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Study of Secularisms article

From Power to the Spaces of the Ethical


I would like to thank Kyle Lambelet, Heather DuBois, and Cecelia Lynch for their thoughtful reflections on my lecture. I am especially grateful for their stimulating questions and critiques, which continued during the writing of my response and which allowed me to elaborate my perspective more carefully and precisely— with two specific and two more general propositions.

In my presentation and my larger project, I underscore that the considerations and critiques of the dynamics of power remain vital for our understanding of the religious, the secular, and their mutual engagements. Furthermore, in the study of religious-secular alliances that made the Solidarność in Poland and anti-apartheid in South Africa so successful, I recognize that these alliances emerged in opposition to the power of oppressive states and that they empowered the Polish and South African citizens to fight the economic, racial, and political injustices. That being said, I also contend that the analytic frameworks that focus exclusively or primarily on power, empowerment, and political strategies tend to omit, under-analyze, or misinterpret the role of ethical ideals and convictions in the political practices of the Polish and South African activists. As both the religious and secular leaders in two movements emphasize, it was what they were for rather than what they were against that accounts for their willingness to make sacrifices. What gave orientation and force to two social movements, I therefore argue, were the activists’ ideals and convictions rather than struggles against or for power.

I concur, in other words, that religious alliances in question are “not coincidental” but they “developed as the oppositional power to hegemonic forces of oppression and exclusion” (Lambelet). I also agree that in both Polish and South African cases there was a struggle to replace oppression with egalitarianism, and where there is struggle, there are power relations (Lynch). But if strategy and struggle against common foe brought the Polish and South African religious and secular leaders together, what sustained their collaborations was a recognition of the shared moral concerns and ideals of justice. My first proposition regarding Solidarność and anti-apartheid movements is therefore an invitation to shift our focus from the questions of power to the realm of ethical—to explore the ethical as it reflects the ontological commitments of individuals and communities and as it shapes platforms for their political actions.

My second proposition for the analysis of Solidarność and anti-apartheid movements is to attend to the revolutionary character of the religious-secular alliances that two movements helped engender. When our attention is fixed on the powers of the secular, which has long dominated the study of religious-secular problematic, the secular is generally reduced to matters surrounding the state or law. As a result, within this theoretical perspective, it is difficult if not impossible to uncover the complex ways in which the secular, just like the religious, is embodied and enacted by concrete individuals.

Even more importantly, within the framework of power, it is not possible to acknowledge that the religious-secular collaborations in Poland and South Africa created political spaces of joint action in which activists could take seriously what they shared and what separated them as citizens. This is the kind of religious-secular pluralism that, following William Connolly, is deep and generous in two ways. First, it is transformative for people’s identities (by indicating the interplay of religious-secular categories or, as I emphasize, by pointing to the moral proximities between religious and secular worldviews). Second, this pluralism is deep and generous because it upholds the ontological differences among citizens (by affirming, to use Connolly’s terms, the visceral character of subjectivities and intersubjectivities that give force and passions to political involvements). To answer DuBois’ question: the kind of deep pluralism that emerged in the Polish and South African contexts sustained the religious-secular binaries but also transformed the way they were practiced in the context of constructive political action by chastening their ontological absoluteness. Such dialectics, in my view, cannot be captured if the discourse of power dominates our analysis.

The observations that emerged from the exploration of the Polish and South African cases are the background for two more generalizable propositions I want to make:

First, the exclusive focus on power is problematic for how we theorize agency. Even if we expand Saba Mahmood’s insight and suggest that to inhabit norms means both embodying and resisting them, within the framework of power the understanding of agency remains constricted to the matters of assent to, or dissent from, that which is external to us. Yet, as the Polish and South African cases reveal, our capacity for agency is not just about our acquiescence to or contestation of norms; it is also about the ability to envision the new spaces of ethical, that is, the capacity to imagine and create new norms and ideals that individuals and communities seek. Theorizing agency this way, one might argue, does not require moving beyond power but keeping the focus concurrently on the realm of ethical and the dialectics of power. If this is the case, why so many of the scholars who study religious-secular problematic, especially when they explore the phenomenology of the secular, don’t develop and sustain the dual focus on power constellations and the types of ethical orientations they involve? There are a few and noteworthy exceptions in this regard, such as Cecelia Lynch’s work on the meanings of the religious and the secular in the context of humanitarianism. The fact, however, that Lynch’s approach is an unconventional one in the studies of religions and secularism only highlights the extent to which the focus on power constrains approaches to the questions of agency.

The second general proposition I want to make is an argument for the necessity to move beyond the discourse of power because it impoverishes our understanding of deep religious-secular pluralism.

Several scholars suggest that we open new spaces for a more nuanced and more contextualized appreciation of religious-secular categories by focusing on the fluidity, evasiveness, and hybrid character of identities and their interplay. I second such perspectives as I see them posited against the long-prevailing notion of religious-secular particularities as irreconcilable and unavoidably in conflict. At the same time, the choice to focus on religious-secular fluidity within the discourse of power—where it most often is examined—is a political, not merely analytical, decision. It is, moreover, a political decision accompanied by an assertion that religious-secular fluidities and hybridities are sites of greater political creativity and better models of solidarity.

That kind of focus on fluidity and hybridity raises several questions. First, should the view of hybrid religious-secular identities as more ethically inclusive than the ontologically rooted, culturally embedded identities be taken as a claim that ought to be explored empirically or as a normative ideal? If the former, our analysis can be open to various possibilities: staying close to the actual relations and negotiations of religious and secular actions can ensure that our theorizing will remain tentative rather than hegemonic. But if the assertion is that hybrid, fluid aspects of religious and secular identities are a normative ideal and, moreover, and if this assertion is developed within the discourse of power, then this line of argument impoverishes rather than enriches our understanding of deep pluralism. Instead of opening this category to further exploration and theorization, construing it as primarily religious-secular hybridities turns deep pluralism into a monolithic normative space that marginalizes other secular-religious instantiations and especially, what Connolly calls, “the final sources of morality.”

Secondly, if the focus on hybridity and fluidity marginalizes the visceral registers of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, aren’t we circumventing rather than tackling the difficult but unavoidable task of addressing the deepest differences between those holding religious and secular identities? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, does the focus on hybrid religious-secular identities within the framework of power provide an opportunity or present an obstacle for peace studies? If we are to establish the view of deep religious-secular pluralism as defined primarily by fluidities and hybridities, aren’t we missing the constructive political force of the final sources of morality—aren’t we excluding the passions and commitments that deep religious and secular identities bring into the work of social transformation or peacebuilding in various societies?

The Polish and South African cases suggest that the religious with the capital “R” and the secular with the capital “S” constituted much of the ethical motivations for activists’ political stance and practices. These categories were recognized as sources of deep differences but they also pointed toward the transformation that only deep differences can bring: they gestured toward encounters in which religious-secular distinctions were not defined by power-constellations but, in the words of the Polish philosopher and Solidarność chaplain Józef Tischner, by capacity to see oneself with the eyes of the other.

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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.
 
Study of Secularisms article

Turkish Muslimism: A New Islamic Engagement with Modernity


The engagement between modernity and religion is often presented through the use of binaries: secular and religious, public and private, liberalism and fundamentalism. But in a new volume, Muslimism in Turkey and Beyond, Turkish sociologist of religion Neslihan Cevik explores forms of religious engagement with modernity that resist these crude divisions, pointing instead to the possibility of a hybridity that blurs the lines between categories often viewed as diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Cevik explored some of these themes in detail at a recent talk at Notre Dame, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion & Society, entitled “Turkish Muslimism: A New Islamic Engagement with Modernity, Neither Fundamentalist nor Liberal.”

The concept of Muslimism, according to Cevik, refers to a form of engagement in which the mode of religious self-understanding “neither rejects nor submits to modernity, but actively engages modernity through Islamic categories and practices.” For Cevik, Muslimism indicates the formation of a “new religious orthodoxy” that embraces many aspects of modern life while reflexively submitting that life choices back to Muslim categories of evaluation. In this sense, Muslimism should not be seen as a particular ideology, although it does inevitably engage with politics through its influence on (and occasional cooptation by) Turkish political parties and its marshalling by groups, such as women’s rights organizations, pushing for greater political representation and equality through the use of traditional religious language and symbols.

Rather, Cevik views Muslimism as a distinctively Turkish and a distinctively Muslim mode of engagement with modernity. It is both an analytic and empirical category, observable through its instantiation within elements of practice in specific social, cultural, and political contexts–what Cevik refers to as “cultural sites of hybridity.” Through the rise of Muslim fashion (or self-styling), Muslim hotels and vacations, and Muslim business associations, Cevik charts some of the ways in which Muslimism actively seeks to code and morally regulate aspects of modern life. While Cevik acknowledges that these articulations may resemble trends in consumerism, she suggests that at the level of individual experience they actually represent a blurring of the distinctions between the categories of “modern” and “Muslim,” previously viewed by many irreconcilable. In this sense, and in addition to the binaries outlined above, Muslimism also resists the lamentably common perception that Islam is somehow uniquely anti-modern and prone toward fundamentalism.

Cevik traces the emergence of Muslimism in Turkey to the neoliberal erosion of statism through the 1980s, which resulted in the declining prominence of state and society-centered articulations of mutually exclusive religious and secular/modern identities. The opening of new economic opportunities created an upwardly-mobile population within Turkey whose experience with modernity left them at odds with conservative Islamist religious prescriptions, but still deeply skeptical of the secular state’s attempts to relegate their religious beliefs to the realm of personal, private, and cultural phenomena. To navigate these tensions new languages and determinants of modernity emerged, now more individual-focused (though not individualistic), and within which piety and modernity shed their oppositional associations and came to be seen as potentially complementary aspects of a new social accounting of modernity decoupled from both the strict communitarian regulations of Islamism and the secularizing tendencies of the state.

According to Cevik, Muslimism resists the hegemony of both the secular state and the Islamic state, which she considers to actually share many ontological assumptions about their citizens, manifested through their paternalistic, authoritarian tendencies regarding matters of individual religious freedom and responsibility. In its opposition to the shared regulatory tendencies of these competing visions of the state, Muslimism’s emphasis on individual agency is key for Cevik. In its resistance to the contrasting impositions on individual conscience prescribed by both Islamism and the secularizing tendencies of the modern state, Muslimism stresses the potent moral agency of the individual, and imbues the self with critical, morally-reflexive possibilities for action and self-regulation. By emphasizing the deliberative qualities of Muslim theological concepts such as iman (faith) and tahqiq (verification), Cevik depicts the Muslimist as a critical, intellectually curious moral agent capable of interrogating all forms of inherited, hierarchical knowledge, capable of maintaining both an “unapologetic” piety and the experience “modernity without guilt.”

Looking forward, Cevik acknowledges the contingency of Muslimism as a historical development, and avoids any sort of teleological claims about its future. Internal factors, such as economic stagnation, the unresolved Kurdish question, and the association between Muslimist elements and Turkish political parties, all present serious challenges to sustaining Muslimism as a form of pluralistic democratic engagement. External factors pose similar challenges to the durability of Muslimism, with a fear that regional security threats, the massive refugee influx from the conflict in Syria, and rising Islamophobia in Europe and the West will trigger a corresponding rise in authoritarianism within Turkey itself. However, Cevik’s lectured ended on a cautiously optimistic note. In its ability to balance the demands of moral and religious freedom with those of the secular state, Cevik considers the model of hybridity indicated by Muslimism to represent perhaps “the most viable version of democratic secularism” currently available.

Especially compared to the alternatives of violent extremism that dominate public imaginings of religion’s engagement with modernity, Cevik sees in Muslimism an “actual, living counter-alternative” to radical religion, and one with implications beyond the respective political and religious spheres of Turkey and Islam. To this end, Cevik suggests that other religious movements across the globe–including US Evangelicals, Pentecostals in Latin America, and certain communities within Israel’s Haredi movement, among others–might be similarly construed as “new religious orthodoxies” similar to Muslimism, but the implications of the similarities between these religious communities and their negotiations with modernity will require research beyond the scope of her current project.

In terms of enduring questions about Muslimism, given that Cevik locates the origins of Muslimism in Turkey’s historical processes of economic neoliberalization, and coupled with her market-driven examples of “cultural sites of hybridity,” how do we square the claims to individual agency associated with Muslimism with the critiques that advanced market capitalism provides only the illusion, never the reality, of non-determinate expressions of individual choice and selfhood? How potentially problematic is consumerism as a grounding for individual agency?

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Garrett FitzGerald
Garrett FitzGerald is a Doctor of Political Science & Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame and was a Research Associate for Contending Modernities. Garrett’s research interests focus on bringing the critical and constructive insights of decolonial thought into conversation with the theory and practice of peacebuilding.
Study of Secularisms article

Five Observations on Muslimism


As I mentioned in my intro to Cevik’s lecture on Muslimism, the project itself represents a significant step in our better understanding of the ways in which Islam, or rather, Muslims in concrete historical and sociological contexts, engage various institutions of modern life.

The book is interested in the agentic capacities of religion and religious actors. In this regard, the book is not identical with, but is nonetheless representative of, the multiple/vernacular/contending modernities perspectives: it considers the ways in which religion transforms modernity as much as modernity affects and transforms religion.

This is both my reflection on Cevik’s argument and my caution about the possible comparative approaches to various ‘new religious orthodoxies’: Cevik is rightly careful about the future developments of Muslimism, as they depend on various factors (political, economic, religious). On my reading, this cautious approach also ought to be taken with any comparisons between Muslimists and, say, Pentecostals in Latin America or US Evangelicals. Any comparative work in this area needs to be alert to the possible simplifications and repetitions of the old subtraction narratives about the ultimate victory of the secularizing impetus in modernity: for example, the view that the more individualistic theological stance noted in Muslimism will ultimately result in the rejection of the communal identity.

There is a great difference between hybridity Cevik discusses (as conducive of political and religious creativity and spaces of pluralism) and the hybridity that Olivier Roy, for example, identifies (as a source of radicalism). Hence my question to Cevik; to what extent the forms of hybridity she identifies are dependent on a particular narrative of Turkish national identity?

One final question: Islam makes a strong emphasis on social justice. Could the ideals of social justice as construed in Islamic thought be used as a critique of Muslimism and, if so, how?

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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.
 
Study of Secularisms article

Further Reflections on Muslimism


In response to FitzGerald’s summary and final question, I offer two things to consider: First, neo-liberalization was more than an economic shift. The crucial point is that is undermined state control on culture (as regards the definition of modernity, for example) and religion. In other countries, Muslimist-like sentiments may appear through other main determinants that could also result in reduced state control.

Second, though expressions of Muslimism emerged first through the markets (which is not at all surprising, since markets are more open to innovation than, let’s say, state institutions), they prevailed in the society at large through women’s movements to human rights associations, thereby articulating a political ethos as well. What matters most is that, in each of these areas, there is an emphasis on individual responsibility and a search for alternative establishments that would allow the pious to reshape modern practices through Islam (such as 5-star hotels that don’t allow alcohol, and a political discourse that sees the concept of iman as resulting in a liberal state).

When it comes to Mispters, Muslimism becomes more vulnerable I think. The Mipster movement being located in the youth and being oriented to social inclusiveness (not surprising given its diaspora status) make it much more open to liberal adaptation, which would bode ill to Muslimism, which would be challenged by liberal attitudes about homosexuality, for example. But even within the Mipster community there is constant negotiation: how much engagement is too much? where do we stop to preserve the symbolic boundaries? So change is not readily accepted, but filtered. Nevertheless, it does carry the risk of turning into liberal religion.

Now, the consumerist aspect of Muslimism is also under the influence of global markets. As the markets recognize the growth opportunities for Muslim lifestyles, they engage more actively with Muslims and their lifestyle needs. We may see markets co-opting Muslimism, just like political parties or states may. In that case, we would also have Islamist-like formations attacking Muslimism for being a degenerate extension of consumer culture, similar to the case of party co-optation, in which critics would argue Muslimism to be an extension of party politics. Indeed, such critiques have already begun (see Halil Ibrahim Yenigun, “Turkish Islamism in the Post-Gezi Park Era,” 2014). Muslimists will have to try and protect their independence with conscious effort. For that, they will need intellectuals.

Regarding Jakelić‘s first question, we do have to be careful about comparison. Conditions in each case will vary, but I simply point to the fact that not only Muslims but others too engage modernity through this alternative way, a way that looks neither liberal nor fundamentalist. I disagree, however, that an orientation toward the individual will lead to the rejection of community. What Muslimists achieve is a conservative transformation of the concept of umma as something that has acquired throughout the ages an authoritarian style and conceptualization. It is not a rejection of umma or communal experience per se, but it is the demand that community, as an external source of power, is not the main agent of morality. For example, many Islamists see the hijab as a making symbol of Muslim community, a symbol that creates the Muslim community in its differentiation from others. But hijab is simply an individual duty towards God. And that is where the judgment will be.

Regarding Jakelić‘s final question, to me this is a Christian take of Islam. Muslimists of course are aware of social inequalities and are not happy with them. But their battle, if there must be one for us to consider a movement to be ethical, lies somewhere else. Their battle lies in refusing Islamism and secularist approaches that violate moral freedoms. The Social Justice League marked First and Second Wave Jihadism since the 1960s, first anti-colonial discourse (the killing of Anwar Sadat, for example), then al Qaeda and the Taliban against the evil, imperialist West. With Muslimists, it is not that black and white. The articulation of social justice into the Islamic narrative has been ideological in general. Muslimists are not taking this bet.

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

Rebranding Islam: Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, and the Making of “Moderate Islam”


During the years following 9/11, Indonesia’s foreign ministry promoted Indonesia as the model for “moderate Islam.” During his 2009 speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, then-foreign minister Hasan Wirajuda proclaimed:

President Obama, in Cairo a few days ago, invited the peoples of the Muslim world to a partnership with the American people to address an array of critical issues: violent extremism, the Middle East situation, nuclear disarmament, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, and economic development and opportunity… I came here to tell you that Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, has long prepared itself to answer President Obama’s call for partnership.

More recently, in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, Indonesia sponsored several workshops with Egyptian and Tunisian politicians and civil society leaders in order to “share lessons” from Indonesia’s democratic transition from authoritarian rule. Further still, Indonesia has tried to reposition itself as a global peace broker within the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), most recently hosting OIC’s Extraordinary Summit for a just solution in Palestine.

As part of Contending Modernities’ ACI Indonesia Research Group, my current research examines how Indonesia’s governmental and civil society Islamic organizations are trying to rebrand the world’s largest Muslim-majority country through combined efforts of bilateral, multi-lateral, and Track II diplomacy. My research explores the multiple sites, discourses, and actors involved in the constitution – and contestation – of the claim that Indonesia is the exemplar of “moderate Islam.” In doing so, this research contributes to a burgeoning academic literature about religion, diplomacy, and soft power. Understanding such soft power strategies can shed light on the cleavages, conflicts, and coalitions of religious authority, community, and identity within, and beyond, Indonesia.

The late Edward Said’s notion of “traveling theory” helps us to understand how discourses such as “moderate Islam” move around the world, flowing in different directions, and taking on multiple meanings along the way. I do not attempt to define, much less defend, the idea of “moderate Islam.” Instead, I follow the concept in its multiple iterations, at times promoted as the ideal and “true Islam,” and elsewhere targeted by its various critics, Muslim and otherwise.

I first became interested in this project a decade ago while conducting research about Indonesia’s most famous Muslim televangelist, Aa Gym, whose Islamic school was often included in the foreign ministry’s soft power efforts in person-to-person diplomacy. More recently, I have observed public diplomacy inter-faith programs promoted by Indonesia’s embassy in Washington DC as well as similar endeavors sponsored by the Nusantara Foundation, founded by Indonesian inter-faith leader Imam Shamsi Ali.

Nusantara is the Indonesian word for “archipelago.” Many of Indonesia’s political, religious, and civil society leaders have embraced the concept of Islam Nusantara to refer to local historical practices and contemporary understandings of Islam that, according to Islam Nusantara’s proponents, offer an alternative to some of the hardline interpretations of Islam that many Indonesians perceive as rooted in Arab culture, not the Islamic faith.

Indeed, the world’s largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), championed Islam Nusantara as the theme for its 2015 convention, and Indonesia’s anti-terror governmental organizations are increasingly implementing the concept as part of anti-radicalization programs. Likewise, Indonesia’s Ministry of Religion has begun the arduous task of training 200,000 public school religion teachers on how to teach about Islam in terms of peace, moderation, and compassion.

However, the idea of Islam Nusantara is not without its detractors (even within the ranks of NU). Critics have ridiculed proponents of Islam Nusantara, using a clever acronym to liken them to strange otherworldly beings (jinn). Popular preacher Buya Yahya disparaged the appeal of Islam Nusantara as “haram pig meat wrapped in halal lamb meat.”

Indonesia’s modernist Islamic organization Muhammadiyah, eager to steer clear of such polemics – but also keen to promote “moderate Islam” – has advanced the less controversial phrase “progressive Islam” (Islam Berkemajuan). On March 13-16, 2016 the Association for Muhammadiyah University Students (IMM) hosted youth from fifty-two countries as part of their international conference, “Countering Terrorism.” Several of Indonesia’s religious, political, and academic elite addressed participants during the opening ceremony.

IMM’s youth chair introduced Zulkifli Hasan (the chair of parliament) as his personal hope to become Indonesia’s next president. When Hasan took the stage, he waxed nostalgic about “moderate Islam” in Indonesia, reiterating the Quranic passage that Islam was brought to this world as a “blessing for all humankind” (rahmatan lil ‘alamin).

As with all grand schemes to improve the human condition, however, the devil is in the details. Only a few weeks prior to Zulkifli Hasan’s speech, in the midst a contentious national debate about LGBT rights, he derided gays and lesbians as a threat to national morality (moral bangsa) and proclaimed that LGBT organizations should be banned from university campuses. Even among its proponents, what counts as “moderate Islam” does not easily adhere to Western liberal-secular ideas about citizenship and belonging.

“Moderate Islam” thus has a life of its own, and cannot be simply reduced to a Western hegemonic discourse projected outwards as part of the war on terror (of course, that is certainly part of the story). Of equal importance are the ways Muslims themselves craft and contest the concept, inflecting it with new meanings and local nuance. “Moderate Islam” is perhaps best understood not in singular terms of what Islam is, but as competing visions and projects about what Islam could, and should, be.

In this regard, NU recently announced that they will convene a people-to-people “International Summit of Moderate Islamic Leaders” in May 2016. NU will invite 200 Muslim scholars, from at least forty countries, with a broad range of expertise. As one senior NU leader, Gus Yahya Cholil Staquf, proclaimed:

Because we are the world’s largest Muslim nation, we cannot consider violence in this world to be distant from Indonesia. It is high time that Indonesia assumes the role and takes the initiative to gather the world’s Muslim leaders to discuss this problem. Indonesia’s strength lies in the fact that we do not have an invested interest, unlike Iraq, Iran, Syria, and even Saudi Arabia.

Despite Indonesia’s own “great power aspirations,” many diplomats and religious leaders from the Middle East privately look down on Indonesia and often relegate it to the periphery of Islam. However, with the current turmoil in the Middle East and the situation in Egypt and Turkey looking increasingly bleak, perhaps “moderate Islam” in the world’s most successful Muslim-majority democracy should not be considered peripheral after all.

 

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James Hoesterey
Jim Hoesterey is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University whose research and teaching interests include Islam, media, and politics. His recent book, Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-Help Guru (Stanford University Press, November 2016), chronicles the rise, fall, and rebranding of Indonesian celebrity televangelist Kyai Haji Abdullah Gymnastiar. Hoesterey’s current book project focuses on the cultural politics of diplomacy, foreign policy, and the making of “moderate Islam.”
Authority, Community & Identity article

Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality in Ivory Coast


Sub-Saharan African societies, generally described as community-oriented, are often compared with Western societies, generally pictured as individualistic. But this simplistic divide can be misleading. The postcolonial predicament in Sub-Saharan Africa is a complex conundrum that encapsulates various dialectical processes involving the constant renegotiation of the relations between community and the individual, belonging and autonomy, submission and rebellion, and authority and autonomy. Gender relations and sexuality are one of the main fields of the renegotiation of values, identities, and power relationships. Who sets the norms, in what capacity, and for whom? Sub-Saharan Africa actively participates in the generation and propagation of gender theories. The repercussions of these theories on public and social policies are prompting heated debates on long-standing beliefs and practices about sexuality, marriage, and family.

The present research project focuses on one case which encapsulates many facets of the debates between religious constituencies and secular authorities: the recent reform of the family code in Ivory Coast. The adoption in 2013 of a new family code that redefines power dynamics within marriage by institutionalizing equality between husband and wife sparked heated debates about gender roles in Ivorian society.  The official explanation given by the Ivorian government amidst the controversy surrounding the revision of the family code was that Ivory Coast had to honor its international commitments, having signed the convention on gender equality. But further prompting revealed that it was also a condition the Ivorian state had to fulfill to access a particular fund related to Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The revision of the family code was handled mostly as a political process at the parliament without much consultation of people at the grassroots level. Instead, parliamentarians consulted with a number of NGOs, both national and international.

There is an emerging debate between the religious and the secular constituencies of Ivorian society on attempts to enforce a more liberal framework of sexual morality and gender practices. The enforcement of gender equality and the emerging debate on homosexuality and gay marriage are generally perceived by religious authorities, both Catholic and Islamic, as a threat to traditional morality on gender roles, sexuality, and family. African traditional religious authorities also see these changes as a violation of African traditional values. These debates are often occasions for religious authorities to voice their concerns about what they perceive as the pitfalls of modernity or instances of moral decline.

The current project investigates the terms of the emerging debate between the secular and the religious on the changing patterns of gender relations and sexuality in contemporary Ivorian society, with a focus on the related reconfiguration of authorities, communities, and identities. In other words, the main research question is: how are Catholic, Islamic, and secular constituencies of contemporary Ivorian society engaging with new conceptions of sexuality and gender relations, and what are the related patterns of authority, community, and identity?

My overall argument and major hypothesis is that contemporary Ivorians, as postcolonial subjects, operate within multiple layers of community, authority, and identity, including the religious and the secular, and are selectively embracing the modern liberal normative framework regarding sexuality and gender relations. The Ivorian state, with its secular claims, is often caught between the international pressure aimed at reshaping its public values and institutions in order to accommodate the liberal agenda, and the local resistance of major sections of the population often supported by religious authorities.

Regarding collective representations, the study investigates the values, beliefs, perceptions, social representations, and norms underlying the debate around the changing patterns of gender power relations and sexuality in Côte d’Ivoire. It further explores the changes in relation to roles and positions, individual, and collective identities as well as the resulting forms of cooperation conflicts and compromises. I will give particular attention to inherent forms of authority and the ability of institutions (religious, political, administrative, social, and cultural) to direct, maintain, modify, or control standards and established practices.

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Ludovic Lado
Ludovic Lado, S.J., is the director of Centre d’Etude et de Formation pour le Développement (CEFOD) in N’Djamena, Chad. His publications include Catholic Pentecostalism and the Paradoxes of Africanization (Brill, 2009); Le Pluralisme Religieux en Afrique (PUCAC, 2015); and Towards an Anthropology of Catholicism in Africa (forthcoming).
Authority, Community & Identity article

The Battle for Meaning: Christians and Muslims at Odds over Indonesian Constitutionalism


As part of the introduction of the Authority, Community, Identity working group, the Contending Modernities blog will feature a series posts outlining the proposed research from scholars in the ACI Africa and ACI Indonesia subgroups. 

In summer 2014, Nahdatul Ulama (NU), one of the largest Muslim organizations in Indonesia, joined the Catholic Church in saying no to abortion after the Indonesian government issued Government Regulation No. 61/2014, a new regulation on reproductive healthcare. The new regulation reaffirmed the prohibition of abortion in Indonesia, but added exceptions for cases of rape or serious danger to the mother’s life. After some Islamic clerics issued a statement that abortion is “morally acceptable” if it is performed within the first 40 days after conception, NU sided with the Catholic Church in calling for an absolute ban.

The abortion debate in Indonesia is a fitting illustration of the global trend toward liberalization of access to abortion across the world. In Indonesia, this phenomenon cannot be separated from the constitutional reform that took place more than a decade ago. The series of constitutional reforms that took place through the 1990s and early 2000s resulted in the adoption of a lengthy and impressive of Bill Rights in the Indonesian constitution, and can be seen as evidence that Indonesian has joined the “race to the top” on its upward trajectory of adopting universal rights. Moreover, in the decade and more since its inception, the Indonesian Constitutional Court has emerged as an important player in the creation of a new kind of Indonesian constitutionalism, issuing many decisions on the protection of civil and political rights.

This phenomenon immediately raises a question of how the Muslims and Christians respond to the new notion of constitutionalism in Indonesia: do they embrace or reject it? No comprehensive studies have been undertaken of the relationship between the Indonesian Constitutional Court and religious groups, primarily Muslims and Christians.

The focus of my research is a series of constitutional cases in Indonesia, including those litigated in the Court and those that never reached the Court. As such, the study will contribute to the discussion of Christian–Muslim relations within the context of Indonesia’s domestic constitutional regime.

In one instance, the case of the Religious Education Law, Islamist political parties proposed a bill demanding the state to enforce a sectarian policy on religious education in both public and private schools. Most Christian-affiliated groups opposed the bill with a little support from some Muslim-affiliated NGOs. The debate ended up with the victory of Muslim groups, but the Christians groups never challenge the Law to the Constitutional Court.

Indonesia has also witnessed a new phenomenon of the so-called “constitutional jihad.” Since 2012, Muhammadiyah, one of the largest Islamic organizations in Indonesia, has been in the forefront of constitutional litigation, viewed as part of the struggle for social justice in Indonesia. After its involvement in the Oil and Gas III case, Muhammadiyah cited judicial review as a “constitutional jihad,” part of their “great legal struggle.” With their constitutional jihad, Muhammadiyah has challenged much statutory legislation around governmental policies. Interestingly, however, none of these challenged statutes have involved religious issues.

To date, there have been no comprehensive studies on how Muslim and Christian groups perceive the judicial review process in the Indonesian Constitutional Court. This study aims to fill a significant gap in the field of law and religion in Indonesia by conducting empirical research and analysis on the role of both Muslim and Christian advocacy and participation in shaping and contesting Indonesian constitutional politics. This study will collect and analyze data from the cases brought to the Court and those cases that never reach the Court; and from interviews with both Muslim and Christian groups involved in constitutional litigation in the Court. No data of this kind has been systematically assembled to date in Indonesia. Drawing upon a combination of archival and field research, this project therefore deals with a socio-legal theory around how constitutionalism and judicial review have been understood by Muslim and Christian groups in Indonesia.

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Stefanus Hendrianto
Stefanus Hendrianto is a Jesuit Regent at Santa Clara University, and he teaches both at the Law School and the Political Science Department. His research interests include constitutional law and comparative law. His current research and writing have focused on the intersection of constitutional law and religion, especially on the issues of religion and modernity in the context of international human rights.
Authority, Community & Identity article

ACI Africa – Pentecostal Pastors and the Crisis of Political Authority in Africa


As part of the introduction of the Authority, Community, Identity working group, the Contending Modernities blog will feature a series posts outlining the proposed research from scholars in the ACI Africa and ACI Indonesia subgroups. 

Since January of this year, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) Nigeria has hosted Divine Encounter and Shiloh Hour, a special monthly ministration and prayer service, in Abuja, the Nigerian Federal Capital Territory (FCT). April’s version of Divine Encounter took place in the city’s 60,000 capacity National Stadium complex against a backdrop of a prolonged fuel scarcity that virtually crippled social life and economic activities across the country. It was therefore not altogether surprising that, as he mounted the podium to address the large interdenominational congregation, the ‘fuel situation’ was the first item on the agenda of Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, the General Overseer of the RCCG. Having commended the congregation for finding their way to the event against all odds, Pastor Adeboye charged them thus: “Pray that the fuel scarcity be soon over and pray that this will be the last time we will ever have such occurrence in the country.”

Pastor Adeboye’s performance at that event, and his admonition to his listeners, are telling for several reasons, reasons that, as a whole, speak directly to my main research objective of articulating the sociology of the emergence of the Pentecostal-charismatic pastor as the focal point of authority in most of sub-Saharan Africa today. I will return to this presently, but first, let me offer a few brief remarks on why I find the performance of pastor Adeboye and his admonition telling.

In the first instance, the political significance of the space in which this religious event took place should not be lost on us. After all, Abuja is not just the country’s Federal Capital; it is the territorial and spatial symbol of the endless jousting for political influence and power between those two contending blocs: Christians and Muslims in Nigeria. The RCCG’s decision to make a crowd-pulling religious spectacle in Abuja a monthly affair may be primarily economic (after Lagos, Abuja boasts Nigeria’s greatest concentration of upper middle-class business leaders, powerful politicians and state officials, foreign diplomats, and international consultants.) As well, it signals an attempt to consolidate the political success that the Church ostensibly scored last year with the election of lawyer Yemi Osinbajo, a proud pastor of the RCCG, as the country’s Vice President. Incidentally, Mr. Osinbajo and his wife, Dolapo, were in personal attendance, with the added presence of Chief of Defense Staff Major General Abayomi Gabriel Olonisakin, and Health Minister Professor Isaac Adewole imbuing the occasion with all the gravitas of a state ceremony.

This brings me to a second reason why I find Pastor Adeboye’s performance telling. By admonishing his audience to “Pray that the fuel scarcity be soon over and pray that this will be the last time we will ever have such occurrence in the country,” Pastor Adeboye was enacting a ‘play’ with deep political connotations. With Vice President Osinbajo in the audience, any allusion to the political origins of the scarcity of fuel (for instance, the fact that successive Nigerian elites have failed to invest in the infrastructure for refining oil, hence its current rickety state and the country’s never-ending distribution struggles) would have put the VP on the spot. Yet, by failing to go for the political jugular and attempting to avoid politics or political controversy, Pastor Adeboye was in fact playing politics. Directly or indirectly, he was lending his name and reputation to a reading of the (origins of) the fuel crisis as a non-political act, hence unapproachable via conventional political routines.

Doing so, that is, advancing an interpretation of events that obfuscates or sometimes outright denies their political ontology is not exactly new to a man who has been hailed as perhaps the most politically influential charismatic pastor in contemporary Africa, the spiritual godfather to countless politicians and business leaders scattered across the African continent and beyond. For example, in 2009, acting in his self-appointed capacity as a semi-statesman without portfolio, Pastor Adeboye paid a ‘state’ visit to the Ajaokuta Steel Rolling Company, and promised that its infamous history as a steel producing company with no blade of steel to its name would soon be over because “I am going to put it as a priority in my prayers and I am sure God will take control.” The situation at Ajaokuta remains the same (still no steel), and experts agree that it remains the single most potent symbol of the omnipresent economic mismanagement of the Nigerian political class.

Ultimately, Pastor Adeboye is just a single individual. But he is a member of a critical pastoral cohort that I have described elsewhere as a ‘theocratic class’. The fact that this ‘class’ is politically influential, and increasingly so, is undeniable, though that influence may wax and wane in accordance with the personal fortunes of individual pastors. What I am seeking to uncover in my Contending Modernities research, a subject still relatively unattended in the relevant literature, is the socio-economic, political, cultural, technological, and last but not least, global context for the emergence and deepening of this influence. In other words, how do we account for the growing authority of Pentecostal pastors in societies under various forms of pressure, and how do we leverage such an account for a deeper understanding of the crisis of authority in contemporary Africa?

My research posits that as postcolonial secular modernity chokes on its founding promises, and as the state becomes more of an abstraction in people’s everyday lives, Pentecostal pastors have for all practical purposes emerged as ‘consultants’ who are entrusted with the final word on a range of subjects, from the pietistic to the private. This situation, I suggest, portends serious ramifications for how we understand social citizenship in societies still struggling to a lay a foundation for participatory democracy.

Across a variety of sociological milieus, ranging from post-industrial democracies, through consolidated military oligarchies, to societies under dictatorships of various permutations, accounts of the  ‘politics of piety’ have exposed the role of the religious leaders in the manufacturing of civic consent. Building on this literature, my research situates the newly emergent agency of charismatic pastors within the void created by the retreat of the state (a process far more complicated and certainly more nuanced than the impression given in conventional accounts), the decline of ‘traditional’ pillars of authority (for instance, university academics) and the quest for stability created by constant disruptions in the global capitalist economy.

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Ebenezer Obadare
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington, D.C.; a fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute of Theology, and contributing editor of Current History. Author and editor of numerous books on religion and politics and state and civil society in Africa, Obadare’s most recent work is Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender and Sexuality in Nigeria (Notre Dame Press, 2022). He is editor of Journal of Modern African Studies, published by Cambridge University Press.  
Study of Secularisms article

Reconfiguring the Discourse of Power


Slava Jakelic’s presentation on the productive collaborations between religious and secular civil society activists provides a trenchant critique of the attempt by those some call the “Asadians” to inscribe powr, particularly secular power, as the be-all and end-all constitutive characteristic of modernity. Jakelic agrees with Talal Asad (among others) in his historical deconstruction of the terminology of the religious and the secular, but argues that Asad and his followers end up reinscribing the divide by insisting that the secular has taken the upper hand in an oppositional power struggle with the religious. This focus on power, Jakelic further contends, prevents our understanding alternative constructions of religious/secular boundaries, including historically significant religious/secular alliances such as occurred in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle and Poland’s Solidarnosc.

Jakelic is a prominent sociologist of secularism and religion, and her work has done much to advance our understanding of and knowledge about secular and religious humanisms and pluralism in collectivist societies and beyond. Her Kroc presentation was no exception to the quality and persuasiveness of her thinking. Both Jakelic’s analysis of the tensions underlying the scholarship on secular power and her employment of world-altering examples of secular/religious collaborations in South Africa and Poland illuminate the promise of challenging the idea that secular and religious categories are inevitably and exclusively problematic. She shows that, in civil society practice, these categories generate both ethics and identities that activists struggle with precisely because they make sense to them. They have decided to accept or reject some aspects of what they understand as the religious or the secular, and they wrestle with others. (In my own work, I call this “popular casuistry.”) Moreover, they clearly identify themselves as actors on one or the other side of the binary. We cannot ignore, in other words, the internalization of these categories in productive ways by these (and presumably other) activists. Recognizing their existence, moreover, and delving into actors’ own conceptual struggles, allows us to emerge from the fray with new possibilities for productive collaboration.

This is rich material. I learned a lot from it and can’t wait to read the ensuing volume. In addition to admiration, however, Jakelic’s talk has prompted two other reactions, which I hope are also productive. First, I differ with her on the role of “power” — in particular, her desire to move “beyond the discourse of power,” and I question whether her activists move beyond it, too. Second, I would ask her to address in more detail the problems and possibilities of fluid boundaries between religious and secular categories and identities.

First, the issue of power. Jakelic’s prescient analysis, in my view, does not move “beyond power” itself, but rather relocates it to a more productive place than being stuck in the historical vacuum of the construction of religion and secularism as descriptive terms (and the consequent victory of the secular over the religious in the inevitable march to modernity). Her secular/religious collaborative exemplars, it seems to me, do not ignore power in two ways. First, their very existence is predicated on the conviction that oppressive power can be replaced with alternatives that incorporate racial, religious and secular egalitarianism and democracy. This is very much about struggle, and struggle is still inherently about power relations. But instead of an ultimately static and reified religious/secular battle, Jakelic’s actors are engaged in high-stakes struggles to transcend the powers that practice and institutionalize violence.

Second, many of the resources that Jakelic’s activists bring to bear on their struggles are founded on their experiences of the “power” of religious and/or secular ethical constructs, and their ability to see past the divide even as they define themselves on one or the other side of it. It is critical to note for those who would blame secularism (or religion) for all of our ills, that it is not this divide that causes the high stakes of these activists’ struggles; instead, deploying religious/secular differences allows them to appreciate the “power” of concepts and practices (spiritual, ethical, material) that they themselves locate on one or the other side, such as the necessity and yet the futility of sacrifice.

I am not saying that the work of Jakelic’s activists is reducible to power alone; rather, I argue that it is impossible to excise power out of their struggles completely. However, by relocating power away from the religious/secular binary, and instead understanding what constructive as well as constitutive role religious/secular differences can play in these movements, Jakelic is providing us with a tremendously important insight. We do not need to remove power from the scene to make that insight work productively.

Second, and more briefly, I ask Jakelic to expand on her critique of the idea that religious/secular categories are fluid, and the implications of that critique for her work. As someone who has frequently written about the fluidity of these categories, I agree with her that both scholars and activists make political decisions when they conceptualize religious/secular categories as either fluid or static (or something in-between). But, it seems to me, it is critical precisely to see when and how actors interpret and re-interpret these boundaries, and to understand that they can evolve and even alter radically. I think that Jakelic’s excellent analysis allows for this kind of approach, but I would like her to say more on the subject and its importance (either way) for peacebuilding.

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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.
Study of Secularisms article

St. Hedwig’s or St. Casimir’s and Why the Difference Matters


Just as the identification ‘religious’ says only little in itself, there’s no such thing as the secular person. The Asadians are correct that these words come to life – have salience – in mutual tension. Like other identity categories, ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are defined through historical use. The fact that someone is religious may seem unimportant to that person. Perhaps what matters in time x, place y is membership in St. Hedwig’s Polish Catholic Parish versus St. Casimir’s, a church equally Polish and Catholic.

Jakelić’s presentation disrupts the religious-secular binary because she looks in detail at the stories of particular persons. Lambelet points out that further investigation of the moral sources drawn upon by the actors in her cases would reveal hybridity in addition to collaboration. I agree, but disagree that this need be “surprising.” Surprise is an affective response cultivated by the very binary that Jakelić is disrupting. People who share socio-cultural space often directly or indirectly share myriad moral sources with complex genealogies. It is only in the less common instances of violent segregation that communities develop in vacuum-like conditions. As advocates of interreligious collaboration have explained for years, the ‘dialogue of life’ often results in cross-connections regardless of the success of textual and doctrinal dialogues.

In the cases portrayed by Jakelić, focus on the common enemy was more compelling than the religious-secular divide – again noted by Lambelet. It is important to note also that these enemies were themselves a mix of religious and secular actors. Namely, Solidarność and the anti-apartheid movement struggled against those wedded to the status quo – whether as a result of bourgeois complacency, elite power maintenance, ideological fervor, religious commitment, fear of change, or a combination of these and other motivations.

Looking at the South African case, it matters that the secular actors Jakelić profiled were communists (and that the religious ones were the social justice, not the authoritarian, types). This belies Asad’s definition of the secular. As Jakelić mentioned, he has said that the secular is characterized by an aversion to all pain and suffering, understood as inherently meaningless. Yet, these secular communists were willing to risk their lives for a new society. Was this because of an exchange among religious and secular actors? In itself it seems only to indicate that Asad’s ethnography of the secular was limited to its bourgeois and elite forms.

Is the religious-secular binary and its power analysis sufficient for all societies in all times? No, and Jakelić demonstrated that clearly. The next questions might include when is this binary opposition used, by which actors, in which social locations, to what ends? In terms of the cases already at hand: Was the discursive binary completely missing? Or was it operative and defused? And has it emerged in some forms subsequent to the fall of those common enemies?

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Heather DuBois
Heather DuBois teaches at Florida State University, specializing in political theology, critical theory, conflict transformation, and religion and peacebuilding. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2018.