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Theorizing Modernities article

Many Humanisms, Many Modernities: Contesting Talal Asad’s Anti-Humanist Critique of Humanitarianism


In his recent essay “Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarianism,” Talal Asad offers a genealogy of the notions ‘human,’ ‘humanism,’ and ‘humanitarian,’ and charts their changing meanings and interconnections. The genealogy he unveils is complex, but its goal is one: to take us through a critique of humanitarianism and, most specifically, a critique of military humanitarianism. In opposition to Charles Taylor’s (purported) view of modernity as moral progress toward the culture of universal benevolence, Asad argues that modern notions of ‘human’ and ‘humanism’ legitimize a particular kind of violence that is constitutive of humanitarianism (395).

In linking the category of the ‘human’ to modern humanitarian interventions, Asad wants to show how it can happen that a universal category of ‘humanity’—“a large, all embracing category whose members have a single essence”(395)—humanizes some and dehumanizes others. Asad finds the roots of this possibility in Christianity. The exercise of violence, Asad contends, is intrinsic to the Christian understanding of what it means to be human due to Christianity’s approach of “reaching out” to those in need with both “charity and chastisement” (398). What is more, the modern idea of the human, while secularized, remains faithful to its Christian origins in two ways: by sustaining the dual emphasis on cruelty and benevolence and by upholding the simultaneous inclusion of some and exclusion of others.

There are many insights in Asad’s genealogy of the notions of ‘human,’ ‘humanism,’ and ‘humanitarianism.’ The links he establishes between modern and Christian understandings of notions of ‘human’ and ‘humanity’ help explain the theological and exclusivist origins of the word ‘humanitarianism’ in the 19th century: at the time, the term expressed the orthodox majority’s disapproval of Christians “who subscribed to the exclusively human nature of Jesus” (401). Asad also successfully relates his genealogical account of humanitarianism to his larger critique of modern nation-states, to ultimately unmask military humanitarianism and the fact that some states do and others do not possess the power to exercise violence. Most of all, Asad excels in the critique of humanitarianism when he uncovers the fluid and entangled character of various categories that help shape it (‘human,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘humanism’), and as he invites us to expose Western moral and moralizing self-understanding.

Notwithstanding these insights, Asad’s continued and exclusive focus on the Christian roots of Western modernity significantly limits both his genealogical endeavor and his critique of humanitarian interventions. Because of this focus, Asad does not recognize that there has always been more than one—Christian and Western—story of humanism. The retrieval of the ideals of self-cultivation and dignity of human beings in the Chinese humanist tradition, or in Islamic thought, indicate that probing the ideas of what it means to be human and what it means to flourish have hardly been reserved for the Christian and Western ethical and political imagination. A broader, comparative exploration of the notions of ‘human,’ ‘humanity,’ and ‘humanism’ would also suggest that one of Asad’s central points—the argument that the (unreflexive) universalist “concept of the human” intrinsically carries “the idea of difference” (402)—is as relevant for Christian as for other traditional humanistic endeavors. Most importantly, moving beyond the preoccupation with the Christian-Western framework of modernity would destabilize the central assumptions of Asad’s genealogy of humanism. Such shift would compel us to ask: if there was never only one Christian and/or Western secularized tradition of humanism through history, why would there be only a single story of humanism and humanitarianism in the present?

Undertaking such a genealogy of contemporary humanisms and humanitarianisms necessitates the acceptance of the idea of multiple modernities, whether one sees these modernities as contending with, or informing and enriching, each other. Asad does acknowledge, “‘modernity’ is neither a totally coherent object nor a clearly bounded one”; he also recognizes that “many of its elements originate in relations with the histories of peoples outside Europe” (Formations of the Secular, 2003: 13-14). But Asad also unequivocally posits modernity as a project that “aims at institutionalizing a number of (sometimes conflicting, often evolving) principles: constitutionalism…democracy, human rights, civil equality…consumerism, freedom of the market…secularism,” (Ibid) and, as he would likely add today, humanitarianism. In his observations, Asad gestures toward the continued change of the principles of modernity; in his genealogies of humanitarianism, religion, or secularism, he attends to the multiplicity and porousness of meanings and boundaries of these categories and institutions. Yet, while concerned with past transformations, Asad’s genealogical accounts tend to marginalize the complicated and constantly changing current embodiments of the categories in question. This is not paradoxical but unavoidable: as I have written elsewhere, Asad’s whole project intends to unmask the powers of Western modernity as a hegemonic and universalizing project. However, this larger objective (and, I would suggest, the implicit normative purpose) of Asad’s genealogical quests does not alter the question raised before: if we know that there have always been many humanisms, why accept the view that we are living today with just one story of humanism and humanitarianism?

Due to his sole preoccupation with a secularized Christian and Western story of human-humanism-humanitarianism, Asad’s genealogy misses ongoing, creative, and complex contemporary engagements with the ethics and practices, promises and ambivalences of all humanistic projects—engagements that can and do inform the ways in which humanitarianism is being envisioned, enacted, and critiqued. For some time now, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Confucian, and secular thinkers have been trying to conceive of more chastened humanistic dispositions, which not only attempt to avoid the dehumanization or exclusion of others but, more importantly, which affirm the responsibilities we have to one another as well as to the non-human world.

Particularly worth noting here are William Schweiker’s and Edward Said’s humanistic statements. The former is theological, the latter secular; the first is primarily ethical, the second principally critical and political in character. But Schweiker and Said share in common a serious and deep engagement with the critiques of humanism such as the one Asad offers. Schweiker and Said thus address the traps of (particularist) universalisms and affirm the value of pluralism in humanistic imaginaries. They tackle the dangers of traditional humanism’s optimism and unrestrained claim to power by chastening their humanistic visions—beginning with the recognition of the limitations and fragility of human capacities and underscoring the importance of reflexivity and self-critique in humanistic pursuits (in Schweiker’s case, most importantly, by giving humanism an orientation beyond intra-human ends). In so doing, Schweiker and Said do not only establish humanistic orientations as vital for ethics and politics today; they also help us see that all humanitarian visions and actions are necessarily, by virtue of being human, hopeful and tragic at the same time. Such visions inherently carry ambiguities that, to follow Didier Fassin, shape humanitarian reason to reflect both solidarity and inequality.

In his reflections on Asad’s thinking on the human and humanism, Aamir Mufti suggests that Asad’s own critique is ‘interventionist’ in character and dependent on the very categories he exposes. Mufti is especially troubled by what he sees as Asad’s different treatment of modernity and religious traditions—what he understands as Asad’s expectation of self-critique from the former but not from the latter. Mufti’s is an important argument because it points to the normative reasons for the boundaries of Asad’s genealogical method. On my reading, however, Asad does not demand modernity’s self-critique because he does not think it is possible. His writings carry an argument that all dissonant voices—the external voices of (religious) traditions or the internal (modern) voices of self-criticism, as one could interpret the contemporary humanistic endeavors—are ultimately incorporated, adopted, and consumed by the hegemonic powers of the secularized Christian, Western, modern project. This line of thinking is both what is at stake in, and what limits, Asad’s critique of contemporary humanitarianism. He convincingly unpacks the modalities of power that constitute and permeate modern life but, just like other anti-humanists (as Schweiker points out), Asad offers no tools that would guide and restrain the powers of the modern.

As a result, we have before us two possibilities: on the one hand, the limbo of modernity’s critique and perpetual suspicion regarding its institutions, including humanism and humanitarianism, and, on the other, the development of humanisms that are chastened, reflexive and self-critical, hopeful but also painfully aware of the limits of all human(itarian) labor.

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Slavica Jakelić
Slavica Jakelić is the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Valporaisio University. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and nationalism, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Jakelić has worked at or was a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the United States—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia; the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University; the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame; and the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion & Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. She is also a Senior Fellow of the international project "Orthodoxy and Human Rights," placed at Fordham University.

Jakelić 's writings have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Religious Ethics, Political Theology, The Hedgehog Review, The Review of Faith &International Affairs, Studies in Religion, Sciences Religieuses, and Commonweal. She co-edited three volumes: The Future of the Study of Religion, Crossing Boundaries: From Syria to Slovakia, and The Hedgehog Review’s issue "After Secularization." Jakelić is the author of Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2010) and is currently working on two books, Pluralizing Humanism (under contract with Routledge) and Ethical Nationalisms.
 
CM Reacts article

CM Reacts: Election of Sadiq Khan – Usama Hasan


With the historic election of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London this weekend, Contending Modernities solicited the reactions of several leading scholars and analysts on what this election means for London, the UK, and the global context. These responses represent a range of diverse perspectives, demonstrating the rich, and at times contentious, discourse that animates current debates about religion and secularism in late modernity.

With the Name of God, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate

London’s Muslim Mayor – What Implications for the World?

“Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I love London so!” – Thus begins a famous Victorian-era concert hall song. It expresses a sentiment that is certainly true of me and millions of other Londoners, including the UK capital city’s first Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, elected on 5th May 2016 to serve a four-year term. These reflections are written within two days of the new Mayor’s officially taking office.

The Mayor of London is a relatively new post, and Khan has only two predecessors: Ken Livingstone (of the socialist Labour Party, like Khan) and Boris Johnson (Conservative Party), who each served two terms. The Mayor of London has wide-ranging powers relating to transport, housing and other economic policies in the city. His office is at City Hall, which is also home to the Greater London Assembly, elected at the same time. Despite their many achievements and failures, the previous two mayors are perhaps best remembered by Londoners for transport-related successes: Livingstone for the “Congestion Charge” in the city centre to substantially cut traffic, and Johnson for his cycle-hire scheme. Both of these successful initiatives have been copied by capital cities around the world, so the Mayor of London has somewhat of a global impact, and indeed spends much of his time leading trade delegations abroad for London’s benefit. Khan is thought to have attracted many voters by his promises to freeze the cost of public transport, and to tackle London’s housing crisis, driven by rising immigration and demographic changes such as the erosion of traditional family units.

Multiple identities

In a theme that resonates well with Contending Modernities, Khan has consistently spoken of his (and everyone’s) multiple identities, in his case these being: British, European, Western, Pakistani-origin, Muslim, human rights lawyer, the son of a bus driver and a product of a working-class council estate home. Thus, Khan’s election has the potential to be hugely inspiring and empowering to “minority” or “underdog” groupings, like Barack Obama’s election victory in 2008.

Amidst the confusion and societal atomism engendered by the complexity of our modern world and its telecommunications systems, a well-functioning democracy is one way of bringing people together and giving them belonging: whatever our political and religious differences, we can legitimately say that we (collectively) elected XYZ as Mayor or other elected official, that we voted to remain within the European Union (EU) or to leave it.

Resisting extremism

Khan has spoken eloquently of the need for London to be inclusive and united, including people of all faiths and none: after his swearing-in ceremony in the presence of faith leaders at Southwark Cathedral, one of his first official engagements was to attend a Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) event, important symbolically since one of his previous organisations, the islamist-controlled Muslim Council of Britain, had boycotted HMD for many years before it finally reversed this stance. Khan has also recently moved away from questionable associates, distancing himself from the anti-semitism problems within the Labour Party and vowing to tackle extremism within Muslim communities. This allowed him to resist allegations of being soft on extremism made against him by his nearest rival, the millionaire Zac Goldsmith. (Incidentally, Zac is the brother of Jemima Khan whose ex-husband, the leading Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, campaigned for Goldsmith to become mayor.) Arguably, Goldsmith may yet have won the mayoralty, were it not for his public stated opposition to Britain remaining within the EU, a matter that will be decided by a hotly-contested UK-wide referendum just six weeks after the mayoral election.

The above example is emblematic of much wider issues: the UK has approximately 3 million Muslims, of whom roughly 40% live in London, and 40% are also, like the new mayor, of Pakistani origin. (When we add India and Bangladesh, South Asia accounts for the origin of about 70% of British Muslims). London has a large Muslim population: 8-10%. Regrettably, there has been an increase in anti-Muslim hatred in the UK over the past few years, largely driven by islamist extremism and terrorism coupled with irresponsible media coverage (the “Londonistan” effect), but the election of Khan is a powerful reminder of the inclusive outlook of Londoners, unsurprising from a truly cosmopolitan city. It also undermines the divisive, us-vs.-them rhetoric of extremists of both the far-right and islamist varieties.

Donald Trump has already reacted to Khan’s election, promising to exempt the latter from his proposed moratorium on Muslims entering the USA. Khan has responded to this, reminding us that Trump’s outrageous suggestion is not about one individual, but about millions of adherents of one of the world’s major religions.

Religion and State

Today, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, travelled to London by the Eurostar train to meet Sadiq Khan. Their two cities are consistently amongst the world’s favourite tourist destinations, and face similar challenges: unemployment, the economy, transport, housing, terrorism. British multiculturalism, with a monarchy and established church, addresses the religion-state relationship in a very different way to the laissite model of the French Republic.

Religion and civic state; national and local; modernity, identity and economy; xenophobia, islamophobia and antisemitism; family values and individualist libertarianism: amidst all of these contending factors resonating across Europe and beyond, the groundbreaking election of Sadiq Khan is a beacon of hope for our fractured societies.

In a much-loved English children’s story, a poor boy called Dick Whittington travels to find fortune in London, having heard that its streets are paved with gold. In keeping with our religious traditions of spiritual alchemy that emphasise that every human heart is capable of becoming “pure gold,” I hope that faith- and civic-communities will capitalise on this opportunity to pave London with success at many levels, and export some of that success to the wider human family.

 

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Usama Hasan
Usama Hasan is the Head of Islamic Studies at the Quilliam Foundation in London. As Quilliam Senior Researcher, Dr Usama engages in ongoing reform, outreach, and media work. He aims to address key questions on gender rights, minority rights, personal freedoms, penal codes; seeking to harmonise tradition and reason, faith and science, and developing the Sharia in keeping with the original Prophetic spirit of mercy, and away from rigid ritualism. Usama is regularly featured on international television channels, including BBC Hardtalk, CNN , ITN, Sky News, Channel 4, MBC, ARY, Al-Jazeera and has also written various columns for The Times (paywall), The Guardian , The Telegraph and the Washington Post.
CM Reacts article

CM Reacts: Election of Sadiq Khan – Myriam François


With the historic election of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London this weekend, Contending Modernities solicited the reactions of several leading scholars and analysts on what this election means for London, the UK, and the global context. These responses represent a range of diverse perspectives, demonstrating the rich, and at times contentious, discourse that animates current debates about religion and secularism in late modernity.

London began this past balmy weekend with the news that Sadiq Khan has been elected Mayor of London in a landslide victory – achieving the biggest personal mandate of any politician in UK history.

“Victory for Sadiq Khan highlights tolerant face of London,” says the Financial Times. Indeed, despite some efforts to present Sadiq as a secret Al-Qaeda-supporting fanatic out to impose public beheadings south of the London Eye, Londoners – or at least 57 per cent of them – do not seem to have bought into the idea that Khan is in fact a secret extremist.

I should say that the fact Londoners didn’t buy into that ploy is not exactly cause for a victory dance. If Sadiq Khan, the man who the Daily Mail has called “so liberal he backed gay marriage and even launched his campaign in a pub”, could be seen as an extremist, then frankly the rest of us are screwed. The entire strategy played into some of the most sinister anti-Muslim sentiment currently being peddled as a means of discrediting any Muslim who dares raise their head above the pulpit.

The fact so much has been made of Khan’s “Muslim” identity suggests that despite his victory, Muslimness remains as contentious an identity as ever.

For many Muslims, it was a sign that no matter how clean your slate, the extremist label can be wheeled out to diminish your credibility and, frankly, humanity. And so in this sense, the fact Londoners proverbially raised their eyes at such a crude tactic is a heartening vindication of London’s true vibe – a proud multicultural city that recognises that its diversity is indeed its richness. Studies show it’s much harder to hate people you get to know, and in London Muslims make up around 12.4 per cent of the population. In some boroughs it is 40 per cent, compared with around 4.5 per cent of the general population. Indeed, most Londoners probably just don’t care about Khan’s religion, because they don’t see how it would impact the policies he plans to implement.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is what people really care about: the fact that a whole generation feels priced out of the housing market; the fact that the cost of public transport has risen under Boris’ watch (a man who was once asked the cost of a single ticket and had no clue); the threefold increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes since the Paris attacks; the need for safe cycle routes, the eye watering cost of rent, and all the other stuff that affects their quality of life. In other words, policy matters.

And the significance of Khan’s “Muslim” identity was always much overstated, both by his worst detractors and by some of his strongest supporters.

Yes, he’s a Muslim, but he’s also many things: British, second-generation Pakistani, a human rights lawyer, and, of course, as we know from his repeated references to his “bus-driving” Dad, working class. And actually this part of his identity may be more significant to Londoners than his faith or his ethnicity. London has become an increasingly divided capital, one in which working class communities are pushed out of their old neighbourhoods by gentrification and cleaners schlep in the small hours of the night to gigantic glass pyramids whose inhabitants they will never meet. Yes, his faith matters – to Muslims and people who hate Muslims – but his working class identity speaks to everyone who wants London to be for everyone. He represents in many ways a kind of Londoner which has been forgotten under the rule of cheerily, proudly posh Boris Johnson.

But I will say this: Khan’s victory is very meaningful to a lot of Muslims who see in him the embodiment of a previously unattainable dream. As one friend who gave up his position elsewhere to campaign for Sadiq explained to me, the symbolism of a Muslim mayor of London for a whole generation of Muslim children who never thought that someone “like him” could attain such a position – is very real indeed. And certainly the symbolism of London electing a Muslim mayor is a powerful one internationally. Perhaps France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls could follow up his congratulations of Khan with an attempt to start tackling the kind of overt and endemic racism which would make Sadiq’s election in today’s France a real impossibility.

But both his detractors and his ardent supporters should know that it’s entirely unlikely Khan will represent “Muslim” interests in the narrowest sense of the term – and that’s a good thing. He’s mayor to all Londoners, and as a good Muslim – and, critically, a good elected official – that should mean a commitment to representing each and every one of them fairly. The Conservatives will have a few lessons to take from this resounding defeat, not least amongst them that in London – despite its reputation for wealth and excess – the appeal of a working class hero shouldn’t be underestimated.

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Myriam Francois
Myriam François is a writer, broadcaster, and academic with a focus on current affairs, the Middle East, Islam, and France. She worked as a broadcast journalist for TRT World from 2015-2017, and writes a regular columns for the New Statesman’s rolling politics blog, “The Staggers”, the Telegraph, and Middle East Eye. Myriam is the presenter of BBC One documentary “A Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited,” and has also presented a short video for BBC news on the genocide at Srebrenica. Myriam is a Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies (CIS) at SOAS University, where her research focuses on British Muslim integration issues, as well as the centre’s media outreach and research dissemination. Myriam received her PhD (DPhil) in 2017  from Oxford University, focusing on Islamic movements in Morocco. She tweets @MFrancoisCerrah and can be contacted at info@myriamfrancois.com.
CM Reacts article

CM Reacts: Election of Sadiq Khan – Hamid Dabashi


With the historic election of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London this weekend, Contending Modernities solicited the reactions of several leading scholars and analysts on what this election means for London, the UK, and the global context. These responses represent a range of diverse perspectives, demonstrating the rich, and at times contentious, discourse that animates current debates about religion and secularism in late modernity.

The New Monarchist Mayor of London Seems to Be a Muslim

Sadiq Khan, born in 1970 to a family of Pakistani immigrants, has just been elected the new Mayor of London.

His late father, Amanullah Khan, was a bus driver, his mother, Sehrun, a seamstress. He grew up in low-income housing, as BBC reports, in “a cramped three-bedroomed house on the Henry Prince Estate in Earlsfield, south-west London, sharing a bunk bed with one of his brothers until he left home in his 20s.” The new mayor’s parents were recent immigrants. “Amanullah and Sehrun Khan emigrated from Pakistan to London shortly before Sadiq was born, in 1970. He was the fifth of their eight children—seven sons and a daughter.”

Mr. Khan studied law at the University of North London, where he specialized in human rights, and is married to Saadiya Ahmed, who is also a lawyer. They have two daughters, Anisah and Ammarah.

My first and foremost thoughts when I read the news were drawn to his working-class immigrant parents: to his father Amanullah and every single bus stop he approached to pick up and let out passengers to make a decent living for his family, to his mother Sehrun and every single stitch she ran through a garment with her sewing machine to help raise her family.

This is not to disregard the significant fact that Mr. Khan seems, like the rest of us, to don a particular shade of being a Muslim. Yes, Sadiq Khan, the new Mayor of London, is a Muslim too: the first Muslim mayor of a major European capital born and raised to an immigrant Pakistani family. Writing from a city over which now towers prominently the figure of the xenophobic, racist, misogynist Donald Trump and his relentless fear-mongering against Mexicans and Muslims as “rapists” and “terrorists,” who respectively take advantage and hate “us,” this aspect of Mr. Khan’s immigrant provenance matters too.

There is no doubt the election of Sadiq Khan as the new Mayor of London is a momentous occasion, a shock to the xenophobic fear-mongering flooding Europe from the UK to Greece.

But at the same time I thought we should not fetishize the fact that he is a Muslim, but far more importantly celebrate the tenacity of a working-class immigrant family to raise a child to have the audacity to dare to imagine himself running a magnificent city. His Muslim background and demeanor, his and his family’s Muslim names, his use of a copy of the Qur’an in his official ceremonies, all come together to signal a significant symbolic register in European self-consciousness: Muslims are here, and are here to stay.

The Making of a Muslim Monarchist

Prompted by friends on my Facebook page when I first shared my first impressions of this news, I began to read more about the new Mayor of London, and here things got splendidly more complicated.

The first thing I learned was the nasty campaign of fear and loathing that the new Mayor’s Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith had led against him, associating him with acts of extremism and violence perpetrated by Muslims in London and elsewhere in Europe. We learned that the even the UK Prime Minister David Cameron had sent letters to the British citizens of Indian origin stoking Hindu-Muslim hostilities to prevent Sadiq Khan from becoming the new mayor.

“The prime minister has been criticized,” I read in the Guardian, “for sending out letters targeted at London’s Gujarati Hindu and Punjabi Sikh voters, calling on them to back the Conservative mayoral candidate, Zac Goldsmith.” The letters from David Cameron suggest Goldsmith is the only sensible choice as mayor for London’s south Asian communities, at a time when we need “to be keeping our streets safe from terrorist attacks.”

Wow, I thought. Was this not what David Cameron’s ancestors did in India before partition, fomenting Hindu-Muslim and other sectarian hostilities to stay in power. Are we really in a “postcolonial” period if that “post” is supposed to mean beyond the pale of coloniality?

The venomous smear campaign against Sadiq Khan went beyond the Tories, and reached even more monstrous dimensions in the far-right racist Britain First Party that published frightful video clips warning voters against the Muslim contender. The white supremacist Europe was up in arms.

Muslims Have Arrived

But Mr. Khan himself was now also revealed to be not so much an innocent victim of such chicanery and in fact a street-smart politician “baptized” in the fire, as it were, of British politics and all its nastiness.

As his prospect of becoming the Mayor of London had become more serious, he had begun a series of strategic moves to placate his opposition. He moved emphatically, according to reports, to denounce the BDS movement, a non-violent act of civil disobedience initiated by the Palestinian civil society, declared himself an enthused and teary-eyed monarchist, and had distanced himself from his party leader Jeremy Corbyn for refusing to sing the UK national Anthem “God Save the Queen.”

The more we read about the new London mayor the more we realize he is a shrewd politician, a man, a Muslim man to be sure, who wants to be the mayor, and just like Barack Obama before him in the US he too has learned fast and he plays smoothly. In a piece for the New Statesmen, “How Sadiq Khan won the London mayoral election,” we read:

Having run to Tessa Jowell’s left in Labor’s selection contest (trading on his opposition to the Iraq war, the welfare reform bill and his nomination of Jeremy Corbyn), he swiftly made a centrist pitch to the electorate at large. He would, he repeatedly declared, be “the most pro-business mayor ever”. Milibandite policies such as the 50p tax rate and the “mansion tax” were disowned. In a defining interview with the Mail on Sunday a week after his selection, Khan ruthlessly distanced himself from Corbyn, condemning his failure to sing the national anthem and presciently warning of Labor’s “anti-Jewish” image. He went on to make just two public appearances with his party’s leader and was listed in the “hostile” group of MPs.

The new Muslim Mayor of London, in short, is a Zionist monarchist by political expediency, a natural political careerist, a shrewd lawyer, and as all of those a true inhabitant of the British parliamentary politics. He did or did not choose his adversaries carefully. He became like them.

Yes, he is a Muslim, but above all a British politician Muslim, and by extension a European Muslim: a Muslim who uses his immigrant background to his advantage without allowing it to damage his political career, precisely the same way Obama selected his father’s “color” and his mother’s “faith” to engineer an expedient political persona for himself.

As a politician, Sadiq Khan represents a different gestation of Muslims immigrants than the ones who are now running away from the murder and mayhem in Iraq and Syria, seeking haven in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and with a small segment managing to get themselves to Europe.

As evident in the boldly racist Conservative and Britain First campaigning against Sadiq Khan, the fear-mongering against Muslims is perfectly alive and well in the UK. Furthermore, targeting Khan marks a clear indication that both the Islamophobia and xenophobia of the Tories (on one side) and the monarchism and Zionism of Sadiq Khan (on the other) are all integral to the British politics, which the new Mayor of London has mastered the hard way from his early youth. An Islamic iconography of power (for and against Muslims) is now in full display in European politics.

Sadiq Khan denounces the BDS and distances himself from the far more principled and progressive politics of Jeremy Corbyn with the same tenacity that Zac Goldsmith and David Cameron would use Islamophobic fear-mongering and the Hindu-Muslim divide against him. Sadiq Khan, Zac Goldsmith, and David Cameron are cut from the same political cloth. They authenticate each other. The offspring of the working-class Pakistani immigrants stages his politics the way he speaks his English, with his carefully cadenced, neighborly accent: fast, furious, street-smart, outmaneuvering the elitist white establishment that has systemically ostracized him, from his childhood, to his youth, to his political ambitions.

While Sadiq Khan represents the generation of Muslims who have assimilated their identity politics back to the overriding politics of their city and country, visionary and far more courageous statesmen like Corbyn in the UK (or Sanders in the US) have overcome their European identity politics to imagine a world beyond their manufactured borders.

Muslims, in short, have in Mr. Khan arrived in the UK and EU politics, part and parcel of the same nasty politicking for power. Before and beyond Mr. Khan’s careerism for power stand his parental generation of migrant laborers and the current wave of migrants and refuges facing a European site of xenophobic resistance that now includes Muslims too. European Muslims like Sadiq Khan have made it as lawyers, businessmen, and politicians. Their distant “cousins” as new arrivals from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria are too close for their comfort. They will do everything they can to keep them “back home” if their arrival will compromise their political ambitions.

Remaining true to the logic of his political careerism, Mr. Khan will use the memory of his “bus driver father” the same way Barack Obama used the racialized identity of his father and the faith of his mother to position himself as a black and a Christian candidate.

There is a serious lesson in this fact for European and US Muslims. At what point will their identity politics yield to a progressive ethics of responsibility that will actively side with the Christian Corbyn and Jewish Sanders against and beyond the accident of all our births, and thus unite in fighting against Islamophobia and anti-Semitism—above them both hovering the hysterical fear-mongering and callous bigotry of all sorts–to move toward a liberation beyond all pales of identity politics?

It will take generations of Sadiq Khans before the British Muslim population would produce a Jeremy Corbyn from their midst, or US Muslims a Sanders. For now the political rectitude of a public intellectual like Tariq Ali to Corbyn would mirror that of the late Iqbal Ahmad to Bernie Sanders in the US to keep us all on the right track. Until then, for this Muslim, I would take the Christian Corbyn and the Jewish Sanders over the new Mayor of London Mr. Sadiq Khan any day of the week, and twice on any given Sabbath.

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Hamid Dabashi
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written over 25 books, edited 4, and contributed chapters to many more. An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan. A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction, 2010). His most recent work includes Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (Harvard, 2011), The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (Zed, 2012), Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body (Palgrave 2012), Being A Muslim in the World (Palgrave 2013), and Can Non-Europeans Think? (Zed, 2015).
CM Reacts article

CM Reacts: Election of Sadiq Khan – Loren Lybarger


With the historic election of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London this weekend, Contending Modernities solicited the reactions of several leading scholars and analysts on what this election means for London, the UK, and the global context. These responses represent a range of diverse perspectives, demonstrating the rich, and at times contentious, discourse that animates current debates about religion and secularism in late modernity.

The recent London mayoral election was never going to be a run-of-the-mill poll, no matter what the gadflies might have told us about Muslims having a long history of running Western cities. Not in this moment, in which Muslims figure in Western public opinion as a threat to civilizational order near and far. On the contrary, coming just one day after Donald Trump’s rise as presumptive Republican nominee for the Presidency of the United States, the election of Sadiq Khan, son of working-class Pakistani immigrants and a practicing Muslim, could only have been an exceptional moment. Against a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, Khan’s rise to the top job in London’s City Hall appears to refute the politics of fear in Europe and America.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Khan’s seemingly exceptional status has featured prominently in the media’s coverage of his campaign and election victory.

The New York Times headline, for example, declared, “Sadiq Khan Elected in London, Becoming Its First Muslim Mayor.” Further down, the report drew the contrast with Trump’s rise, quoting Khan as saying he hoped the presumptive Republican nominee “loses badly.” British media headlines took a different tack, stressing the importance of Khan’s victory to the Labour Party in what was otherwise a less-than-stellar performance by Labour candidates, nationally. Nevertheless, the opening lines of both the BBC and Guardian articles highlighted Khan’s Muslim identity. The Guardian, especially, noted that Khan’s stunning success was a powerful counter to the “scaremongering” campaign of Conservative Party challenger Zac Goldsmith, who attempted to link Khan to extremist Muslim organizations.

The implicit meaning of this media framing has been hard to miss. As a Muslim, Khan, through his victory, ironically rescues the beleaguered secular-liberal value of tolerance, or, in the context of London, “cosmopolitanism,” a notion that makes toleration—in terms of an implicit acceptance of difference and inter-cultural solidarity—its ethical core. Notably, Khan has been able to perform this salvific role only so long as he has convincingly affirmed and embodied tolerance in this cosmopolitan sense. He has done so pitch-perfectly, stating, “I will be a mayor for all Londoners.” In an interview preceding the poll, he sought to press this point with the voters by underscoring the centrality of the city to his identity. In response to a question about his Islamic religious commitment, he stated: “It’s part of who I am—that’s the best way of describing it, because I’ve been asked this a lot. We all have multiple identities: I’m a Londoner, I’m British, I’m English, I’m of Asian origin, of Pakistani heritage, I’m a dad, I’m a husband, I’m a long-suffering Liverpool fan, I’m Labour, I’m Fabian and I’m Muslim.”

Khan buries “Muslim” in this self-description. The identifier comes dead last in his long list of other self-conceptions. Yet, in a moment in which the Islamic State has dominated headlines, “Muslim,” not Londoner, which heads Khan’s list of descriptors, is the crucial term; and it hardly surprises that the global media has lifted it to prominence.

The other identifiers matter, too: they render Muslim a metonym of the cosmopolitan norm. This “Muslim” exists seamlessly alongside other identities. It stands for irenic integration. And, it stands against that other “Muslim”—the one emblematic of terror and intolerance. The London election provides the mechanism for this inversion by endowing the Muslim-as-cosmopolitan with the authority of a landslide. Londoners have overwhelmingly chosen to believe, and to affirm, that Khan the Muslim is who he says he is—a Londoner first and foremost. But it is his Muslim identity, and the current moment of fear and rising anti-Muslim bigotry, that lends his elevation to London’s mayoralty its deep resonance, especially among secular liberals worried about the erosion of tolerance.

The euphoria, therefore, that has greeted Khan’s victory, especially among secular liberals and the left, is understandable. Still, the perception that Khan’s election strikes a blow for cosmopolitanism is fraught. The victory certainly signals one major metropolis’s rejection of xenophobic politics. It hardly means, however, that racism toward Muslims is at an end. The Trump campaign, if nothing else, serves as a sobering reminder of the virulence that anti-Muslim bigotry has attained within the political mainstream.

Another potential danger lies in emphasizing Khan’s Muslim identity above all else. As a long-time friend put it in a social media post:

It’s a pity that the fact he is Muslim is taking up so much space in the media. Wouldn’t it be better to underscore that here is a guy with a working class background from an ethnic minority who has been elected as a mayor? In what he has been saying until now after his election it seems to me he is doing everything he can to stress that he is London’s mayor—first and foremost. Is it helpful to him in his new task to stress that he is Muslim in the headlines? Would it be important for me to know when dealing with him if I were his employee in City Hall? The information [about his religion] belongs further down in the text together with number of kids and his wife’s profession.

In other words, by emphasizing his Muslim identity, the media implicitly contradict Khan’s claim that he is a Londoner above any other possible affiliation he might have. The danger here is that for cosmopolitan toleration to work difference must not emerge as distinctive but rather must become the unspoken norm. Trumpeting Khan’s Muslim identity cuts in the opposite direction: it reinforces Muslim exceptionality and in so doing undermines Muslim inclusion within the taken-for-granted order of life.

The rendering of Islam and Muslims unremarkable in the putative West remains an elusive end. Fifteen years since the September 11th attacks, anti-Muslim racism continues to spike. Yet, as they further establish their presence, and as the second and third generations assert themselves as full participants in the national community, especially, Muslims will likely shed their exceptional status. For now, Sadiq Khan is London’s “first elected Muslim mayor.” Soon, however, he may become, simply, London’s mayor, who happens to be Muslim—assuming we care anymore to remember that fact.

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Loren Lybarger
Loren D. Lybarger is an associate professor in the Department of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University, Athens, where he teaches courses on Islam, Sufism, Political Islam, Theories of Religion, Religion and Violence, and American Religions. He is the author of Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Secularism and Islamism in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 2007).
CM Reacts article

CM Reacts: Election of Sadiq Khan – M. Christian Green


With the historic election of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London this weekend, Contending Modernities solicited the reactions of several leading scholars and analysts on what this election means for London, the UK, and the global context. These responses represent a range of diverse perspectives, demonstrating the rich, and at times contentious, discourse that animates current debates about religion and secularism in late modernity.

Beyond British Islamophobia?: The Election of Sadiq Khan

At the public launch of the Contending Modernities project at a Notre Dame alumni event in New York in Fall 2010, I described to someone in the audience the research on Religion, Rights, and Recognition of Identity that I had begun as a visiting fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. My fellow audience member, a British national, listened as I described the part of the project that involved comparison of British and French approaches to the integration of Muslim immigrants in their societies, with particular reference to a then–prevailing view that the British were doing it better than the French—that theirs was a “kinder and gentler” integration. At that point, my interlocutor stated emphatically and in a low tone suggestive of prophecies and portents, “Don’t let anyone tell you that the British are kinder and gentler to their immigrants than the French. They’re not!”

More recent events, such as the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015 and the bombings in Paris in November 2015, as well as the bombings in Belgium (France’s partially French neighbor) at the Brussels airport and Maalbeck metro station on March 22, 2016, turned attention to Europe’s French regions, even as Britain was debating the “Brexit” that would separate it even more definitively from its European neighbors. At the Brookings Institution, terrorism researchers Will McCants and Christopher Meserole attributed the Sunni radicalization underlying both the French and Belgian bombings to French political culture in what they described as a “French connection” or “Francophone effect.”

Against this backdrop of problems affecting its Francophonic neighbors, London’s election of Sadiq Khan to be its mayor provided a triumphal, feel-good moment for proponents of the “Britain is better” school of comparative integration studies. Khan is the son of Pakistani immigrants, grew up in a working-class council flat, and was the fifth of eight children born to his father, a bus driver, and his mother, who worked as a seamstress. After earning a degree in law and embarking on a career as a human rights lawyer, he rose through the political ranks of the Labour Party in a succession of local, national, and ministerial positions to his recent victory. It is a striking turn of events in a Europe that is elsewhere being roiled by right-wing nationalism and Islamophobia, especially in response to the influx of immigrants generated by the crisis in Syria in Iraq.

It could have been otherwise. Britain is no stranger to problems of integration, which it was forced to confront in the 7/7 bombings of 2005. Three of the four bombers were British-born sons of Pakistani immigrants—the terrorism was thus “home-grown.” The bombings prompted much national debate, such that upon turning on the television in my hotel room during a spring trip to London in May of 2006, the very first thing that this visitor heard was a heated debate over proposal to teach “British values” in schools. The proposal was widely perceived by Britain’s Muslim community, including its large British Pakistani community, as being a particularly heavy-handed integration effort aimed at them.

There have also been more recent tensions around Britain’s Pakistani Muslims. In a manner satirized to great effect in the dark comedy “Four Lions,” Britain has, with other countries, been a sending country of foreign fighters to the Islamic State. The most notorious of these was Mohammed Emwazi, better known as “Jihadi John,” one of four British jihadis known as the “Beatles,” who delivered excoriations against the West in an East London accent while beheading Westerners in what quickly became a distinctive genre of bloody ISIS videos. In 2014, there were revelations in international headlines about white, working-class girls in the English town of Rotherham being gang-raped by gangs of Pakistani men in incidents that were said to be known to the authorities, but overlooked out of a perverse political correctness in the face of a multicultural ideal. One of the most notorious recruiters for ISIS, implicated in the flight of three girls from Bethnal Green in East London, has been Aqsa Mahmood, a Scottish daughter of Pakistani immigrants, who has radicalized young Muslim women to join ISIS as jihadi brides.

It is important to highlight, in a context in which many still accuse the global Muslim community of silence and complacency in the face of radicalization and jihadism, the important role that Britain’s Muslim community has played in combating radicalization and violent extremism. Last year, I had the great privilege of team-teaching a course on “Religion and Conflict,” put on by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation for a group of European and Middle Eastern diplomats and government officials gathered in Pristina, Kosovo. One of my teaching colleagues was Usama Hasan of Britain’s Quilliam Foundation, which has been a leader in the effort to counter radicalization among Britain’s young Muslim population. A Cambridge-educated astronomer and imam who memorized the Qur’an by the age of eleven, Hasan also became radicalized at university and briefly took part in the “jihad” against Communist forces in Afghanistan in 1990-1991. In presentations to the course, akin to the lectures that he has delivered widely in Britain and elsewhere in the Muslim world, Hasan spoke movingly and compellingly of his experiences of marginalization, otherness, and in some cases outright racism growing up in Britain. It was clear from his account that in comparison to the more recent stories of ISIS jihadis from Europe and elsewhere in the Muslim world, including the United States, when it comes to immigrant integration and religious pluralism, Britain is no kinder or gentler than anywhere else.

This framework of radicalization, extremism, and terror may seem a grim background to be celebrating the election of Sadiq Khan to be the Mayor of London and, indeed, the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital. But it is a necessary one in order to appreciate the importance and the potential of the moment. The burden of being a demographic “first” is never an easy one, especially for “firsts” that are laden with social, cultural, and political symbolism—for that we can observe the many trials, tribulations, and, at times, the missed opportunities of the presidency of Barack Obama in the United States. But in light of recent and past history, the election of Sadiq Khan to the mayor’s seat is a signal event, carrying the possibility for London and for Britain to be at its best in addressing ongoing challenges of integration—combating radicalization, violent extremism, and Islamophobia.

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M. Christian Green
M. Christian Green is a scholar, teacher, researcher, writer, and editor working in the fields of law, religion, ethics, human rights, and global affairs.  Green is currently a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, a general co-editor and the book review editor for the Journal of Law and Religion, and editor and publications manager for the African Consortium for Law and Religion Studies. She blogs at Cakewalks and Climbingwalls.
Contending Modernities article

Introducing CM Co-director Atalia Omer


Contending Modernities welcomes our newest co-director Dr. Atalia Omer. As a scholar trained in the theories and methods of the study of religion she brings expertise in religion, conflict and peacebuilding as well as attention to conceptual questions of modernity and secularism. CM asked Prof. Omer a few questions about her approach to the unfolding work of Contending Modernities.

What interests you most about the interactions between religious and secular forces in the modern world? 

As a scholar trained in theories and methods in the study of religion, with a background in Islamic and Jewish Studies and the Modern West as a historical complex, I am especially interested in examining two complementary dynamics. First, I explore how religious meanings participate in social, political and cultural formations. Second, I analyze how interpretative and critical work on religion intersects with efforts to think about issues related to conflict and peacebuilding. I am interested in research focusing on processes of religious innovations, whether they take place within the realm of feminist engagements with traditions, or through sociocultural and political interactions with others in pluralistic contexts. I do not view modernity or the modern, in this respect, as necessarily involving epistemological violence with respect to religious traditions. Modernity’s challenge of pluralism demands that we think substantively about political categories of citizenship and the relevance of the intercultural elastic tradition of human rights to religious innovation, change, and engagement with plurality on social, political, and religious levels of interactions.

Why are initiatives such as Contending Modernities important in the current global political climate?

Religion quite literally exploded onto the screens of analysts of international relations through the events of September 11. These events have forced many to overcome their secularist myopia. At the same time, there is still a general tendency to analyze religion in terms of form and function. Too little consideration is given to hermeneutical engagement with content. I think this is an area where Contending Modernities can greatly contribute to deepening literacy and nuance to the analysis of religion in a global context. Similarly, at a time when most individuals inhabit spaces defined by plurality and pluralism, the kind of sensibilities Contending Modernities is underscoring — religio-cultural interpretations, challenges, and intersections — will prove invaluable both on the level of theorizing religion and secular modernity as well as in shaping public discourse on religion and modern pluralities.

What is your vision for Contending Modernities as a research and public education initiative? 

Contending Modernities has accomplished an impressive amount of work in its first phase. It established working groups that research globally central questions pertaining to the research initiative. These working groups produced or are still in the process of producing articles and monographs which will greatly contribute to research as well as potentially to outreach and education.

Moving to the next phase, I think that we can intensify our blog presence and communication channels with journalism that engages religion. Other areas of change will include cultivating a more robust engagement with the secular as a discursive tradition as well as various threads of humanism, increasing gender diversity of the participants and involving more early and mid-career scholars in leadership and framing of the substantive directions of working groups.

Similarly, I think that CM can make productive interventions into the theoretical debates that currently animate the academic study of religion. I’m particularly excited about the formation of a small Theory Task Force that will examine and analyze synthetically the research produced thus far by the various working groups. This task force will give particular attention to conceptual and theoretical questions concerning religion and modernity and focus upon gender, identity, and lived versus official religion. In this way, CM can establish itself as offering cutting edge interventions in key areas of research in religious studies.

A lot has been written about secular modernity and critiques of secularism, I am convinced that CM can take the conversation to the next phase. While the project initially focused on Muslims, Catholics, and secular as three discursive traditions, my hope is that we will both broaden the scope to other traditions and, in particular, Judaisms and Protestantisms because the essential task of articulating robust accounts of the “secular” and of modernity and modernities requires that we will engage their discursivity as well.

Another item on my wish list is to connect the scholarship of CM to the study of the subfield of religion, conflict, and peace (RCP), an already established strength of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. The kind of discussions unfolding in CM can embolden research and praxis in RCP and vice versa. There are crucial intersections and synergies to be explored.

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

What’s Ethical about Popular Casuistry?


“How do religious humanitarians make sense of what they do?” Cecelia Lynch asked in her recent lecture at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. The answer Lynch proposed was, at least in form, what she has called “popular casuistry.” In her lecture, Lynch conceptualized popular casuistry as “how religious actors enact their ethics in practice, how they practice ethics in the exigencies of their times.”

Casuistry, of course, has more than one association, as Lynch rightly noted. Negatively, it calls up the sophistry of clever moral argumentation that may be intended to justify even nefarious actions. But, Lynch didn’t use it in this sense. Rather, she had in mind, more positively, the medieval Catholic moral practice of discerning the fitting principle to apply to a concrete case through appeal to past precedent by way of the exercise of prudential judgment.

Bridging these meanings, negative and positive, Lynch cited Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin’s The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. Jonsen and Toulmin argued that, in spite of casuistry’s bad name, the problem was not casuistry per se but rather its abuse that should draw our critique. As such, what we need is not a cold-turkey rejection of the practice, but rather, better casuistry.

Lynch’s study adds to Jonsen and Toulmin’s intervention by not only retrieving the concept of casuistry, but using it to fill out the neglect of ethical reasoning within International Relations. Critiquing her primary field, Lynch argued in agreement with Ager and Ager (2015) that scholars need to engage more fully with religion and its import for humanitarian practice. Constructively, Lynch has modeled a way to execute fuller engagement through a neo-Weberian approach that views: 1) ethics as constitutive of (and constituted by) political and economic dynamics; 2) religions as discursive traditions that are living and active; and 3) the intervener and outsider as a research subject worthy of critical attention.

Lynch’s study of the ethics of religious humanitarianisms not only retrieves the notion of casuistry, but develops it by using it as a lens to understand the everyday ethics of humanitarian actors. Thus the term “popular casuistry.” Lynch attends to the specific, contextual ethics that animate the practices of religious actors at the multiple sites of international humanitarianism (Cameroon, Kenya, Geneva, and the United Kingdom, to name a few locales). Through in depth interviews that start with the rough ground of religious humanitarians’ moral terrain, Lynch inductively identified sites of moral deliberation. Social conflicts over medicine and healing, practices for memorialization of the dead, and arbitration of land disputes all provided the contexts of moral work.

Lynch found that these moral issues, however, were transacted in a social imaginary that included four dominant discourses: 1) the history and spread of Islam and Christianity in Africa; 2) the legacies of colonialism and post-colonialism; 3) the rise of neoliberalism; and 4) the war on terrorism. If the issues named above furnish the sites of moral reasoning, these discourses provide the discursive field in which that moral reasoning took place. Lynch offered several rich examples of interviewees who engaged in popular casuistry on this terrain.

There is much that I appreciate about this approach. My questions, however, push Lynch toward disclosing more of what she means by the provocative term popular casuistry and specifically what normative work this description allows.

Casuistry has classically included 1) a case; 2) principles or precedents; 3) procedures of applying principle to case and 4) a judgment. Each of these heuristically separable (but iteratively practiced) moments in a casuistic analysis provides an opportunity for clarification.

First, regarding the case: I want to hear more about the kinds of moral dilemmas that religious humanitarians face. While medicine and land were featured in her lecture, I also wonder about other issues: possibly those related to gender and sexuality, violence, governance, and economics. Of course, what appears as morally significant is always already framed. But, what appears as morally significant is, well, morally significant. Did political or sexual violence appear as morally significant issues? Why or why not?

Second, regarding principle: it was not clear to me what precedents Lynch’s subjects identify as morally relevant or fitting. What are these precedents? And, are these articulated as principles, paradigmatic stories, practices, sacred texts, or something else? Lynch was right, in my view, to seek to move beyond Weber’s too static conception of principles, as well as beyond MacIntyre’s too hermetic conceptualization of traditions. While we agree on both these moves, it is not yet apparent to me that the four dominant discourses that Lynch identified provide the normative heft that Lynch needs for her analysis.

Third, regarding application: Lynch performed a double objectification of her analytical gaze, first naming herself as an outsider and second using that outsider status to interrogate the status of the humanitarian intervener. This work sets her up to take another step and lay bare the processes of practical reason (phronesis) that both her research subjects and herself engage in. How do they/she identify issues as “moral”? How do they/she identify principles as fitting? How do they/she apply those principles to the discursive contexts in which they/she operates? Answering each of these questions might illuminate more fully the ethics at work in popular casuistry.

Fourth, regarding judgment: the point of casuistry (at least according to Jonsen and Toulmin) is to come to prudential conclusions about specific cases that then can in turn generalize (however cautiously) into norms that might be used across cases through a similar process of specification. I suspect that Lynch’s Neo-Weberianism presupposes an objective distance that is principally descriptive in its aim. By descriptive, I mean that it gives an account of moral deliberation but does not presuppose the cogency (coherence and obligatory force) of the moral norms that come into play. But, I want to hear more from Lynch about the judgments of her research subjects, as well as her own judgments. This would require, of course, for Lynch to disclose her own normative orientation. But, by noting some of the limitations of a purely Weberian approach as well as objectifying her own role as an outsider in the contexts in which she researches, I think her methodology invites just this kind of move.

Lynch’s proposal strikes me as potentially quite fruitful as a mode of ethical and political analysis. It closely aligns with my own research interest to explicate the ethics implicit in the practices of peacebuilders. To harvest these fruits, however, I want to encourage Lynch to further clarity about the conceptual work that casuistry does in her research.

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

Religious Humanitarians and the Challenges of History


Professor Cecelia Lynch (University of California, Irvine, and a Contending Modernities’ Luce Visiting Fellow at the Kroc Institute) delivered a talk on March 31st, 2016 titled “The Popular Casuistry of Religious Humanitarians: Christian and Islamic Ethics in Action.” The lecture introduced debates concerning the ethics of NGOs, foregrounded concerns about power, knowledge production, and paternalism, and brought attention to the complexities of historical memories by paying special attention to the enduring legacy of colonialism in Africa.

On the basis of extensive interviews and observations conducted over the last ten years and across Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, Lynch has intervened in debates that seek to understand contemporary religious humanitarian ethics as it relates to decolonization, the rise of neoliberalism, and the war on terrorism. In framing her research, Lynch is acutely aware of her “outsider” status and location. Indeed, she has focused in this research on the role of the “outsider”—whether this is active intervener (peacebuilder, development worker) or the scholar. Moreover, the colonial past is the very present of sub-Saharan Africa, which Lynch stressed is often considered as “a site to be acted upon by others.” Mindful of these dynamics, Lynch has cultivated a tone of humility and concern about the lingering and transmuted forces of colonialism, neoliberalism, and African orientalism.

Lynch first situated herself vis-à-vis the emerging literature on religion and humanitarianism in IR. She agreed, to a certain extent, with Alastair Ager and Joey Ager who have argued against a simplistic and instrumental explanation of the role of faith-based groups in humanitarianism and have challenged the secularist bias of humanitarian practice which has exhibited an instrumental approach toward religion and faith communities. Like Ager & Ager and other scholars at the Kroc Institute and elsewhere who take religion seriously and on its own terms, Lynch suggested that substantively understanding religious ethics is not an effort unrelated to analyzing the avenues for and limitations of humanitarianism and peacebuilding.

She likewise concurred with Severine Autesserre’s thesis in Peaceland (2014) that “top down solutions” of international interveners’ praxis reinforce isolation from local populations, entrench ignorance about them and their histories, and reinforce hierarchies through attempts at imposing peacebuilding solutions. However, Lynch does disagree with Autesserre’s downplaying of (neo)liberalism as a major factor in such detrimental paternalism. Indeed, Lynch has employed a Foucauldian framework elsewhere to critique neoliberal discourses and their ramifications for framing humanitarianism.

Though departing from Autesserre, Lynch echoed the insights of Lisa Malkki who, on the basis of an ethnographic study of the Finnish Red Cross in Finland, turned the focus from aid recipients to humanitarians themselves and their neediness and loneliness. According to Malkki, these dynamics are embedded within and symptomatic of her understanding of Finnish societal problems. Lynch too called for turning the lens inward to examine historical trajectories and genealogies of both external interveners and transnational religious traditions (of Christianity and Islam) vis-avis African religions, practices, and customs (avoiding both exoticizing and reifying what is meant by ‘African”).

Lynch also concured with Marie Juul Petersen who has examined transnational Islamic NGOs and the challenges their histories present, especially as they need to navigate the discourses informing the war on terrorism. Lynch affirmed that her Muslim interlocutors tend to be increasingly concerned themselves with “extremists” or “reformists” especially in West Africa.

Hence, in conversation with this emerging literature, Lynch frames her own approach as a “neo-Weberian” in that it recognizes the dynamisms of religious ethics and renders religious beliefs as constitutive of broader economic and political processes. This is a highly embodied and embedded approach to religion and to the effort to understand religious actors. It is this neo-Weberian lens that leads Lynch to her understanding of religious actors are engaged in what she terms “popular casuistry.” Popular casuistry refers to how everyday religious actors make sense of their situations, selectively retrieve from precedents and thus selectively and contextually interpret the requirements/prescriptions of their traditions to determine what kinds of action are ethical in particular circumstances.

In examining humanitarianism in West and East Africa, Lynch’s neo-Weberian approach propels us to examine how contexts shape certain actions and claims and how religious actors authorize such actions and claims. An enduring question, however, is whether such actors also challenge the underpinning discourses shaping and informing their popular casuistry.

Lynch identified specifically the need to examine the histories of the spread of Islam and Christianity, colonialism and postcolonial struggles, the emergence of neoliberalism, and the war on terrorism as crucial factors intersecting with patterns of popular casuistry in African contexts, including syncretic praxis. Lynch illumined the continuous negotiations of African and “imported” religions (Islam, Christianity and the histories of their importation) in lived daily life of her interlocutors in order to foreground the need to always examine how our own traditions and identities are syncretic and “imbricated with those of others.”

For example, popular casuistry for one young West-African Christian woman working in East Africa with a multi-country student Christian organization entails a systemic examination of “empire” which she understands as “the forces operating today within the global economic context and also political context.” If the “common good” entails the reduction of poverty and conflict, the “popular casuistry,” Lynch stressed, demands educating “youth on the structures of economic power, which connects ‘root causes’ to broader issues.” Yet for others, it is precisely Christianity that is implicated in and linked to postcolonial power structures.

In addition to attending to the ways that actors challenge and redeploy the discourses underpinning popular casuistry, analysts need to recognize how neoliberalism shapes humanitarianism, including as practiced and resisted by religious actors through popular casuistry.

One such dynamic that Lynch identifies in a related forthcoming coauthored article (with Tanya Schwartz) is the phenomenon of “donor proselytism” which, according to her extensive interviews, is interlaced with some religious actors’ concern with the “audit culture” and “audit dependency” cycle. Accordingly, “some organizations—almost always transnational ones—can access donor funding, can access the U.N. and its agencies, etc,. while local organizations-including religious actors—find it much more difficult to do so,” Lynch underscores.

Lynch described a most acute story concerning Somali groups trying to break into the NGO and FBO mold. She suggested that the level of “donor proselytism” such groups confront relates not only to the failure to substantively engage “the local” generically but specifically “the Islamic local.” Lynch’s interviews with Somali representatives in Kenya demonstrate “a constitutive relationship” between being local and Islamic and how this combination complicates access to transnational donors and shapes the way in which religious identities are employed in seeking such access. Hence, the discourse of the war on terrorism, in tandem with neoliberalism, shapes popular casuistry.

The war on terrorism has impacted humanitarian action in East and West Africa, Lynch explained, in two general ways. First, it increased mistrust of Muslims by Christians and, second, it deepened the worry by Muslims about the status of “reformists.”

Indeed, neoliberalism and the war on terrorism constitute critical factors in shaping popular casuistry of religious humanitarians, including under the frame of Muslim organizations that “have taken on Western, secular methodology and terminology-but had not really looked at religious equivalent in terms of ethics and beliefs.” Hence, Lynch underscored that an actual effort on the part of transnational Muslim organizations to engage Islamic ethics explicitly is exciting but not sufficient if such efforts do not also include paying “attention to embedded histories.”

Lynch concluded her talk with a discussion of how the critique of neoliberalism and its intersection with the war on terrorism as well as attention to the enduring legacy of colonialism and missionary impositions challenge the concept of accompaniment that often animates humanitarianism and development efforts. She rightly asked how we can “foster research and practice that incorporates this kind of ongoing reflexivity?”

Lynch’s research is to be celebrated for the ways it foregrounds and explicates the importance of interrogating the discursive formations that inform religious ethics and popular casuistry. Her neo-Weberian framing allows for an elastic lens through which to examine the intersections of neoliberal and (African) orientalist discourses in the diffusion and praxis of the technocratic donor-driven apparatus of humanitarianism and development work. Popular casuistry, on both the levels of emic and etic actors, is profoundly influenced by the dominant and dominating economic logic. Her concern with “donor proselytism” is relatedly crucial for nesting any effort to analyze humanitarianism and development (explicitly secular as well as explicitly religious) within the deep and enduring histories of colonialism and missionary expansions. This neo-Weberian approach also brings into sharp relief the demand to understand religiosity contextually, historically, and within the various socioeconomic and political forces without falling into reductive explanatory frameworks.

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

The Popular Casuistry of Religious Humanitarians: Christian and Islamic Ethics in Action


Attention to “religion” in the work of humanitarians broadly-conceived (including both development and emergency relief actors) is on the rise, as is interrogating the reasons why humanitarians do what they do, and the role of religious actors in the broader “humanitarian international.” Drawing on interviews with Muslim and Christian humanitarians in multiple sites, Cecelia Lynch addresses the hermeneutics of religion in contemporary humanitarian action. In the lecture given on March 31, 2016 and accessible below, Lynch focuses on concepts and tensions important for peacebuilding that emerge from the “popular casuistry” of actors who navigate the principles of their faiths in difficult contexts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_AQ0p1BgCQ;feauture=player_embedded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGjis2MgEAE;feature=player_embedded

[For more discussion see Atalia Omer’s “Religious humanitarians and the challenges of history” and Kyle Lambelet’s “What’s ethical about popular casuistry?“.]

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Cecelia Lynch
Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is an expert on international relations, religion and ethics, humanitarianism, and civil society, and has researched and published extensively on topics related to peace, security, international organization, globalization, humanitarianism, and religion. She co-edits the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) Blog, at www.cihablog.com.