Blog

Theorizing Modernities article

Piety and the Logics of Consumer Capitalism


Photo Credit: Doni Ismanto. Fashion Photoshoot For Batik Kiawah.

President Donald J. Trump is as well-known for his vocal and vitriolic Islamophobia as he is for his brand. Indeed, unabashed and aggressive Islamophobia has become a central feature of the Trump political brand. Positioned within the spaces of both tension and collusion between global commodity capitalism and contemporary Islamophobia, Faegheh Shirazi’s Brand Islam—The Marketing and Commodification of Piety emerges at an intriguing, politically dangerous, and culturally charged moment in time.

According to Shirazi, “the truth is that Islam is merging into commodity marketing, promoting capitalist consumerism by appealing to Islamist sentiments” (140). However, as Laurence Moore and other historians remind us, the religious application of marketing techniques is not itself new. In Western contexts, Christianity and industrial capitalism were intimately entangled from the beginning. Moreover, as Coleen McDannell and others have argued, religion is reproduced, materially, in tandem with the everyday world of objects and, as Brent Rodríguez Plate and others have emphasized, religion is inexorably and endemically linked to and mediated through the body. That is, certain historical and phenomenological aspects of religious commodity fetish are not entirely new.

Photo Credit: Aslan Media. “Hot Pink and Mustard Bowtie Shirtdress” at the Abaya Addict show.

For her part, Mara Einstein has argued that in our highly commercialized society, religions themselves, in order to rise above the cultural noise, must become active and eager participants in the branding discourse. Marketing gets consumers to do things with objects–with and to their bodies. As such, among other things, Shirazi’s excellent and arresting study of religious branding proves to be a usefully critical intervention into the domains of material and popular religion. Again, however, as Shirazi herself concedes, neither the religious remaking of mundane objects nor the marketization of religion are new. What is new, she writes, are the “surprisingly out-of-the box methods entrepreneurs and companies are using to convince devout Muslims to part with their money” (196).

Having established the burgeoning Islamophobia of the post 9/11 period and the deep histories of colonialism and postcolonial struggle as the broader context for the emergence of “brand Islam”, Shirazi weaves together six case studies (the halal food industry, halal animal slaughter, the marketing of Islamic toys, halal cosmetics, and Islamic fashion) in the service of her larger argument regarding the commodification of Islam. In addition to an admitted focus on Iran, within which the author maintains active personal networks and to which she has unique cultural and institutional access, the scope of analysis extends to the Malaysian, Indonesian, Turkish, American, and E.U. contexts as well.

Brand Islam is rife with well-chosen and well-documented examples of Islam’s multivalent relationship with global consumer markets. In addition to a discussion of well-known lightning rods like the burkini controversy in France, Shirazi touches on the less-documented contestation over the halal status of civet coffee by Islamic scholars (ulama) in Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, and the proliferation of administrative bodies charged with the certification of halal goods and services (and, at times, the transnational disagreements between them about what counts as halal (permitted) and haram (forbidden)). Along the way, Shirazi provides the reader with useful signposts in the form of summations of basic Islamic theological doctrine relevant to the dynamics she explores.

As Shirazi explains, the religious practice of halal recalls Allah’s dominion over all things. Historically, dietary restrictions and the prohibition against the consumption of alcohol have taken precedence although, in reality, halal can be extended into a plethora of everyday activities. At stake, according to Shirazi, are the following are tensions which remain of central interest to her analysis: 1) Just as markets in brand Islam expand through the category of halal, on the surface potentially Islamicizing global capitalism, so too does this imply, in turn and in equal measure, a structuring of Islamic piety by the coordinates and logic of consumer capitalism; 2) The desire for piety and a stance of solidarity with the worldwide ummah (Muslim community) can fuel Muslims’ increased existential investments in the commodity circuits of global capitalism; 3) One consequence of virulently Islamophobic societies is the proliferation of “brand Islam” within the coordinates of those very societies; 4) Brands can sell the mystique of halal as well as Islamophobia (sometimes the same brand will even play both sides of that dangerous game).

As the reader learns, both the Islamic world itself and multinational corporations recognized somewhat late that the religious category of halal could be extended into Islamic-compliant lifestyle products (124). That is, halal lends itself well to market segmentation and product differentiation. In my view, the crux of Shirazi’s study—one which could receive more exacting analytical attention—is precisely this phenomenon whereby an ancient religious category is being transformed (in real time) from the inside out through its mediation by the now ubiquitous brand form.[1]

In actuality, brands are sets of metaphorical associations individuals have with products, services, persons, places, groups, and organizations. These associations are often ritualized through consumer practices. While a general discussion of the brand form itself could help further direct the reader, Shirazi does not provide one. Moreover, although the term “brand Islam” is foregrounded in the very title of Shirazi’s monograph, she does not offer a unifying definition of how she actually uses the term (and the term itself is listed in the index only twice). However, she does offer some guidance. Early on, Shirazi explains, “Islamic commodities I view as Brand Islam, working at the level of fetish, as Muslims consumers, perhaps especially Muslim middle-class consumers, attach mystical and religious significance to what might otherwise be considered inutile and mundane objects” (7). Later, she adds, “Brand Islam has morphed into an explosion of products and services, some useful and some superfluous, created by Muslim manufacturers and government-sponsored initiatives as well as by entrepreneurs solely interested in profit, not the Prophet’s teachings” (199).

While Shirazi admits that sentiments of piety (especially in the face of xenophobic violence and danger) can motivate the practices of the consumers of “brand Islam”, she is more dismissive of the manufacturers, government-sponsored agencies, and financiers who are indispensable to the explosion of the new halal culture industry. At several points in the text, Shirazi reduces motivation on the production side to profit-motive alone. However, as Daromir Rudnyckyj argues specifically within the Indonesian context, Islamic theology can be blended into the ideology of a specifically Muslim neoliberal entrepreneurship. Interesting ethnographic questions, therefore, lay beyond the horizons of Shirazi’s landmark study regarding the social processes whereby the profit-motive is ‘Islamicized’ by the entrepreneurial purveyors of “brand Islam” and whereby religious and economic valuations are squared (and transmuted) in tandem. This important sociological question also presents itself: does “brand Islam” signal the religious deinstitutionalization of swaths of global Islam into taste groups, voluntary associations, and corporate cultures? Does an increase in everyday piety through “brand Islam” simultaneously and necessarily weaken the authority of Islamic religious institutions?

Finally, all of the case studies Faegheh Shirazi includes speak to the gendered dynamics that underwrite its global development and to the ways in which women’s bodies stand as literal crossroads for the crisscrossing of historical forces. From the burkini controversy to the religiously imposed strictures against an Islamic fashion industry in Iran to the displaced patriarchy played out in controversies regarding the modesty and piety of girls’ dolls, the rise of “brand Islam” (and both religiously conservative and Islamophobic resistance to it) is being mapped onto the bodies and souls of Muslim women and girls (and their proxies like lingerie mannequins). In the immediate aftermath of the election of Donald Trump (whose own personal history of violence against women became a major campaign issue) to the American presidency, Muslim women who veil have been especially vulnerable to the rising tides of hate crimes and bias attacks. Shirazi’s book might have us ponder whether in the Age of Trump, religious, political, racial, economic, and cultural conflicts might not continue to play themselves out at especially electric levels of intensity upon the commodified bodies of pious, upwardly mobile Muslims.

Brand Islam—The Marketing and Commodification of Piety is a groundbreaking book that will be of interest to scholars and students of contemporary Islam and across disciplines. It adds to our comprehension not only of contemporary Islam but also to our understanding of the conditions of post-secularity that are today characteristic of the relationship between religion and neoliberalism. Faegheh Shirazi has performed a great service to several fields by clearing such timely and fecund paths.

 

[1] None of this is to imply the either Shirazi or I put any stock in the existence of an a-historical, pristinely Islamic halal in the past. Rather, the point is that Shirazi has very usefully brought attention to a moment of observable and patent transformation and change.

Array
George Gonzalez
George González is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Monmouth University. Most broadly, his research interests lay in the sociocultural legislation of Western metaphysics and the concrete and specific form of power that has attached to liberalism, as a historically specific kind of cosmology. He remains especially interested in approaching the study and criticism of postsecular, neoliberalism through the framework of religious social change. He was trained in ethnographic method by the philosophical anthropologist, Michael Jackson, and has special interests in the work ethnography can do at the intersections of religion, science and global capitalism and as a complement to critical theory. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital—Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project and articles on methodology in the study of religion, the conceptual relationships between ritualization and branding, and the ‘workplace spirituality’ movement in contemporary business management. He is currently working on a multi-site ethnography and historiography of the ritualization of consumer capitalism and is set to begin fieldwork with the famed radical performance troupe, Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping in early 2017.
Theorizing Modernities article

Halal Markets as Sites of Cultural Hybridity: Moral Agency and Public Participation


Photo Credit: Eric Baker. A young woman joins her bikini-clad friend at the beach in Turkey.

For decades, markets saw religion, especially Islam, as something that required little or no attention. The turn of the Millennium proved this thinking wrong. Today halal markets are worth around $4 trillion and within that the Islamic apparel industry by itself is projected to be worth $300 billion in the coming few years. Once overlooked, with these mouthwatering numbers the Islamic fashion industry has attracted even Western giants like DKNY, Tommy Hilfiger, MANGO and Marks & Spencer.

Despite a viable total available market, stunning growth rate, and the mobilization of global fashion giants, a unicorn is yet to emerge in the Islamic apparel industry. The fact that it has not is not simply about hard-hitting competition or bad advertisement. It is about bad product/market fit—products that do not fully cater to the need or problems of consumers. In other words, most companies that operate within the Islamic clothing industry were quick to recognize the potential but have failed to understand what the actual need or problem is, what that problem means and what socio-political factors drive it.

The common crucial mistake companies, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike, make, is that they reduce the growing Muslim interest in contemporary markets to a newfangled Islamic consumerism, which breathlessly awaits the next mundane product to be marketed as ‘Islamic’, be it a purse, an elevator that only carries halal goods, or china tableware.

This false start has led to the erroneous belief that entry to halal markets requires just a simple step: take an item, as mundane as it can be, market it as ‘Islamic’—as if Islamic is generically and mechanically defined— and voila!  As such, not just companies but whole cities, such as the City of Torino in Italy, see halal markets as part of their smart economic growth strategy and presume that they can get a jumpstart in the race for halal markets by simply marketing a wide range of items as Islamic or halal.

Academic debates follow a similar path. They too view the Islamic presence in capitalist markets as an escapist Muslim consumerism, driven by market expansion, which has engulfed Islam and commodified Islamic symbols. The broader implication in terms of social theory, they maintain, is that modernization via consumerism loosens the symbolic boundaries of religion, blurring the distinction between the sacred and the consumable profane. In the context of Muslim immigrants in the West, more recent work emphasizes Islamophobia as the fuel for rising Muslim consumerism. As Muslims confront Islamophobia, markets step in to offer products that reinforce Islamic identity, provide psychological assurance, and connect individual Muslims coping with xenophobia to the broader global Umma.

No doubt the global expansion of markets, immigration, and the rise of Islamophobia have created a unique environment for shrewd marketing. However, my empirical work in Turkey on how Muslims engage modernity and my subsequent experience as a founder of a young modest wear start-up company point to a different story, one in which Muslim engagement of fashion, or markets more broadly, goes well beyond consumerism driven by clever marketing. Approaches that follow the consumerist path, including Brand Islam and the works of Turkish scholars such as Timur Kuran and Ozlem Sandikci , seem to center their reading of Islamic markets on the manufacturers’ interests and assessments while neglecting the historical origins of Muslim engagements with modernity as well as the agency and active participation of the pious in the rise and shaping of halal markets. Moreover, these approaches are still underpinned by an old assumption: the divide of religion versus modernity, where Muslim engagements of modernity result in the engulfment of Islam, in this case via consumerism and capitalism.

Photo Credit: Aslan Media. Saudi women play soccer.

Yet the problem Islamic fashion solves goes well beyond an appetite for ostentatious consumerism. Rather, it is indicative of such broader shifts as the theological rise of the self and religious self-identity, the rejection of authoritarian religious communalism, and a redefinition of Umma, as well as increasing Muslim public female agency and visibility.

What I fundamentally found in my empirical work on the subject was that the rise of Islamic markets went well beyond consumerism, and that this rise was situated not against the backdrop of Islam versus Western-modernity divide, but, to the contrary, increasing Muslim engagements of modernity and the resulting hybridity.

 

A New Commentary: Stepping Out of False Divides

For decades, social theory on religion prescribed that religion’s interaction with modernity could take only two forms: religion would either reject modernity to preserve tradition, or, if and when it chose to engage modernity, it would have to modify tradition, ultimately turning into liberal religion.

In Turkey, since the 1980s, a new religious commentary emerged, Muslimism, which defied this dichotomous thinking. Neither a fundamentalist rejection of modernity nor liberal translation of religion, Muslimism embraces aspects of modern life while submitting that life back to a sacred, moral order, creating as such hybrid institutions, lifestyles and spaces, and practices. Muslimists are not after a top-down or bottom-up Islamization; they are neither state nor society-centered but individual-oriented. That is, Muslimism seeks to formulate a lifestyle in which the individual believer can be incorporated into modern life while holding passionately onto religion.

We can locate this new religious commentary, its practices, and institutions in “cultural sites of hybridity,” where Muslims articulate Islam with modern values, practices, and discourses, generating new amalgamations.

These sites first emerged in the markets in the form of Islamic vacations, restaurants, Islamic fashion companies, or business associations. Yet, going beyond the confines of a market orientation, these institutions have altered the boundaries that used to strictly separate religious and secular (Kemalist) lifestyles, spaces, and codes in Turkey. They showed that it was possible for Muslims to take part in modernity while preserving religious commitments. By the mid-1990s, the sites of hybridity spilled over other sectors of society becoming manifest in civil organizations and politics. These include, for example, human rights organizations, which refer both to the UN Human Rights Convention and Islamic theological sources to define human rights, and women’s organizations that claim both a pious and democrat identity. Muslimists have also generated a new Islamic political ethos that uses Islam to embrace modern political values; especially individual rights and pluralism.

Whether in markets or as articulated in a political ethos, the sites of hybridity are spaces where Islamist and secularist definitions of Islamic and modern identities are transcended and replaced with new definitions. Importantly, rather than secularizing Muslims, hybridity makes Islamic identity more salient. It introduces Islam into everyday life and public spaces in new forms making it possible for passionate religion to take part in modern life and institutions. As such, historically, the rise of Muslim markets has not been an independent development generated by shrewd marketing, but was part and parcel of this comprehensive Muslimist engagement of modernity. Additionally, Muslimists’ emphasis on individual choice and true piety (iman) rejects authoritarian religious communalism and conformity while opting for conscious moral agency and self-expression. In the case of the halal market, this orientation has furthered an interest in personalized Islamic attire and products.

Self-Styling, Moral Agency, and Hybridity 

My empirical work on Muslim engagement of modernity in Turkey involved interviews with pious women who witnessed the very first Islamic runways and the earliest attempts to combine contemporary fashion with tesettur (Islamic attire) around the late 1980s. Even then this curious mix was accused of, on the one hand, being impure—the pinnacle, indeed, of Islam’s corruption by Western modernity— and on the other hand, for being strictly moralistic. Emerging out of the “uniform era” where dress was regulated by the (male) authoritarian religious communities (cemaat), the proliferating tesettur designs opened up a new space to dress in accord to individual identity: age, marital status, likes and dislikes, body type, or personality. This also coincided with the rejection of patriarchal codes as women claimed their own moral agency and autonomy over their own bodies.

As such, what many reduce to consumerism is in fact rooted in a meaningful shift: the aversion to authoritarian religious communalism and attempts instead to nurture a religious community that recognizes and gives space to the self and individual agency to determine moral decisions and behavior. This shift importantly did not point to secularization of orthodoxy; it was filtered through theological notions of true piety and Tahqiq (what is it that I believe, and why?), which legitimized the self and expression of its uniqueness and agency.

Photo Credit: Lan Rasso. A young woman runs in a race in Malaysia.

There is more. The blend of fashion and tesettur has undermined the monotone divide of Islam and modernity, a divide that delineated how a Muslim female can (and should) live, what public spaces she can enter, and what activities she can take part in. Take swimming and sports. These activities have been dominated by secularist aesthetics and norms: ‘the normal way’ to swim is to uncover, or ‘to run the normal way’ you have to wear shorts. These norms are not just discursive but they determine product lines. For decades, designs were either appropriate to religion but not to sports activity, or vice versa. Consider a 7 year old who loves playing basketball. When she turns 13 and reaches puberty, and starts wearing tesettur, whether she will continue to play will not be based on ‘can I shoot a ball?’ but on ‘what am I gonna wear?’

The innovate pieces that emerged out of Islamic apparel industry undermine both the secularist standards that exclude religion and Islamist prescriptions that consider modern activity to be corrupt. Take the hasema, the first Islamic swimsuits. The first producer of hasema in Turkey, Mehmet Sahin, is known as “the man who made Muslim women swim”. This epithet clearly communicates the distance that used to exist between Muslim women and swimming as a cultural exercise. The hasema brought in a revolution: the company did not simply sell swimming gear; it sold the possibility of engaging in an activity —swimming— and a public space (e.g. the beach) once closed off to pious women.

Given the historical Islam versus modernity divide, for Muslim women, the question of “what am I going to wear?” then translates to:

Who can I be?

What activities can I engage in?

What spaces can I enter?

The hybrid, innovative products that emerged out of halal markets affirm these questions, and alter, as such, the boundaries that had strictly separated Islamic versus secular life spaces, practices, and cultural codes. Hence, rather than expanding one’s fashion choices, fashion in the Islamic context has originally been about expanding women’s life options and plans.

This is why the Islamic fashion market has come to be worth billions.

Array
Neslihan Cevik
Neslihan Cevik is a Turkish sociologist of religion. Cevik completed her PhD at Arizona State University (2010). She then joined Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, for her post-doctoral research. She is the author of “Muslimism in Turkey and Beyond: Religion in the Modern World” (November-2015, Palgrave MacMillan). Currently, Cevik is a senior researcher at SESRIC,Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. Her work on religion appears in CNN-Arabic, Daily Sabah, OrientXXI, Informed Comment, and Political Theology Today, and is translated into Arabic, French, and Turkish. Cevik helped found the first postcolonial studies research center in Turkey, PAMER, Uskudar University. An engaged social entrepreneur, Cevik also is the founder of Mline Fashion, a modest wear and lifestyle start-up company that seeks to encourage Muslim women's economic and public integration.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Hybridities of Hijabi Barbie: A CM Book Symposium on “Brand Islam”


How to interpret the meanings, functions, and hybridities that Hijabi Barbie, halal cosmetic, and Burkini merchandise inhabit in the cacophonous urban spaces of France, London, and Los Angeles? How does this question, along with a deeper engagement with the commodification of religion and pluralization of the sites of religious authority through the secular mechanisms of the market, touch upon the tensions, contestations, and varieties of modernities religious actors embody through daily practices? Contending Modernities (CM) chose to focus on Faegheh Shirazi’s Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety to highlight a few central conceptual issues that animate our research initiative. First, the book affords an opportunity to discuss modernity’s reliance on capitalist and neoliberal engines and logics and the construction of a certain kind of modern subjectivity coherent with these logics. Second, it illumines the phenomenon of expanding brand Islam, that is, the employment of a halal label, to a diverse scope of “secular” and “ordinary” activities such as makeup application and selecting attires for athletic activities. It also examines how such halalization currently contributes to and participates in novel modes of self-described piety in the midst of Islamophobia and sociocultural estrangement in non-majority contexts, or to creative innovation within the constraints of Muslim-majority settings.

Shirazi grounds her conceptual frames in the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior to explain halalization as an effective marketing strategy. Clearly, this theoretical framing already gestures to Shirazi’s reliance on a conception of the individual-qua-consumer—a modern subjectivity foregrounding an autonomous choice that could offer, Shirazi seems to suggest, emancipatory possibilities. “At a time when many Muslim citizens…are struggling to free themselves from conservative fundamentalism and the patriarchal stranglehold of mullahs, muftis, ayatollahs, and mulanas, one might ask whether the trend toward Islamic commodification is helpful,” Shirazi ponders. “Will it serve to minimize suffering, diminish discrimination particularly against women, or further basic human rights?” (207-9). She poses this question but does not respond directly. This quote points to two responses: the one embraces halalization of daily life through Islam branding as emancipatory. The other is concerned with the neoliberal assumptions folded into a celebration of emancipation through consumption.

One of our solicited respondents, Neslihan Cevik, makes a strong case for the emancipatory potentialities of neoliberalization of Islamic branding and consumption. For Cevik, marketization of Muslim products for everyday activities and consumption patterns represents more than “shrewd marketing.” Drawing on her empirical work in Turkey and experience developing a modest fashion line for young women, she claims the market also represents a site of hybridity she calls Muslimism. Muslimism, Cevik writes, “is a quest to formulate a lifestyle in which the individual believer can be incorporated into modern life while holding passionately onto religion.” Our shrewd reader will immediately surmise the many assumptions presupposed in this quote that suggest that Muslimism, as articulated by Cevik, seems to be embedded in a modernist discourse of subjectivity. Even while attempting to challenge unreconstructed secularist bifurcation of “religious” and “secular”, it nonetheless reinstates such bifurcation by positing the marketing and commodification of Muslim piety as a site where Muslim subjectivity can finally be modern. Nonetheless, Cevik views the kind of Muslimism generated through commodification of brand Islam as an emancipatory space where Muslim actors can participate in “generat[ing] a new Islamic political ethos that uses Islam to embrace modern political values; especially individual rights and pluralism.” Hence, the codification of piety described by Shirazi facilitates, Cevik argues (without explicitly referring to Shirazi’s thesis), the emergence of new Muslim subjectivities consistent, so it seems, with political liberalism. Let us not forget the Christian underpinnings and colonial histories of this tradition (Asad 2003, for instance).

The implication in Cevik’s account, therefore, is that somehow commodification and marketing of Islamic piety is emancipatory from tradition by producing a modern Muslim piety (and pious individuals) understood in terms of individual self-stylizing. Shirazi maintains a focus on the phenomenon of the marketing of Islamic piety rather than engaging in the kind of normative deliberation pursued by Cevik. Halal consumerism, Shirazi shows, cultivates the possibility of stylizing and marketing piety such that Muslim women and men can go through their daily and secular lives in a thoroughly “Muslim” way, from their choice of toothpaste, cosmetic products, and banking to their wardrobe, food, and vacations. The halalization of an entire spectrum of activities as a mechanism for enhancing a particular target market (from the perspective of business) but also for enabling, in some instances, Muslim women to enjoy more “normal” leisure as on public beaches and/or by wearing burkinis poses a question about whether the “secular” realms of activities are religionized or whether piety and religiosity are driven by market forces. A second respondent, Vincent Miller, likewise ponders the emancipatory aspects of the halalization of daily activities. In particular, he underscores the pluralization of religious authorities afforded through neoliberalization where religious expertise blends with business decisions, allowing for the emergence of “alternative experts” and with it “the expansion of personal choice.” The manufacturing of burkini and halal athletic wear for women and girls indeed entails that athleticism is a permissible sphere for Muslim actors. Hence, branding Islam tells an emancipatory narrative that pushes the boundaries of unreconstructed interpretations of secular modernity.

Photo Credit: Ikhlasul Amal. Barbie look-alike in West Java, Indonesia.

However, the emancipatory conclusion only represents one type of response to Shirazi’s work. The other response, as noted, worries about the operative forces of fetishism and commodification. The book certainly exposes a tension between profit and prophet which leads Miller to underscore that the “deregulation of religion” through the pluralization of religious authority also entails a “decidedly pro-consumption bias.” Likewise, George Gonzalez, in his response, ponders “does ‘brand Islam’ signal the religious deinstitutionalization of swaths of global Islam into taste groups, voluntary associations, and corporate cultures? Does an increase in everyday piety through ‘brand Islam’ simultaneously and necessarily weaken the authority of Islamic religious institutions?” Gonzalez’s analysis is deeply attuned to a critique of neoliberalism, offering a sobering reminder that Cevik’s self-stylizing individual (in its assumed middle to upper class and/or Mister [Muslim hipster] status) is a product of the neoliberal frame and cannot be understood outside of its discursive scope and epistemological assumptions. Gonzalez situates his discussion of Brand Islam within a broader scholarly engagement with the commodification of religion and piety, highlighting both gender and class in articulating where more research on branding religious tradition can be further enriching. Far from the emancipatory potentialities Cevik and Miller find in Islamic branding as a mechanism for individual Muslim piety and inclusion through redefining of modernity and pluralizing the sites of religious authority, Gonzalez views the trend of commodification of culture and religion as far from liberating, constituting a mode of imprisonment in the “iron cage” of capitalism (to recall Weber’s famous pronouncement).

A fourth respondent, Slavica Jakelić, ponders “the desire to sacralize all domains of life.” She is reminded of the familiar Weberian insight about the relations between religion and the emergence of modern capitalism and processes of secularization. Jakelić subsequently identifies paradoxical tensions in the supposed intensification of Muslim piety through capitalist mechanisms: “while Muslims as believers might focus on halal in the context of the global market as the realm that enables them to exert theological, cultural, and political agency and do so against Western modernity,” she writes, “the impulses that shape their theological orientations and religious acts related to halal seem quite aligned with some aspects of that modernity.” What Jakelić suggests here is that the commodification of piety studied by Shirazi is highly consistent with secular modernity or the secular condition even while enabling individual pious actors to assert their Muslim self-stylization as oppositional. The very focus of the market on individual consumers and their tastes and preferences validates this point. Shirazi’s account, however, dives deeply into the hermeneutical process present in this heightened level of brand Islam. Jakelić, therefore, echoes Gonzalez’s reservations about the emancipatory narrative, celebrating post-secular conceptions of Muslim modernity as embodied in branding processes.

The commercialization of halal finds Quranic authentication or, at the very least, Shirazi writes, does not subvert its authority, although the processes of certifying products (especially food) as halal as opposed to haram constitute sites of contestation between business motives and a multiplicity of Sharia-grounded religious authorities. Notably, Shirazi shows how an unfavorable fatwa, even if emerging from an unqualified or dubious source, can have severe ramifications for a product’s career in the market. Shirazi highlights that such fatwas influence patterns of consumerism and labeling of haram or halal. The latter point foregrounds another theme of CM noted in Miller’s engagement with the book, namely our focus on the dynamism of religious authorities in a secular age that does not spell the absence, diminishment, or declension of religion but rather its relocation and reimagining in relation to political, social, and cultural conceptions of citizenship. Clearly, both the market potential of halal and the participation of Muslim consumption in generating new modalities of piety that often project themselves as “traditional” force us to analyze, through a Weberian Verstehen methodology, the intersections of socioeconomic and political forces with religious meanings, traditions, and modes of interpretations.

Shriazi’s book offers a glimpse into the Quranic exegetical work that participates in the marketing and commodification of Muslim piety. She also offers resources to show why it works, especially by examining sociological and psychological factors informing halal consumerism and commodification. Especially in non-majority western contexts, where the colonial legacy is enduring and has been recalibrated through other means, anti-western sensibilities offer resources for supposedly reclaiming authentic Islamic identity through enactment and promotion of a halal lifestyle. The commodification of Islam afforded through the market logic of neoliberalism, therefore, becomes a primary mechanism for reclaiming tradition interpreted through a brand. On the other front, Shirazi suggests, the consolidation and growth of the halal market also plays into the rhetoric of Islamophobes who identify supposedly subversive (violent) intentions behind consumer choices. Yet, Shirazi concludes, “In the West, ironically, the more vitriolic and anti-halal the public discourse, the more attention the general public pays to all things halal” giving rise, for instance, to “haloodies” [or halal foodies] (212). The broadening acceptability and integration of halalization onto the landscape of multiculturalism goes beyond a simple market analysis recognizing that millions of Muslims constitute a “market” to be exploited and manipulated. It also illumines the elasticity and dynamism of the modern pluralistic secular sociopolitical frames, with their internal tensions and inconsistencies and yet various sites of hybridization, religious innovation, and multidimensional deepening of the discursive scope of the secular.

 

Photo Credit: Lu_Lu on Flickr.com

Array
Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Global Currents article

Theo-Politics in Flux: The ‘Alt-Right’ on God, Christendom, and the Nation


Photo credit: IndyBay.org. White supremacist group Identity Evropa was founded in 2016 in California and conducts poster campaigns across US universities, particularly targeting offices of professors of color.

A few moments with the Jewish-German philosopher Hannah Arendt can show us ways in which race, religion, and political life operate elastically to produce a narrative that sustains a totalitarian, anti-pluralistic system of control. Arendt’s insights are deeply relevant to the cultural imagination of America’s “Alt-Right”—the euphemistic label employed by American White nationalists. This is an especially important time to revisit Arendt. 

Arendt shows us how the Nazi racial fantasy of almighty power to remake the world, the will to power of ethnic nationalism, remains entangled in a tradition of monotheistic theology. The continuous logic of messianism operates together, paradoxically, with Nietzsche’s conviction that “God is dead.” The Nazi ideology of Arendt’s own “dark times,” as she called them, depended upon the tension between these contending modernities. Whether killing God left us an inheritance only of the human will to power, or whether the will to power killed God, cannot be readily disaggregated.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt provides an account of “the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved,” (viii).[1] (This theme is under-recognized in the current literature, but I address it in my forthcoming book Politics in the Absence of God.) Comparable threats are manifesting today. With the dramatic resurgence of White nationalism in America, we can borrow Arendt’s insights and say that “[t]he subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition” (ix).

This twenty-first century “Alt-Right” American movement revives singular White entitlement to formal power, complete with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim discourse that are both sublimated and explicated. The movement is at once secular and indebted to singularly Christian logic. Its manifestos preach the “imperious necessity of a European Brotherhood.” The National Policy Institute, its primary think tank, is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States and around the world.” The movement’s adherents admire Russia as an embodiment of White anti-LGBTQI nationalism. They herald Zionism as implemented in Israel for its commitment to religio-ethnic purity and domination (ethnocracy). Its aspirations require that the “Alt-Right” subvert the aspirational values that underpin, to return to Arendt, “all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world” (viii).

Below, I shadow male writers of White nationalism as they contend internally over how to occupy time and space, and under allegiance to what God or gods. We will see how pre-modern aesthetics and theology function to produce White politics and culture in ways that can be culturally practiced.

 

A note on method: technology as medium, subverting “hidden mechanics” 

Photo Credit: Bob Jagendorf Neo Nazi Rally in Trenton, NJ, 2011.

Contemporary fantasies of White supremacist and/or separatist patriarchal White nations are not overtly modeled by the mastery of antebellum plantations or racialized purity drives marching native peoples west. Nevertheless, the “Alt-Right” imaginary is fostered by alluring narratives and archetypes that foster identification with pre- or a-modern cultures. Virtual realities of cable television, video games, on-line blogs, and chat rooms present enchanted worlds manufactured as “purer” times of White supremacy, free from contaminating environments of pluralism, diversity, feminism, and the regime of “political correctness.” Collective imaginaries of a lost world that must be fought for, or might be made Great Again foster identification with concatenated European Whiteness, masculinity, and power.

Distinctively late-modern technological delivery systems and cyber space also allow for accelerated and more effective consolidation of “alternative facts.” Therefore at each stage in this brief tour, we will briefly glimpse how a fantasy of White patriarchy with a special relationship to God and to salvation history is reflected back through contemporary American media.

 

The madman’s cry: “Where is God?” and the conflict of absolute values

Where is the Christian tradition in this project of racial trans-Atlantic nationalism? Within to the Alt-Right movement, this is a surprisingly complex and important question.

Christian doctrine teaches a universal brotherhood of salvation in which there is “neither Jew nor Greek.” Because the “Alt Right is openly and avowedly nationalist,” because it does not recognize spiritual equality across races and ethnicities, the movement would seem to be on a collision course with essential Christian values.

For the New Right, “The Christian Question” (Sam Francis, 2001) asks whether the values of German folk religion have not always been at odds with Christian values of egalitarianism and universalism. Francis works from James Russell’s Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Socio Historical Approach to Religious Transformation, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).  The recent kerfuffle at the University of Chicago Divinity School reminds scholars of religion that we should be alert as to how reputable academic institutions, and perhaps our guild in particular, wittingly and unwittingly serves white nationalist agendas.

 

White Paganism

Stephen McNallen, the Texan-born founder of the neo-Paganist religious movement Asatru Folk Assembly, rejects Christianity for its profession of universal humanity. Because Christianity “lacks any roots in blood or soil,” he says with concern, it can “claim the allegiance of all the human race.”

McNallen calls for a return to “the Faith of our Ancestors.” He professes, “I am a pagan, because it is the only way I can be true to who, and what, I am. I am a pagan because the best things in our civilization come from pre-Christian Europe.” (Other American Heathens object to any association of McNallen with their religious movement, given his association with the “American neo-fascist radical traditionalist movement.”

Identifying against Christianity functions in multiple ways. A new identity is produced that signifies its repudiation of values of universalism and egalitarianism. Rejection of Christianity also accomplishes rejection of debts to the Jewish Jesus and the Jewish origins of Christianity.

These practices of identity are also derivative of neo-romantic atavistic values and aesthetics of proto-fascist Europe. Then too, Aryan nationalists identified with “pagan” Europe, appealed to hero-god mythology of Greek antiquity, or claimed absolute allegiance to a lineage of blood and soil.

In the U.S. now, pre-modern but post-Christian media invites viewers in to constructed worlds of so-called “paganism.” Earnest adventures of noble Whites triumph in “Vikings” and “Game of Thrones.”  “World of Warcraft,” like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings invites consumers to inhabit fantasy worlds in which species are differently playable races (The blond humans of the Alliance fight the tribal orcs of the Horde, etc.).

 

Christendom and Racial Rule

The paradox here, Vox Day, another White nationalist male blogger, reminds his readers, is that Christendom was necessary for forging common European identity. “Pagan or Nietzschean alt-righters” have “legitimate criticisms about Christianity,” he allows. Yet his White brethren “souldn’t [sic] forget that it was the first religion that gave a feeling of kinship and a common purpose to Europeans.”

Arendt agrees. “Consciousness of nationality is a comparatively recent development” (230). Under Christendom, the ethnic nation was secondary to participation in God’s order. By doctrine, all humans shared the possibility of salvation through Christ.

In ““What the Alt Right Is,” Vox Day professes that “[h]uman equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.” Nevertheless, he identifies as a Christian, as well as with the superiority of Whites.

If this claim strikes some readers as dissonant, Arendt invites her readers to re-encounter the theo-politics of European Christian imperialism and colonialism. On their imperial adventures, Christian Europeans encountered “great physical differences between themselves and the peoples they found on other continents,” she recounts. They proved themselves unable “to include all the peoples of the earth in their conception of humanity” (176-177).

Religion is a malleable institution. Its history can be told in many ways, and it can be lived out in many ways. Arendt revisits the Dutch Boers in South Africa to illustrate how readily they reconciled Christian practice with the supremacy of their own ethnic group.

Nativist White American Protestants lived out this performative contradiction of doctrinal principles of universalism with militant chattel slavery by identifying Whiteness alone with civilization and progress. They are indebted to European imperialists and colonialists, but also to ongoing White American Christian practices of eugenics, mass incarceration, and other forms of terror.

Given this history, it should not be surprising at all that some American White Nationalists seek to “Save Christianity.”  Richard Spenser joined the conversation in December 2016 with “Ghosts of Christmas Past.” He reclaims both the enchantment of Santa and the local and in particular the Whiteness of Santa in religious imagination of northern Europeans.

Certainly Jesus is back on TV. Promos for “Finding Jesus” season 2 play on CNN between the hours as news anchors fret about Breitbart news and the authority of Alt-Right visionary Stephen Bannon. Special effects enchant biblical epics such as “Noah” (played by Russell Crowe) and Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: God and Kings” (in which Welsh Christian Bale plays Moses). The Roman world of primitive Christianity also performs White masculinity in divine favor. In “Ben-Hur,” the British Jack Huston is cast in a “Gladiator”-like remake. In the forthcoming “Resurrection,” Mel Gibson will supplement his “Passion of the Christ.”

 

The Post-Christian White Nation: Its Own Absolute

Credit: John Kittelsrud Photos taken during National Socialist Movement (Neo-Nazis) march in Phoenix, AZ, in 2010. “The NSM was there to protest a federal judge’s decision to ‘water down’ the SB1070 immigration legislation.”

“A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same conclusion,” says Nietzsche in The AntiChrist §16. “A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. In him it does honor to the conditions which enable it to survive, to its virtues—it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks.”

In Europe, says Arendt, even an idea of a sovereign God slipped away. The collective no longer looked to providence to work through a chosen nation, granting it a warrant for ethnic violence. Instead, the ethnic nation came to believe its “own chosenness without believing in Him who chooses and rejects,” she says (73). Attributes once assigned to God (stable, eternal, and essential) transferred to the nation in which one lived and for which one died. Émile Durkheim’s social functionalist analysis of religion shows its ongoing conceptual purchase. Society worships itself. The practices and sentiments of social solidarity prove basic in this analysis of religion as epiphenomenal.

This post-Christian vision for White nationalism that seeks “metapolitical prayer and will to power” installs the ethnic nation as its own god. Predictably, the ethnocracy arrogates ultimacy to itself and authorizes the “ethical” violence required for population purity.

In this rendition of contending modernities, individuals and groups of the Alt-Right travel the internet under the name of nihilism. Their second-order humor is sardonic; they deride enchantment. Pepe the Frog (with benign origins in the web comic Boy’s Club) functions as an anti-Semitic, racist internet meme. The signification of the image is, again, atavistic. Kek the frog-headed man had a prior life as the ancient, androgynous Egyptian deity of darkness and god of chaos. Now his initials show up as “LOL” on infamously female-trolling World of Warcraft chat boards.

The technological medium is modern, but the message refuses the norms of modern liberal society: transparency, accountability, and equal power of civic participation.

 

Where that Leaves Us

“We are protected by God,” said President Donald Trump in an Inauguration Speech co-written by Bannon. This much American exceptionalism is consonant with our national history. But singular changes to civil religion are afoot. In the Holocaust Remembrance Day national address, the murder of European Jewry went purposefully and unapologetically unmentioned. Muslims with U.S. Green Cards were singularly legally held at international airports, while Syrian Christians received the special attention of the president. Bannon’s ascent to a general’s role on the principles’ committee of the U.S. National Security Council defies precedent, and Arendt’s cigarette smoke lingers in the air.

Array
Mara Willard
Mara Willard is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing her first book, entitled Politics after the Death of God: Hannah Arendt on Religion and Politics, and publishes and teaches more widely on religion, modernity, and feminist thought. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and her BA from Swarthmore College.
Field Notes article

Faith, Ethnicity, and Illiberal Citizenship: Authority, Identity, and Religious “Others” in Aceh’s Border Areas


Although Indonesia is not an Islamic state, it uniquely granted the province of Aceh permission to officially implement sharia law in 2001. This was an effort to win over the Aceh people, who are known to be deeply religious Muslims, against the Aceh Liberation Movement (which had no sharia agenda). Since then sharia has become the “master signifier” which defines all other aspects of life in the region. All other legal sources—customary laws, national laws, and international conventions—are interpreted according to, and should not contradict, sharia. The Quran and prophetic traditions are the major sources of legal authority and take precedence over the state constitution and national laws in all local qanuns (bylaws). The thing is, although Muslims are a majority (98.19% according to the 2010 census), non-Muslims live in Aceh too, albeit a small minority. They are citizens, just like their Muslim counterparts, and should technically have equal rights.

How, then, do local Islamic establishment politics and illiberal citizenship affect interreligious relations, sources of authority, and how individuals define their identity, especially in Aceh’s ethnically and religiously mixed border areas?

 

Religions, Ethnicity and “Host-Guest Citizenship”  

Map of Aceh Province in tan, with North Sumatra Province in pale yellow.

We entered Aceh in 2016 from the east border areas adjacent to North Sumatra— the Regencies of South East Aceh, Singkil, and Tamiang, and the municipalities of Subulussalam and Langsa—with liberal citizenship in mind, and encountered many questions regarding interreligious relations. Through observations, interviews, informal conversations, and focused group discussions, we found that Aceh implements a “host-guest citizenship”, in which Aceh is seen as the “land of sharia” (nanggroe syariat) and therefore the land  of Islam with Muslims as “hosts”. Meanwhile, non-Muslims are considered “guests”. Such illiberal citizenship has been legalized by the central government through Law No. 18/2001 and Law No. 11/2006. The former grants Aceh the right to implement sharia law and the latter obligates the governor, mayors, and regents to ensure sharia is implemented in their respective territories. To our surprise, this is not only the way the Acehnese define themselves against “others,” but also, to some extent, the way non-Muslims perceive themselves in Aceh. Some Christian and Buddhist leaders told us, “as guests we have to respect the traditions of the host.”

The Aceh-North Sumatra border is interesting in terms of religious identity and ethnicity. The neighboring province, North Sumatra, is home to a significant number of Christians (31% Protestants and Catholics), although Muslims are still the majority (66.09%). Migration of Batak Christians and others from North Sumatra to the border areas of Aceh is common practice, usually for work in palm oil plantation factories. Due to this migration, the number of Batak Christians living in Aceh’s border areas has been increasing. As a result, unlike most other parts of Aceh, the east border areas are more religiously and ethnically pluralistic. Although Muslims are still the majority, the Acehnese ethnic group are mostly a minority. Here live ethnic groups that are identified as Muslim, such as the Acehnese, Alas, Tamiang Malay, Boang, and Minangkabau; those identified as Christian, such as the Toba Batak and Karo Batak; and those associated with multiple faiths, such as Pakpak (Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, and Pambi [a local religion]), and Javanese (Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam).

These border areas also have the highest number of churches in Aceh. In Southeast Aceh there are 124 churches operating (only 38 are officially recognized by the government); in Singkil 24 churches (of which four are official); in Subulussalam four churches (only one church is legally recognized); in Tamiang there was one church, but it was closed by the government, and three Buddhist temples (vihara); in Langsa one church and one Buddhist temple shared with Hindus. Most of the churches belong to Batak and Pakpak people.

Since the implementation of sharia in 2001, the identity marker that indicates a group is the “host”, or “insider”, has become religious (Islamic) rather than ethnic. The Muslim ethnic groups hold dual “hosthood”, that is, they are ethnically and religiously hosts, such as Acehnese in Langsa; Alas is Southeast Aceh; and Tamiang Malay in Tamiang. Meanwhile in multi-religious ethnic groups, Muslim and non-Muslims compete with each other internally, and externally the Muslim members align with Muslims from other ethnicities to form a pan-Islamic “hosthood”. Multi-religious Pakpak and Muslim Boang have shared “hosthood” in Subulussalam and Singkil for a long time, but since 2001 the Boang and Muslim Pakpak have allied with other Muslims such as the Acehnese, Minangkabau, and Muslim Javanese, claiming the “hosthood” of Subulussalam and Singkil.

 

Protecting Muslim Faith, Establishing Authority and Identity

Aceh’s Muslims and the Aceh provincial government have at times viewed the heterogeneous and pluralistic nature of the border areas as a “threat” to the Muslim faith and Aceh’s identity as the “land of sharia”. The growing number of churches and rumors of “Christianization” of the border areas frequently generate concern for local authority as well as Muslims. Responding to such a “threat”, the Aceh government issued Gubernatorial Decree on Building Places of Worship in 2007. At the national level, the Joint Decree between the Minister of Religious Affairs and the Minister of Home Affairs in 2006 requires a place of worship obtain the support of 90 congregation members and 60 neighbors, complete with copies of their ID cards. But locally, the Aceh government’s 2007 Gubernatorial Decree makes the requirement even stricter. A place of worship must be supported by 150 congregation members and 120 neighbors. This has made it almost impossible for minority religions in Aceh to build their places of worship.

Islamic Center in Aceh Tamiang Regency.

In addition, the provincial Sharia Office, which operates within the gubernatorial office, established a “frontier preachers” (da’i perbatasan) program which has been operating since 2002. About 150 to 170 preachers were sent to border areas to teach Islam to Muslims. To bolster the program, the government also established “frontier Islamic boarding schools” (dayah perbatasan) and Islamic centers. The main aim of these endeavors is to protect the Islamic identity of the border areas, and prevent Muslims from being targeted by Christian missions.

The above policies cannot be separated from three government institutions: the Sharia Office, Council of Ulama Deliberation (Majelis Permusyawaratan Ulama/MPU), and Aceh Religious Treasury Council (Baitul Mal Aceh/BMA). They exist at the provincial, municipal, and regency levels. While the Sharia Office drafts sharia derived legislation and manages sharia related policies, the MPU gives religious opinions (fatwas) and advice to the government concerning policies and regulations, as well as giving or not giving permission for public events. In this respect, many non-Muslim religious and social events cannot be conducted because they fail to receive the MPU’s permission. The BMA collects Islamic charity (zakat, infaq, sadaqah) and manages them for poverty alleviation and for supporting programs of sharia implementation. No similar institutions exist for non-Muslim citizens.

The only institution shared by Muslims and non-Muslims is a state-supported Forum for Harmonious Relations among Interreligious Communities (FKUB). It is in this forum that interreligious issues and social problems are discussed. It is also in charge of giving letters of recommendation for building places of worship. However, in most cases Muslim biases dominate the forum because, in most regions, the number of Muslim representatives in the forum is double or even triple that of other religions. Committee members are selected proportionately from the local community and Muslims tend to be the overwhelming majority. Non-Muslims have no choice because it is the only government-supported interreligious forum. So far, there are no civil society NGOs working specifically on interreligious issues, although there are individuals striving for religious freedom. On the contrary, there are Islamist movements—Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), Islamic Ummah Forum (FUI), and Youth for the Care of Islam (PPI)—which have successfully organized people against any increase of churches in Singkil, burned a church, and pressured the government to close others.

The host-guest model of illiberal citizenship is also the framework through which the Aceh government and Muslims perceive tolerance of non-Muslim citizens, which can be called “asymmetric tolerance”. As host, the argument goes, they have given their non-Muslims “guests” the right to perform their beliefs and religion, but within the bounds set by the host. In return, the guests should respect the tradition, beliefs, and regulations of the host. Such favoring of a particular religion, seen through the perspective of liberal citizenship, is nothing but legal, political, and social exclusion. As such, the demand for equal citizenship has been emerging among academics, intelligentsia, NGO activists, and those who struggle for religious freedom in Aceh, although their voices have so far not affected the mainstream adherence to illiberal citizenship.

 

Photo Credit: Moch Nur Ichwan. Featured image: Youth Christmas in Tamiang (2016). The Christmas ceremony was planned to be held in an open space, but moved to a parishioner’s home because of the rain. The congregation could not use their church because they failed to receive the government’s permission.

 

References

Ichwan, Moch Nur. “The Politics of Shari‘atisation: Central Governmental and Regional Discourses of Shari‘a Implementation in Aceh,” Michael Feener and Mark Cammack (eds.), Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia, Harvard: Islamic Legal Studies Program, 2007, 193-215.

Feener, R. Michael. Shari`a and Social Engineering: The Implementation of Islamic Law in Contemporary Aceh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Kloos, David, R. Michael Feener, and Annemarie Samuels (eds.). Islam and the Limits of the State: Reconfigurations of Practices, Community and Authority in Contemporary Aceh, Leiden etc.: Brill, 2015.

Salim, Arskal. Contemporary Islamic Law in Indonesia: Shari`a and Legal Pluralism, Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2015.

Array
Moch Nur Ichwan
Dr. Moch Nur Ichwan holds PhD degree in Religious Studies and Islamic Politics from Tilburg University (2006) and is currently coordinator of doctorate program at the Graduate School of the Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His most recent publication is “Neo-Sufism, Shari‘atism, and Ulama Politics: Abuya Shaykh Amran Waly and Tauhid-Tasawuf Movement in Post-Conflict Aceh,” in C. van Dijk and N. Kaptein (Eds.), Islam, Politics and Change: The Indonesian Experience after the Fall of Suharto, Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016.
Field Notes article

Living Under Islamic Authority: Identity and Community Among Non-Muslims in Aceh


Many know Aceh, Indonesia, as a predominantly Muslim area with a very strong Islamic identity. It is a province of the western-most part of Indonesian archipelago, at the northern tip of Sumatra island. As early as the twelfth century, Aceh was the first locale in this region to witness the establishment of a Muslim sultanate, after which Islam spread to much of the rest of Indonesia. According to the 2010 census, while around 88% of the total Indonesian population is Muslim, almost 99% of the population of Aceh is Muslim. The remaining one percent non-Muslim residents (around 55 thousand) living in Aceh are Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, and Confucians. This non-Muslim minority largely lives in towns or districts along the provincial border with North Sumatra, such as Singkil, Subulussalam, Kutacane, and Tamiang. Another concentration of the non-Muslim population is found in population centers such as Lhokseumawe, Langsa, and the provincial capital of Banda Aceh.

Researchers Arskal Salim and Moch Nur Ichwan interview a religious leader in Kutacane.

Of those cities or districts where non-Muslims live in Aceh, both Kutacane and Singkil have the largest non-Muslim population. For this reason, we visited these sites first for this Contending Modernities research project. Along with Moch Nur Ichwan (my co-investigator) and Marzi Afriko (a local research assistant), we arrived at these bordering districts in March 2016. We started our trip not from Banda Aceh, but from Medan, the capital of the North Sumatra province. We did so not only because of Medan’s relative proximity, but also to see and feel how much both districts are culturally and demographically affected by North Sumatra, which is quite different from Aceh. While Aceh is primarily a Muslim province, North Sumatra is a province with a large Protestant population.

Given the long presence of non-Muslims in Aceh and the fact that sharia Islamic rules are now officially enforced in Aceh since the beginning of the twenty first century, we are interested in finding answers to the following questions: 1) How does the local implementation of sharia in Aceh affect relationships between people of different ethnic and religious affiliations? 2) How do ethnic and religious minority groups perceive and respond to the enforcement of sharia? Are they optimistic or pessimistic about their future in the province? And 3) How can we explain the process of identity and community making for non-Muslims in Aceh given they now live under Islamic authority?

Like in other areas of Indonesia, the burning issues that bring interreligious relations sharply to the fore are religious conversion and the establishment of places of worship for religious minorities. As early as 1968, a church was burned in Meulaboh, in West Aceh, and from then on the presence of a new church in any part of Aceh has been contentious. Muslims in Aceh and elsewhere in Indonesia view churches with suspicion as hubs for spreading the influence of Christianity. Some members of the Muslim majority fear that churches are platforms for proselytization aimed at gradually converting Muslims.

Our recent site visit to Kutacane and Singkil generated more questions. Both districts have a strong presence of Protestants both in terms of population and the public presence of churches and Christian symbols. However, while in Kutacane people with different religious backgrounds are bound by a variety of social relations including long traditions of interreligious marriage, the people who live in Singkil tend to be socially segregated. What are factors that foster religioethnic engagement in Kutacane and social barriers Singkil? How do non-Muslims in both districts identify themselves and build their own community? To what extent are they able to address the social constraints of living under Aceh’s Islamic sharia rules—like dietary restrictions and bans on alcohol?

Our tentative findings reveal an interesting hypothesis. It seems that people who live in Singkil are uncertain about how to present their social identity: in particular, their insider or outsider status. The question of whether or not Singkil is within the Acehnese ethnic group’s zone of influence, or how much it has been Acehnized, remains unresolved. The Acehnese are the majority ethnic group who live on the northern tip of Sumatra. Almost all of the Acehnese are Muslims, and to be Acehnese is to be associated with Islam. As Singkil is located on the provincial border, near populations of non-Muslims in North Sumatra, the presence as well as the influence of the Acehnese in this region has generated strong ethno-religious rivalries. Unlike other places in Aceh, territorial and ethno-religious “insider” identities do not cleanly overlap: to be from Singkil does not simultaneously reference both ethnic and religious categories. In fact, the question of who is an insider remains contested.

The population of Singkil is predominantly composed of members of the Batak Pakpak group. Although some of them are Muslim, unlike the Acehnese, their identity as Batak Pakpak is independent of their Muslim identity. In fact, many Batak Pakpak are non-Muslim. Before Indonesia’s independence in 1945, these non-Muslim Batak Pakpak were a majority population across the region. The provincial division after the independence made non-Muslim Batak Pakpak a majority population in North Sumatra province, while across the border in Singkil, in the Aceh province, the majority is Muslim Batak Pakpak. For this historical reason, non-Muslim Batak Pakpak who currently live in Aceh Singkil refuse to be identified as migrant outsiders. In summary, to be from Singkil implies identity elements that do not easily coexist with those of the Acehnese. So when it comes to the current term for the regency and town, ‘Aceh Singkil’, one would think that two different things are forcefully blended. And, this blend is yet incomplete.

In contrast, Kutacane is widely known as the home of the Alas, the predominant ethnic group which has lived in this area for centuries. The Alas are distinct from the Acehnese. However, like the Acehnese, most Alas people are Muslim. And being Muslim, the Alas easily integrated into the prevailing political culture in the province including the implementation of sharia. In the meantime, non-Muslims living in Kutacane are mostly from the Batak Karo sub-ethnic group. They are considered outsiders who migrated from North Sumatra. Thus, compared to Non-Muslim Batak Pakpak in Singkil who contend with Muslim local residents (some of whom are also Batak Pakpak) for “insider” status, non-Muslim Batak Karo in Kutacane seem to have accepted their outsider status and are less motivated to compete politically with the local Alas residents. The non-Muslim Batak Karo are recognized and accepted in the region as a distinct entity, and therefore have more reasons to remain a separate community. As such, despite inter-ethnic social relationships with Muslim Alas, the Batak Karo also have opportunities to express their particular religious identity even under Islamic sharia authority.

 

Photo Credit: Arskal Salim. A woman drives by the Religious Court of Singkil, which hands down sharia law for the regency.

Array
Arskal Salim
ARSKAL SALIM is currently Professor of Politics of Islamic Law at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) in Jakarta, Indonesia. He obtained a PhD in Law from Melbourne Law School, Australia, in 2006. His PhD dissertation was published by Hawaii University Press in 2008 with the title: Challenging the Secular State: The Islamization of Laws in Modern Indonesia. Having completed his PhD, he went to Germany for a postdoctoral research fellowship at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology from 2006 to 2009. His postdoctoral project then was published in 2015 by Edinburgh University Press with the title: Contemporary Islamic Law in Indonesia: Sharia and Legal Pluralism.
Authority, Community & Identity article

Religious Festivals, Community Engagement and Peaceful Co-Existence


Community engagement is an important mechanism to maintain peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic and multicultural country like Indonesia. It is comprised of the active involvement by diverse members of a given society in mutually beneficial interactions. In Lombok, an island in the eastern part of the country and home to many ethnicities and religions, one way to generate community engagement is through public religious observances and cultural festivals. They can serve as a means for social integration, peace, and harmony, as evidenced in various events.

For example, people of different ethnic backgrounds and religious affiliations participated in the 26th national Qur’anic reading festival in Mataram last summer. While the Hindu-Balinese deployed pecalang (civil guards) to safeguard the festival parade, Catholic students joined the choir team and sung the festival anthem in the opening ceremony. In another festival featured in the top image, called perang topat  (a theatrical war using rice cake) in the area of Pura Lingsar, west Lombok, Hindus and Muslims gather, interact, and compete in religious and musical performances. On Christmas morning members of Radio Antar Penduduk Indonesia/RAPI civil force assisted the police to ensure the safety of Christians during their rituals. While this is a secular civil association with no affiliation to any one religion or ethnic group, a mix of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and others make up its membership. Furthermore, the Ansor of Mataram Branch, the youth wing of Nahdlatul Ulama/NU (the largest Islamic organization in the country), has successfully sponsored multiple interreligious gatherings in remembrance of a pluralist figure, the late fourth Indonesian president and NU former leader Abdurrahman Wahid. It has also supported the congregation of Gereja Yesus Kristus Tuhan (GYKT church) in its so-far unsuccessful efforts to obtain a permit to establish a new church.

From the left: researcher, policewoman, and RAPI members in the front of the main gate of Gereja Protestan Indonesia Barat (GBIP church) in Mataram on Christmas morning, 2016.

Cultural festivals promote community engagement along cultural and ethno-religious lines, lessening segregation through what may be extended contact in preparation for the event and establishing relationships and communication between groups. In order for public engagement to have greater positive impacts and reach, it needs to be “scaled up”, to borrow Robert Hefner’s word, by involving broader community participation. Scaling up public engagement requires integrating diverse groups into more religious and cultural festivals and other regular community programs. According to a senior Christian priest, there has been no systematic grass-roots peacemaking effort for the purpose of mediating Muslim-Christian tensions in Lombok since the 2000 outbreak of violence. Instead, what has continued is inter-group consolidation amongst elite and top figures. The Indonesian inter-religious harmony forum (Forum Kerukunan Umat Beragama/FKUB, a state body) holds regular meetings with state officials, the intelligence service, the police, community leaders, as well as other secular and religious authorities about the religious social dynamic, security, and intolerance. Those assembled seek to formulate the best mechanism to curb intolerance or violent conflict. For example, within a week of the destruction of a mosque in Tolikara, Papua, in June of 2015, the provincial FKUB board quickly responded to the incident by inviting all community and religious leaders to unite. This is an important mechanism, but it only addresses tensions at a certain level of society.

What has not been sufficiently developed are formal or informal encounters at the grassroots level which involve all community members regardless of their ethnic and religious affiliations. Religious cultural events or festivals help resolve this problem because almost everyone is welcome to participate and engage. Through such festivals, people interact and engage intensively, establishing channels of communication and relationships. The lack of positive exposure to diverse people is a major concern for efforts to eradicate intolerance. The failure, or at least the postponement, of the approval for the GYKT church noted above underscores the effects of insufficient community engagement with this minority Christian community. Recently, the FKUB of Mataram city issued a recommendation to the Mataram city government advising the GYKT congregation be permitted to build a church. However, the recommendation is now at odds with the opposition of the majority of the local community. While procedural or administrative steps have been fulfilled, intolerance remains a roadblock. The problem arises mainly because none of the GYTK congregation lives in the area where the church will be built. More importantly, the congregation and the community hardly communicate or engage in public events together. This leads one to ask whether a new religious space can be built in a community where no congregational members live.

In Indonesia, it is legally nearly impossible to erect a new place of worship that does not correspond to the majority religion in a given community. The Minister of Religious Affairs and Minister of Home Affairs Joint Decree No. 8 and 9/2006 require at least 60 local residents’ approval and 90 available religious adherents before a place of worship can be built. While in practice adherents to the majority religions in Indonesia often do not fulfill the requirement nor do they have serious difficulties in meeting it, religious minorities have often found it to be a major obstacle. They believe that the decree discriminates against them. However, the examples from Lombok suggest that the issue is not solely a legal one. Rather, it is also a cultural issue. The solution to this problem is often contingent upon the management of communication and engagement with the local community where the new place of worship will be constructed.

A Catholic bishop baptizes children on Christmas at St Maria Immaculata Church, Mataram, one the most damaged churches in the 17th of January, 2000 riot

This can be seen in the cases of a church for the Gereja Kemah Injil Indonesia community (GKII) and a Christian college called Sekolah Tinggi Theologia Injili Indonesia (STTII). The GKII church does not yet have an official permit from the local government in Mataram. The GKII contends that it has completed requirements to obtain a permit that will give it the status of a permanent “legal” church, but it has not yet been approved. The priest of the church, however, does not consider this as important as the proper functioning of the church and regular services for its members. Every year, his church celebrates Christmas openly and invites local community leaders and sub-district heads. To gain community support, the church is involved in community social work, such as giving to charity and caring for the environment. A similar approach is taken by STTII. Although this college holds an official permit, it continues to cooperate with non-Christian locals (most of whom are Muslim) and comply with their social conventions, such as participating in community-based security at night (ronda), celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (mawled), and attending burial ceremonies whenever a neighbor passes away. As a result of this engagement, the college principal suggests, non-Christian neighbors have never considered the presence of the college a threat. Indeed, the ability to build and maintain houses of worship in these cases may be predicated upon the positive esteem of their non-Christian neighbors.

The social and cultural practices which these two Christian institutions have adopted in their respective communities are by no means obligatory. Rather, the institutions are seeking the most viable way to negotiate a strict legal boundary or cultural barrier. The goal is to establish good communication and enhance social engagement. These are key parts of accelerating social integration. Further efforts by the parties concerned, including the state agencies, religious authorities, community leaders and non-government organizations, must move beyond elite dialogue to focus on strengthening and enhancing community engagement.

 

Photo Credit: Mohamad Abdun Nasir

2 Comments on Religious Festivals, Community Engagement and Peaceful Co-Existence Array
Mohamad Abdun Nasir
Mohamad Abdun Nasir is a lecturer at the Department of Islamic Law and Economics at the Graduate School of the State Islamic Institute (IAIN) Mataram. He received a Fulbright Presidential Scholarship and Emory Laney Graduate School Scholarship for his doctoral degree at Emory University, where he earned his PhD in Islamic studies in 2013. His recent publications have appeared in the Asian Journal of Social Science and Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.
Theorizing Modernities article

Bridging Ethnoreligious Divides in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Choosing Peace Together through Interreligious Action for Conflict Transformation


Choosing Peace Together (CPT) was a CRS-run program in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) that operated from 2010 to 2014 in partnership with Caritas of the Bishops’ Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Two decades after the formal conclusion of the war, CPT demonstrates the constructive role of inter-religious action in responding to enduring deep ethnoreligious divisions in post-war contexts of trauma and in working intently on substantial reconciliation. In distinction from the apparent secularity of land conflicts in Mindanao, BiH’s deep ethnic divisions overlap with religious identities (Christian Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks), and thus a superficial analysis posits religion as a driver of conflict. In both cases, however, religion intersects in complex and dynamic ways with the history of violence, the construction of rigid and exclusionary identity boundaries, and the potential for conflict transformation. The mono-cultural/ethnic/religious nation is an outcome of modern nation-making, in spite of romantic claims of primordial nationalistic authenticity. The fact that exclusivist ethnoreligious warrants and the war in BiH are very recent historical developments counters potential narratives that suggest ancient hatreds and inevitable separationist impulses as the conflict’s primary causes.

In post-war BiH, ethnic divisions still loom strongly, especially in associations of war victims, which tend to harbor hostile views of ethnic others. Counting around 150,000 members, these associations are typically mono-ethnic, and exert broad and substantial informal influence on public opinion. Likewise, in intergenerational terms, and due to strict ethnic segregation of schooling and curriculum, youth born after the war’s conclusion are exposed to routine dehumanizing of other communities by parents, educators, and media while harboring no memories of inter-communal interactions and peaceful cohabitation. Such youth, Nell Bolton and Edita Colo Zahirovic explain in their overview of the CRS/BiH CPT program, are even more predisposed to resist reconciliation efforts than their parents, fearing that reconciliation means accepting the suffering their parents endured during the war. CPT, consequently, was designed as a three-part psychosocial training on communication, trauma, and forgiveness, followed by “Speaking Out” events where war survivors publicly share their stories. When implemented with youth, CPT also included interactive performances using the approach of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, a three-week Peer Peace Education Camp, and an online Small School of Peacebuilding. CPT’s theory of change posited that if potential spoilers (in this case, war victims and youth) were to embrace reconciliatory efforts, and if influential organizations demonstrated support of such efforts, then reconciliatory attitudes would spread to organization members and to broader societal circles. Survey data produced by CPT in BiH indeed suggest that the targeted workshops strengthened inter-communal interaction and mutual understanding, with 84% of participants reporting willingness to consider the possibility of forgiveness. 84 “Speaking Out” events subsequently facilitated interethnic panels of war survivors, reaching over 3,500 audience members who, when surveyed, reported that such events contributed to attitudinal change toward other ethnicities (in one location over 80% reported such a change).

A youth peace camp

CPT’s focus on open discussion of painful memories facilitated transformative experiences on personal and inter-personal levels. However, in some instances, “Speaking Out” caused anxiety and re-victimization, highlighting enduring needs for psychosocial support. Another shortcoming was the inability to offer pathways from personal and inter-personal (horizontal) transformations to (vertical) policy-level structural change as in the Binding, Bonding, and Bridging program in Mindanao, when municipal authorities became stakeholders in inter-communal land dispute management. CPT also overlooked providing participants with tools and resources for “re-entry” into communities where rigid ethnic other-ing still persists, as well as the peacebuilding potential of (but also obstacles for) intentionally involving women in the male-dominated space of discussions of wartime memories.

Despite all these shortcomings, CPT, by Bolton and Zahirovic’s account, effectively illustrates the binding, bonding, and bridging approach formalized later for the context of the conflict in Mindanao. This 3B method focuses on three sets of activities: binding activities focus on self-transformation (including through trauma healing processes); bonding activities direct attention to intra-group relation-building as constituting a necessary stage for inter-group dialogue and collaboration, which represent the third bridgingtype of activities. According to Bolton and Zahirovic, CPT demonstrated the role of trauma healing and self-transformation in the 3B method in particular as mechanisms for inter-ethnoreligious recognition.

Focusing on youth and other potential spoilers as loci of reconciliation through trauma healing and “counter-messaging” suggests that hermeneutical work that draws upon religio-cultural and historical literacy is a necessary, if less attended to, dimension of the assessment of CPT in BiH as a peacebuilding mechanism. Indeed, the case study of CPT illuminates the distinct ways in which the 3B approach could operate in transforming narratives, perceptions of the “other,” and societal reconciliation through inter-ethnoreligious engagement and truth-telling. Like in Mindanao where religious and indigenous leaders in the barangays were key to implementing 3B, CPT too highlights the potential role of religious actors in promoting such projects for social cohesion. By “counter-messaging,” I mean the ways in which re-interpretive work counters the various levels at which exclusionary narratives and other-ing unfold in the media and in school curricula.

While, in Mindanao, the effectiveness of the 3B program was measured in terms of capacity to mediate land conflicts among Christians, Muslims, and other indigenous people, in BiH the effectiveness of CPT was measured by tracking attitudinal shifts and greater recognition of the other’s authentic narratives among Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. To reach such transformative spaces, it is necessary to engage more deeply with questions of how stereotyping of other ethnoreligious communities can be combated through counter-messaging (including through transgressive theatre) and challenging historiographical accounts in text books. The role of religion, therefore, is more interpretive than instrumental as in the case of Mindanao, where traditional religious leaders were identified for the communal traction they already possessed and which was enhanced through inter- and intra-religious work as well as training in more “secular” conflict resolution skills.  By contrast, inter-ethnoreligious action in BiH–and especially action that could offer pathways to reconciliation and desegregation of ethnoreligious spheres–requires re-narrating religion’s intersections with national historiographies and their reproduction in media and popular artistic expressions. Hence, such an analysis calls for more research on how religious literacy can participate in peace media, art, youth engagement, and curricula development pertaining to efforts for re-narration and cultivation of empathy and inclusive democratic praxis.

 

Photo credit: Velija Hasanbegovic for CRS

Array
Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Field Notes article

Young New Delhi Muslims Vie for a Position in Contending Modernities Course


Early Saturday morning, January 7th, 90 young men and women braved a much-needed downpour to the Don Bosco provincial house in the Okhla area of New Delhi, India. All graduates of Muslim seminaries (madrasas), they gathered in the auditorium for the opportunity to be one of the fifteen finalists in a unique post-seminary course designed to engage them in critical Islamic and scientific discourses. The goal: the ability to confidently yet ethically engage a modernity that is worlds away from the society evoked by the premodern texts they exclusively studied during their madrasa training.

The event, organized by Contending Modernities (CM) Co-Director and Professor of Islamic Studies, Ebrahim Moosa, and CM’s Lead Faculty for the project Dr. Mahan Mirza, with support from the India-based Dr. Waris Mazhari, was the launch of the Moosa’s “Advancing Scientific and Theological Literacy in Madrasa Discourses” project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Another launch event will be held in Gujranwala, Pakistan, to identify the first international cohort for the three-year Madrasa Discourses project. The South Asian recruits will be joined by a handful of conversation partners, also madrasa graduates, based at Darul Qasim in Chicago. The project arises out of Moosa own journey in India’s madrasas, which is recounted in his book What is a Madrasa? The book, written for a non-specialist audience, illuminates Moosa’s proposals for the change and renewal of Islamdom’s complex knowledge traditions.

New Delhi hosts a variety of schools of Islamic thought, and the applicants to the Madrasa Discourses project were no exception. Selected from over 250 students, the madrasa graduates present that Saturday morning came from Barelvi, Deobandi, Jamaʿat-i Islami, and Salafi denominations of madrasa franchises. Most of these madrasa graduates are currently pursuing their higher education in the humanities, seeking academic careers in Islamic Studies, scholarship in Arabic, Urdu and Persian literature, international relations, journalism, and law.

Provided with hot tea on arrival to ward off the uncharacteristically cold weather, the 90 students took admissions tests regarding their general knowledge of Islamic history, law, and theology, and science. They were also evaluated for their competency in English and Arabic and completed a written component to gauge their independent thinking skills and understanding of human dignity and renewal in the Islamic tradition. Of those, 37 returned the next day for interviews with the project leaders.

The Madrasa Discourses project in India will soon announce 17 finalists who will pursue the challenging, albeit rewarding, course over three years. Students will polish their English language skills and delve into history, science, theology, and other fields through weekly online seminars hosted at Notre Dame in collaboration with South Asia based scholars. Notre Dame-based Dr. Mirza will conduct an in-person intensive week-long seminar each academic semester, and during a two-week annual summer workshop students will be exposed to a broad array of scholars and experts. Describing his vision for the project, CM Co-Director Ebrahim Moosa shared the buoyant hope that these young scholars will transfer the intellectual expertise and skills gained into myriad forms of service for their communities and beyond by advancing human dignity, compassion, and beauty in human development.

 

Photo courtesy of Waris Mazhari.

Array
Dania Straughan
Dania is Program Manager at the Contending Modernities research initiative, where she oversees operations and contributes to program development. Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies. She is active in efforts to establish restorative justice pathways in her local community, and volunteers to advance grant making for community-led social cohesion programs globally. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Global Currents article

Taking it Back from the Global Catholic Right: Reclaiming the Underworld of the Religious Imagination


As we struggle to understand the rightwing populist movements that have taken the world stage, Roman Catholicism has turned out to have an unexpected, tragic starring role. Those who work in the expansive global network of Catholic thinking (universities, high schools, popular or university presses, parishes, magazines, think tanks, and NGOs) cannot responsibly ignore this. Anyone seeking to make sense of the world we find ourselves in should also take note. How can this movement’s religious imagination—its theology, its spirituality—be understood? Most importantly, what might a distinctive mode of resistance look like?

In the United States, white Catholics voted for Trump by a wide margin. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, is a devout Catholic, and the transcripts of his (warmly received) speech given to the Vatican have recently been released. General Michael Flynn, the choice for national security advisor, hails from a large Irish Catholic family. In France, the devout and staunchly conservative François Fillon has pulled ahead in the presidential primaries, supported by those now known as les zombies catholiques. The term “zombie Catholics” refers to the faithful who had long been dismissed in secular France, but have suddenly, as if from the dead, risen up to assert their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Throughout Eastern Europe, the far right gather under a broad Catholic-nationalist coalitions in the region, including Poland’s League of Polish Families. Around the world, these populist movements present themselves as the besieged, traditionalist victims of the secular, elite establishments of power.

At one level, the centrality of Catholicism here makes sense. Despite the gilded thrones and papal rings that might suggest otherwise, there is a deep history of Catholic scorn for establishment powers. Within this theological imagination, through Jesus, God chose the least and lowliest of vessels to enter into human history, not as a real king, but as an infant who grew up and surrounded himself with the lowly, the poor, the criminals, and the generally unfit. It makes sense to Christians that the most reviled would have special divine favor, not the centers of worldly power. The uneducated, the poor, and the rejected are endowed with a transgressive kind of holiness. Catholic sermons and hagiographies throughout history constantly remind people of this inverted logic. To be holy or authoritative, the lack of respectable credentials can be a sure route to success.

Hagiographies of St. Francis often begin when Francis strips himself naked before the shocked townspeople of Assisi. When Teresa of Avila interrupts the narrative flow of her mystical theology in The Interior Castle with “But I am so stupid!” it is not only internalized oppression. Nor is it rational, but it is the Christian logic of inversion at work. When French novelist Léon Bloy highlighted the sanctity of the protagonists of his books (the orphans, the poor, the insane, the disfigured) he always, as a contrast, described the blind and deaf elite, oblivious to the cries of the vulnerable from below. Bloy’s 1902 Exégèse des Lieux Communs [Exegesis of the Commonplaces] was a collection of satirical aphorisms from the bourgeoisie (today it would be like a parody of Chicken Soup for the Soul). It made a splash: in 1928, Walter Benjamin called it “splendid. A more embittered critique, or rather satire of the bourgeois could hardly have been written.” We see this Catholic mockery of authority in artists closer to home too, like the late, great comedic genius Chris Farley. His character Matt Foley pokes fun at parental authority, clueless disciplinarians, and his own huge body. Bruce Springsteen had all this in mind in his new memoir: “I don’t always participate in my religion but I know somewhere… deep inside… I’m still on the team. This was the world where I found the beginnings of my song. In Catholicism, there existed the poetry, danger, and darkness that reflected my inner self.” Here is the almost religious aura that surrounds mockery of those in charge, peering at what’s underneath, and endowing that underbelly with a new kind of reverence and power. It is a vision that can steer the conversation. In her 1962 Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas, herself a Catholic, theorized as a feature in fact of all religions, not just Catholicism. In the realm of ordinary reality, according to Douglas, we work to excise death, danger, and weakness from our lives. But in the religious domain, what is taboo carries what she called a “symbolic load” in our psyches that can serve as a powerful source of relief, regeneration, and resistance.

When, in 2014, French sociologists Emmanuel Todd and Hervé Le Bras declared those French Catholic populists on the right who oppose gay marriage “Catholic zombies,” the grotesque term was meant as an invective. But the zombie is a contemporary symbol that marks that strange liminal space between life and death. To call these populists zombies was to inject their transgression of liberal norms with the foulness of death and turn it into an ultimate symbol of taboo, giving it more power. It made perfect sense that we suddenly saw pictures of white, middle-class Catholic French activists dressed up in zombie costumes, fake blood coming out of their mouths, holding up signs reading, “No gay marriage!” In the United Sates, white Trump supporters wore pins emblazoned with their new repugnant monikers: deplorables. The more transgressive Trump and his followers seemed, the more fascination and desire gathered around them.

So in one way, what we see in the rise of right wing populism among Catholics is simply an extension of the Christian logic of inversion. But the differences are noteworthy. We saw, for instance, in Trump’s campaign an antiestablishment mockery of the elites (that charade has now all but disappeared). But the “taboo” was not only to mock the elites, but to insult the world’s multicultural present and its attention to race, religious pluralism, and gender. Trump was not just poking fun at the media establishment and Washington, D.C., but mocking the vulnerable, especially the elites who care about the vulnerable: his own victims of sexual assault, people with disabilities, American Muslims. This violated the logic of Christian inversion and the basic rules of humor (which tends to be about overturning hierarchies). It’s funny to see a powerful man in a tuxedo slip on a banana. But a little old lady? No. This is why Trump was so stridently unfunny and un-Christian even if he played, on the surface, with their transgressive logic. He was using psychic flirtation with a taboo critique of the mainstream, but deepened, rather than overturned, basic hierarchies.

In the work of antiestablishment Catholic writers who went on to have lasting power—like Dorothy Day or Léon Bloy—there is, admittedly, also sometimes a proximity to insanity, but humanity is eventually revealed within the peril. They focus on the concrete reality of protagonists bought in from the margins, and despise efforts to obscure their lives. For example, in Bloy’s 1909, Le Sang du Pauvre [Blood of the Poor], he inveighed against on the horrors of child labor practices, which were rhetorically condemned throughout Europe but still widespread. Catholics tended then to blame everything on secularism or Protestants, but Bloy, at his best, resisted temptations to change the subject: “In order that no one may say ‘religion is forgotten,’ the little girls’ workshops are often managed by nuns!” he wrote.

In contrast, right wing populism now is a studied refusal to attend, in any way, to the actual material reality of vulnerable people’s lives. It is a projection of ideology that never encounters reality. Instead, their flirtation with taboo lands its focus not on the humanity of people struggling, but on scapegoats. The conversations steer themselves, as if irresistibly, to immigrants and Islam. In Steve Bannon’s comments to the Vatican, there is a blend of populist frustration with banks but the activist energy gathers for a war against Islam, strengthening our nation against it, and an urging to return to our “Judeo-Christian roots.” This fanciful and divisive rhetorical construct is a dangerous diversion playing to basest instincts in human nature. It helped create the culture we are in at the moment, where it perfectly acceptable to select a national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who has called Islam a “vicious cancer.” What could that possibly signal other than a call for the absolute violent destruction of Islam by “Judeo-Christians?”

In Europe, Islam and immigrants are scapegoated too, but among Catholics, the politically active populism focuses a great deal on homosexuality, feminism, and changing gender norms. One feature of their success has been to link their resistance to liberal gender norms to anti-Americanism. This keeps the antifeminist and antigay activism still seemingly tethered to a respectable anti-elitism and anti-hegemony. Activists associated with the Catholic group La Manif pour Tous [Protest for All] in France, for instance, protest gay marriage and inclusion of the idea of gender in schools (as opposed to biological sex), by framing these issues as an American invasion. As historian Camille Robcis has shown, in activist literature the term theory of gender is often rendered in English even in French pamphlets to signal its foreignness and Americanness. Rightwing activism slides easily into longstanding French Catholic anti-American sentiment, signaling that family relations, like so much else in our world, are tragically in danger of Americanization. This brand of populism is a much easier sell.

***

So what should we do? If this weird religious imagination with its taboos, inversions, and scapegoats is the problem, sober-minded secularism must be the answer, right? No. This must be emphasized: we cannot succumb to the familiar triumphal narrative of secularism. This almost always makes things worse.

In trying to imagine alternatives, my own research has focused on the small community of Catholics who played important roles in resisting anti-Semitism and fascism in France in the 1930s and 1940s. Though our world is radically different from theirs (a point I state emphatically), their ways of pushing against the widespread scapegoating of religious others and the acquiescence to authoritarianism overlaps with some of our own concerns. Three distinctive resources help us imagine Catholic kinds of resistance today.

First, the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac was among the few priests active in the resistance. In letters and essays from 1939-1944, he showed prescient awareness of the widespread but largely unconscious feelings of repugnance against Jews spreading throughout Europe, animating the violence and indifference. He called it an “invasion of poison” that spread, little by little, into “souls.” To understand it, de Lubac immersed himself in the propaganda literature of Aryan nationalism. “It is repugnant,” he wrote, “to move about again in this bloody filth by rereading these blasphemous pamphlets.” He saw that the propaganda functioned at a deep psychic level of demonization, making sure Christians felt they were so unlike Jews spiritually that their destruction was irrelevant. De Lubac and others insisted their work was a kind of “spiritual resistance.” In some essays, he directly described the violence, but he also worked on the underworld of the religious imagination as it pertained to the vulnerable, highlighting the spiritual vitality of the Jewish scriptures and their connection to Christianity. He honed in on the beauty of Jewish texts and prophets in the Hebrew Bible: “The Prophets shake us still today…. They console us in our distress and revive hope in us. The Psalms nourish our prayer every day.” Against those who would stress separation between Christians and Jews he wrote, “In truth, all this is our heritage. We will no longer allow them to tear it away from us.” De Lubac understood this work as distributing a kind of spiritual food in a time of crisis.

Similarly, the writer Raïssa Maritain, a Catholic convert from Judaism, wrote in 1942 of the beauty of the household Jewish piety she knew growing up as a child in Russia. In her archives, I found a letter from a priest written to her in 1943. “I was not an anti-Semite,” he wrote, “but there was in me a certain repulsion. I have overcome it, and for that I thank you.” Today on our campuses, in book clubs, in magazines, and at conferences, we might consider the power that spiritual, literary, even mystical narratives and art have to reach these levels of repulsion that so many white Catholics feel toward Muslim refugees, gay families, the poor, African Americans, and women who control their reproductive lives. Not all activism has to be about the direct political level of conscious belief, action, and policy. Showing the spiritual depth, beauty, and humanity of a vulnerable group can work effectively on that deeper level.

Second, when I was a graduate student one of my mentors, the beloved Church historian John W. O’Malley, coined a phrase, the “parishization” of Catholicism. It described a process in modernity in which we have come to think only of the parish as the place to find “church” and spiritual nourishment. This wasn’t always the case. In early modern times, monasteries, mendicant societies to aid the needy, confraternities, shrines, and schools were key places for meeting God in community and living out one’s faith. (You can see a summary on page nine of this document.) This opened my eyes up to a feature of the twentieth-century Catholic resisters in Europe that I would have otherwise missed: in their writings there is very little discussion of parishes. I’m sure many of them went to mass, but it wasn’t where the intellectual, spiritual, or social action usually was, by a long shot. Instead it was in the salon of the Maritains, or the events hosted by resister and scholar Marie-Madeleine Davy at the Château de La Fortrelle, or the community gathered around the underground journal Témoignage Chrétien [Christian Witness], and groups like Amitié Chrétienne [Christian Friendship] focused on Jewish-Christian friendship. At the same time, in the same impulse, Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality were sprouting up in the United States. The work was political, but it was also understood to be deeply spiritual, and it didn’t necessarily happen only in the parish.

In our own time, Stephen Pope wrote powerfully about how little Catholic parishes in the U.S. did to resist the authoritarian trends that led us to Trump. He writes of the “anemic, impersonal, and ‘low impact’ character of many of our parishes today.” For Catholics looking for alternative ways to “be” church in addition to the parish, we might think of places like the monasteries that offer spiritual renewal and recharging, like the Benedictine Abbey Regina Laudis in New Bethlehem, CT. Or we might think of places like the thriving immigration center, Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Services in East Harlem. Started by nuns in the 1950s, it is now run by secular women who have a deep respect for the original spirit of founding Sisters. The staff consists mostly of brave, dedicated New York women with social work degrees who work to meet the needs of immigrant families in East Harlem. Or I think of the Abraham House in the South Bronx which helps families with incarcerated parents. Abraham House was started by a French worker priest and Belgian nuns. These are just some institutions near my home that embody the spirit of Catholic resistance. But they are all over the world. They would love to hear from progressive Catholics—or anyone—for support. We might too think about the crucial role that Jesuit Universities have played in places where populations were dangerously vulnerable, like the Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador in the 1980s. In the United States, there are twenty-eight Jesuit universities—so much potential and institutional power! It is in these places, not only the parishes, where the action often is. And they are all still here.

But none of these organizations can carry the weight of inadequate social policies. Alone, they cannot fight whatever cruelties the far right has in store. This leads to my final example. In the 1930s Jacques Maritain described the American community organizer Saul Alinsky as “one of my closest friends who was an indomitable and dreaded organizer of ‘People’s Organizations’ and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as efficacious as they are unorthodox.” Maritain and Alinsky had met through George N. Schuster, then editor of Commonweal and chairman of the board of trustees of Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Maritain wrote in a 1940 letter to his friend Yves Simon, “Alinsky has discovered in community organization work the creative sap of American life and I believe in them can be found the germ of an authentic renewal of democracy.” Through Alinsky, Maritain saw in these community organizations seeds of renewal: the grassroots efforts to put pressure on governments to protect the vulnerable, immigrants, the poor, mothers who cannot afford childcare, low-wage earners. Today, we must include grassroots efforts that have been dismissed as “women’s issues” (or as Maritain wrote, “None of my business!”). In 2016, we don’t need to wait for Catholic men to prioritize issues: we have to put priorities like childcare and access to contraception at the forefront of our efforts to combat poverty at the heart of grassroots demands.

Though whatever efforts we put in at the local level, we should resist the temptation to assume a march towards secularism, even if we’re understandably dismayed at the role many Catholics are playing in the current political moment around the globe. In our protests, art, speeches, books, and teaching, our words and actions should draw deeply from the symbolic wells of the religious imagination: inversions, transgression, blood, death, renewal, redemption. There are risks, to be sure, in engaging its strangeness, but there is a long history of creative, risky thinkers who drew deeply from this symbolic reservoir and combined it with a compassionate, leftist social politics. To think of de Lubac again: “All of this is our heritage. We will no longer allow them to tear it away from us.” But the heritage must be struggled for and reclaimed, constantly. When Charles Péguy wrote, “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics,” I think he meant that it was the mystics, the artists, the writers who spurred our imaginations and opened our horizons, and the politicians, often for the worse but sometimes actually for the better, who took it from there. There is just so much to do.

 

Photo Credit: Laurie Avocado, “Christ of the Breadline”, flickr.com

Array
Brenna Moore
Brenna Moore is Professor of Theology at Fordham University. She works in the area of modern Christianity, with a focus on Catholic intellectual and cultural history in Europe. Dr. Moore’s teaching and research centers on mysticism and religious experience, gender, a movement in theology known as “ressourcement,” (“turn to the sources”) that paved the way for Vatican II, and the place of religious difference in modern Christian thought. She is most recently the author of Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This project explores a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century.