings attended by other Wimbum Chiefs. We have brought up this point with members from Njirong village and they have argued that in the past, Ntumbaw villagers did not want to recognize them as an independent village. However, Njirong villagers took their case to the west Cameroon government and their chief was recognized and that recognition also meant that they kept the land on which they have lived for generations. As both villages look to the future, the question will not end with who owns Papa’s land, but: is the land big enough for all who need to grow food? If that is the case, and both sides agree, what are the conditions for reconciliation?

Array
Elias Bongmba
Elias Kifon Bongmba is Harry and Hazel Chair in Christian Theology and Professor of Religion at Rice University. Bongmba is the principal researcher in the "Land and Authority in Postcolonial Africa" Contending Modernities project.
Global Currents article

Diplomacy as Hypocrisy: The Biya System in Rome and at the Vatican


Photo Credit: rbairdpccam. “Catholic Mission Shisong”

In this post, first published on the CIHA blog in English and on Cameroon-Info.Net in French, CM researcher Ludovic Lado considers the role of religion as a vehicle to speak truth to power, on the one hand, and religions as institutions existing within the state system, on the other. In the case of the Catholic Church, which has a long tradition of diplomatic relations with political leaders, the effort to maintain positive relationships with heads of state can generate actions incongruous with, or in opposition to, the prophetic role of Catholicism on the ground.

 

Writing this text is for me a Lenten practice, an act of penitence for my people’s cause. I write in a hotel room in Rome, where I traveled in response to an invitation to an international scientific conference. But I was distracted by a curious coincidence: the state visit of Cameroon’s President Paul Biya on the same dates. Such a visit is technically called diplomacy. I learned that, in the course of this visit, President Biya received the gold medal of the Italian University Rectors’ Conference, during a ceremony in which Biya was lauded for his “great achievements” in promoting culture and higher education in Cameroon. But in fact, what is the state of higher education in Cameroon? And why has Italy become the premier western destination for Cameroonian students? It is precisely because our universities are not doing well. In distinguishing between the person and the office of the president of Cameroon, I wondered whether the Italian university officials spoke of the real Cameroon or simply read a speech prepared for them. Addressing Italian investors, one heard President Biya joke about his more than 30 years in power. Better to laugh than cry! Let us not forget that political power is a question of life and death for our peoples. And western economic interests make a mockery of democracy and human rights in Africa. It is too bad that some continue to count on western leaders to help them find the path to liberty.

How should we explain that this is a troubled time in the history of Cameroon, in which the Biya system is shamefully repressing the Anglophone resistance to Francophone assimilation, erasing all forms of dissent while Italian officials, hungry for investments, choose to treat President Biya as a hero of culture and higher education? Who is mocking whom in the end? Of course it is the poor Cameroonians who are daily victims of the political economy of violence that supports the world economy. This diplomacy, punctuated by compromises and silences of complicity and guilt are nourished by blood, like the genocide in the eastern DRC or the human dignity sacrificed on the altar of the economic interests of multinational companies in neighboring countries. Such hypocritical diplomacy makes the global political and economic order a veritable structure of sin according to the social teachings of the Church. Have the Italian officials forgotten the Lampedusa drama? And if they have not forgotten it, do they ignore the fact that it is the mediocre regimes like that of Mr. Biya that push their young people to emigrate in dangerous conditions across deserts and seas? Under these circumstances, a diplomacy of complacency is a diplomacy of complicity.

When I learned that President Biya would be received by the Pope, the head of the Catholic Church, I couldn’t help but think of the dialogue between Jesus and Pontius Pilate during the Passion. Jesus told Pilate, “I came into the world to attest to the truth. Whoever is of the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked, “What is the truth?” (John 18: 37-38). I ask myself whether the dialogue between the Pope and President Biya will center on the truth, that which would liberate Mr. Biya and his people (John 8: 32). I wonder whether the Vatican diplomacy with its network of apostolic delegates serves this truth, to which the Church must witness, the body of Christ, during good times and bad. What do the nuncios say to the Pope about our heads of state, who smile at the Vatican while trampling on human rights, public freedoms, and human dignity in their own countries? It depends on these apostolic delegates, the ambassadors of the Vatican in our countries. Unfortunately, these nuncios have the unlucky job of maintaining good diplomatic relations with the State, which is good for the mission of the Church; paradoxically, though, this sometimes comes at the price of its prophetic role. That is also called diplomacy and I often wonder what it has to do with the Gospel, serving justice, and the truth of these times. I hear that it is up to the local churches and not the apostolic delegate who is usually a foreigner, to assume such a prophetic role vis-à-vis the political insanity that is costing thousands of lives in our countries. But bishops and priests are themselves afraid of Pontius Pilate’s reprisals. So the Church is ensconced, in the name of diplomacy, in a system based on hypocrisy, one that masks the truth and feeds on human lives. I dream of the day when my Church will distance itself from this diplomacy of complacency that harms the poor.” May the time come when every head of State who goes to meet the Pope and every bishop or priest fears hearing the prophetic message of John the Baptist to Herod, “You do not have the right to take the wife of your brother” (Matthew 14: 4). We know that John the Baptist ended up in prison where he was beheaded. The Church does not have the right to silence the truth through fear of persecution.

By way of conclusion, I dare to believe, but without giving into illusions, that the reader of goodwill will understand that the crux of my dissent is not Mr. Biya as a person, but rather the unhealthy political system that he represents, and that has caused suffering to so many of my compatriots for decades. It is this well-oiled system that every Christian has the obligation to subvert until the point of delivery to the scribes of Pontius Pilate, to suffer and die like the Savior. Isn’t it better to die from love for the truth rather than from malaria? I do not fear because Easter is near! Thus begins my own writing of a return to my village of origin.

 

Translated from French to English by Cecelia Lynch.

Array
Ludovic Lado
Ludovic Lado, S.J., is the director of Centre d’Etude et de Formation pour le Développement (CEFOD) in N’Djamena, Chad. His publications include Catholic Pentecostalism and the Paradoxes of Africanization (Brill, 2009); Le Pluralisme Religieux en Afrique (PUCAC, 2015); and Towards an Anthropology of Catholicism in Africa (forthcoming).
Field Notes article

Madrasa Graduates: Children of Abraham and Aristotle


Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons. “School of Athens” by Rafael at the Vatican. The fresco features Averroes, or Ibn Rushd, the Andalusian Muslim polymath.

Have you ever wondered how your everyday Muslim connects with the Islamic tradition today? The connection takes place as it always has: at the feet of scholars. More precisely, it happens in air-conditioned auditoriums at knowledge retreats in universities and hotels around the world. These gatherings typically consist of teachings in Islamic jurisprudence, ethics, and theology, offering theories of the soul, temperaments and humors, and virtue ethics that originate in ancient Hellenistic philosophy.

However, these teachings are credited to scholars like Raghib al-Isfahani and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali instead of Aristotle or Plato. This is because by the eleventh century of the Common Era, ancient learning had been completely assimilated into Islamic thought. So deep and thorough was the influence of Greek, Indian, and Persian communities on Islamic intellectual and political life that the different strands became virtually indistinguishable.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons. “Ottoman astronomers at work around Taqī al-Dīn at the Istanbul Observatory.”

The fusion of “foreign” learning with Arabic revelation in the formation of classical Islamic thought cannot be overstated. It is vital to recognize the debt to foreign influences for two reasons: 1) it precludes naïve and even irresponsible appeals to adhere to some kind of “pure” Islam that existed in the past, and 2) it encourages openness in religious thought that is necessary for religion’s continued relevance through changing times. If the essence of “tradition” is to be found not in its content but in its dynamism, then fealty to tradition can be redefined, shifting it from an emphasis on “transmission” to an emphasis on “openness” to new ideas.

The Templeton-funded project to “advance theological and scientific literacy in madrasa discourses” is designed to bring about this very shift. Tradition, we argue, is not the mere repetition of the creativity of past scholars. Tradition is active participation in ongoing creative syntheses, keeping in mind shifts in human understanding. The project is guided by an “elicitive” pedagogical method that draws on resources that are already present in Islamic thought. The purpose of an elicitive approach is to preserve authenticity and legitimacy: the encounter with new knowledge comes as an extension of, rather than rupture with, the inherited Islamic scholarly tradition.

Throughout the course of human history, philosophers, scientists, and mystics have offered competing cosmologies to describe the universe we inhabit and experience. Before the mesmerizing advance of science and technology that we see today, competing views of the structure and composition of the universe could not only be internally coherent but also equally good at explaining things around us. Today, premodern cosmologies must contend with the reality of modern science if they are to remain relevant. This does not mean that everyone must become a materialist or succumb to scientism; however, it does mean that the knowledge systems and philsophical presuppositions that propel and sustain science must be intelligently grappled with.

Take the following as an example of unintelligent grappling. In one of my undergraduate courses, we read Rachel Carson’s argument against the use of pesticides. Reading from one of her environmental essays in Silent Spring, an eager student quickly bought her argument hook, line, and sinker. He proceeded to extend Carson’s compelling argument in our classroom discussion without realizing that it relies on the scientific theory of biological evolution. When I asked the student what he thought of that, he was taken aback because, as a traditional Muslim, he had not yet come to terms with evolution.

This kind of an incoherent intellectual framework is neither compelling nor sustainable. It will not only continue to alienate future generations of thinking Muslims from their tradition, it will also keep Muslim thought ossified and irrelevant in the modern world. One of my Quran teachers used to love to repeat this story: “Once I asked a colleague of mine—who was a medical doctor—what he thought about evolution. He replied without batting an eye: ‘Why, it’s disbelief!’ When I told him I was not seeking a fatwa but rather a scientific perspective, he changed his tune: ‘Well, the evidence is very compelling!’” (I can still hear the story in an endearing lilting South Asian English accent!)

If Islam is to thrive as a religious and intellectual tradition that cultivates healthy individuals and communities in the age of modern techno-science, it is imperative for traditional Muslim theology to come to terms with the ontological worldview, epistemological assumptions, and sociological implications of modern science. This does not mean that Muslim theology should surrender unconditionally to science’s terms. It does mean, however, that Muslim thought needs to understand and contend with these terms with integrity and sophistication, not with off-hand dismissal or asystematic appropriation. I suspect that real intellectual engagement will lead to new syntheses in a creative process of knowledge assimilation and appropriation which was a hallmark of the classical Islamic scholarly tradition.

An exemplar for the “madrasa discourses” project is none other than the celebrated Ghazali, mentioned above. In his reflections on his own intellectual journey as recorded in his autobiographical Deliverance from Error, Ghazali lambasts the religious fool who refutes his intellectual opponent with strawman arguments or with naïve understandings of his own tradition. Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, draws inspiration from Ghazali in his work on Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination: “Frustrated by the violation of common sense demonstrated by some implacable theologians, Ghazali reminds us of the wise dictum that ‘a rational foe is better than an ignorant friend.’ With bruising sarcasm, he said elsewhere: ‘To shun an ignoramous is to make an offering to God!’” (p. 181). An essential prerequisite to critique, says Ghazali, is to first not only understand but also to articulate the opposing point of view sympathetically. Ghazali, who has been widely recognized as an intellectual “renewer” of tradition, serves as a model for us in this respect.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons. “Illustration by Al-Biruni (973-1048) of different phases of the moon, from Kitab al-Tafhim (in Persian).”

The notion that tradition needs constant updating or renewal is embedded within Islamic teachings, and it fits right in with our elicitive pedagogical approach. Renewal takes place when two sources of knowledge—of the world and of scripture—collide. There is only one requisite for the success of an endeavor that brings different intellectual systems into conversation: the use of common terms that are intelligible to both. As in the case of translation from one language to another, seamless communication is only possible when another language is mastered. In our case, the language that madrasa graduates must begin to learn is the language of modern science and contemporary academic frames for the study of nature, society, and history.

Our hope is that the intimate intellectual encounter that we facilitate will lead to greater respect, understanding, and even trust, across cultures and civilizations. Trust lays the foundation for mutual enrichment, reconciliation, and enduring peace. Given that the intellectual heritage of Catholicism shares so much in common with the Islamic past, as children of both Abraham and Aristotle, it is no coincidence that a project of this kind is located at the University of Notre Dame, one of the world’s premier Catholic institutions of higher learning.

Array
Mahan Mirza
Mahan Mirza was appointed teaching professor and executive director for the Keough School's Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion on July 1, 2019.

An Islamic studies scholar and expert on religious literacy, Mirza brings extensive pedagogical and administrative experience to his roles at Notre Dame, including serving as dean of faculty at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college. Prior to his appointment as Executive Director of the Ansari Institute, Mirza served as the lead faculty member for Notre Dame's  Madrasa Discourses project, which equips Islamic religious leaders in India and Pakistan with the tools to confidently engage with pluralism, modern science, and new philosophies. 

Mirza holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. from Hartford Seminary, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University. He has taught courses and lectured on Arabic-Islamic studies, western religions, and the history of science, along with foundational subjects in the liberal arts, including logic, rhetoric, astronomy, ethics, and politics. He has edited two special issues of 
The Muslim World and served as assistant editor for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (2018).

He is a fellow with the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the Keough School and continues to serve as an advisor for Madrasa Discourses.
 
Field Notes article

Inter-Religious Literacy Among Young People in Indonesia: Contrasting Frameworks

and
Photo Credit: Nicholas Adams. Local researchers from Kampoeng Percik: Ambar Istiyani and Agung Waskitoadi.

Europeans like us, the lead researchers, tend to see religious questions through a European lens: our inter-religious (or inter-denominational) histories are shaped by the Reformation, the development of modern nation states during the Thirty Years War, the legal frameworks that regulated the opportunities of minority traditions, the privileging of the individual in Enlightenment thought, and the complex negotiations between religious and secular institutions in the twentieth century. Religious identity is often a deep and fundamental concern for members of European religious traditions and religious people arguably tend to see their religious identity as what is distinctive about them. This presents some challenges for research into Indonesian contexts: it is vital that European presuppositions about what ‘religion’ is, or about what religious difference is, do not distort local narratives. Our project mitigates this risk through its partnership between researchers from European universities (Birmingham and Berlin) and fieldworkers from local Indonesian research centres (Percik and Interfidei), centres whose leaders are familiar with Western religious studies but are not confined by its limited imagination.

An example may help to illustrate what is at stake. It is quite common to hear Indonesian intellectuals suggest that in Indonesia religious affiliation is as much an administrative matter as one of deep personal conviction or identity. This sounds odd to Western ears (or at least to the ears of the two Western researchers working on this project), given the ways in which religion is in our contexts a marker of identity.

However, it is worth noting some recent discussions which suggest that in Western contexts too ‘religion’ is a significantly administrative matter. There is a growing literature on the local construction of religion through law and state mechanisms (for example Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s account of the ‘securitization of religion’ or  Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s discussion of how the ‘religion’ of the USA’s Constitution’s First Amendment plays out in contemporary foreign policy).

It is important to understand that in the wake of the anti-Communist purge of 1965 Indonesians were for the first time required to declare officially which religion they belonged to. This was a strategy intended to expose Communists, who tended to be anti-religious. Moreover, ordinary folk were not free to describe their religious affiliation. They were limited then to five: Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Catholic and Protestant (also sometimes named ‘Christian’). This presented severe challenges to Jews, for example (there were until recently synagogues in some cities–the last one in Java, Beith Shalom in Surabaya, was destroyed in 2013), and it also meant that those who practised local Javanese religious traditions had to find an alternative religious designation for themselves. Suharto’s imposition of a requirement that Indonesians identify their ‘religion’ created an administrative imperative and generated a concept which was then put to local use in various ways. (Since 2006 Confucianism was added as an available “religion” category and at least since 2010 it is permissible, at least in principle, for this field to be left blank–although it seems few dare to do this.)

Photo Credit: Eckhard Zemmrich. Javan Gamelan.

Javanese traditions are nonetheless still alive in villages in Salatiga. In October of 2016 we visited a church in Nalen where a new balcony was being constructed at the West end. This was a major—and expensive—undertaking, and it was not immediately obvious to us what its purpose might be. The balcony, it turned out, will in fact house the church’s gamelan, thus expressing musically a deeply rooted Javanese religious heritage in a Christian setting.

The case study explores the ways in which such categories as ‘community’ and ‘identity’ are locally constructed; we have not found that there is ‘modernity’ (a general category manifesting itself in various local contexts) but rather local histories whose memory (perhaps explicit but very likely implicitly) shapes contemporary self-understandings. These are not readily generalizable. Our project is primarily led by young local actors’ own characterisations of their religious practices and especially their willingness to move between one tradition and another (for example by ceasing to be Buddhist and becoming Muslim).

One can test Western theoretical constructions of religion to assess their adequacy in an Indonesian context (as Robert Hefner has done in Civil Islam); our approach is to suspend judgment on what a general category of ‘religion’ might be (this has been another notorious question in literature in this field) and to pay attention to how local actors seem to use and conceive it. It is not so much the construction of the category ‘religion’ that is at issue, so much as the various uses to which traditions (which Europeans might name ‘religious’) are put in local contexts. For example, the continuation of traditional Javanese religious practices like the ‘Slametan’ are embedded within Muslim everyday life. The Slametan is a communal meal, deeply rooted in Javanese traditions, which might be local and small-scale or large regional affairs: they typically mark births, deaths, or significant dates in the religious calendar. The food is a blessing: to eat is to receive favor. There is arguably a significant difference between the sharply contrasting ‘religions’ of state bureaucracy (where local actors must name their tradition and thereby exclude the others) and the significantly more blurred edges between traditions in actual communities.

These considerations lie in the background of our research into young people’s attitudes to other religious traditions and we are interested to discover how things look after our fieldwork is completed this year. The main body of research will be composed of interviews with youth who participate in inter-religious initiatives, especially ‘before and after’ conversations, with follow-up interviews one year and two years after participation to discover whether students’ interests, concerns, and relationships are sustained beyond the immediate period of the initiatives themselves. Since it is notoriously difficult to demonstrate cause and effect in situations of this kind, we mitigate the danger of attributing all shifts in perspective to the inter-religious initiatives considered here by taking into account other activities that might have shaped their religious views.

It is certainly a puzzle to figure out how young people view flare-ups of ‘religious violence’ if religious identity can be viewed, at least in some regions, (in the words of one Indonesian colleague) as ‘largely an administrative matter.’ It is also a puzzle to account for religious practices as simultaneously deep-rooted (as in the case of Javanese customs) and yet readily exchangeable (as in the cases of changing religious tradition). That is a central focus of our research.

 

Featured Photo Credit: Tom Soldan. Gamelan Crok. Flickr.com

Array
Eckhard Zemmrich
Dr. Eckhard Zemmrich is a Research Fellow of Religious Sciences and Intercultural Theology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Prior to that, he served as a Theological Advisor for the Evangelische Landeskirche Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische Oberlausitz, as a parish pastor in Germany, and as scientific Co-Worker for the Council of Churches in Indonesia, in Jakarta.
Nicholas Adams
Nicholas Adams is Professor of Philosophical Theology at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham. His principal areas of research are the impact of German Idealism on Christian theology together with the investigation of philosophical problems in inter-religious engagement.
Field Notes article

Introducing Who Are My People? An Interview with Emmanuel Katongole

and
Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

KL: Thanks Emmanuel for sharing with me a bit about your new Contending Modernities project. Just to get us started, tell me, what is this project about and how does it connect to the major themes of Contending Modernities?

EK: “Who Are My People? Christianity, Violence, and Belonging in Sub-Saharan Africa” investigates three types of violence: ethnic violence, religious violence, and ecological violence in Sub-Saharan Africa. The driving assumption is that a crisis of belonging lies at the heart of modern Africa. It is this crisis that manifests itself in violence, which takes these three different forms. How does it connect to the major themes of Contending Modernities? The issues of authority, community, and identity (ACI) are connected to the issue of belonging: who am I? Which is connected to where I locate myself in terms of history, but also in terms community. Especially from an African point of view, belonging is always mediated through a sense of community. So, what happens if one’s identity is inscribed into that crisis of belonging?

By crisis I mean that the way that Africa is brought into modernity and the contact Africa has with modernity generates a sense of being received into modernity while simultaneously being rejected by modernity. By this I mean that Africa’s contact with modernity was framed around perceptions of Africa as savage, backward, primitive; a dark continent. The story that received Africa into modern history is of “nothing good out of Africa.” . And so, whatever is within the African heritage, including traditional forms of belonging, is rejected as part of primitive and savage heritage that has to be left behind if Africa is to become modern, civilized. But even as this “savage” heritage is rejected, it gets to be incorporated within the modernity that is supposed to save Africa. A case in point, if nation-state citizenship represented the modern form of belonging, Africans could only be received within the nation-state as members of a “tribe” (the very notion of belonging that was rejected as “backward”). Thus, one can speak about the “invention” of tribe, as a perpetual feature of nation-statehood in Africa.

As a result, in terms of nation-statehood, there is a sense of both rejection and incorporation, a sense of belonging and not belonging. The irony is that the very forms of traditional belonging that are normatively rejected are at the same time incorporated within the founding story of modern statehood. The widespread phenomenon of “tribal” or “ethnic” violence in Africa cannot be fully understood without this story, and how “tribal” and “ethnic” identity gets to be reproduced and exploited within the power struggles of modern African politics.

What perhaps may not be easily understood is the way the crisis of belonging is reproduced especially through the institutions of modern education and politics. In terms of education, anybody who has ever gone to school within Africa learns the story of “nothing good out of Africa” and so learns to look at the past as primitive, as negative, and as backward. In learning to reject this heritage, they learn to reject themselves and to perceive at themselves as not good, not wanted. Meanwhile, they are standing in the space of modernity trying very desperately to become civilized. But, they can only do so as “African” who inherit a particular tradition, who are for example, a member of a “clan” or “tribe” the very notions that are read as “primitive”. And in relation to politics, as I said, in writing the constitutions of modern Africa, “tribal” identity was foregrounded: the African could only be received within the modern nation-state as a member of a tribe. You see? These orphaned notions are repudiated yet incorporated into the foundational structure of modern Africa. But, if that is connected with this sense of not belonging, not being wanted, and then they incorporate this within the space of modernity; you can already sense the crisis. Critically, this is where I’m going to be doing a lot of research, giving an account of the unique modernity of Africa and how it’s connected to that crisis of belonging in Africa that easily triggers violence in these many forms: ethnic, religious and ecological violence.

KL: I’m interested in your work on belonging. It seems like there is both a critical and constructive edge to that work. Critically, you want to expose the tribalisms that live within modernity that are often concealed: a kind of belonging that requires a rejection of other forms of belonging. But, there is also a constructive account that you’re developing here. Is it a retrieval? An improvisation? What’s the constructive account of belonging you are wanting to develop?

EK: First of all, before I come back to the constructive, the critical work manifests in two ways. First, it is to display that unique modernity of Africa. Second, it is to show that the tensions inherent in this particular form of modernity cause outbreaks of violence. What is unique for me is that for the first time in my research I want to connect ecological violence with the other forms of violence, religious and ethnic violence, and argue that they’re all connected with the same ambiguity of living within this modern space. That’s the critical work.

The constructive work that I’m trying to do is, first of all, to investigate the Christian difference: what difference does Christianity make? Often times religion is implicated in the violence. But I’m going to explore the Christian difference by tracing it through the lives and work of particular individuals and communities that I’ve been investigating. Whether it is Bernard Kinvi in the Central African Republic or Godfrey Nzamujo in Benin who are able to resist that violence, but also, surprisingly, who improvise and invent new forms of belonging within that confluence of violence that is neither traditional nor modern. It’s kind of a bricolage. It’s an improvisation. They are, in a way, grounded in the African reality, but in a way that they reject also the binaries, the either or. So, they draw positive insight from African tradition and positive insight from modernity, and they are able to weave and create new forms of community, nonviolent forms of community. So those are the kind of people I want to explore, and study what is at work in their lives.

Katongole pictured with his mother in Uganda.

KL: I know across your work you’ve engaged questions of African political theology that relate to your biography. But this work in particular, though an academic work, is deeply personal. As your title suggests, you’re asking a question about your communal identity which is in some ways a question of who am I? And how do I fit within this construction of African modernity? I wonder how this project is emerging from your own history and identity? And how does it integrate also your diaspora status here at Notre Dame?

EK: That is the motivating, and I think in the final analysis will also be the framing, story of the book. My own identity: who are my people? I go back to the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the violence of it, that is when these questions emerged for me. I know that I’m a Ugandan, but my parents migrated from Rwanda: one is Hutu, the other is Tutsi. So, I looked at the bodies in the aftermath of the violence and said, “Oh my goodness. Which side am I on?” I’m unable to tell.

But that has been compounded over the years as I have traveled and stayed in Europe for six years and America now for fifteen or so years. So, am I African? Am I American? Am I Ugandan? Am I Rwandan? Am I Hutu? Am I Tutsi?

I think that what has been revealed in all of that is a sense of coming together of the different facets of my identities – and what I have learnt over the years in terms of the possibilities and challenges of inhabiting more than one identity, of belonging to more than one community. I’m going to use the notion of the Ephesian moment—the coming together of the fragments that Paul talks about in the letter to the Ephesians when Jews and gentiles shared for the first time the meal table thus giving rise to a new fellowship—as the theological framing lens. I will draw upon what I have learnt from my own journey throughout the years about these Ephesian moments from a theological point of view. That’s why my own biography is at stake here.

The different people that I will be investigating within the context of narrating religious, ethnic and ecological violence display some of the bringing together of fragments that used to be far apart. “The dividing wall has been broken,” as Paul writes in Ephesians. A New community has emerged through the act of Jews and gentiles “eating together.” I read that as the quintessential ecclesiological moment, that coming together. So what these people are doing is performing dimensions of church, as God’s new people; the church not so much as an institution but as an event, an Ephesian moment.

But, it’s really framed through my own story. Or, maybe the driving motivation is connected to my own story, my own sense of diasporic presence, of not able to tell clearly who my people are, because even people I originally thought were “strangers” have come to be part of “my people.” I’m really excited about that as well.

KL: Thank you, Emmanuel, for telling me a bit about this project. I share your excitement and look forward to hearing more as your research proceeds.

Array
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).  
Kyle Lambelet
Kyle Lambelet, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University's Candler School of Theology and a Research Associate with Contending Modernities. His research focuses on the intersections of religion, ethics, conflict, and peace with particular attention to the ethics of nonviolence.