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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.

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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.

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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

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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.
Authority, Community & Identity article

Gender, National Identity, And Nation-Building: Komnas Perempuan & Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia


 

June 2016 was a good month for Komnas Perempuan (Komnas), the National Commission on Violence against Women, an independent state agency. One of Indonesia’s top religious leaders, Dr. (HC) KH. Ma’ruf Amin, National Chair of the Majlis Ulama Indonesia (MUI, the Council of Islamic Leaders, the clerical governmental body that provides Islamic guidance), made an unusual reference to Komnas Perempuan praising the organization’s ongoing efforts to eradicate all forms of violence against women. He also announced that MUI would start paying closer attention to violence against women and issue fatwas against it. Not only did this remark cause great excitement among Indonesian advocates for women’s rights, it also reveals a strategy employed by Komnas of cultivating support among male religious authority figures to address detrimental gender norms and practices.

That same month, Komnas Perempuan commissioners were preparing a visit to the presidential palace on June 9th, to discuss the draft for a law on sexual violence against women with two ministers and President Joko Widodo himself. The bill was considered another victory in the struggle for women’s rights.

The month closed with the governmental decision that 3,143 local Shari’ah-minded laws (perda or peraturan daerah) should be abolished. The decision concerned the rules that were considered to be discriminatory and intolerant and thereby out of alignment with Indonesia’s Constitution. For years Komnas Perempuan and other human rights organizations had produced reports and findings arguing that the majority of these rules were especially harmful for women and children. Working both within and across Muslim, Christian, and other traditions, Komnas and women’s empowerment groups have sought to dismantle prejudicial legislation, and, more profoundly, to change mindsets to allow for the advancement of women and children. Komnas Perempuan’s remarkable success this last June should not be surprising: it is the result of decades of careful work, along with its partner organization of Koalisi Perempuan, to develop women’s agency both through and in spite of discursive traditions. These two women’s movement are notable, in part, for their strategic deployment of religious and secular sources of authority to pursue their aims of women’s agency and flourishing.

The Birth-Hour of Two Women’s Movements

In the chaos leading up to the fall of the Suharto regime in May of 1998, organized groups attacked ethnic Chinese businesses, raping and killing ethnic Chinese women in Jakarta and Solo. This blatant disregard for the bodies and lives of women turned out to be a turning point; two influential organizations were launched that advocate women’s rights: Komnas Perempuan and the Koalisi Perempuan.

After significant pressure, on October 9 of that year Presidential decree 181 announced the creation of Komnas Perempuan, an independent state human rights organization that would address all forms of violence against women. Working closely with local, national and international partners, Komnas was tasked with raising awareness about the many forms of violence that impact Indonesian women.

On December 17th, 1998, a second organization advocating the rights of Indonesian women was launched. Founded by 75 women activists from different regions, the Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia (Women’s Coalition, KPI) aimed to insert gender equality and justice into the newly formed democracy. KPI continues to promote women’s roles in democratic reforms by various capacity building activities that, among others, include anti-corruption education.

Key Loci of Collaborations

Both KPI and Komnas maintain memberships that represent the broad spectrum of Indonesian society, with a diverse membership of internally varied religious affiliations, regions, social classes, and ethnic groups. KPI’s executive committee, for example, includes a broad constituency that includes farmers, laborers, lesbians, prostitutes, and other groups whose voices often remain unheard. The intersection of these constituencies within the democratic processes of the organizations are spaces of lived pluralism, with representatives negotiating cultural and religious practices in order to, often laboriously, set the goals of the two organizations. This process is not free of contention: for example, when issues arise concerning LGBTQ populations, some conservative Muslims or Christians prefer not to involve themselves in the conversations.

The groups work at the fault lines of national laws and regulations, local cultural practices, and religious injunctions. Within this disputed field, KPI and Komnas’ goal is to change the frame of reference concerning issues related to women and gender. Since the majority of Indonesia’s inhabitants is Muslim, the Islamic legal system (fiqh) dominates the social and legal discourses for Muslim as well as for non-Muslim women. However, the division between secular and religious discourses is not clear-cut. In certain circumstances or at certain levels of society individuals or groups use the discourse that is most familiar to them or most appropriate to the occasion. For example, when certain ideas are transmitted via Qur’an or Bible study groups, the leaders will necessarily speak from a religious frame of reference. In other contexts, discourses on universal claims to equality are often couched in religious language by Muslim and non-Muslim women while secular language, for example that used in human rights discourses, can be taken as a challenge to revisit the discussions about respective religious traditions. Surprisingly, secular language is at times used to formulate religious arguments, a topic we will touch upon in a future essay.

Many of the groups related to the two organizations consider religious teachings to be a vehicle for women’s empowerment, for example through discussions about gender relations, the role of women in the family, and religious leadership. Religious language is also being used to encourage women’s participation in political platforms as political positions are considered to provide opportunities to advance ideals of justice and equality. Non-religious sources may be used as well: secular human rights discourses are, in fact, central to promoting recognition of LGBTQ dignity. As such, these women’s rights advocates use different founts of authority in specifically contextualized ways, sourcing religious and secular traditions as appropriate to their particular location.

Komnas and KPI seek external collaborators to further their cause as well. They curry the support of male religious leaders using what Khaled abou elFadl calls “persuasive authority”, paving greater social support for their public activities. In this sense, the organizations selectively work within existing social systems of authority to advance their cause (Chapter 2, 2004).

These two human rights organizations reconfirm a woman’s value as citizen and her duty to guard the democratic principles of the nation state, in particular the ideals of pluralism, meaning that it is forbidden to discriminate against citizens based on gender, religion, ethnicity, or social status. In doing so, they create spaces of agency for women as public defenders of pluralism. They do this in a fiercely pluralist fashion, including women, groups, and organizations of all regions, ethnicities, and religions. Yet these women negotiate complex social rules, and some spaces of agency expand faster than others. For example, there is often a deep and paradoxical gap between these women’s public and their private lives. In the public sphere they can be influential politicians while at home submitting to their husband’s decisions.

Through their work directly with victims, their cultivation of varied supporters and arguments among traditional sources of authority in Indonesia, and their advocacy for women on the regional and national stage, these two organizations have pushed society to reimagine women’s rights and to respect women’s dignity. In other words, Komnas Perempuan and KPI seek to bring about a mental revolution that will lead to real change within society; a nation in which women are full partners in sharing power and authority. They have done this not by drawing on one single source of authority, but by building a multi-perspectival normative commitment to the agency and flourishing of Indonesian women.

 

Photo Credit: Australian Department of Foreign Affairs/Komnas Perempuan. “Komnas Perempuan held a theatrical performance as part in advocating rights of the migrant workers. Many of community member, NGOs, women activists are involved and attend the event. This activity is part of KP exercises to increase KP’s capacity in influencing relevant policy debates affecting women’s rights.”

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Nelly van Doorn-Harder
Professor of Islamic Studies at Wake Forest University. Van Doorn-Harder was born and raised in the Netherlands, were she earned her PhD on the topic of women in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. Before moving to the USA, she was director of a refugee program in Cairo, Egypt, and taught Islamic Studies at universities in the Netherlands (Leiden) and Indonesia (Yogyakarta).
Global Currents article

Conservatism and Liberalism in Morocco: A Conflictual Dynamic in the Post Arab Uprising Era


What are the oppositional dynamics between liberalism and conservatism in Moroccan society in the wake of the so called “Arab spring,” the popular uprisings that swept through North Africa and the Middle East five years ago? This is the central question animating my reflection. The legacy of the “Spring” leads us to several questions: How did the Arab uprising affect the conflictual dynamic between conservatism and liberalism in Morocco? How does the state’s political regime reinforce this conflict? How does the regime employ elements of modernity in order to maintain tradition (as they interpret it)? Why does conservatism have enduring traction? Why is liberalism rejected by a large part of the society itself? And do liberal and conservative groups have a vision and a project for society?

To answer these questions, we need to understand the Moroccan political context. Morocco is an executive and absolute monarchy where King Mohammad VI is considered the commander of the faithful. The king holds complete governmental powers (executive, legislative, and judiciary) and supreme religious authority. Accordingly, the religious apparatus is linked politically to the monarchy and works within the framework of the state’s religious policy. In the context of the Arab popular uprisings, Morocco’s protest movement was launched by a youth coalition on February 20th, 2011, and soon spread to 53 cities, including several major cities. The coalition demanded democracy, freedom, dignity, and social justice. King Mohammad VI responded by announcing a popular referendum in July of that year for constitutional reforms, while also integrating the “moderate” Islamist party (Parti de la Justice et du Développement) into the government as the head of the parliamentary coalition after the managed legislative elections in November 2011. Those two major steps helped mitigate public discontent, ensuring the longevity of the political regime, especially the autocratic monarchy. However, the reforms reinforced paradoxical phenomena which issued from a simultaneous effort to retain traditional social institutions and culture, and to adopt some aspects of liberalism related to secularism, freedom, and human rights. For example, one of the most recent points of conflict between conservatism and liberalism is the call by feminist groups for full gender equality in inheritance law. While some human rights provisions were added to the constitution to promote such equality, as explained below, caveats permit inequality to continue.

The majority of Moroccan youth who protested and aspired to political change are caught in a “conflict between the values of an imposed modernization and traditional values [that] has yet to be settled” (Ben layashi, 2012, p. 149). In Morocco, liberalism is accepted at the economic level but not yet at the societal level around certain social issues, like gender equality. In fact, the attitude of Moroccan youth towards secular and religious spheres alike is extremely ambivalent, sometimes resulting in a creative synthesis of ostensibly clashing values and modes of praxis. For instance, young men may want to have a girlfriend and to carry on a sexual relationship outside of marriage. Yet women are expected to enter into marriage as virgins; as a result some undergo operations to restore or reconstruct the hymen once they find a groom.

The imposed modernization coming initially from the colonial era and now more so from globalization is referred to by its detractors as “westernization.” Liberal civic groups borrowed modernization models wholesale from western societies, especially from France and the United States, and did not produce an endogenous vision and process to modernize society and update societal traditions without erasing identity. As such, liberalism is generally regarded as illegitimate. Given its lack of local roots, this form of liberalism requires top-down imposition, ironically leading both liberals and conservatives to coincide in their support for Morocco’s autocratic regime.

As mentioned above, the 2011 constitution reinforces the traditional role (the sanctity) of the monarch as a commander of the faithful, and keeps modernity as a façade to justify the royal monopoly over spiritual and temporal powers, with the latter defined again by the non-separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers. One of the major characteristics of the Moroccan regime is the use of modern elements by the traditional political apparatus to maintain and preserve its autocratic nature. This is referred to as “change for continuity.” When faced with a threat, the regime implements new reforms to give the people the feeling that a change is happening. However, these are reforms that do not affect the regime’s traditional bases. The regional Arab uprising pushed King Mohammad VI to address the existing request for constitutional reform in order to slow down the turmoil on the streets. However, constitutional reform can achieve little given that the Moroccan regime is not based on the constitution, but relies instead on the traditional contract called “Bay’a” (pledge of allegiance) which makes the king above accountability and even above the constitution itself. In fact, the monarchy is considered the institution that produces the constitution. The latter is simply a modern law which does not change the autocratic monarchy but rather makes it stronger. The king as a commander of the faithful was, and still is after the uprising, the executive chief of the government, the supreme judge nominating judges, the head of the army, and the decision maker for foreign policy with the foreign allies and international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Foundation. At the economic level he is the first entrepreneur.

The 2011 Moroccan Constitution purports to protect many human rights and recognizes their universal aspect if and when they are not opposed to the religious identity of state and society. The “recognized” rights are without precise normative content; for example, the rights to life and physical integrity are not accompanied by a clear abolition of the death penalty (Madani et al., 2011). Also, the constitution provides that certain rights are to be defined and regulated by ordinary or organic laws, many of which remain restrictive: freedom of press is guaranteed but legislation will set the rules of organization and control of public means of communication. The main rules all contain the three red lines, or the “sacred trilogy”: religion, monarchy, and territorial integrity. Other rights and freedoms are contradictory, such as the right of faith and belief: it remains illegal to convert from Islam to other religions, and punishable to tempt a Muslim to convert. It is also forbidden by law to change from Sunnism to Shi’ism or to other Islamic denominations. In a constitution aimed at combining in a non-homogenous way the two concepts of a civic state and a religious state, the role and supremacy of international treaties remains ambiguous. For instance, the equality between women and men was always recognized by the constitution but not by domestic laws or society. Article 19 of the Moroccan Constitution establishes this equality but adds that it must be in accordance with the “permanent characteristics of the kingdom.” The crisis over the family status and the role of women has been aggravated by a mixture of laws, some western and some based on Islam, which leaves Morocco in an ambiguous state between civil and religious legal authority (Gray, 2015, p:41). The royal speech given in 2004 when the reformed family code was officially revealed confirmed that Shari’a is the main legislative source in this case, trumping international regulations. The king said, “I can’t make licit what God made illicit and I can’t make illicit what God made licit,” by which he referred to discussions related to total equality between men and women, in addition to the interdiction of polygamy. With this sentence, the king satisfied conservatives and sent a clear message to liberals that Morocco remains a religious state.

The conflict between conservatism and liberalism in Morocco is very complex in the sense that conservative ideas have coexisted with some liberal views like women’s employment. However, when Islamism gained ground in Morocco in the mid 1980’s, its anachronistically inflexible form of conservatism quickly replaced the flexibility of more traditional local forms of conservatism. Social conservatism remains the status quo, not because it has a roadmap for how to engage with modernity, but rather thanks to religious discourse, the support of society and the state, and the growth of religiosity. Moroccan society still believes in the sacred and in traditions; it is deeply conservative and often does not distinguish Islam from Islamism, religion from religiosity, modernization from westernization, secularism from atheism, and freedom from debauchery. Before the uprising, the liberal requests were elitist; certainly no ordinary people discussed the freedom of expression or gender equity. Since the mid 2000’s, thanks to widely accessible information technology, such debates have reached the wider populace, but after the uprising and given social media many of those topics entered homes without necessarily being adhered to or openly discussed. The debates and the requests remain elitist and do not represent the pressing material needs of most Moroccans.

Liberalism is seen as a threat by much of society; it is widely rejected and only supported by minority groups even after the uprising. The uprising did not shorten the distance between the society and liberalism. On the contrary, the uprising showed how conservative society is, and how it is fearful of losing its Islamic identity to westernized atheists conspiring to implement a foreign agenda.  The liberal trend has not provided an attractive vision for society either; its demands are limited to individual liberties and women’s rights rather than deeper political changes. For example, liberals protest for the right to eat publicly during fasting hours in Ramadan but not for freedom of expression, and they do not criticize the autocratic nature of the political regime. Paradoxically, both liberal and conservative groups defend the ambiguous character of the political regime’s “liberal autocracy” and ask for its protection.

Finally, both Moroccan conservatives and liberals have no long-term intellectual vision. The conservative view is rooted in an effort to protect society and the regime from different shocks caused during the post-colonial era, including globalization as a new form of imperialism, and the Arab uprisings. The liberal view is not mature enough to produce a true modern vision tailored to the society without importing pre-packaged western models. The Arab uprising unveiled a conflictual dynamic between liberalism and conservatism in other Arab contexts, not just Moroccan society, but at same time it uncovered the absence of a plan, leadership, vision, and debate. Manipulated modernism exemplified in the façade of constitutionalism cannot lead to true debate between tradition and modernity, and imported liberalism cannot lead society towards culturally and religiously sensitive modernization that reveals “tradition” as contested and living discursive space rather than a reified ahistorical and cross-cultural package.

 

Photo Credit: Christopher Rose, “Coupling”: “The plaza at the Mosque makes a nice place for young unmarried couples to be alone while still out in public.”

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Hind Arroub
Hind Arroub has a Ph.D in law and political science; she is a Moroccan political and social scientist, a Fulbright senior lecturer and scholar, and adjunct professor at Fordham University at the political science department and the Arabic program. Hind is the founder and director of the Hypatia Institute, an independent and interdisciplinary think tank. Hind is the author of several books and articles, including Approach to the Foundations of Legitimacy in the Moroccan Political System (2009) and Revolutions in the Era of Humiliocracy: On the Arab World Issues (2001).
Global Currents article

The Trump Administration’s Terra Incognita for American Muslims


President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration is terra incognita for American Muslims. Never before has an American president embraced such blatantly discriminatory and dangerous views against Islam and Muslims. Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, has called Islam a “cancer” and a “political ideology” that “hides behind the notion of it being a religion.” Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, has said that “the toxic ideology of Islam” is the largest threat confronting the United States.

Trump’s clear articulation of a dangerously Islamophobic worldview paradoxically presents an opportunity for American Muslims. Muslims, since 9-11, have been cast into one of two binaries: followers of a uniquely violent religion, or apologetic defenders of a simple “religion of peace.” The reality is that Islam is a multifaceted civilizational complex that exists in human history and is undergoing specific sets of dynamics in specific locations. Trump’s era gives Muslims the opportunity to articulate this truth, and in so doing, enjoy the same presumption of complexity and nuance of other communities.

The notion that Islam is a “religion of peace” can be traced back to former President George W. Bush, who aimed to exonerate Muslims following the 9-11 terrorist attacks, eager to contest the notion that “Islam” itself was responsible. Bush’s reasons for this seemed both sincere and strategic: sincere because there is little evidence that Bush and the Bush family itself harbor particular animus toward Muslims; strategic because that administration knew that it would need the assistance of several Muslim-majority countries to prosecute their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I take issue with Bush’s pronouncement not because I believe that Islam prescribes terrorism and violence as a foundational kernel of the faith. This latter notion—one that has steadily taken hold in American political, military, and civil society discourse over the past fifteen years—is the most dangerous philosophical instantiation of Islamophobia in American society today, and one that Trump repeats with characteristic bluntness. I take issue with “Islam is peace” because the statement is a non-sequitur that removes the civilizational complex of Islam from the historicized field of politics, accidents of history, Muslim subjectivities and myriad interactions and intersections with non-Muslims that make up the messy soup of that which constitutes contemporary Islam and Muslims. In other words: sometimes Islam manifests itself peacefully. Sometimes, Islam manifests itself violently. And so on for every example of organized human society.

Embracing nuance and complexity is Muslims’ best hope in the Trump era. To do this, I endorse the progressive Muslim movement’s notion of “double critique”. An ontology of double critique is premised on two notions:

  1. Contemporary Muslims have a serious problem with jihadi groups who use violence to advance their agenda. This violence is predicated on a particular ideology, which cherry picks from the Islamic tradition to produce an exclusionary, supremacist world view that disparages and devalues non-Muslims, women, sexual minorities, and minority Muslim sects. Indeed, in my opinion as an intellectual historian of the Islamic tradition, Islam, in this sense, is in its dark ages.
  2. These challenges are in part produced by and compounded by western colonialism, imperialism, and for Muslim minorities in the western world, white supremacy. Not only do imperialism and colonialism visit violence, war, support for autocratic dictators, and land theft on Muslim nations and societies, but perhaps even worse, Muslims have had to contend with the “colonization of the mind” that attends the process of colonialism: a feeling of inferiority, learned helplessness, and a fear that Muslims cannot solve their own problems.

Donald Trump did not win the popular vote, and is a hopelessly polarizing figure. It is hard to imagine that many of his declarations will be taken seriously by the majority of Americans who did not vote for him, or by most world leaders, many of whom are confused by our presidential choice. As Trump inaugurates what many pundits call our “post-fact society”, his Islamophobic posture will be met with the same incredulity most of his statements and positions will elicit from those still committed to thinking. This theatre of the absurd leaves a space for American Muslims to maneuver within the paradigm of double critique. I believe, therefore, that they should take the opportunity to advance the following during the Trump years:

  1. Build an Islamic theology that emphasizes love, mercy, acceptance of all others, charity, service, humility and kindness—all traits that are found easily and solidly in the Islamic tradition.
  2. Build Muslim institutions, develop intellectuals, nurture spiritual leaders who espouse the values in number one. I say this rather than say that exclusionary, violence-prone, chauvinistic versions of the faith should be “fought” or “resisted.” The reason is that resistance, especially if this is the primary activity, drains our energy without advancing a positive alternative.
  3. In the process, do not demonize any groups, including Muslims with a more conservative understanding of the faith. Conservatism is not the problem—jihadism, exclusionary world views against women and minorities, and violence are. (Ironically, or perhaps not, exclusionary world views and violence against women and minorities also characterize the Trump era.)
  4. American Muslims should partner with American institutions that safeguard civil rights and civil liberties.
  5. American Muslims should stand up for the rights of all minorities in the United States threatened by Trump’s regime, including undocumented Latinos, African Americans, religious minorities such as American Jews, Native Americans, and LGBTQ Americans.

I do not mean to be sanguine about the real dangers a Trump administration presents to American Muslims. We might face very dangerous and dark days, indeed. But, barring very difficult circumstances, the terra incognita of the Trump era can offer American Muslims the opportunity to emerge stronger, more self-articulated, and more inclusive and loving.

Photo Credit: Lion Multimedia Production USA “MichiganMuslims‬ are at the State Capitol!”

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Sarah Eltantawi
Sarah Eltantawi is a scholar of Islam. She is the author of Sharia on Trial: Northern Nigeria's Islamic Revolution (2017, University of California Press), as well as articles on topics ranging from Shi'i Jurisprudence to concepts of Nigerian post-modernity to work on Contemporary Egypt and Gender. Dr. Eltantawi is an analyst of the Muslim-majority world on major media outlets, and Member of the Faculty in Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies (Asst. Prof) at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.
Global Currents article

American Muslims in the Age of President Trump


During the 2016 presidential election, Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University spoke about the “normalization of Islamophobia”. With the election of Donald Trump, there is growing concern among some Americans, especially among American Muslims. Mr. Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lt. General Michael Flynn, has spoken of Islam as a “political ideology” and a “cancer”. As of this writing, there is talk of reviving some version of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which ran from 2002 to 2011, registered some 82,000 people born in Muslim-majority countries, yet resulted in no terrorism-related charges being filed. Thankfully, President Obama dismantled the NSEERS program at the end of 2016, and at the beginning of 2017, Senator Cory Booker and others introduced the “Protect American Families Act” to block any future such registry.

My new book, Muslims and the Making of America, examines the reality of Muslim life in the United States, and shows how Muslims have helped to make America the country that it is. The book reflects not only my own academic work for the past twenty years, but my own life as a Muslim living in America during that time.

I was born in Pakistan, and came to Canada in 1970 when I was 4. I grew up in Toronto, educated there from kindergarten to PhD. In those early days in Toronto in the 1970s, I saw almost no Muslims on television. The only ones I remember were African American athletes, particularly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and the Greatest of All Time, Muhammad Ali. They were my childhood Muslim heroes, and over 40 years later, they remain models for me of how to be a Muslim. Ali passed in 2016, and at the end of last year, Kareem received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Both men were also instrumental in civil rights, and not just exemplars of athletic greatness. When we think of the history of the civil rights movement in America, how many of us think of Malcolm X when we think of Dr. Martin Luther King?

Through Ali and Kareem, I learned about the history of Islam in African American communities. We estimate that at least 10 percent of the slaves brought over from West Africa were Muslim. So to take only one example, in 1730, a Muslim slave named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, also known as Job ben Solomon, was brought as a slave to Annapolis, Maryland. This, one needs to remember, was two years before George Washington was born. Solomon’s story was told in a slave narrative that was published in London in 1734.

Two centuries earlier, in 1528, another Muslim, Estevancio the Moor, landed in what is now Florida. He was a slave of Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and they both accompanied the Spanish conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez on his expedition to the New World. Estevancio explored not only Florida but also Arizona, before he was killed in 1539 by the Zuni in what is now New Mexico. During the second presidential debate, Hilary Clinton mentioned that Muslims had been in America since the time of George Washington. In fact, we’d been there over 90 years before the Pilgrims arrived, and some two centuries before General Washington was born. There has, it surprises some people to learn, never been an America without Muslims.

American Muslims have served in the United States military since the Revolutionary War. There were some 300 Muslim soldiers who served during the American Civil War. That’s not a large number, certainly, but it also gives the lie to the oft-repeated claim that Muslims are newcomers to the United States. At the end of 2015, ABC News reported figures from the US Department of Defence that some 5,896 Muslims were serving in the military. That number may be higher, since some 400,000 service members did not self-identify their faith. So almost 6,000 American Muslims serve in the armed forces, helping to defend their country.

In 1997, I moved to Los Angeles where I’ve lived for the past twenty years, teaching and researching about American Muslims. For the last dozen years, I’ve done that in a Catholic university. Last year, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego spoke of “the New Nativism”, the connection between American Muslims and American Catholics. We are very much alike, conceived in Protestant American history as alien others, Catholics in the 19th century, and Muslims in the 21st. American Muslims, like American Catholics, are ethnically diverse. African American Muslims represent somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of American Muslims. Another third of American Muslims are South Asian, while the last third are Middle Eastern (which may mean being Arab, Iranian, Kurdish, etc.). Like American Catholics, American Muslims are an American success story, solidly middle class and mostly professional. There are thousands of American Muslim physicians, for example, perhaps as many as 20,000 if one looks at information from the Islamic Medical Association of North America.

In 2006 the first Muslim was elected to Congress, Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, an African American convert to Islam. The other Muslim in Congress, André Carson from Indiana, is also an African American convert, elected in 2008. It’s no surprise that the two Muslims in the U.S. Congress are both African American, given the long history of Islam in African American communities. But there are also issues for American Muslims.

In 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen was killed in a drone strike. However, he was also a U.S. citizen, and as such should have been subject to the “due process” that is the right of every citizen. And this was under the authorization of a Democratic president, Barack Obama. One wonders what will happen under President Trump. Again, there is a connection here with American Catholics, who in their history were also seen as “un-American”. A few days after the 2016 election, Archbishop Jose Gomez, himself a Mexican immigrant, spoke eloquently about the Church siding with immigrants, Latino/a or otherwise.

There is talk of “sanctuary”, and of sanctuary cities, where local police will not cooperate with federal requests to detain immigrants. These include major cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as over 350 counties. On the one hand, I appreciate the gesture, that local police in Los Angeles will not do the work of federal immigration authorities. And of course I appreciate the bravery of those in the New Sanctuary Movement, who risk their own imprisonment to help immigrants. They are living out the highest ideals of their religious traditions to do justice and provide hospitality to the stranger.

On the other hand, I am worried. The concept of “sanctuary” is a noble one, and the idea of a church or other place of worship as an inviolable, sacred space is an important one. But I also hold no illusions, and I think there is a blurring of legal categories. As much as cities may declare themselves “sanctuaries”, the marginalized are still at risk. The federal government still has very strong powers, and if we can kill our own citizens (something that we in a Catholic majority state like California, in direct violations of the teachings of the Church, voted for), we certainly can arrest and deport them. I hope that those in need can find sanctuary in our churches, mosques and synagogues, but I also pray that it doesn’t come to that.

Photo: Malcolm X photographs Mohammad Ali after his defeat of Sonny Liston in 1964. Credit: Bob Gomel, EPHouston [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Amir Hussain
Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on Islam, American Muslims, and world religions. His most recent book, Muslims and the Making of America, was published by Baylor University Press in October 2016. From 2011 to 2015, Amir was the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the premier scholarly journal for the study of religion.
Global Currents article

Fear and Mourning in the Shadow of Orlando


 

On the evening of June 12, 2016, a few hours after the mass killing at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, thousands of Seattle residents gathered for a vigil at Cal Anderson Park. The event boasted a compelling roster of speakers including the state governor, Jay Inslee, and Seattle’s first openly gay mayor, Ed Murray. All who took the microphone that evening spoke of sorrow, compassion, and struggle. They expressed their grief over the massive loss of life in Orlando and emphasized the need to persevere in such dark times. But one of the speakers that night brought a particular message to the crowd. Her name was Sonj Basha and, during the few minutes of her speech, she offered the following words concerning the shooting: “The Muslim community and LGBT community are not separate; we mourn together. I am Muslim, I am queer and I exist.”

Muslim and queer. They exist. Basha’s words were the most powerful of the evening. For Muslims like me, her short but compelling affirmations were urgent and necessary. They provided a critical disruption (if only momentarily) of the ongoing normalization of fear as a condition for a national politics of difference as threat.

As most of us know today, the killer, Omar Mateen, identified as Muslim. Born in New York to Afghan parents, he lived his entire life in the United States. He was an American Muslim. During the 911 call and negotiations with police, Mateen pledged his allegiance to Daesh (ISIS). He also expressed anger over the death of a Daesh fighter killed in a US airstrike in Iraq. At no point, however, did he say the killing was motivated by his hatred of the LGBTQ community. And despite numerous investigations into Mateen’s personal life including his sexual behavior, nothing conclusive demonstrated that the murder, brutal as it was, reflected hatred of sexual identity as a motive for the crime.

My point here is not to dismiss the possibility that Mateen’s actions were an effect of his heterosexual hatred of sexual diversity. The point, rather, is to consider how the attack fit into a cultural politics of fear in which difference itself became the basis of a threat that promoted particular kinds of alignments and divisions. Specifically, it is to question the affective workings of fear in the production of Muslim difference.

In her work on the cultural politics of emotions, Sara Ahmed provided a way to see how fear works in the production of threat and reification of difference. According to Ahmed, fear is “the intensification of ‘threats,’ which works to create a distinction between those who are ‘under threat’ and those who threaten.” Moreover, Ahmed suggests that fear functions as a threat in such a way that it affectively aligns some bodies with others. As fear generates ‘a threat,’ it also creates alignments between those who understand themselves as threatened and those they perceive as the threat. Understood this way, fear is not a singular or individual experience. It is, rather, an affective link experienced as threats to some group from some group. Inseparable from threat, fear distinguishes, reifies, and aligns. “I am afraid” thus means “I as us am afraid of you as them.”

In the case of the Orlando massacre, the sense of fear Ahmed describes became clear in its designation as a crime of both terror and hate. The day after the massacre, for example, President Obama acknowledged that the motivations of the killer were unknown yet he nonetheless proceeded to describe the attack in terms of terrorism and hate. During his public address, Obama offered the following words:

“So whatever the motivations of the killer, whatever influences led him down the path of violence and terror, whatever propaganda he was consuming from ISIL and al Qaeda, this was an act of terrorism but it was also an act of hate. This was an attack on the LGBT community. Americans were targeted because we’re a country that has learned to welcome everyone, no matter who you are or who you love.”

Similarly, Nihad Awad, Founder and National Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, denounced the attack with explicit reference to racism, homophobia, and transphobia. In his press conference, he described the attack as “a hate crime plain and simple.” Needless to say, President Obama and Awad were not alone. Throughout the US press and online media, the massacre registered in terms of terrorism and hate. In so doing, an entire affective politics of fear as threat was mobilized. Specifically, the combination of terror and hate facilitated a politics of fear as the intensified threat of the Muslim as Other.

This is not the context for providing a historical account of the Orientalist production of the Muslim subject or for covering the history of American heterosexual violence against non-normative sexualities. Suffice it to say that the vulnerabilities invoked by both terrorism and hate were sufficient for enabling deep-seated historical and contemporary fears that broadened the threat of the Muslim menace. As the president suggested, this was an attack of terror and hate. Americans and the LGBTQ community were thus directly addressed (interpellated) as the subjects of a particular fear and thus threat. Or more precisely, fear as the threat of terror and violence aligned Americans and the LGBTQ community as bodies vulnerable to the violence of Muslim terrorism and hatred.

It is important to note that while the threat here was novel in its production, it was also fragile. Historically, whatever has been signified by “American” has not easily incorporated those who identify as LGBTQ. Indeed, just a few months before Mateen murdered 49 people in an Orlando nightclub, North Carolina passed the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act. Deemed by some as one of the most anti-transgender laws in US history, the act signaled a growing resistance to the inclusion of LGBTQ communities in the legal experience of American equality and identity. Yet after the shootings and despite the new legal exclusions, the American public and political establishment mobilized a politics of fear that depended on the inclusion of the LGBTQ community within the American collective. If only provisionally, fear enabled a particular “collecting together,” as Ahmed puts it, of bodies hitherto distinguished but hereafter united.

But the affective binding of the LGBTQ community to the American national body also produced distinction. As certain bodies aligned, some were excluded. In the case of Orlando, the temporary inclusion of LGBTQ subjects within the American national body involved the exclusion of Muslims through the reproduction of the discourse of the war on terror. Structured according to the binary logic of a victimized “West” and aggressor “Islam,” the narrative incorporation of Orlando’s victims resignified the murder as an act of terrorism in which the violence of Muslim sexual intolerance not only underscored the moral superiority of America but also proved the necessity of American empire. As the President’s words suggested, Orlando was a terrorist attack directed both at the LGBTQ community and America. More specifically, it was the violent expression of Muslim hatred for sexual diversity as a principle of American inclusivity. And precisely because it represented the homophobic hatred of the Muslim Other, it justified the exceptional measures of American empire. Like 9/11, like the Boston bombings, and like the murders of Charlie Hebdo, Orlando demonstrated the moral superiority of Western values and the need for violence in the war against Muslim terror. By branding the massacre an act of terrorism, in other words, the US establishment furthered the narrative politics of the war on terror in which the violence of the Muslim Other highlighted the exceptional tolerance and diversity of the US nation as civilized and the exceptional intolerance and singularity of the Muslim other as barbarian. As Jasbir Puar has argued, it showed that Muslims present an “especial threat to homosexuals, that Muslim fundamentalists deliberately and specifically target homosexuals, and that the parameters of this opposition correlate with those of the war on terror: civilization versus barbarism.” The combining of terrorism and hatred meant that the Muslim menace now represented a specific threat grounded in the hatred of sexual diversity. Fear as the threat of terror and hate was fear of the threat of the terrorist and heterosexist Muslim.

This combination presented a particular problem for Muslims. Unlike previous threats constituted by acts of terror, Muslims were in a much more complex position of defense. While Muslims have resisted the binding of Islam and terrorism in public discourse through careful analyses of its historical roots in colonial racism and the hypocrisy of Euro-American violence against the Global South, what could we say about our collective attitudes towards the LGBTQ community? Whereas Muslims have routinely denounced our Othering by affirming our organic political, economic, and social ties with and as Americans, could we now affirm our organic ties with the LGBTQ community? Did we have any?

For many Muslims, non-heterosexual difference is seen as sinful and even punishable. This has led to various forms of exclusion that reify modern conceptions of sexual identity and suppress the diverse ways Muslims actually live their lives. It has produced mutually exclusive choices for Muslims who live non-heterosexual lives by reifying the idea that Muslims cannot also be LGBTQ.

These exclusions and the politics they entailed were just some of the thoughts I pondered as I stood in the crowd that night. I was there as a Muslim who genuinely believed that my presence at the vigil was no mere performance. I believed it was a natural display of affective solidarities that were irreducible to any single identification. I was there as a Muslim, and much more. But before Basha’s speech, my sense of the growing fear of the Muslim threat and the shifting alignments it enabled left me unsettled. Thus when Basha took the podium and in a few simple words affirmed her – indeed, our – alignments as Muslims and LGBTQ, my own fears were relieved. If only for a single affective moment, neither terror nor hate could claim the event. Nor could fear. Instead, as Basha suggested, it was grief and mourning that we shared, that aligned us.

Perhaps it was just a fleeting affective instance. Perhaps not. But my sense of Basha’s speech was that something akin to what Judith Butler described as the political possibility of mourning took hold. As Basha refused the alignments that divide us, she invited us to reflect on the fundamental ways loss, grief, and mourning demonstrated the possibility of a “we” that refuses the politics of fear. As Butler noted, grief is not necessarily private or depoliticizing. It is, rather, enabling of a “sense of political community of a complex order.” And in that moment of Basha’s affirmation, “I am Muslim. I am queer and I exist,” she offered a glimpse of that “community of a complex order.” In mourning and in loss, fear was overcome and something of a “we” emerged. Who “we” were may be difficult to explain. But whoever we were, it was not united by fear.

 

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Michael Vicente Perez
Michael Vicente Perez is a sociocultural anthropologist who works in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. His research interests include migration and displacement, ethnicity and nationalism, memory, violence, human rights, Muslim societies and Islam. He is currently researching a project titled “Surviving Statelessness: Everyday Life among Ex-Gaza Refugees in Jordan” and he is also working with CM contributor Ali Mian on a project titled “Muslim Bodies: Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Islam.”
Authority, Community & Identity article

Two American Fears: Islamophobia and Homophobia


 

We live under the haunting shadows of the twin towers. The tragedy of 9/11 thrust American Muslims into precarious corners. We have become homeland pariahs, bodies suspended between national belonging and national alienation. The regime of race has expanded—racialization now admits religion, and Islam is first in line. Traps for self-inflicting cultural containment are set throughout the murky terrain of terror.

In this historical moment, Muslims can easily feel that they are in but not of this country, and that they must forfeit their agency for participating in the elaboration of national culture and politics. Yet, countless Muslims do not give in to the temptation of self-victimization and self-ghettoization.

Many American Muslims imagine and aspire to inhabit a democratic America-in-the-making. For America is not some static automaton uttering inhospitable remarks or some solitary castle with jingoistic graffiti on its walls. America is a dream, a reality-to-come, a standing reserve of cultural difference. America is not a finished product to be consumed, but a land to be cultivated with care and caution.

To state these idealist hopes does not imply that the rampant Islamophobia in many echelons of our country does not trouble me. Neither does it imply that the racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes and practices of some of my coreligionists leave me uninjured. This historical moment presents both difficulties and opportunities for analyzing the intersections of Islamophobia and homophobia. By historicizing the emergence of each distinct dynamic, we gain analytical clarity about the complex negotiations of identity, which is never static but always becoming.

At the outset, some insiders might insist that conversations about some Muslims’ homophobia need to take place within the Muslim community, and that we not air our dirty laundry in public. I am troubled by such demands, for they assume some sort of concealed communal space available and accessible to American Muslims writ large. The people who make these demands probably have in mind certain mosques or certain Islamic organizations. For better or worse, no mosque and no organization represent all Muslims.

It is important to acknowledge that with Islamophobia and homophobia we are dealing with two different but related historical beasts. While religious and sexual identities take root in institutional settings quite different from each other, the hatred directed at these identities stems from contrasting yet connected pathologies. This is the case because both Islamophobia and homophobia are forms of discrimination against a person’s interiority, or, as Foucault would have it, “the truth of the subject.” Let me explain this point by recourse to critical race theory and queer theory.

In a compelling account of the modern regime of race, critical race theorist Leerom Medovoi historicizes the link between two types of racisms: color-line (racism based on the color of one’s fleshed body) and dogma-line (racism based on the dogma in one’s soul). He connects these two sides of racism, which target black and Jewish and Muslim bodies, to one of the defining marks of modernity itself, namely, the Cartesian body-mind split. He notes how “these two axes of race have not operated separately upon mutually exclusive populations but rather propped one another up and comingled in complex ways” (“Dogma-Line Racism: Islamophobia and the Second Axis of Race”). Jews and Muslims have been subjected to racist discrimination based on the perception of falsehood in their inner selves. Now let us briefly turn to the exclusionary and discriminatory logic that structures homophobia. In a brilliant reading of Freud, Judith Butler argues that modern heterosexuality emerges only in and through a system of prohibitions and renunciations, including the renunciation of one’s homosexual attachments. When expressed as a form of renouncing one’s same-sex attraction, homophobia becomes a “vehicle of satisfaction” (The Psychic Life of Power). In this account, homophobia results out of the internal suppression of a subjective truth prohibited by heteronormative social norms.

These two theories identify interiority as the theater on which Islamophobia and homophobia play their parts. Medovoi and Butler illustrate how Islamophobia and homophobia, respectively, have been constructed as “maladies of the soul.” Because these twin arguments are based on productive speculation, they might not persuade everyone. Yet, seen from the angle of the reigning politics of exclusion and discrimination in this country, the solidarity between persons targeted by Islamophobia and homophobia appears as a highly desired political strategy, if not a necessity, for those who believe in and struggle for social justice.

It is worth pursuing if Islamophobia and homophobia stem from some sort of basic negative evaluation or myopic attitude toward difference, be it religious or affective, doctrinal or sexual. If so, then what social arrangements sustain this attitude? In other words, what is the relationship between these two fears and certain social arrangements, such as religious exceptionalism, gender segregation, homosociality, and heteronormativity? When I hear homophobic comments from my coreligionists, I think of the aforementioned modes of socialization as enabling their homophobia. I also think that some Muslims have fallen prey to the dominant narratives of heteronormativity in this country. By excluding sexual minorities, some of my coreligionists aim to shore up their own position within the realm of heteronormative American citizenship. This context probably serves as the immediate domain of intelligibility in which some American Muslims invoke and extend condemnations of same-sex acts mentioned in certain classical Muslim texts.

Now let me address the politics of critique with reference to Islamophobia and homophobia. It is problematic to assume that every critical posture toward Islam and Muslims is Islamophobic. Likewise, it is equally troubling to assume that every critical analysis of same-sex identity amounts to homophobia. But who gets to judge between sincere critical inquiry and bigoted criticism? How is it that the mainstreaming of heterosexuality falls outside our critical purview? How is it that our country’s complicity in creating the terror we are fighting escapes our critical gaze? Moreover, is hateful speech about Islam or Muslims only Islamophobic when uttered by non-Muslims? Likewise, is injurious language about same-sex identity only homophobic when uttered by heterosexuals? How might we go about cultivating compassionate-yet-critical engagements with Islam and queerness? In sum, we would do a disservice to our analysis of these complex social forces if we were to act as the phobia police whenever “Islam” and “same-sex intimacy” were critically and historically examined. At the same time, we would also do a disservice to social justice if we were to tolerate or ignore injurious words and actions dressed in the garb of criticality.

In conclusion, I’d like to argue for the political purchase of a historicist understanding of religious identity and sexual orientation, both of which name complex zones of human experience and interaction. Historicist accounts of religion and sexuality are enabling and productive, for they posit religious traditions and sexual lives as changing, and changeable, constructs. If humans made these things, then humans can also un-make or re-make them. Let me explain these points in brief detail. First, religious identity is not reducible to things such as profession of faith or experience of the transcendent. To reduce it to any such variable enacts epistemic and representational violence on those “religious” phenomena that a particular supposed essence of religious identity excludes from admission into the category. Thus there is no generic “religious identity,” as religious self-identification is not only subjective but also takes place in highly variegated communal contexts. Second, and likewise, giving any essential content to “sexuality” severely limits its endless possibilities. The terms, “sexual orientation” and “sexual identity,” are undoubtedly recent inventions, even though the idea they refer to seems to be timeless. Its seeming timelessness, however, does not imply that it exists outside of history. It only means that despite its historicity, many people experience it as inner, timeless truth. To historicize this concentration of truth in sexuality is not to negate its worthiness to structure a form of life, but only to provincialize it as one among many forms of expressing the libidinal. Thus, seeing religion and sexuality as mobile and organic processes renders them hospitable and welcoming. Can we not inhabit religious and sexual orientations as open forms of identification, at once game for being and becoming?

 

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Ali Altaf Mian
Ali Altaf Mian is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Seattle University. His fields of research include South Asian Islam, the history of Muslim legal thought and practice, gender and sexuality in contemporary Islam, Sufism and comparative mysticism, continental philosophy, comparative religion, and theory and method in the study of religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Interreligious Experiences, Catholic Umbrellas


 

It has been a pleasure working recently to package for publication Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) collection of six new case studies on Muslim-Christian cooperation, many of which are being featured on this site. Fifteen years ago, when I was at the Center for Mission Research and Study at Maryknoll, New York, I developed a keen interest in the threats and challenges inherent in contemporary Muslim-Christian dynamics, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The production of a co-edited Orbis book, Artisans of Peace (2003) spurred my interest in a set of comparative studies and reflections in countries that were either Christian majority, Muslim majority, or relatively even in their number of adherents. Nigeria was of particular interest, and its strategic importance is highlighted in Philip Jenkins’ 2002 work The Next Christendom.

One of the first places I travelled to after joining CRS in 2005 was Mindanao in the southern Philippines. CRS’ global workshop there was on interfaith initiatives, and it drew on what was already a decade of work engaging Christians, Muslims, and the indigenous Lumad population. There were stimulating presentations by Muslims and Christians alike, and a field visit to a slum in Davao where grassroots Muslims and Christians gathered on the floor of a simple hut to share their beliefs and their everyday concerns. This was more than research or study. It was informed reflection on committed practice in what has continued to be CRS’ flagship program in Muslim-Christian dialogue and action.

As I retire from CRS this year, I have the satisfaction of seeing case studies produced on the basis of truly significant projects in sub-Saharan Africa and Mindanao, as well as the Balkans and Egypt. I am grateful that an innovative CRS training manual on building skills and sensitivities for Muslim-Christian cooperation is nearly complete. And I have the pleasure of having helped put in place a CRS-funded cross-learning project, Advancing Interreligious Peacebuilding, that will encourage more systematic sharing of experiences, lessons, and best practices from one part of the globe to others, so that future initiatives can be even more effective.

Why is the promotion of Muslim-Christian understanding and cooperation so important? The need for greater peace and social justice in our world seems evident, and Christians and Muslims together make up over half of the global population. If we can jointly bring to bear our religious resources for good, the results could be extremely powerful. Muslims and Christians are jointly present in the vast majority of the world’s countries. Interactions over fourteen centuries have been marked by turbulence but also by places and periods of remarkable mutual thriving. Today, with grave concerns about perceived injustices, religious freedom, mutual intolerance, negative perceptions of the other, and horrifying acts by violent extremists, we are urgently challenged to increase interreligious understanding and to deepen ties of solidarity and cooperation.

Despite the historical and contemporary tensions, and beyond evident theological and doctrinal differences—not to mention the violence and manipulative mobilization of others by small minorities—Muslims and Christians have much in common. There are significant shared core values on social justice and peace in the scriptures and teaching traditions of both. There are common exhortations to compassion and forgiveness. There are myriad living examples of mutual respect and good will, from the diverse expressions of grassroots dialogue and cooperation exemplified in the CRS case studies to elite initiatives like the open message “A Common Word Between Us and You” signed by hundreds of Muslim leaders and positively responded to by many Christian counterparts (2009).

As the late Dutch scholar Jacques Waardenburg noted twenty years ago when Samuel Huntingdon’s facile “clash of civilizations” hypothesis was new, it is never Islam and Christianity as such which develop negative or positive relationships, but “particular interpretations and forms of Islam and of Christianity, found in specific Muslim and Christian groups, which in particular situations condition certain types of relationships” (1997: 15). Practical local issues and specific political and social interests play a crucial role in positive and negative dynamics, even as globalization reduces some of the traditional space between countries and localities. A more than superficial understanding of Muslim-Christian dynamics depends on probing concrete contextual sources of conflict, as well as the often unexplored patterns of coexistence, and it means promoting effective springboards to interreligious cooperation.

My experiences with colleagues during a decade and a half in this interreligious field have taken place almost entirely under the auspices of Catholic institutions—under the organizational umbrellas of Maryknoll and more recently CRS. Has this been a problem? Is Catholic identity not an impediment to building bridges and forging social cohesion? Does it not imply bias?  Does it not stimulate mistrust or breed resistances among religious “others?” Would it not be preferable or more effective to have secular, religiously “unattached” platforms and entry points?

I don’t possess academic evidence with which to respond, but in my experience of interreligious peacebuilding being Catholic has not been problematic. Admittedly, the organizations with which I have worked have not embarked on religious conversion efforts, nor been exclusivist in hiring or programming (there are many countries, for example, in which a majority of CRS’ staff members are Muslims). Neither have I interacted with leaders of ISIL or Boko Haram or Al Shabaab or Abu Sayyaf (hardly fond of Westerners or Catholics), but these are minority extremists.  There is at least latent affinity and mutual respect among vast numbers of believers around the world, whose specific creeds and religious practices may differ, but whose core outlook and ethical principles overlap. The questions of who, where, and how matter a great deal for relationships, of course. But I often remember the reflection of a CRS regional director assigned some years ago to the Middle East. “Wow,” he had pondered, “I will soon be representing a U.S., Catholic institution in the Middle East; this could be tough!” After a short time, he realized that that U.S. connection was indeed a challenge, but not the Catholic one.

 

Photo Credit: Philip Laubner, CRS

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Tom Bamat
Field Notes article

CRS’s Inter-Religious Peacebuilding Programming: Reflections on Authority, Community, and Identity


Catholic Relief Services (CRS) has welcomed the opportunity for our inter-religious peacebuilding approaches to be examined in this blog space through the lens of the Contending Modernities project. This article aims to explore how our body of work in the sphere of inter-religious action (IRA) intersects with some of the questions animating Contending Modernities, particularly those related to authority, community, and identity.

As represented in the case studies featured on this blog–and soon to be published as a book collection–CRS and our local partners ground ourselves in the praxis of inter-religious peacebuilding, as filtered through the experiences of Christian and Muslim leaders grappling with the immediate and existential concerns of their constituencies. Their engagement with one another and with theological dimensions of inter-religious relations cannot be divorced from community needs and aspirations: for improved health and education, for sustainable livelihoods, for safety, for a better future for their children, for dignity. In this reality, the practicalities of life together become as authoritative a basis for inter-religious cooperation as are scripture, tradition, or institutional authorities. Confronting the drivers of child marriage in coastal Kenya, for example, or seemingly intractable land conflicts in Mindanao, southern Philippines, are compelling challenges for religious leaders to seek to address together. Yet CRS’s IRA approach avoids instrumentalizing these religious actors; even as they move towards concrete changes in community wellbeing, these IRA programs seek to increase mutual understanding of religious traditions and teaching–the traditional domain of inter-religious dialogue–as well as to foster trust and improve relationships. CRS understands each of these elements–knowledge, skills and attitudes; mutual understanding and strong relationships; and joint action–as mutually reinforcing components of inter-religious social cohesion.

The approaches illustrated in these case studies are at once respectful of traditional religious authority, and creatively orient it towards collaborative ends. In most cases the IRA projects sought to work with those already functioning as recognized leaders of their respective Muslim and Christian religious communities; that is, those not only holding leadership positions or titles, but also possessing personal qualities to convene, inspire, and galvanize others. To the extent that these religious leaders command respect within their communities, and beyond, it is assumed that they offer an entry point for reaching and potentially influencing or mobilizing broader constituencies. The Mindanao A3B project reflected an instructive extension of this logic, taking care to involve traditional leaders, as well as to cultivate the participation of women leaders where possible. Many projects took further steps to secure approval and authorization from higher-level authorities, such as in the case of CIRCA, which sought the blessing of the Tanzania Episcopal Conference, the Sultan of Sokoto, and others. In this way, religious authority becomes a platform for re-knitting social cohesion. To take an example from Northern Nigeria, Christian and Muslim participants who were initially afraid to be publicly associated with one another are now willing to be seen working together. Even in Bosnia, where the religious dimensions of the programming were largely implicit given the strong overlap of ethnic and religious identities, the project chose to work with war victims because they were understood to be legitimate leaders of public opinion on the possibility of post-war reconciliation.

Beyond the initial stages of engaging leaders, however, the IRA programs examined in these case studies gave participants space and support to explore and deepen their own rationale for cross-religious cooperation; that is, for participants to develop a shared and coherent understanding of their own agency in undertaking such work. CRS’s signature “3B” approach to building social cohesion–progressing iteratively through stages of binding, or personal healing and self-transformation; bonding, or intra-group strengthening and consensus-building; and bridging, or inter-group engagement and collaboration–was a cornerstone of the IRA programming in Central African Republic (CAR) and Mindanao, with the Bosnian case implicitly representing and presaging the 3B approach as well. Both CIRCA and TA’ALA also involved periods of intensive learning and reflection on religious traditions and teachings in addition to peacebuilding trainings. The fruit of these internal and intra-group processes has been the cultivation of an inclusive sense of community and shared purpose among project participants, as well as a reinterpretation of exclusionary narratives.  As described in the CAR case, “communities began to examine their views critically and to see themselves differently, opening the way to coexistence with other ethnic groups.” This was demonstrated in a variety of ways, for example through the creation of a mixed committee to enable mostly Muslim herders and primarily Christian farmers to coordinate their livelihood activities peacefully, or the actions of residents in one remote village to convince a group of Muslims to return from Cameroon, where they had taken shelter at the height of the violence. Meanwhile, women and youth implementing CIRCA connector projects—small, locally-led initiatives designed to address community priorities such as clean water, livelihoods, or child care while also bringing people together across religious lines—in Niger reported that other community members have requested to join the interfaith activities. Some TA’ALA participants invited those they had met through the project into their own homes, despite religious differences that would normally limit this kind of social interaction. And in the final A3B evaluation in Mindanao, stakeholders noted an increased willingness to communicate and have contact across identity lines as the most significant change of behavior brought about during the project. In Bosnia as well, war survivors participating in the intensive workshop series began to work across religious and ethnic lines to support one another through economic hardship.

Working primarily with existing, recognized leaders validates their voices as legitimate arbiters of personal and social norms; that is, as moral authorities on how to live as faithful people in the contemporary world. Further engaging these leaders with their own and one another’s traditions and teachings related to peace and tolerance, and with concrete experiences of cooperation, strengthens the prominence of these values in the vision they promote of a faithful society. In Mindanao, for example, the 143 traditional and religious leaders mobilized in the project subsequently formed 4 municipal interfaith networks, which strengthened their voice on peace and conflict issues. Leaders in TA’ALA intervened in 38 separate instances to prevent violence, and crafted statements to promote tolerance in their communities; these were used as a resource by school administrators in one location to mitigate brewing tensions among Muslim and Christian students, and to foster positive attitudes towards the religious ‘Other.’ In Bosnia, panel presentations in which war survivors shared their stories of trauma and reconciliation helped to change up to 80% of audience members’ attitudes towards those of other ethnic groups. And a particularly powerful example comes from Bouar, Central African Republic, which gained a national reputation as a ‘haven of inter-religious peace,’ thanks to the work of a religious leaders’ platform; so well respected was their work that a Muslim driver who fell into the hands of a violent local militia while traveling in another part of the country was spared harm because he came from Bouar.

Nearly all of the IRA projects also included an emphasis on youth (or child, in the case of DAP) involvement and leadership. In so doing, CRS and its partners affirm young people’s voice, agency, and potential to contribute meaningfully to their communities and their futures. By inviting young people to undergo the processes of self-reflection, capacity-building, dialogue and collaboration, this IRA approach allows them to construct inclusive identities and an expansive understanding of community. Some of these youth, in turn, became active proponents of inter-religious cooperation; doing so requires no small amount of courage in contexts where elders and other authority figures may tacitly or actively disapprove. In Niger, for example, CIRCA youth expose themselves to potential–though to date not active–pushback from religious hardliners through their use of public address systems to promote peace and social cohesion. TA’ALA youth in Egypt used more informal opportunities to share their experiences with peers and with villagers curious about their newly formed inter-faith relationships. The experience from Bosnia, meanwhile, illustrates that youth and even adult participants in project trainings may need additional support for dealing with resistance in their own communities.

These case studies also point to some growing edges for our approach to inter-religious action. One is the further potential to support and empower youth as agents of change. Another is to explore avenues for greater involvement of women leaders in this programming. In addition, several of the case studies–from Bosnia, Central African Republic, and elsewhere–highlight missed or under-explored opportunities to extend the personal and relational transformations experienced by direct project participants to effect changes at higher levels or to embed such changes in governance structures and systems. Outcomes from CIRCA and Mindanao, on the other hand, provide examples of how IRA equipped religious leaders to become more influential in working for peace and reconciliation through various government institutions and processes, including the empowerment of minority leaders—Muslims and indigenous peoples—in Mindanao to claim their rights. This suggests a next frontier for IRA engagement with authority, and specifically how the spiritual and moral authority claimed and represented by IRA leaders may challenge or complement state power that is ostensibly secular, but frequently highly attuned to its positioning on matters of religious identity and societal balance of power.

In an era when much of the discourse around Christian-Muslim relationships is animated by fear of the Other, CRS’s IRA portfolio represents an alternative framing of inter-religious engagement. The cases illustrate the potential for IRA to foster mutual understanding and strong relationships, informed in many cases by deep reflection on religious traditions and teachings, not strictly for joint action yet rooted in the concerns generated by daily realities and challenges of community living.  

 Photo Courtesy of Philip Laubner/CRS
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Nell Bolton
Nell Bolton serves as Senior Technical Advisor for Justice & Peacebuilding at Catholic Relief Services. Prior to this, she supported CRS’s peacebuilding and governance programming in Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, as well as working and consulting in sub-Saharan Africa beginning in 2001. She has worked on social cohesion and the promotion of equitable democratic governance with, among others, The Carter Center, the Ulster Project, and Habitat for Humanity. Following a return to her native New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, she led a variety of advocacy initiatives and headed a faith-based social justice organization in southeast Louisiana. Nell holds Masters degrees from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame and from Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where her thesis focused on the intersection of religion, gender, and peacebuilding.