A girl stands on the edge of a cemetery for children at a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. Photo: Andy Hall/Oxfam.
One of political theorist William Connolly’s challenges to the regulation of public speech by supporters of liberal secularism has been to expose the “visceral register” of political engagement. Rejecting the sequester of the emotional and embodied in the “private sphere,” he investigates how metaphysical commitments appear in our public life often through micro-politics of self-artistry. In other words, though some regulators of our public life seek to limit the conversation, metaphysical commitments often emerge anyway. Furthermore, these commitments often appear in the visceral register, through emotion, ritual, and art.
In his new book Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa, Emmanuel Katongole explores a constellation of manifestations of politics in a visceral register by analyzing the theology and politics of lament in East Africa. Tacking between theological and empirical analysis, Katongole gives an account of the hope that is within him, a hope that is rooted in the embodied and emotionally laden practices of lamentation.
Katongole’s book begins with the contradictions presented by the African encounter with modernity. The originary violence of colonialism produces a pendulum swing between pessimism and optimism. Katongole’s argument is, in part, that a theological account of the relationship between hope and lament can allow the transcendence of this contradictory dialectic. “In the midst of suffering,” Katongole argues, “hope takes the form of arguing and wrestling with God” (xvi). Lament as wrestling with God is not a private, or merely spiritual, matter. Rather, echoing here Connolly’s insight, Katongole argues that the visceral practices of lament are inescapably political.
Katongole’s book proceeds through a method of portraiture, juxtaposing biblical narratives with representations of concrete embodiments of lament in East Africa. This method produces a many sided prism, through which the central argument that lament and hope are irreducibly connected shines through. Katongole takes us episodically through multiple dimensions of lament—cultural, theological, political and more—and with each new episode we learn more about the texture of lamentation and why it is such a necessary practice.
In the following symposium, four commentators offer an insightful collection of observations, affirmations and critiques of Katongole’s work. Contending Modernities collaborator and Professor of Political Science at University of California Irvine Cecelia Lynch writes in her essay appreciatively regarding Katongole’s thick theological exposition. For her, this inescapably metaphysically laden account of politics is what the discourse of political science needs to make sense of the complex dynamics of political and social change in East Africa. She questions, however, whether Katongole has given adequate attention to the complex mix of religious dynamics present in the contexts out of which he writes. While she does not call him to cast off his unapologetic Christian theology, she asks Katongole to consider how Christians as Christians might make sense of the lament of those who don’t share their Christian faith. Whereas Lynch invites Katongole to consider the religious (and nonreligious) diversity of his context, Tinyiko Maluleke, Professor of Theology at the University of Pretoria, critiques Katongole for his lack of engagement with the rich, internally plural theological discourse occurring across Africa. Though Maluleke appreciates Katongole’s scriptural and empirical engagements, he worries that his claims about Africa writ large are too grandiose and in their “descriptive haste” miss important developments that may, ultimately, strengthen Katongole’s argument. Also in the vein of history, Paul Ocobock, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, wonders how the laments featured in Katongole’s work draw upon historical precedents. Ocobock celebrates Katongole’s departure from history, however, insofar as he disrupts the long and lachrymose characterization by the west of Africa as the “Dark Continent.” Finally, Professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University William Cavanaugh pushes an affirmation made by both Ocobock and Lynch further to ask what the West stands to learn from Africa. Cavanaugh turns the gaze back on Western modernity and invites Katongole to critique the shallow optimism that animates late modern politics.
Each of these commentators raise significant questions for Katongole, questions which indicate, ultimately, the strength of his work for shifting the paradigm of our understanding the complex, context-specific ways in which modernity has collided with East Africa.
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.
Photo Credit: Mark Fischer. “Cathédrale Notre Dame de Victoire de Yaoundé.”
How do religious women in Cameroon navigate their faith vis-à-vis their communities and religious hierarchies? Our Contending Modernities project is in its initial phase, so in this blog post we detail our framework and initial thoughts, focusing on the structure of Catholic women’s engagement in Cameroon. (Our larger project examines three different constellations of women’s groups—Muslim, Catholic and African “traditional”—in Yaoundé, Bamenda and near Ngaoundéré, three distinct parts of the country.)[1] We want to know whether and how these women of faith consolidate community and reinforce and/or challenge authority. We are particularly interested in settings in which Cameroonian women employ tools of their faith to assert rights, grow spiritually, and address economic and political issues they face, vis-à-vis religious and governmental structures of authority. We conceptualize authority as encompassing religious as well as political and economic forms of legitimacy and decision-making. We think of community as consisting of intersecting gender, faith, geographic and ethnic boundaries and identities. The women’s groups in each site are also connected to different degrees to broader faith-based and NGO networks and transnational advocacy and humanitarian groups. They thus provide important sites for investigating the multiple forms of authority and community in Cameroon, a country often described as a microcosm of the continent, bringing women’s agency to the fore in ways that are shaped by but not pre-determined by transnational pressures and trends.
As background, we detail initial observations regarding the dynamics at the heart of Catholic religious communities in many parts of Cameroon. The collaboration between engaged laypersons and religious authorities has many implications for the social and professional lives of the faithful. It is important to recognize that many active Cameroonian Catholics, including women, are motivated by the desire to live their spirituality and offer their services to Church institutions. Such engagement, however, can, at the same time, produce competition as well as self-promotion in order to obtain a potentially privileged position vis-à-vis the clergy.
Catholic women (and men) may belong to religious institutions that are also social and many times remunerative. These organizations parallel public institutions as well as secular (non-religious) private ones. Members of the clergy may also use their influence to promote particular lay women and men in positions within these organizations, including within public and private non-religious institutions. While Cameroon does not have an official religion, Catholics do make up almost 40% of the population, while Christians overall make up 65%.
Socio-professional promotion, then, becomes in part institutionalized through religious engagement. Such processes occur particularly in charismatic groups, and represent, in effect, an important way in which modernity is created for Catholic women. Many factors contribute to the fact that these religious associations become the promoters of personal and socio-professional development. Women, for example, learn the games of competition, the modes of efficient management, and the methods of diverse organizational performances; these organizations also encourage aspirations to better living conditions. At the same time, they provide psychosocial and frequently economic solidarity as well. Finally, acquiring these leadership and organizational skills provides a space for the ongoing construction of women’s identity, both religious and socio-professional.
The Catholic Women’s Association
The Catholic Women’s Association (CWA) of Cameroon, based in Bamenda, links and organizes Catholic women in cities across the country. Our initial contacts have been with the organization in the capital, Yaoundé, where we met with a number of the women leaders in the capital city, and attended a benefit event for a local hospital with them. This event was organized by a coalition of many groups, including the Belgian Embassy, and took place at the Hilton hotel, the premier hotel in the city. Prior to this event, the primary investigator (PI) met with one of the leaders of the CWA in Bamenda, who immediately took her to the archdiocesan priest who acts as the spiritual advisor for the group. This was done to ensure that the priest was informed of and approved of the research project; the CWA leader also wanted the PI to understand how important the priest was to the women’s spiritual formation. At our meeting, the priest was not only supportive, but also very helpful in making additional contacts, in particular with the national CWA President in Bamenda. These events confirm that the CWA is an important means of spiritual as well as social identity formation, and also indicate that the CWA tends to work closely with religious authority, but also that its members tend to be connected with centers of influence that are not explicitly religious. Subsequent visits can help us address the degree of professional (and also economic and political) identity formation, as well as any independent channels of religious formation among the women.
One of the features of Cameroonian politics is the potent division between the anglophone and francophone sections of the country, which stems from the post-World War I era when Cameroon, which had been colonized by Germany in the 1880s, was divided between the British and the French. The francophone political class has been dominant in the country since independence, and Anglophone grievances built up and in 2016 erupted in strikes largely led by professionals (particularly lawyers and academics). The government responded by cutting off internet access to the Anglophone part of the country. Bamenda, the headquarters of the CWA, is in the anglophone part of the country, while Yaoundé, the capital, is largely francophone, although the majority of people in the capital have a knowledge of both languages (as well as one or more Cameroonian languages). As a result of the internet cutoff, the PI’s email requests to CWA headquarters have not been answered, and communication other than by telephone is difficult.
This situation means that subsequent research will also be critical in assessing whether the CWA attempts to transcend linguistic as well as other identity boundaries. We intend to develop further our understanding of what constitutes the channels of authority and influence for women in the CWA, vis-à-vis both the Catholic clergy and institutions outside the official purview of the Church (examples could include other professional associations, universities, embassies, government ministries, transnational NGOs). Finally, subsequent research can aid in identifying the importance of diasporic connections for the CWA. The CWA’s website discusses its diasporic links and activities, providing yet another way in which CWA members negotiate “modern” identity, socio-economic factors, and relationships of authority with other women as well as with clergy.
[1] “Traditional” African religions are significant in all three areas of the country, either separate from or in combination with adherence to Christianity and Islam, although they are more evident in some places than others.
Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is an expert on international relations, religion and ethics, humanitarianism, and civil society, and has researched and published extensively on topics related to peace, security, international organization, globalization, humanitarianism, and religion. She co-edits the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) Blog, at www.cihablog.com.
Fouda Ange Tatiana is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Yaounde II in Cameroon. Her research focuses on political behavior, mobilization and collective action, as well as questions of citizenship and political commitment. She is part of the ACI Cameroon project team as the field survey administrator.
Madrasa Discourses Pakistan Lead Faculty Amman Khan Nasir on a fieldtrip in Islamabad.
Under the steady beam of the PowerPoint, Pakistani students enrolled in the Notre Dame-based Madrasa Discourses program grappled with the theological implications of the age of the universe and theory of evolution—revealing their deep discomfort following a presentation that challenged a literal reading of the Quranic Genesis. This was a rare and civil encounter between religious scholars and scientists, hosted at an Islamabad hotel by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS). Such meetings are an anomaly in a country where religious and scientific experts occupy exclusive and often antagonistic social spaces. The event was the fifth day of the week-long “April Intensive” session of the “Advancing Theological and Scientific Literacy in Madrasa Discourses” project.
Pakistani Madrasa Discourses students meet with PIPS scholars at the Crowne Plaza Hotel
Dr. Abdul Hameed Nayyar, renowned Pakistani physicist and nuclear disarmament activist, patiently fielded questions from the openly skeptical students in the first semester of their three-year program. “What about competing theories?” some asked. “How can science be a source of truth if it is constantly shifting?” At the heart of these concerns are questions of epistemology echoed by the Indian students enrolled in the program who were meeting simultaneously a few hundred miles south across a militarized border. Borders, however, remain pervious to ideas, and both sites were connected throughout the week via an online virtual classroom.
Science and religion both operate through consensus. So say scholars who navigate contentions and even apparent contradictions inherent in conflicting theories and theological readings in the search for deeper truth. Yet consensus is nebulous concept. Who defines a consensus? The Ulama, religious scholars of a region? Or all experts of a particular age? Do we? The answer is significant, as the claim of a consensus carries weight and is even viewed as binding authority. And while religion, with its deep historical roots and foundational texts, may appear more infallible when faced with the continual transformations of science, can it too shift with the times and new forms of moral consensus? These are difficult and unresolved questions.
Hakim Syed Zillur Rahman speaks with Indian Madrasa Discourses students at the Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Sciences.
Religious scholars’ skepticism of science as a source of knowledge continues. At the PIPS meeting with scientists the binary approach to tradition (turāth) versus renewal in Islamic theology (tajdīd) surfaced once again. Yet, as the Director of the Sharia Academy in Gujranwala, Mawlana Zahid ur Rashidi, noted, science and religion are both components of an analytical approach. Science attempts to answer “what” questions; religion seeks to answer “why” questions. Apart or together, they both seek different aspects of the truth. In fact, in predicting the periodic renewal of religion, the Prophet Muhammad seems to have anticipated modernity by weaving the notion of continual change into the very fabric of religion, argued Professor A.K. Ramakrishnan of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who spoke to students about the Philosophy of History.
During the intensive sessions, students covered the history of philosophy though a reading of Sophie’s World, discussed the skepticism of Ghazali, the empirical approach of Ibn Khaldun, and engaged in critiques of the theological tradition by ardent scripturalists and rationalists alike. They did this by interacting with the faculty members of Madrasa Discourses: Mahan Mirza (Notre Dame), Waris Mazhari (New Delhi), Ammar Khan Nasir (Gujranwala), Idris Azad (Islamabad), Zahid Mughal (Islamabad), Mawlana Waheeduddin Khan (Delhi), Yasin Mazhar Siddiqui (Aligarh), Hakim Syed Zillur Rahman (Aligarh), and Altaf Ahmad Azmi (Delhi).
Indian students visit Maulana Wahiduddin Khan at the Centre for Peace and Spirituality located at Basti Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, New Delhi.
The eminent scholar and peace activist Mawlana Wahiduddin Khan advised students that their madrasa training is foundational and indispensable, but that their connection and relevance to the world will come from experiences “off campus.” These off-campus experiences are what Madrasa Discourses attempts to facilitate. At the meeting in Islamabad with scientists, madrasa graduates did not uncritically adopt the theory of evolution. Nor did the physicists defer to the standard story of human origins attributed to the Qur’an and held by followers of the Abrahamic traditions. Yet, hope lies in the readiness of the scientists to engage with religious scholars and the openness of madrasa students to learn more. In the exchange regarding the process of seeking and approximating truth, the seeds of an idea may have taken root. The destination of this open-eyed journey across different philosophical and epistemological traditions may not be clear or predictable, but composed rather of myriad intricacies, inspiring us to better understand the human condition in its full complexity.
Indian students discuss texts at the Don Bosco School in New Delhi.
Lead Faculty Waris Mazhari and Mahan Mirza at the resting place of Sufi mystic Nizamuddin Aliya.
Indian students on a field trip to the central mosque at Aligarh Muslim University.
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.
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.
Aceh, with its special autonomy and self government model, has a special right to apply shari’a law. The region has attracted frequent media coverage for various reasons: the armed political conflict, the 2004 earthquake and tsunami disaster, and shari’a law cases, among others. While it is known as the stronghold Muslim community in Indonesia, Aceh as a provincial territory is also home to religious and cultural minorities, such as the Chinese, locally known as “Tionghoa” or “orang Cina.” Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, is an interesting area to observe or learn about the Aceh Chinese community’s cultural and religious dynamics. This short article will discuss the case of the Chinese in Banda Aceh area, with some comparison to another Chinese community in Tamiang, a district located in the provincial border between Aceh and North Sumatra (a province that statistically has quite a significant number of non-Muslims). Through this narrative, the essay will address how political, religious, and economic sources of authority affect the social acceptance and rejection of the Chinese community.
Chinese Community in Banda Aceh.
Photo Credit: Adnan Ali. “Red Lanterns.”
Chinese migrants have a long history in several regions in Sumatra, including Aceh. They settled in several areas of Aceh, not only in the big city of Banda Aceh, but also in several sub-districts across Aceh. In terms of religion, most of those Chinese are either Buddhist or Christians. In Banda Aceh, they live predominantly around the area called Peunayong, now referred to as the city’s “Chinatown.” Most of them work as traders or business men/women selling groceries, food, and clothing. There are two notable Chinese temples along Peunayong’s main road. Apart from the Peunayong area and its surroundings, some Chinese in Banda Aceh also live in the Goheng area, across a small river near the Teuku Umar main road, and in the Setui business area nearby. One of the Chinese community leaders in Banda Aceh mentioned that historically the Goheng area was a community of Hokkian Chinese migrants. After the tsunami disaster, some of the Chinese community also moved to the Pantee Riek and Neuheun villages into new homes in the “perumahan Budha Tzu Chi” complexes funded by a “Tionghoa” organization for the people affected by the 2004 tsunami.
Authority and Community: Social Acceptance and Resistance
It has been years since shari’a law was formally instated in Aceh in 2002 and since the conflict between the Indonesian government and Aceh independent movement ended with the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding in 2005. Over the years of armed conflict and its aftermath, the construction of local identity as “Acehnese” (orang Aceh) and Muslim became more dominant. While the Chinese (Buddhist and Christians) and the local people (mostly Muslim) have coexisted relatively peacefully in Banda Aceh since Chinese settlers arrived in the nineteenth century, or even before, in the last 50 years politics and armed conflict have caused many to feel unsafe or flee.
When the armed conflict in Aceh escalated in the late 1970’s, boosted by the establishment in 1976 of the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (Aceh Independent Movement), some acts of terror caused members of non-local ethnicities like the Chinese and Javanese (though majority Muslim) to leave Aceh. However, many Chinese returned, especially after the signing of the 2005 peace agreement. Earlier in 1965, the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) resurgence had much the same effect, and many Chinese fled Aceh for security reasons.
Both religious and community leaders as well as state authorities have particular impact on the social acceptance or rejection of, as well as policies that affect, the ‘other’. For example, Chinese Buddhists and Christians practice their cultural and religious observance as minorities. Some of their cultural and religious events, like Chinese New Year (Imlek), are quite well known locally as “uroe raya Cina” (Chinese holiday). When the late Mawardi Nurdin was mayor of Banda Aceh, there was a big public Chinese festival held in the city in 2011. However, this event was discontinued after his death. The acceptance or rejection of a public recognition of this Chinese holiday, in this case, was dependent on the will of state authorities and political leaders. The impact of these leaders is also felt in other ambits, such as with names. The Chinese in Aceh, like other Chinese elsewhere in Indonesia, adopted an Indonesian name apart from their Chinese given and family name. These local names are mostly utilized for special and official purposes. Having an Indonesian name has not always been optional, however; the New Order government of Suharto enforced the taking of local names. The fourth Indonesian president, Abdurrahman Wahid, rescinded this order and additionally allowed the Chinese religion of Confucianism to be officially recognized by the government.
Religious and Social Identity
Most Chinese settlers were Buddhist upon arriving to Aceh. Quite a number of them converted to Christianity around the 1970s. The Chinese now make up a significant portion of the Christian population in Banda Aceh. Some of them are affiliated with the Methodist Church in Kampung Mulia. There are also two Chinese Buddhist temples nearby. The Methodist Church offers primary and secondary education, and most students are Chinese. Meanwhile, there is a Catholic Church near Peunayong, and Catholic Chinese are also part of its congregation.
Photo Credit: Nugraha Kusuma. “Chinese New Year.”
During Abdurrahman Wahid’s presidency, the Chinese cultural performance of Barongsai (a dragon dance dating from fourth century China) was recognized officially by the government, together with other aspects of Chinese culture, after having been banned for years, especially during the New Order regime. In 2011, the Barongsai was performed at a Peunayong festival and attracted the attention of many Acehnese people and visitors. This Barongsai was at once contested and later prohibited, especially through municipal government policy. More recently, from 2014 until the present, the Barongsai has been performed again. Recognizing the potential for polemic and resistance, the Chinese have tried to avoid further rejection by combining the Barongsai performance with the seudati, a local Acehnese dance. Now when the Barongsai is held, seudati dancers perform around the Barongsai dragon dancer.
Conversion to Islam: Muallaf and Muallaf Organizations
In addition to those who converted to Christianity, a few Chinese also converted to Islam. A village leader (keuchik) from the area near Peunayong noted that three Chinese people from his village had converted to Islam within the last decade. They converted for a number of reasons, include marriage. Mixed marriages between Chinese and locals occur mostly in the second or the third generation, with almost none in the first generation. There is no clear statistical data from formal sources about the number of Chinese who have converted to Islam. One Chinese leader interviewed estimates that around 200 Chinese have converted to Islam in Aceh. Newly converted Chinese are referred as “muallaf,” or more specifically “Cina muallaf.” On the Aceh border with North Sumatra, in areas like Tamiang, there are said to be many more converts to Islam, not only from Chinese community, but also from other ethnicities, such as the Batak (some of whom migrated from across the provincial border to Tamiang). Converts to another religion are often expelled from their extended family. This exclusion normally persists for years, sometimes for two generations. This research has recorded several personal stories of struggle from converts to Islam, and their situation can be quite difficult, socially. On the one hand, these converts were expelled from their family and ethnic groups, but on the other hand, they are not yet fully accepted by their converted religious community.
This situation has led to initiatives by Chinese converts in Banda Aceh like Mr. R, a business man affiliated with the Aceh Independent Movement. He helped found Formula (Forum Muallaf Aceh, or Forum for Aceh Converts) in 2010 and received support from the provincial government. However, the organization split due to internal conflict, and PMAS (Persatuan Muallaf Aceh Sejahtera, or Unity of Converts for a Prosperous Aceh) was founded, led by Ms. F. The branch of PMAS in Tamiang actively advocates for the betterment of muallaf, economically and socially. One of the interesting phenomena observed during interviews with [muallaf] Chinese was the way they affiliated themselves to local identity. For instance, a Chinese [muallaf] leader claimed that she is more native than another Chinese Indonesian: “I am more native than him, he is from Medan, and I am locally from Goheng Banda Aceh” (“…Saya ini lebih asoe lhok (penduduk asli) dari pada…, dia itu Cina Medan, saya keturunan Go Heng. Asli Banda Aceh, saya…”). She was, in essence, arguing that being more ‘local’ as someone who was born in Aceh supported and provided her with particular privilege and status. That is, the status of being closer to “native,” and as such less rejected because of commonalities with the Muslim Acehnese majority.
The process of social co-existence between majority and minority occurs is dynamic, not stable. Several other factors apart from religion or ethnicity also play a part in the process, such as politics, power and economics. Nevertheless, in the overall public space in Aceh with its special case of shari’a law, violent conflict has not re-emerged, nor have there been public conflicts or contestations. This is in line with the findings from the research and development unit of the Ministry of Religious Affairs in which Aceh is categorized as a “passively tolerant and low violence” community with regards to interreligious relations in Indonesia. In the case of Aceh, [contemporary] narratives fed the formation of “local” identity, when the notion of who is/was “local” (which is apparently based on racial/ethnic identity), and who is/was “other” became stronger, especially during and after the Aceh armed conflict (1976-2005). These insider/outsider contestations as usual influence the notion of whose culture is dominant and whose is lesser.
Syafi’eh, “Terang Lampion di Serambi Mekkah: Relasi-Muslim Tionghoa di Aceh Timur in Noviandi dan Muhammad Alkaf”, Pembentukan Kesalehan dan Artikulasi Islam di Aceh, Langsa: Zawiyah Serambi Ilmu Pengetahuan, 2015.
Photo Credit: World Bank Photo Collection. “Women at a community meeting discuss the reconstruction of their village” in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
There is no sharp division between secular and religious discourse in the minds and practices of women in Indonesia. Rather, both must be used proportionately towards better public policy for women and marginal groups in Indonesian society. Religion is not only a matter of language and ritual; it is a path towards the betterment of human life. Max Weber, in his research on religious movements, questioned the religious positions controlled by religious leaders who are not models to behave with dignity (Weber 1978: 471). The Indonesian Women’s Coalition echoes Weber’s arguments and cultivates the spiritual person’s personal righteousness within the principles of Pancasila[i] through the women’s leadership program. In the coalition’s efforts to promote equality and justice, religious and secular frames and sources of authority are selectively and strategically used.
The Indonesian Women’s Coalition has trained its members to be involved in public policy making from the village to the national-level. As a mass feminist organization and movement, the Indonesian Women’s Coalition practices the principles of equality and gender justice as a correlate to the constitutionally-mandated protection of diversity (www.koalisiperempuan.or.id).
While the majority of members are Muslim, the Indonesian Women’s Coalition has organized and educated women both using religious and secular teaching. It advocates religious teachings that favor gender equality and justice, and references secular international norms. Members learn about their political and social system in the spirit of equality and critical thinking, providing new lenses with which to interpret gender relations at the family and communal levels. As a result, members have contributed to the creation of women- and children-friendly city regulations, and better reproductive health care policies.
To foster women’s leadership, the Indonesian Women’s Coalition empowers women by training them to negotiate gender relations within families. At the village level, activities involving women at the grassroots encourage dialogue processes between women and men in a family. When referring to asymmetric experiences of equality, referencing certain religious tenets can bolster the role of women outside of familial spaces and encourage the expansion of women’s leadership to serve the community. Religious authorities in Indonesia’s mosques tends to promote teachings that establish the man as the head of the family, while exclusively women are dedicated to domestic work. However, the feminist education provided by the Indonesian Women’s Coalition puts forth a rereading of the Islamic teaching that changes family relations. God created women equal to men, and as such, both should be involved with domestic tasks.
Indonesian Women’s Coalition members are also members of the PKK (the Family Welfare Development Organization) a grassroots women’s organization formed since the Suharto New Order era. During the Suharto (or officially Soeharto in Indonesia) era, the PKK was seen as a state apparatus to employ women in public service roles, but without providing women leadership opportunities. The Indonesian Women’s Coalition, built in the post-reformation era, has changed the role of women in Indonesia. Together with other women’s organizations nationwide, the Indonesian Women’s Coalition is campaigning for the implementation of a national regulation which requires political parties to nominate women to at least 30% of all candidacies. Members of the Indonesian Women’s Coalition who live in areas with local regulations that discriminate against women and marginal groups like LGBT, have worked together to remove them.
Photo Credit: Anna Istanti, IWC. The Indonesian Women’s Coalition informs locals about national health policy and advocacy in the village of Pengol, Indonesia.
This approach has won the Indonesian Women’s Coalition the support of women around Indonesia. By the end of 2013, there were 38,000 individual members at the grassroots level in 900 villages across 24 provinces. Members of the Indonesian Women’s Coalition are mostly village-level activists, many of whom are part of women’s religious organizations, who fight together for their interests in transforming public policy. Currently through the MAMPU program (Advancing Indonesian Women for Poverty Reduction), the Indonesia Women’s Coalition assists the National Health Service by providing healthcare information at the village level. At MAMPU’s launch, the Indonesian Women’s Coalition in the region of DI.Yogyakarta held a seminar to present the national health insurance system to fellow citizens. The organizers invited religious leaders among other leaders in society to support their program on health insurance because they believe that the right to health care is political, and sought to cultivate broad support.
At the national level, the Indonesian Women’s Coalition is currently arguing cases before the Constitutional Court on the formulation of articles 284, 285, and 292 of the Code of Criminal Law (Kitab Undang Hukum Pidana). The coalition and other community organization are challenging the reformulation of the definition of adultery, which would involve the state in matters of citizens’ sexuality. Civil society organizations objected to the lack of clarity regarding the punishment for adultery outside of marriage and for same-sex sexual relations, which are seen as a crime even though they are not criminalized by national law. The current formulation of articles 284, 285, and 292 explain adultery as sexual acts committed by persons of different sexes, outside of marriage.
The Indonesian Women’s Coalition considers Pancasila, tradition, and religious discourse to be primary sources to improve the lives of women and children, as well as tools to nurture the living pluralism within its community. For examples, members educated in Islamic studies reference a teaching from the Book of Fiqh to strengthen the position of lesbian, bisexual and transgender groups both within the coalition and in society. In this book, Aisha, the wife of the prophet, protected and physically made space for transgender persons to pray behind her. As such, LGBT groups are assured protection.
Meanwhile, other members use secular discourse to advocate women’s rights within the rights framework of the United Nations, such as CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women) and with the language of global feminism. These sources of authority offer international legal status which advances the coalition’s work on women rights. Both secular and religious discourse have their legitimacy and are used in different circumstances.
Arguments built by the Indonesian Women’s Coalition show respect to religious norms and international legal norms. In fact, both sources contain authoritative human rights norms which provide philosophical and religious underpinnings for their just implementation. Neither one can be relied upon on its own. The Indonesian Women’s Coalition seeks to build egalitarian social policy within state policies, and believes that individual piety, when used to improve others’ lives, can inspire more women leaders to work for equal and just public policy for all citizens.
[i] Pancasila, the foundational and constitutional theory of the Indonesian state, contains five principles of human rights values: belief in Deity, civilized humanity, unity of Indonesia, equal representation of people, and social justice
Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta received her Ph.D. in anthropology and Indonesian studies from Nijmegen University in the Netherlands. Farsijana also holds a Master of Arts degree in religion and society from Satya Wacana University in Salatiga, Indonesia, and a bachelor’s degree in theology from the Theological Seminary, Jakarta. Farsijana has worked as a field researcher on social change in the Moluccas for the University of Amsterdam (1999–2000). She was a lecturer for the Institute for Integrated Village ministry (1995) and assistant director of the Center for Analysis and Training in Rural Development in Tobelo, North Moluccas, Indonesia (1990).
Photo Credit: Joe A. Kunzler Photo, AvgeekJoe Productions, growlernoise-AT-gmail-DOT-com. “#Trimet MAX Blue Line at Beaverton TC”
A man is spewing racist and anti-Muslim invective against two young women, one of whom is wearing a hijab. It’s Friday afternoon—rush-hour in Portland, OR—and the train is crowded. Three men move to quiet him. They are pleading with him to settle down, to get off the train. One is making concessions, saying that yes, the man is a taxpayer, but he’s scaring people and he needs to get off. As the train glides towards the next stop, the man pulls a knife. In a flash, he cuts the throats of the three men. Two of them die. The third is still recovering.
It is unimaginable. I’ve ridden that train countless times, jostling with others, happy to be part of the city’s life and, at the same time, looking forward to getting back to my leafy backyard. The reality of it presses into me. The story runs off the page, escaping the banality that envelopes the news. I feel it, the horror of it and the astounding, shining bravery of those who rose to shield the young women.
The suffering of those close to the event is the part that is truly impossible to grasp: the parents and friends of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, a recent Reed College graduate; those surrounding Rick Best, a veteran and father of four; the long recovery of Micah Fletcher and his people; the pain endured by the women who were harassed and the fear felt by their families; and the trauma experienced by others on the train. Their story is theirs to tell. Namkai-Meche’s mother, Asha Deliverance, is telling hers with astounding eloquence and humanity. She is imploring us to reflect and to work for change. We must heed her call to think about the future we want. It’s a political question, but only because politics refers to our communal life, to the life of a group of people, moving together through the world, hoping to make it home safe.
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Photo Credit: Tony. “Empty Car”
It hardly bears mentioning that these deaths were part of a pattern of rising white nationalist, anti-Muslim fervor connected to the candidacy and election of Donald Trump to the presidency. The killer’s track record of hate speech makes that much clear. His actions on the train were part of a chain of death threats, mosque burnings, and murders that has snaked across the country since Trump first got on the campaign trail. These events have led some to ask if liberalism—defined roughly as a concern with individual freedom and tolerance—is in its death throes or if it was always unable to live up to the promise of incorporating real difference, cultural, ethnic, or religious.
Somehow, Islam has been tied up in this question for a long time, at least as a theoretical matter. In her masterful book, ThomasJefferson’s Qur’an, the scholar of Islam, Denise A. Spellberg, unwinds the story of how the founders of the United States understood Islam. For Jefferson, Islam was a litmus test of values. More than a reality, it was an ideal through which one could test the boundaries of toleration. Jefferson supported the tolerance of Islam as proof of his own. Sadly, he does not appear to have imagined that the existence of Muslims in the republic was not just a theoretical future. He likely lived amongst Muslims, or their decedents, who were enslaved on his plantation. Spellberg also writes of a curious figure, John Leland. A friend of Jefferson and a Baptist minister, Leland squinted at tolerance as an inadequate sentiment and argued for fuller bodied embrace of Islam and other religions.
Leland’s is a sentiment I hear with some frequency these days. In my own field of Islamic studies, some scholars hold up Islam as a retort to liberal tolerance and secularism. Often drawing on the work of the Catholic philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, these Islamicists point to the Muslim tradition as an alternative to shallow and callow liberalism. For them, a tradition, such as Islam or Catholicism, animates people at the core of their being. They argue that liberals dilute themselves and deceive others when they claim that our deeper needs and identities can be bracketed, allowing us to enter into the public sphere as equal, rational agents, tolerant of difference but only inasmuch as it doesn’t encumber public life. Really, these scholars argue, this “go along to get along” philosophy is always a cypher for the cruel imposition of European and American values on others. The historian and literary critic, Joseph Massad, goes so far as to claim that liberalism must castigate Islam, which it paints in its funhouse mirror image, to constitute itself. Islam, in Massad’s telling, will always be excluded from liberalism.
The reality is that Muslims have participated in liberal societies, including the United States, for a very long time. Anglo-American philosophers may have used tolerance as a hypothetical test to see who could live within the polity. But tolerance also has historicity outside of these theories: it was shaped by the encounters of people over the centuries. In this sense, tolerance isn’t the purview of John Locke and other dead white philosophers. It is one of the evolving ways that people have worked out, amongst themselves, to live and travel side-by-side.
Neither can Islam made into a simple retort to liberalism. Namkai-Meche took the same Introduction to Islam course that I did more than a decade later. The course was taught by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri at Reed College. As GhaneaBassiri said in a recent radio interview, those of us, like Namkai-Meche and myself, who came to the class looking for easy rejoinders to anti-Muslim hate were bound to be frustrated. The course delved deeper than that. By illuminating the nuances of the dizzyingly diverse array of people, ideas, and practices that associate with Islam, the course showed us, implicitly, how small modern American Islamophobia is. We began to understand that Islam is infinitely more complex and the world infinitely bigger than any stereotype would allow.
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Today, with tolerance threatening to slip from view, we may wonder if liberalism wasn’t so bad after all. Liberal tolerance certainly has been used as a cover for some of the world’s greatest brutalities, as its critics claim. And, they are right to remind liberals of this. But this doesn’t mean liberalism can’t be separated from fascist and colonial violence. Even in liberal philosophy, to tolerate may not be only to ignore. Tolerance might also be an active coming together of three men of different backgrounds to uphold the common good. It is tempting, anyway, to tell that story when thinking of Namkai-Meche, Best, and Fletcher on the train. Of course, that event was more than the unfolding of a pre-determined political philosophy.
Like the spontaneous protests at airports after the Trump administration released its executive order on immigration, the acts of these courageous men were a demonstration that the political exists not in the halls of Congress, the White House, or the writings of theorists. Politics unfold in spaces of transfer and traffic, where people come together for discrete moments. In such transits, new and shared understandings emerge, sustained by the collective desire to continue moving together.
Namkai-Meche’s last words—reported by a woman who pulled off her shirt to tourniquet his wound—were, “Tell everyone on this train that I love them.” We love you, too.
Samuel Kigar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Islamic studies track of Duke University's Graduate Program in Religion. His research areas include Islam in the Maghreb, modern Muslim thought, pre-modern Muslim political philosophy, and religion and law. He is currently writing a dissertation entitled, "Islamic Land: Muslim Genealogies of Territorial Sovereignty in Modern Morocco, 1930-1990.” He tweets at @sam_kigar
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.
Jolyon Mitchell is a Professor specializing in Religion, Violence and Peacebuilding with special reference to the Arts, at New College, the University of Edinburgh.
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?
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
