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Global Currents article

Addressing Global Restrictions on Religion: The Need for Increased Positive Examples from OIC Member States


Despite the expressed hope of many world leaders that the political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 would lead to greater freedoms and fewer religious restrictions for the people of the region, research suggests that the region’s already high level of restrictions on religion have continued to increase in recent years. A recent report titled Arab Spring Adds to Global Restrictions on Religion, produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, is the fourth annual report in a series that measures and analyzes government restrictions on, and social hostilities toward, religion.

Focusing on 2011, the report found that while government restrictions on religion in the Middle East and North Africa region remained high, social hostilities markedly increased. For instance, the number of countries in the region experiencing sectarian or communal violence between religious groups doubled from five to ten. We can assume that next year’s Pew Report will not present a fundamentally different conclusion as the turmoil in the region continued throughout 2012.

Looking for Signs of Progress

While the overall picture painted by the report (pdf) is one of increasing restrictions and social hostilities, I was particularly interested to read examples of governments and societies around the world attempting to address the rising tide of restrictions through a variety of initiatives and actions, from encouraging interfaith dialogue to modifying laws and policies. Specifically, I tried to identify any positive news or good practices displayed by member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which were highlighted in the Pew Center’s analysis.

According to the report, “efforts to combat or redress religious discrimination and increase tolerance were reported in a total of 76 countries in 2011.” Policy changes were one tool used to decrease religious restrictions, such as official recognition of previously unrecognized religious groups. Two examples of this were the official registration of the Roman Catholic Church by the government of Azerbaijan in July 2011 and the Albanian government’s recognition of Judaism as an official religion in September 2011. Other initiatives sought to prevent violence against religious minorities by increasing security deployments, as was the case with the government of Bangladesh ensuring the peaceful celebration of Hindu, Christian and Buddhist festivals in 2011.

Interfaith dialogue was another vehicle utilized in addressing religious restrictions and social hostilities towards religious groups. The signing of an agreement between the governments of Saudi Arabia, Austria and Spain to establish the King Abdullah International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID) in Vienna, Austria, provides an example of inter-state cooperation to improve interreligious and intercultural tolerance.

The report states that “in addition to interfaith dialogue, other educational and training initiatives to increase religious tolerance and decrease religious tensions occurred in a total of 39 countries in 2011.” In some cases, educational projects focused on groups that were considered likely to be influenced by extremism, as was the case in Uganda where police outreach to Muslim youth increased following the 2010 terrorist attacks. Other initiatives, such as the sponsorship of 10 Omani students to participate in a religious pluralism program at Cambridge University, focused on building tolerance through higher education.

I was happy to see the first workshop of the OIC co-sponsored Istanbul Process referenced as an example of training initiatives involving multiple countries. The event, which focused on “training government officials in effective outreach to religious communities,” drew representatives from 26 governments and four international organizations to Washington D.C. at the invitation of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Istanbul Process was initiated by OIC Secretary General Ihsanoglu and Secretary Clinton in July 2011 following the consensual adoption of the OIC sponsored Resolution 16/18 by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2011. The resolution was a landmark development in bringing an end to the controversy and divide over the concept of defamation of religion at the intergovernmental level.

On a personal note, as a Turkish citizen I was pleased by the Turkish government’s decision in August 2011, allowing for the compensation or return of properties to non-Muslim communities whose land had been confiscated by the state in 1936. This development was indicative of the governmental and societal interventions in 2011 in “a total of 29 countries on behalf of religious groups that previously had experienced problems acquiring land or obtaining building permits.” In this regard, another example was the Kuwaiti government’s decision to allocate land for the Coptic Orthodox Church to build a place of worship to accommodate its members in the country.

Coordinating Role of the OIC in Promoting Religious Tolerance

Despite these examples of positive progress in promoting religious tolerance, the question remains whether the 57 OIC member states will be able to counter the trend of increasing restrictions on religion and social hostilities toward religion in the coming years.

In a commitment to furthering necessary progress, the OIC should take on an even greater role in coordinating the efforts of the member states. Under the coordination of the OIC General Secretariat and the newly established OIC Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC,) a dialogue should be initiated encouraging OIC member states to voluntarily exchange information on their interfaith efforts and protections for religious freedom. This collaboration would be instrumental in highlighting the good practices of many OIC member states on the international stage and setting standards of best practice for those countries that are still developing their efforts on these issues.

While negative perceptions and discriminatory practices targeting Muslim communities in some Western countries are increasing at alarming levels, open dialogue on this scale will preempt the perception that OIC member states focus only on Muslim communities in the West. Rather, it will serve to further interfaith dialogue focused on the protection of all faiths and beliefs. It is only through the translation of transparent and inclusive dialogue into governmental and social action that we can we begin to address and combat the trend of increasing restrictions on religion in order to protect the religious freedoms of future generations.

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Ufuk Gokcen
Amb. Ufuk Gokcen is the Ambassador and Permanent Observer of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to the United Nations in New York since April 2010. Prior to his appointment, Mr. Gokcen, a Turkish national, was the political adviser to the OIC Secretary General from 2005 to 2010 at the OIC Headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. From 2001 to 2005, he was First Secretary/Counsellor and Deputy Head of his country’s Embassy in Syria. Previously, he served at the Turkish Embassies in Riyadh and Muscat as well as at the Middle East Department of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Presently he also acts as a key representative of the OIC General Secretariat to the US State Department.
Field Notes article

Local ‘Political Friendships’: The Key to Making Multiculturalism Work


Towards the start of my research for Contending Modernities on multiculturalism I found myself watching a TV debate on the topic. The panel touched all the bases you would expect to be covered in such a debate – national identity, immigration, religious and political extremism – and yet it was difficult not to feel that the discussion was floating above some of the real life challenges of multiculturalism, captured perfectly by one politician’s insistence that we should ‘forget about blending people and just build the most beautiful mosaic society we can’.

Six months later, having just finished writing the report, I heard the very sad news that the wife of a man I had met through my research had suffered a stroke. This man was part of a multicultural father and son’s group in East London that used a small grant to organise monthly trips with activities like camping and archery. The amazing thing about this situation was that this very diverse group rallied around the family in the most incredible and practical way – from cooking meals to offering lifts to and from the hospital. In fact, the wives of the dads were even getting together – Hindus, Catholics and Muslims – to pray for this woman and her family.

The lesson of these two stories is the message of Making Multiculturalism Work – that overcoming the challenges presented by diversity requires fewer expert opinions and clever one-liners, and more local relationships between people of different faiths and ethnicities.

Political Friendships

My research set out to investigate how projects in the UK are already bringing diverse groups together and forming what Harvard scholar Danielle Allen has called  ‘political friendships’ across difference. In particular I looked at the UK government-funded Near Neighbours programme, which enables different faith groups to undertake social action projects together, and the civil society campaigning of community organisers as practiced by Citizens UK.

The first thing that became clear was the importance of working together. Dialogue is all very well, but if there is no tangible common action then it will be hard to create any sense of shared destiny. The Near Neighbours programme is a good example of how governments can contribute through giving small grants with the sole criteria that projects bring people together from different faiths or ethnicities. Such initiatives allow people to engage each other in ways that make sense to them, with nobody telling them what they should be doing or how.

Second, if people are going to move beyond surface level co-operation, they need to be free to share their deepest motivations. Citizens UK has been quick to recognise this, giving its participants chances to share ‘testimony’ in public meetings. This often involves the sharing of personal stories where themes that aren’t always permitted in the public sphere, such as  family and faith, are particularly in evidence. The result is that campaigners can trust each other to stick together when challenges arise because they know exactly what their collective efforts represent to each person involved.

Fostering Unlikely Alliances

Encouraging political friendships by building skills in working together and sharing core motivations involves making difficult choices. One challenge is in deciding who is considered acceptable to work with. There is something of an irony in ‘progressive’ circles that whilst outwardly championing diversity and difference, many people are often quite restrictive in who they will co-operate with in public. The example of the debate regarding whether political parties in the UK should be working with faith groups, which they might agree with on social justice but disagree profoundly with on issues of equality and personal morality, highlights this dilemma.

The experience of Citizens UK and Near Neighbours suggests a need to change the way that individuals and groups judge potential partners, moving from using a ‘progressive test’ of their beliefs to a ‘relational test’ of whether they can co-operate with people from different backgrounds. They have found that this more open form of cooperation can create unlikely alliances which are transformational for all involved, and that such experiences are actually more likely to soften fringe views than simply giving people the political cold shoulder.

The second challenge of the report is to those who might feel nervous about the idea of exploring core motivations because it could lead to the divisive subject of faith and religion coming up in public. Again, the experience of Near Neighbours and Citizens UK suggests that this fear is somewhat ungrounded. Instead, they found that people are usually quite good at negotiating fundamental differences themselves without relying on boundaries for what is and is not a publicly acceptable topic for discussion.

Practical Multiculturalism

The business of creating a more practical multiculturalism by promoting political friendships across difference might be a little more complex than it first seems. But at its heart this report has a very simple message: that the future success of multiculturalism will not be won by lofty new theories or more debates on national identity, but by encouraging real relationships at a grass roots level between people of every background and belief. Nobody is exempt from contributing to this task, and it is up to all of us to consider how the institutions in which we are involved might strengthen their members’ skills in working together and sharing core motivations. Then like the dads of East London we might just find ourselves surprised by the possibilities of political friendships to create diverse yet united communities of which we can all truly be proud.

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David Barclay
David Barclay is a Partner at Good Faith Partnership helping leaders in politics, business, faith, and charity to work together towards shared goals. From 2012-2016, he was the Faith in Public Life Officer at the Contextual Theology Centre, based in East London, which helps churches to engage with their communities. He is a former President of the Oxford University Student Union, and has spent two years living and working in Western China.
Field Notes article

Community Organising and Congregating Values


The resignation of Pope Benedict VXI in February, the first Pope to step down as Head of the Catholic Church in 600 years, has sparked much reflection for my work as a Muslim woman, and a Community Organiser in East London. In the Pope’s 2012 year-end address to the Curia, he discussed interreligious dialogue not as a means to convert others but as process of understanding in which both parties remain consciously within their identity. I am struck by these words:

“It is necessary to learn and accept the other in his otherness and the otherness of his thinking. To this end, the shared responsibility for justice and peace must become the guiding principle of the conversation”

This is a message that seems to resonate with the experiences of Christian, Muslim and Secular leaders who are involved in Community Organising in East London. Although they have differing worldviews, they are able to compromise and work together for the common good in their community.

However, the congregating of these values is not without its compromise and tension.

Service, Mission, and Advocacy

My research for Contending Modernities (pdf) focuses on the relationships between religious and secular leaders in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and how their motivations to work for the common good interplay with the compromises and tensions they experience in animating their values in public life.

The study considers three key factors: service; mission; and advocacy as congregating values that are integral to motivating these different communities to work together, and explores the underlying conflicts that can arise from their differing perspectives. Through a series of interviews, community leaders have articulated openly how they have overcome some of challenges that working together can pose.

Some of the challenges discussed include: the prioritising of time to the wider community or the institution, relationship building as an opportunity for soft evangelism or conversion, dilution of faith values, religions versus secularism and tensions in leadership.

Despite these challenges, Christian, Muslim and Secular leaders in Tower Hamlets remain committed to relationship building and working together for positive change in the community. Interestingly, interreligious dialogue does not go far enough– action is the oxygen that keeps these relationships alive in the messy politics of public life in East London. Community organising facilitates the finding of common ground in uncertain terrain.

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Ruhana Ali
Ruhana Ali is Program Director for Europe and the Middle East at cross-boundry leadership organization "Common Purpose." She was previously a Citizens UK Community Organiser working in Tower Hamlets training and developing local leaders in the art of public action. Ruhana read Social Policy, Criminal Justice and Psychology at the London School of Economics and became the first Muslim women to be elected as Sabbatical Officer of LSE Students' Union. Her briefing paper "Community Organising and Congregating Values" can be downloaded from The Contextual Theology Centre.
Contending Modernities article

The Secularization Debate in Indonesia and Egypt


Literature on the secularization debate seldom alludes to Muslim discussions of the issue. Among sociologists of religion, secularization theory used to be considered as part of conventional sociological wisdom, but has since been increasingly disputed and discredited. Scholars like Harvey Cox and Peter Berger are often cited as examples of those who have “repented” from ascribing to secularization theory. “After reviewing these developments,” Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart wrote, “Peter L. Berger, one of the foremost advocates of secularization during the 1960s, recanted his earlier claims” (Norris and Inglehart, 2004:4). One should note that there are also opponents of secularization, such as David Martin, who later recanted their earlier position and became its proponents. Both camps often make their case by referring to the “Islamic phenomenon”, albeit without delving into Muslim engagements with this secularization debate.

The Secularization Debate in Indonesia

During the 1970s and 1980s Indonesia and Egypt witnessed public debates involving both proponents and opponents of secularization. When the late Nurcholish Madjid delivered an influential speech to a gathering of major Islamic organizations on January 2, 1970, in Jakarta, it soon engendered a wide controversy in the country. Madjid called for the liberation of Muslim minds from stagnation in religious thinking caused by an inability to differentiate between values that are transcendental and those which are temporal. The vast majority of Muslims, he observed, reject the necessity of Islamic renewal and reform because they perceive “everything as transcendental and therefore, without exception, valued as divine” (Madjid, 1987:207). It is in this context that he called for secularization to make what was temporal stay temporal and liberate the Muslim community from the tendency to spiritualize it.

At the time, Madjid was serving a second term as the General Chairman of the Association of Muslim Students – a modernist, urban Muslim student organization, known as HMI. He went on to earn his PhD in 1984 from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Fazlur Rahman, a Pakistani-born scholar whose progressive ideas caused storm in Pakistan, forcing him to live in exile. Madjid launched his “secularization” idea before he studied under Rahman’s tutelage. However, his engagement with Western scholarship at the University of Chicago led him to refine his approach to the secularization debate.

Madjid’s idea of Islamic renewal received mixed responses from Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, initiating a vibrant and exciting discourse surrounding secularization. Reactions to Madjid’s ideas took the forms of public debates, Friday sermons, and newspaper articles. Unfortunately, most such discussions focused on debates surrounding terminology, particularly focusing on “secularization” and “secularism”, which is understandable given the fact that such terms have yet to become popularized in intellectual discourse in Indonesia. Madjid used the terms along the same lines as Harvey Cox who defined secularization as the liberation of man from religious and metaphysical tutelage, and the turning of his attention away from other worlds and toward this one. As such, Cox argued, “it should be carefully distinguished from secularism” (Cox, 1965:18). Drawing on this distinction between secularism and secularization, Madjid argued that the latter is meant as a form of liberating development, and is “not to convert Muslims to become secularists.”

While he employed the terms from a sociological perspective, his opponents, including Dr. HM Rasyidi, understood secularization from philosophical point of view, suggesting that secularism is the logical consequence of secularization. Two years after Madjid’s electrifying speech, Rasyidi published a book entitled Koreksi terhadap Drs. Nurcholish Madjid tentang Sekularisasi (Correction to Drs. Nurcholish Madjid on Secularization). By referring to Alan Richardson’s Religion in Contemporary Debate, he contended that secularization and secularism are integral parts of Western history which uphold the separation between religion and state. Perhaps, Madjid was then aware that a Coxian conception of secularization was likely to evoke a storm of criticisms. Following his return from the University of Chicago, he no longer referred to Cox to justify the sociological meaning of secularization, but rather to other sociologists like Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah who called such a type of secularization “radical devaluation” or “desacralization.” As Robert Hefner has rightly noted, “Madjid himself expressed misgivings at his choice of terms, commenting publicly that his reference to ‘secularization’ had invited misinterpretation” (Hefner, 2000:118).

The Secularization Debate in Egypt

Viewing secularism as a Western (European) experience that is alien to Islam has been prevalent historically among opponents of secularism in Egypt. Such opponents argue that secularism was born in pre-modern Christian Europe out of the necessity to fight the crippling dominance of the church over the political realm and over intellectual life. It is this claim of the specificity of the European experience that scholars like Fouad Zakaria have bluntly rejected. Like Madjid, in the 1980s Zakaria took part in several public debates about secularization, including one involving influential preachers such as Muhammad al-Ghazali and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It is worth noting that Zakaria stood up in defense of secularism against such respected Ulama in front of unfriendly audiences. As described by Nancy Gallagher (1989: 108-215), during his presentation he was greeted with rumbling and threatening protests. The audience increasingly became restless even though the moderator continually called for silence and kept asking the highly partisan audience to show respect to the speakers.

Zakaria was born in Port Said in Egypt in 1927. He studied at Cairo university (BA) and ‘Ayn Shams university (MA, PhD). He is one of the prominent Arab thinkers who have consistently offered a sustained critique of the intellectual, political, and social foundations and contemporary manifestations of Islamism in the Arab and Muslim world. Even before the public debate in Cairo, the famed Muslim scholar Qaradawi wrote a book devoted to rebutting Zakaria’s idea of secularism, entitled al-Islam wa al-‘almaniyya wajhan bi-wajhin: Radd ‘ilmi ‘ala Fuad Zakaria wa jama‘a al-‘almaniyyin (Islam and Secularism Face to Face: Scientific refutation of Fouad Zakaria and Secularist Groups).

Of course, Zakaria was not the first to introduce the secularization debate to Egyptian intellectual discourse. The debate on this issue had taken place since the middle of the nineteenth century and culminated in the controversial work of Ali Abd al-Raziq, al-Islam wa-usul al-hukm (Islam and the principles of governance), published in 1925. Zakaria inherited this perennial controversy from his predecessors who had first encountered the tangible impact of European cultural and intellectual influences in the Arab region. This explains why, in contrast to the Indonesian context, reactions to Zakaria did not merely revolve around questions of terminology, but the broader question of whether secularism is a solution or problem for the Muslim world today.

Contrary to his critics, Zakaria argued that secularism is not the product of a particular society in specific times and places. Rather, it is a necessary requirement for any society threatened by the oppression of an authoritarian mode of thinking which prohibits people from questioning, criticizing, and thinking about their future. “The reasons that pushed Europe in the direction of secularism,” he asserts, “are cropping up in our present Islamic world, and therefore the widespread idea that secularism is the result of specifically European conditions in a certain stage of its development is baseless” (Zakaria, 1989:66). Zakaria rejects the accusation that his view of secularism is antithetical to Islam, saying that “arguments of most secularists against the interpretations of Islamists are also derived from Islam itself” (2005:21).

Madjid and Zakaria lived in different social and political contexts, yet both used the discourse on secularization and secularism as a starting point to discuss important issues facing the Muslim community in their respective countries. It is difficult to assess, however, the extent to which they have succeeded in their intellectual endeavors. It seems that the Indonesian soil is more fertile than that of Egypt for this modern idea to take root. What accounts for this different reception in both countries needs a further analysis. The point here is that this complexity of Muslim discussions of secularization in Islamic lands, and their engagements with Western scholarship, should not be overlooked.

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Mun’im Sirry
Field Notes article

The New Cosmopolitanism: Global Migration and the Building of a Common Life

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The Contending Modernities Global Migration working group is pleased to announce an interdisciplinary conference to be held in London, UK on 14 & 15 October 2013 – The New Cosmopolitanism: Global Migration and the Building of a Common Life. The conference grows out of the working group’s research project in London, which focuses on the ways that broad-based community organizing enables secular and religious citizens to build a common life. The conference will bring this research into dialogue with a wide range of theoretical and empirical research on the role of faith in public life in pluralist and culturally diverse societies. A keynote lecture will be given by The Most Reverend Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin.

Call for Papers

Few questions in contemporary studies of migration and citizenship have proved more urgent in recent years than the question of how migrants and hosts in societies marked by growing cultural and ethical pluralism are to live together peaceably and inclusively. Globalizing cities in Europe and North America are rapidly becoming home not only to new waves of immigrants, but also to new forms of civic identity, citizenship and civil society. Central to this new multicultural cosmopolitanism are people of faith, whose religious identity and commitments—not least their understanding of what constitutes a just and humane society— informs their interaction with one another and with secular actors and institutions. Working in collaboration, and in other cases in competition, Christians, Muslims (as well as Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, and Hindus), civic and business leaders, and political action groups are working to build community, gain representation and shape local and national democracy.

The global expansion of migration, within and between the global north and south, and the global resurgence and “publicization” of religion – have combined to bring religious and secular models of citizenship and civic education to the fore.  Nonetheless, there is surprisingly little consensus among religious leaders, educators, and policy makers as to what framework might allow people from different religious and ethical backgrounds to live together tolerantly and inclusively.  The lack of consensus is all the more vexing in that migration and religious revitalization today have created multicultural and multi-ethical landscapes all over the globe.  The question of the place of religion in modern multicultural societies is not an academic one, then, but one of the most pressing ethical challenges of our age.

The conference will consider this issue from theoretical and practical perspectives:

(1)  How have global migration and the concept of multiculturalism created new challenges for the democracies of North America and Europe around understandings of citizenship, membership, democratic participation, religion in public life, and social justice?  The conference organizers encourage paper submissions for panels that would consider these questions from the perspective of law, political philosophy, and theology.

(2)  Faith-based community organizing in the inner city has become an important way for immigrants and migrants to forge community with neighbors across the boundaries of ethnicity, race, and religion on issues of economic, political, and social justice.  It is also a vehicle for citizenship formation in multicultural settings.  The conference organizers encourage paper submissions that analyze and explore the practical experience of organizing in urban settings that involve Catholic, Muslim, and secular groups.

Submission guidelines

Please submit paper proposals to Remi Kathawa at remi.kathawa@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is July 1, 2013. Please limit proposals to 750 words.

 

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Vincent Rougeau
Vincent Rougeau has been Dean of Boston College Law School since 2011. He previously worked as a Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame.  He teaches and writes in the area of law and religion, with an emphasis on Catholic social teaching, and is the author of Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship in the New World Order (Oxford, 2008).
Angus Ritchie
Canon Dr. Angus Ritchie is an Anglican priest. For over twenty years, he has served in parishes in East London involved in community organizing, playing a leading role in campaigns for the Living Wage, affordable housing, and a cap on interest rates. He is the founding director of the Centre for Theology and Community. His latest book, Inclusive Populism: Creating Citizens in the Global Age was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2019, and was recently discussed by Pope Francis at a conference of Catholics involved in community organizing.
Field Notes article

Community Organising in London’s Congolese Diaspora


‘Culture is to social organisation, as mind is to brain’. As civic space in London becomes increasingly cosmopolitan, this observation by Mary Douglas emphasises the need to delve deeper into the cultural make up of this thriving metropolis. My experience of engaging members of London’s Congolese diaspora in community organising has highlighted the increasing demand for both intentional processes of integration, and the opening of spaces within which citizens can actively engage in public life. This blog outlines two forthcoming papers, which I am currently completing as part of the Contending Modernities research and education initiative: Democratising Democracy; and The Culture of Community: Opportunities and Challenges created through Diaspora Community Organising.

Acknowledging the Technologies of Democracy

Naila Kabeer identifies an important challenge to the low levels of democratic engagement which have characterised the period since neoliberalism has become firmly entrenched – both politically and economically. For Kabeer, the challenge of structural inequality brought about through relatively unregulated capitalism can only be redressed through the development of active and inclusive citizenship. In her view, international initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals, which are designed to tackle what are considered to be the greatest threats to the flourishing of lives in the developing world, often only perpetuate the structural inequalities of the current economic order. Similarly, the lack of opportunities for civic engagement within narrow and technical democratic processes at local, national and international levels, only furthers this structural inequality. According to Kabeer’s account, democracy is in danger of becoming a means of advancing, rather than regulating, the inequalities generated by unfettered neoliberal economics.

Understanding Civil Society

It is essential to place an analysis of contemporary civic space in London within this structural framework. Experience of organising with the Congolese diaspora over the past year has brought into sharp focus the challenges faced by migrant communities in London. Evidence suggests that one of the main reasons for a lack of integration within British society is a fear of ‘other’. Using Edward Said’s conception of ‘orientalism’ as a lens for analysis, it becomes increasingly clear that difference can be defined according to a broad range of affiliations including culture, faith, experience, and knowledge, regardless of whether these views are real or imagined. Rather than adopting a neutral narrative which denies these differences in a superficial attempt to bring people together, community organising provides a platform through which people of contending worldviews, beliefs and experiences of civil society, can come together to work on behalf of one another for the common good.

Challenges to Inclusive Citizenship

While community organising provides a creative and progressive platform in which people of diverse beliefs, values and opinions can work together, challenging the notion of ‘difference as other’, the process of the organising highlights the fact that these differences are not necessarily easily negotiated in a neutral model. My research further explores the multitude of challenges faced by migrant groups, articulating particularly how these challenges play out in an organising context. The model of community organising is universal in order to retain sharp focus and rigorous strategy, but when one attempts to exercise this model with people of such diverse backgrounds, the ‘western’ basis of the model becomes apparent. Not only does my research articulate the need for an opening of democratic space within which people of all different backgrounds can be heard equally, the model through which citizenship becomes inclusive and active (i.e. beyond the narrow technologies of a ballot box) must be interrogated in order to understand the assumptions which lie beneath its own narrative.

Practical, Moral, and Ideological Considerations

In light of these findings, a number of important issues have been raised for further research. It is necessary to reject the assumption often made that migrant communities come to the UK and learn what it means to be part of a civil society. In rejection of this view, we must ask: What does civil society look like in the countries from which migrants come, and how would a better understanding of this enhance active citizenship within the UK?

Focusing particularly on the practical, moral and ideological barriers found by members of the Congolese community who have been involved in community organising to varying degrees, the research papers pose challenges regarding both life in the countries from which migrants come, and also in the UK. On a practical level, it is necessary to interrogate the physical norms of public life in the migrant’s country of origin. Morally, it is necessary to acknowledge what it means to come from a predominantly faith based society like the DRC, into one which is largely secular. Finally, ideologically, it is necessary to explore how notions of civil society and community are understood to migrants in their countries of origin, and how these understandings complement or conflict with similar notions in the UK. I argue that these findings should not only be seen as tools for enabling diaspora groups to engage more effectively in organising; they should also have an impact on how we, as host communities, consider our own notions of home and community.

Facilitating Sustainable Integration

It is my belief that community organising has significant potential for redressing low levels of democratic participation – through processes which actively engage citizens, encourage integration, and allow the voices of all individuals to be heard at local, national and international levels. However, in order for this process to take place, it is necessary to reject the assumption that community organising is a neutral model. Acknowledging its own cultural framework, one can begin to think through ways in which the model might be adapted to incorporate more fully the breadth of worldviews and experiences incorporated in its agenda. The sustainable answer will inevitably require long-term in-depth analysis, but the imperative is clear.

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Caitlin Burbridge
Caitlin Burbridge is a community organizer in Hackney, London. From 2012-2013 she was Research Co-ordinator at the Contextual Theology Centre in East London.  Caitlin received a BA in Geography from Oxford University and an MA in International Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her research interests include the challenges and opportunities created by the development of cross-cultural communities.
Field Notes article

Brain, Mind and Culture: Promptings from Muslim Theology


Pick up a work by Shah Waliyullah of Delhi (d. 1762), the great Indian polymath and sage-like figure, and he might commend your attention to sensory substitution, or synesthesia – what we can think of as cross talk among sensory areas in the brain. Indeed, Waliyullah is but a premiere example among many Medieval and early modern Muslim theologians who offer startling insights about perception, ideas which sometimes even resemble trending topics like neuroplasticity.  I say this mindful of the warning not to mold our “notion of antiquities after their resemblance to the present”(Funkenstein, 120).

A Bridge between Theology and Culture

Waliyullah wrote masterfully on Islamic law, spirituality, the Qur’an, and the Prophetic traditions.   In these works, he tried to explain how revelations and intuitions are mediated by the human mind, particularly the minds of prophets. In my reading it appears that he tried to build a bridge between theology and culture. His point was to show that while the minds of prophets are in one sense attuned to the celestial spheres, other aspects of their minds refract the maps of their respective cultures.  Of particular importance to him were the specifics of law, norms and values that were encoded in revealed religions like Islam at its very inception in the seventh century.  For most Muslim thinkers and theologians the relevance of norms and values were never in dispute. Yet, often the form and practice of such norms and values sparked debate. Wrestling with these problems forces figures like Waliyullah to grasp the nettle of the metaphysics and the sociology of revelation.

It is thrilling to know that Muslim theologians of earlier generations relied on varieties of knowledge of their time in order to explain and make their theological claims understandable. For theologians like Waliyullah it was almost a matter of necessity to construe a theology that took the empirical aspect of the human person seriously. In his view, theological strictures were often subordinate to the contemporaneous reality of the human being, whether in terms of psychology or sociology avant la lettre, or with the aid of other disciplines of the day like philosophy and metaphysics.

Neuro-Cultural Beings

To make his argument forcefully, Waliyullah proposes what might be akin to indelible cultural maps to which our minds are formatted. Instead of viewing our minds as exclusively neural, Waliyullah implies we might think of ourselves as neuro-cultural beings.  And prophets too are not immune from the cultural mapping of their minds and personas. Their revelations are encoded and mediated by the same cultural maps that their communities project. Waliyullah’s most developed excursus on this topic comes in ‘The Fourth Vision” of his Emanations in the Two Holy Shrines-Fuyuz al-Haramayn.

If a congenitally blind person dreams, Waliyullah asks, how does he see things?  How does a congenitally deaf person hear, in his dreams? Well, he explains, persons with such deficits see or hear with the help of what we would call sensory substitutions or the blending of the senses. Persons with sight disabilities, in his words “cannot in their dreams see colors or forms, instead they see themselves touching things, hearing voices, tasting or smelling things in their dreams.” (Fuyuz, 90). Similarly, a congenitally deaf person never hears things in his dreams but is restricted to rely on his other sensory organs for information to substitute for sight or hearing.

Sensory Substitution

Sensory substitution is crucial for Waliyullah. Why? Because examples of dreamers with sensory deficits allow him to make the case that “pre-existing forms and ideas,” – what I have called cultural mapping – do exist.  These pre-existing forms or cultural maps in the mind of the dreamer become the building blocks—alphabet and language—in which dreams are experienced.

Waliyullah sets up this example to make his major point: revelation vouchsafed to the prophets is organically and culturally related to the worlds the prophets inhabited. How? What prophets speak or teach is derived from their environments and cultures and is first and foremost preserved in their minds. Therefore, he says, when prophets disclose their revelations the “vocables (alfaz), words (kalimat) and syntactical forms (asalib) that were already preserved in the mind of the ‘recipient of revelation’ become manifest.” (Fuyuz, 91). This allows him to say that rules and regulations contained in revelations were always organically connected and in sync with the habits and customs of the communities to which prophets were dispatched. Is he saying that the mind is culturally wired?

I marveled at Waliyuallah’s insights—I am assuming that many theologians and philosophers prior to him held similar views—when I found David Eagleman explain neuroplasticity in his book Incognito.  Consider Eric Weihenmayer who was blinded at age thirteen but who scaled Mount Everest as an adult. Today Weihenmayer climbs with a gadget containing a grid of over 600 tiny electrodes in his mouth called the BrainPort. This device, says Eagleman, “allows him to see with his tongue while he climbs.”

The Blending of Senses

What Waliyullah’s dreamers with sensory deficits achieve via sensory substitution is similar to Weihenmayer’s BrainPort apparatus: the dreamers see or hear with a crucial difference; they see and hear via tasting, feeling and smelling. Sensory substitution “reminds us that we see not with our eyes but rather with our brains” (Eagleman, 41). The blending of the senses is precisely one of the kinds of synesthesia involving the ‘hearing’ or ‘smelling’ of sight or the ‘touching’ of hearing. Synesthesia is believed to be seven times more common among artists, poets and novelists; in short, people who are seers of some sort. But more importantly, the mere existence of synesthesia shows that “more than one kind of brain–and one kind of mind–is possible.” (Eagleman, 80).

Contemporary neuroscience has made great strides in explaining perception. Now we know the traditional view of perception is incorrect in explaining that data from the sensorium pours into the brain and then makes itself seen, heard, smelled or tasted. Scientists now argue that the brain is a “closed system that runs its own internally generated activity.” (Eagleman, 44). Like the dreamers in Waliyullah’s illustrations who see and hear without real sight and hearing, Eagleman too confirms that during “dream sleep the brain is isolated from its normal input, so internal activation is the only source of cortical stimulation” (Eagleman, 44).

So what role do the senses play in perception? Can we completely dismiss the senses? Current knowledge of the neurocircuitry of the brain questions whether visual perception is only a procession of data crunching in a linear fashion from the eyes to the brain.  Instead, what we do discover is that perception involves nested feedback connections that enable the system to run backward. Now we learn that a loopy brain enables us to “make predictions ahead of actual sensory input” (Eagleman, 48). “The more surprising aspect… ,” says Eagleman of this new framework of perception, is that “the internal data is not generated by external sensory data but merely modulated by it.” (44). So, we still depend on sensory data but we now know it surely works differently from what we thought previously.

The Riddle of Metaphors

Waliyullah might have wanted to emphasize the synchronic relationship between the mind and culture, but in the process he disclosed how he thought humans knew and perceived things. It is eminently possible that the blending of the senses had something to do with the pre-eminence of prophets over time, just like poets.

Furthermore, our language is replete with synesthetic metaphors (Ramachandran, 79). We talk of “loud” shirts, “sharp” cheese or “a sharp person” when none of these tactile adjectives apply to shirts, cheese or persons. “We don’t have the foggiest idea of how metaphors work,” says the neuroscientist Ramachandran, “or how they are represented in the brain.” (79). He is optimistic that a scientific understanding of the neural basis for synesthesia might illuminate how metaphors are represented in the brain and how we humans have evolved to entertain such expressions in the first place. Neuroscience might help to unlock a key feature of our existence as rational and language-using beings.

So the riddle of metaphors and the brain makes me wonder, as a humanist, whether Waliyullah’s explanations imply that the brain is also culturally wired. And, if so, then what about claims that the brain is a closed system? And, if it remains a closed system, then how does the culture seep into it?

 

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Ebrahim Moosa
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
Field Notes article

Can Modern Medicine Locate the Human Soul?


This post begins with a provocation: is the human soul within the purview of modern biomedicine? The immediate answer would seem to be: no, it is not. Medical students are not indoctrinated in locating or studying the soul in their courses on anatomy and dissection, nor do they learn about afflictions of the soul (if there are, in fact, any in secular biomedicine) in their courses of pathophysiology. Yet few physicians today in the U.S. would claim that medicine is a “soul-less” practice, although they would be hard-pressed to explain more precisely what they might mean.

A Question of Personhood

In ethical debates around medical care the term most often evoked in the North American context is that of “personhood.” What is the human person and where is it located? These questions become particularly pressing when debating the ethics of care in the earliest and final stages of life. How early in the formation of human cells does the “person” enter the fray? At what stage, in the demise of a human life, does the “person” end?

Cultural anthropologists have been at great pains to counter the assumption that there is a singular universal answer to these questions. In various ritual practices around the world, a new life and personhood can be marked at different stages, just as there are different cultural practices marking a person’s death that could begin before the person’s last breath or several days later. I would like to offer an intervention that suggests how current bioethical debates, that may seem intransigent when the human soul is evoked, may be moved forward.

The Redefinition of Death

As anthropologist Margaret Lock thoroughly detailed in her 2002 book Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, early experiments with cadaveric transplantation in the late 1960s coincided with a biomedical redefinition of the death of the person. Whereas death had most commonly been associated with the cessation of cardio-pulmonary activity, today roughly 1% of the population of North America may die from a massive and irreversible head trauma (usually as a result of car accidents or gunshot wounds to the head), resulting in the cessation of brain function. This small percentage of patients can be placed on a life respirator (a descendent of the “iron lung” ventilator machine that was crucial to treating polio patients in the outbreaks during inter-war America) that maintains organ function until organ and tissue harvesting can occur.

Transplant coordinators and transplant staff have been at great pains to depict these patients as “really dead” although they may seem alive because of the artificial maintenance of the machine. They are warm to touch and their hearts continue to beat. Indeed, there has been much initial discomfort with treating such patients as mere cadavers, and a considerable amount of discursive production to maintain this practice as normal and ethical. Stuart Youngner memorably conducted several studies among clinicians faced with brain-dead patients, demonstrating that there was much disagreement among them about when a person, in fact, was “clinically dead.” Anthropologist Margaret Lock suggested that in North America, where medical policies are strongly kept outside of the domain of public opinion, brain-death as a concept was accepted with little public outcry, which was not the case in other countries, most notably Japan.

In my own work in Egypt, I found that many Egyptian physicians refused to recognize neurological criteria as the overriding decisive factor for defining death. In a medical context where strong religious adherence is pervasive, physicians have been quick to point out that if there is any biological function in the patient (whether machine-assisted or not), this is evidence of the presence, even if lingering, of the soul. One particularly strong opponent of harvesting the organs of brain-dead patients, Egyptian anesthesiologist Safwat Lotfy, suggested in outrage that Muslims must have superior ethics to “secular” physicians in the West, who do not acknowledge the importance of the human soul. Lotfy suggested that a secularist materialistic society is ready to see human beings in utilitarian terms without pondering spiritual questions about our obligations to our fellow man.

Dualistic Understanding of the Mind-Body

While this argument is provocative, I find it counter-productive to engaging in bioethical debates. Anthropological studies among North American clinicians have revealed that they do not deny that biological life continues in a brain-dead patient. Rather, they interpret these biological signs differently. Because North American medical culture has largely inherited a dualistic understanding of the mind-body, they maintain that it is possible for a person to remain biologically alive while her “spirit” has departed. Thus, unlike the charges wielded against them by polemicists, it is not that they do not acknowledge the spirit, but rather that they locate it elsewhere, as potentially separate from a biologically functioning body.

An Intervention

Thus, I suggest an intervention: we cannot resolve disagreements over where the soul is, whether it is possible for the soul to depart from a beating heart, or whether it is necessarily the soul that animates biological life, simply because such questions are outside of the purview of biomedicine. Different traditions resolve these questions differently, and in large world-religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam, there is a wide space of interpretation within traditions over these questions, which are not, in any case, categorically laid out in scripture. These are questions that become critical with the introduction of new medical technologies that enable greater and deeper manipulations of the beginnings and ends of human life.

Rather than asking whether patient A is “really” dead, or whether his soul has departed or is lingering, what we can more productively ask is: Is it ethical to precipitate the pending biological demise of patient A if doing so increases the survival and quality of life of patient B? It is this very question that transplant advocates have tried to avoid by re-defining death along neurological criteria. But however distasteful it is to consider that one life must be weighed as of higher or lower value than another, avoiding the question does not make it disappear. Indeed, whether or not one intervenes medically, some lives continue only at the expense of others. Thus it is this question that we must consider as we widen bioethical deliberations to include people of different traditions, religious backgrounds, scientific learning, and personal experiences.

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Sherine Hamdy
Sherine Hamdy is an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine with longstanding interests in cross-cultural approaches to medicine, health, and the body. Her research has centered on ethical debates around organ transplantation in the Egyptian cities of Tanta, Mansoura, and Cairo. Her book, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt, was published in 2012.
Field Notes article

Is There an Islamic Bioethics?


In the West, religious bioethics has been in conversation with secular bioethics from the time of its inception when bioethics became a subject of public enquiry.  In cultures where democratic governance and public discourse were considered to be rights of citizenry, any matter of critical significance connected with people’s healthcare could not pass without public debate and scrutiny.  From its initial formulations, secular bioethics became entangled in religious valuations of human wellness and sickness, the role of suffering and affliction caused by prolonged illness, and the limits of medical intervention in treating incurable diseases.

An Unmistakable Absence of Input by Muslim Thinkers

Although often marginalized from matters of public policy, religious leaders could not be ignored when the issues at stake were related to ultimate questions about life and death.  The cloning debate in the late 1990s saw the noticeable participation of multi-faith and multi-cultural leaders in informing governments about the moral implications of human cloning, and ultimately influencing policies against human cloning in a number of western countries.  Muslim participation in this global debate was circumscribed by an unmistakable absence of public input by Muslim thinkers.  The judicial decisions (fatawa) that came out of some Sunni centers of Islamic learning, such as Cairo and Mecca, revealed a general lack of interest in using scientific data to guide legal-ethical deliberations, which were undertaken hurriedly in response to media queries about the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep and future projections in human cloning.

Until that time, Muslim physicians and scientists had used either English or translated bioethics textbooks, mostly brought back to Muslim countries by physicians trained in the West.  Obviously, there was a cultural disconnect about what these physicians had learnt in the secular environment and what they found in their own religiously sensitive Muslim culture. Their endeavors to find specifically Islamic responses to earlier debates about abortion or organ donation, to appease the fears and anxiety of their religious-minded Muslim patients, led to new chapters in the compilation of the rulings (fatawa) of selected jurists that were circulated among interested Muslim healthcare providers.

Authoritative Guidance

This responsa literature consisted of varied opinions ascribed to prominent jurists, which functioned as the authoritative and authentic guidance in a number of clinical situations that demanded religious resolution.  They were part of the “Contemporary Issues” (masail mustahdathat) that could be used by Muslim medical practitioners.  Although the opinions were originally derived by taking into consideration principles and rules that were operative in Islamic legal methodology, their ethical dimensions were not brought out for public discussion.  These opinions strictly functioned as “Mufti’s law”, with the implicit warning that those trusting a jurist’s authority should follow these rulings, otherwise such rulings should be ignored.  The agnostic and paternalistic professional environment of the healthcare institutions in the Muslim world (as in other countries at large) hardly cared for the religious sensibilities of its population.  Unlike the western culture of questioning authority, Muslim healthcare culture was yet to empower patients to question the medical procedures and treatments that were determined solely by medical teams.

The Standardization of Technology & Medical Procedures

Biomedical technology is in some sense universal because of the standardization of technology and medical procedures all around the world.  The infrastructure of hospitals in Riyadh or Tehran differs very little from that of hospitals in New York or London.  For this reason, moral dilemmas that confronted patients in Europe or America were also experienced by patients in the Muslim world.  Moreover, the ability of medical sciences to preserve human organs, blood, and milk, and use them to save lives had reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s.  Hence, around the world there was an upsurge in demand for religious points of view on matters that until that time were confined to secular healthcare institutions, which were not always in a position to respond to questions of life and death faced by a patient’s family.

Islamic juridical sciences had developed a morally-sensitive methodology to derive fresh rulings in the area of medical practice. Principles like “No harm, no harassment” or “Aversion of corruption is more important than promotion of benefit” provided groundbreaking judicial decisions without any reference to moral justificatory reasoning.  Muslim jurisprudence was, and remains, essentially religious-text based with the assumption that what God commands is good and permissible, and what God forbids is evil and must be avoided.  Consequently, while other religion-based bioethics deliberations were in conversation with secular bioethics, Islamic responsa literature remained confined within the Shari’a-centered discourse.  Until now, Muslim bioethics has essentially been based on legal decisions without any reference to ethics as understood in secular discourses of bioethics.

A New Moral Discourse

In the last decade, some Muslim jurists have begun to understand the need to discuss their rulings in light of ethical considerations of right and wrong. The result has been that in some Muslim countries (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Jordan) a new moral discourse has found support among religious thinkers who are engaged in placing their rulings within deontological and teleological ethics of the Shari’a methodology.  More pertinently, intellectual efforts are moving towards identifying religiously sensitive principles that can be applied in practical ethics at all levels of human interaction.  Some jurists have adamantly resisted the new requirement to equip themselves with an understanding of the ontology and teleology of human action in order to underscore the universal and, hence, generalizable moral language of Islamic theological ethics that is firmly grounded in human ability to know right from wrong intuitively.  The process of rehabilitating Islamic ethics as a critical part of juridical studies has just begun. It is hoped that the next batch of graduates of bioethics centers in Muslim countries will assume the critically needed new leadership role in facilitating a global religious ethics of care and compassion.

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Abdulaziz Sachedina
Abdulaziz Sachedina, Ph.D., is Professor and IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His research and writing focuses on the field of Islamic Law, Ethics, and Theology (Sunni and Shiite). More recently, he has concentrated on social and political ethics, including Interfaith and Intrafaith Relations, Islamic Biomedical Ethics and Islam and Human Rights.
Authority, Community & Identity article

From St. Francis to the Pope: Preach the Gospel Always. If Necessary, Use Words


Reading some of the latest conclave buzz this morning, I’m reminded that the cardinals, like the rest of the world, want everything from the new pope. Administrative prowess and soul-throbbing charisma. The persistent plea for the latter half of this combo reveals a misguided optimism: that all we have to do is find the right words to explain ourselves to one another and to the world. That will make the misunderstandings and the hurt feelings, not to mention the corruption and abuse – all this unpleasantness – go away.

Of course we could do with better communication skills, to put it mildly – but countering negative media blitz with positivity, and trotting around a public-speaking pope, are shallow correctives. We are way past the point when appropriate words and strong ‘presence’ can make things better. I do not think that Catholics (and friends and would-be friends of Catholics) have forgotten how many truly beautiful words we have on the tips of our tongues and throughout our tradition. Yet, many worry about the degree to which these words are being fulfilled in the concrete daily life that we create together.

The Church Is, in Part, a Human Institution

To get straight to a provocative point, the papal transition is already illustrating managerial logic that defies understanding – perhaps even inside, but certainly outside Vatican City. Pope Benedict’s papal secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, is going to live with the pope emeritus in his new home and serve as the papal secretary of the new pope. […stunned pause…] The Vatican spokesman has said, to quote the Catholic News Service story, that such “a dual role” would not “interfere” with the papacy of Benedict’s successor because “Archbishop Ganswein’s job is primarily one of logistics – organizing the pope’s daily schedule of meetings and audiences – and not a job that brings him into contact with other papal decisions.”

Does not everyone know that the ‘secretary’ is the most powerful person in any office? Agenda setting is the sin qua non of any organization, and direct daily contact with the executive an unparalleled privilege. I can hear the voices of fellow theologians reminding me that the Catholic Church is not a mere organization. Let me be clear, I do not in any way want to reduce the Catholic Church to a human institution. But no matter your ecclesiology, it is in part a human institution. To our detriment, we too often let a correct emphasis on the ‘something more’ turn into a discomfort with this basic fact. This attitude diminishes the very real significance of the administrative tasks that enable everything else to happen within a collective body. It also obscures dysfunction.

Prioritizing the Mundane Would Be Impressive

As a friend of mine likes to say, if any movement of the Spirit is going to stay alive, someone has got to make the sandwiches. If we want to really impress the world and fortify our struggling bits of church-self, we will ask for a pope who will do the equivalent work for the Vatican. We want, and I admit that we need, a globetrotting papacy – preferably one that brings into conversation the factions and geographies of our church. Yet, the first priority is to clean up Vatican City, to get the files in order, so to speak, to be explicitly a functioning human institution.

We do not need a theologian or a catechist or even a strikingly holy man to teach us how beautiful and true still is the Catholic Church. We need to watch someone implementing the mundane, reforming tasks that can make this palpable amidst various proven and alleged scandals. I definitely long for a Catholic Church that communicates healthily throughout its verticality and horizontal reach, that forms a web-shaped pulse of the active love of Christ. I would love to have a pope who could help us to see and participate in that reality. Right now, however, I need the very basics of healthy organizational dynamics. Just give us a boring, effective leader, please.

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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.