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Field Notes article

Empowering Democratic Policy-Making: The Indonesian Women’s Coalition


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.

Photo Credit: CIFOR. “Pandang portrait: Intimate life/oil palm work”

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

 

 

Array
Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta
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).
Global Currents article

The Portland Samaritans and Politics Moving Forward


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.

—

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, Thomas Jefferson’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.

—

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.

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Sam Kigar
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
Theorizing Modernities article

Nourishing Hospitality: Jolyon Mitchell Interviews Mona Siddiqui

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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).

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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.

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A. Rashied Omar
A. Rashied Omar is associate teaching professor of Islamic studies and peacebuilding in the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He also is a fellow of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. 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 a trustee of the Institute for the Healing of Memories in South 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?

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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.

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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.

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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.