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Deadly Violence & Conflict Transformation article

Catholic Ideas, Institutions, and Imagination: Three Keys to Peacebuilding


Three “I”s—ideas, institutions, and imagination—are crucial for understanding how Catholicism contributes to the wider society and to peacebuilding initiatives in particular.

Institutions

The good news is that we are currently witnessing an explosion of new peacebuilding institutional development in key political institutions.  The UN established the UN Peacebuilding Commission (UNPBC) five years ago.  Many countries have similarly established offices for peacebuilding within their foreign affairs organizations, such as the United States Department of State’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, and the US Department of Defense’s new core missions in Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations.

The idea has gained ground that building peace that will last requires more than negotiating peace agreements among combatants, and more than deploying UN peacekeepers to enforce ceasefires and peace accords.  There is greater recognition of the idea that peacebuilding requires a greater number of activities and functions, including and integrating development, diplomacy, and defense, for a longer time frame, and by a greater number of actors, state and non-state alike.

These expanded ideas gave rise to new institutions, which are crucial because ideas and norms don’t exist in a vacuum or in the minds of individuals.  For norms to be implemented, to affect social and political change, they must be institutionalized in organizations and their practices and policies.

Here is where the good news ends regarding the growth of peacebuilding ideas in secular institutions.  These institutions were created with severe capacity gaps, and those remain five years later.  All these institutions were created with no new allocations of money and personnel.  Instead, money and people were shifted from other parts of these organizations, amidst strong turf battles.  The lack of resources signaled a lack of commitment to these new institutions that has hurt and marginalized them, making it difficult for these organizations to have any operational capacity in the field, or to be taken seriously.

For example, over five years countries have voluntarily donated $343 million to the UN Peacebuilding Fund, but only $205 million has been allocated.  Contrast that with Caritas Internationalis, with the $5 billion annual budget of its member organizations. And that is only a portion of the Catholic organizations building peace.  Operating for over 2,000 years, with reach into every country, the Church has a lot of “bandwidth.”  The practical, functional, and institutional capacities that the Church can apply toward building peace are unparalleled.

Ideas

Not only are these new institutions weak, but the ideas of peace and peacebuilding they are pursuing are also limited.  They use the term peacebuilding, but they do not mean what we in the Catholic Church mean by peacebuilding.  They have a very short term focus, on negative peace, on cessation of hostilities, often by or with force, through peacekeepers or increasing the capacity of national security sector forces, and they focus heavily on states and combatants.  They do not focus on ideas prominent in Catholic peacebuilding—participation, reconciliation, right relationship, and long-term sustainability.

Participation is a hallmark of Caritas Internationalis and Catholic Relief Services, stemming from the principle of the sanctity of human life and dignity.  In contrast, in UN peace negotiations and processes, women were entirely excluded from the talks 98% of the time.  A key criticism of UNPBC consultations has been the exclusion of women’s groups.  When these new institutions talk about reconciliation, they do not mean what the Church means—healing of individuals and communities of the traumas induced by conflict, restoration of right relationship.  Instead they mean demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration of armed groups, and police and security sector reforms, often with impunity and payment for those armed actors—peace at any price.  This has led to the critique of many UN brokered peace accords as amounting to men with guns excusing and paying off other men with guns for the violence they have done against women.

Imagination

Why do secular organizations often have such limited ideas and institutional practices of peacebuilding?  Because of a failure of imagination, the critical leaven to building peace.

How can people build peace who have never known peace?  To build a robust, just peace, we have to be able, as Kroc Institute peacebuilding scholar John Paul Lederach notes “to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies.”

The Catholic moral and religious imagination offers many fruitful principles and practices. In our sacraments of communion and reconciliation; in our beliefs in a relational, Triune resurrected God; in our institutional structures that seek to realize these relationships of local and global church, of the Body of Christ; in Catholic social teaching of protection of human life and dignity, preference for the poor, solidarity and subsidiarity, we regularly exercise moral muscles for the common good—a rich moral imagination the world needs.

Too often our governments aim low in building peace, seeing only a world of bad choices among lesser evils. Catholic peacebuilders see a different world, where communion, peace and love are possible.  Imagining peace in war-torn areas is a challenging but crucial first step in realizing peace.

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Maryann Cusimano Love
Dr. Maryann Cusimano Love is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Politics Department of The Catholic University of America and New York Times BestsellingAuthor. Her recent books include Beyond Sovereignty: Issues for a Global Agenda (4th Edition, 2010), Morality Matters: Ethics and the War on Terrorism (forthcoming at Cornell University Press), and "What Kind of Peace Do We Seek?," in Schreiter, Appleby, and Powers, eds., Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis (Orbis, 2010).
 
Global Currents article

Pakistan: Between Betrayed Dream and Desire to Rebuild


What Pakistan Has Become

“The first duty of a government is to maintain law and order, so that the life, property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the State…. You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State…. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State….you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, August 11, 1947

Unfortunately, Pakistan’s polity today does not reflect the ideals set by her founder, outlining a pluralistic democracy and religious freedom. Many believe that if this message by Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his Presidential address in the inaugural session of Pakistan’s constituent assembly had served as the state’s guiding principles, the country would have avoided crucial problems she is facing today. Subsequent regimes pushed the country closer and closer to a theocratic model for grounding political legitimacy and national unity.

Today, in 2011, places of worship, religious leaders, schools for girls, police stations, army bases, and advocates of liberalism and moderation are attacked almost daily by religious extremists trying to impose their version of religion. People offer their prayers in the shadow of armed guards. As Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and allied groups establish their hold in several parts of the country, minority religions as well as some Muslim sects face an existential threat.

Since 2005, the death toll from suicide and other attacks runs into the thousands each year. The vanguards of a theocratic vision of the Pakistani polity use coercive power—effectively granted to them under laws such as the blasphemy laws—to silence dissenting voices such as those of Dr. Mohammad Farooq Khan, an Islamic scholar and psychiatrist; Governor Salman Taseer, critic of the blasphemy laws and advocate of religious freedom and the rights of minorities; and Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, the first Federal Minister for Minorities. All three of these leading stalwarts for tolerance and freedom were murdered in the last ten months.

The Struggle for Pakistan’s Soul Is Not Over

However, the struggle to shift the direction of Pakistan has not ceased. This battle—which is nothing less than a battle for Pakistan’s soul—continues in intense debate and political struggle, which assume many forms in the country’s public life. Despite the number of laws and policies discriminating on the basis of religion, their rationale is increasingly challenged.

While democrats refer to Jinnah’s speech to argue for separating state from religion, their opponents quote the “Muslim way of life” as the raison d’être for a “separate homeland” or and the partition of India in 1947. Indeed, they even cite some of Jinnah’s own speeches, in which he refers to “Islamic principles of social justice.” Furthermore, political parties and pressure groups of various shades that insist that the state must have an exclusive Muslim identity argue that Jinnah never used the term “secular” to define the state of Pakistan. Religio-political parties and the country’s political establishment increasingly equated secularism with “godlessness” in order to amass support for the “Ideology of Pakistan” and a militaristic social psyche based on Islamo-nationalism.

Liberals and democrats countered this argument by saying that learning from experience should be good enough. After all, how well have successive Islamization campaigns—beginning in the 1950s and accelerating in the 1970s—served Pakistan? What does the historical record show? Jinnah may not have expressly warned against theocracy or religious hegemony, but as a matter of fact he never prescribed shariah law as the basis of the polity or the law of Pakistan.

Furthermore, Pakistani “secular” thinking draws upon the historical religious and cultural plurality of the Indian subcontinent and the cultural produce consequences of living together for centuries rather than suppressing religious diversity. The Pakistani secular mind frankly admires the inclusive secularism practiced in neighboring India—recently adopted in Nepal and increasingly practiced in Bangladesh also—in which the state refrains from privileging a single religion or from maiming, discouraging or suppressing any religions. On the contrary, the state, at least officially aspires to play the role of a neutral arbiter.

Towards a New Pakistan

Violence and bigotry in Pakistan are a result of serious misadventures with religion, misadventures for which the political establishment and its collaborators are to be blamed. Religious liberties became the first casualty when the state assumed the role of defining and imposing religion—and one particular brand of religion at that—on public life. This in the face of the fact that the religious ethos of ordinary people carries—or at least carried till it was made to change—the visible imprint of Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Hindu and Sikh religious traditions, as well as the tradition of Muslim Sufi thought and practice. The Christian community in Pakistan is deservedly admired for its contributions in education and health care, and it has played a significant role in promoting interfaith and social harmony. This rich diversity was marginalized and suppressed.

Faith groups from majority and minority communities, along with liberals, democrats, and seculars, have made commendable efforts to stand together to save Pakistan from religious bigotry and build it into a modern, tolerant state. While the overall change or transformation of society and state is yet to be achieved, it must be underscored that these forces have enjoyed some significant successes in this long struggle.

Apart from their contribution to various social movements—for example, struggles for worker’s, women’s, and minorities’ rights—this critical mass of Pakistanis was able to defeat the Shariah Bill of 1998 and the insertion of a religion category in the National Identity card in 1992. More recently, a countrywide campaign had the separate electorate based on religious apartheid abolished in 2002, and another campaign won amendments to the Hudood laws—the laws governing Shariah-sanctioned criminal penalties—in 2006.

Pakistan today needs broad-based reforms. And however pessimistic some people might be about the future of this great South Asian nation, recent successes show that serious reforms can happen. The government and people need to make a collective effort to rectify past mistakes and ensure religious freedom for all citizens. The undying spirit of the Pakistani people and their enduring commitment to true democracy—which braved executions, imprisonments, flogging and torture to oppose and defeat four despotic military regimes in 60 years—demonstrate that a new Pakistan can be built.

I dedicate the following lines to the human rights defenders and peace workers in Pakistan.

Crying Is No Choice

With melting eyes and trembling hands

I stand aside my house in the street

My intestines boiling with fear amassed

Yet crying is no choice

Bodies falling one after another

We forget the count, each time we end

Bare hands pick injured, with heavy heart and cursing looks

While the armed fell innocent

Street where people sang and danced

Children grow up mourning

A fake ideology stands exposed

Yet crying is no choice

We have cried enough

A bullet has no eyes to weep

The gun has no tears

Alas it has not

God give bullet an eye, and let the gun have tears

It is time for them to cry

 

1 Comment on Pakistan: Between Betrayed Dream and Desire to Rebuild Array
Peter Jacob
Peter Jacob studied law, political science and rural development and has been associated with human rights and peacebuilding work in Pakistan for since 1988.
Authority, Community & Identity article

Lessons for Interreligious Dialogue Today


I concluded my last post on Manila 1960 with two questions: Why did Manila 1960 take place under the peculiar circumstances described so far? And why did Manila 1960 remain a forgotten episode in the history of Interreligious Dialogue? Let me answer with two simple statements: Interreligious Dialogue is inseparable from the political field, and Manila 1960 was forgotten because a new religious elite rose to take control of Interreligious Dialogue.

Interreligious Dialogue is Indebted to the Political Field

In the case of the Manila meeting, the significance of the political setting is perfectly transparent.

First, the impulse to organize the encounter was given by a highly political institution, UNESCO, which at the time was still strongly influenced by the secular policy articulated by Julian Huxley, its first director-general, in his 1946 book, UNESCO: Its Purposes and Philosophy (London 1947, and just re-printed in 2010). Second, the meeting was set inside the context of a ten-year plan to promote mutual understanding between East and West and this—in the late 1950s—had primarily no religious connotation. “East-West-relations” were first of all political power relations.

As soon as one looks beyond the Manila episode, this aspect of Interreligious Dialogue becomes even more obvious. From the 1960s onwards, the efforts of the United Nations in Interreligious Dialogue were overtaken by the activities of numerous inter-religious institutions that came to specialize in Interreligious Dialogue. To name but a few examples: The Temple of Understanding (1960), World Conference of Religions for Peace (Kyoto 1970), Committee of Religious Non-Governmental Organizations at the United Nations (1972), World Council of Religious Leaders / Millennium Peace Summit (2002), Tripartite Forum on Interfaith Cooperation for Peace (2005), and the Initiative for a UN Decade of Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (2006)

All these institutions cooperate intensively with the UN. At the same time, they more or less follow their own agenda—most frequently centered around peace issues. And they do this on three levels: On the level of high-ranking religious representatives that are committed to those institutions (either ex officio or out of personal conviction), on the level of “inter-religious experts” who are quite frequently in salaried employment with those institutions, and finally on the level of individual activists linked to those institutions by different networks and quite often without any formal religious qualification (the ominous “people on the ground”).

The establishment of those institutions can be interpreted in at least two ways. One way is as a religious “usurpation” of the political field, an argument recently put forward by Jeanne Favret-Saada (in Jeux d’ombres sur la scène de l’ONU: Droits humains et laïcité, Paris 2010). Another way is as a “politicization” of religious debates, as critically discussed by Catherine Cornille (in The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue, New York 2008). Regardless of which interpretation one wants to follow, Interreligious Dialogue is taking place on the border of the religious and the political field, and it is difficult to understand one without the other.

In front of this background, however, a second question becomes even more interesting and important: If Manila 1960 really stands at the beginning of a loose though increasingly important tradition of this type of encounter, why is it more or less forgotten?

A New Religious Elite Commandeered Interreligious Dialogue

The participants in Manila 1960 were certainly no representative sample of religious believers. They held over-average academic degrees and positions. They were closely linked to Western academia, even though they came from different parts of the world. And they were embedded in the milieu of international diplomacy and cooperation that Pax Romana and UNESCO represented from the late 1940s up to the early 1960s.

So the Manila conference brought together representatives of a rather distinct section of society with links to religious, political and academic milieus, alike.

Their respective intellectual skills notwithstanding, those people were neither formal religious representatives nor experts in Interreligious Dialogue—neither in terms of training, nor in an institutional sense of the word. All of them were obviously religiously committed and informed. All of them had experiences in religious encounters. But they were not linked to any of the inter-religious institutions that were about to emerge from the mid-1960s onwards inside global civil society. In a way, they belonged to an “old guard” of international diplomats who became interested in inter-religious encounters, rather than inter-religious activists seeking to shape international politics.

And this was probably the reason why the protagonists of Manila 1960 were to be forgotten in the first place. They stand between two phases of inter-religious encounters. They foreshadowed future developments and were at the same time still linked to an older generation.

If this is true, the Manila episode tells us as much about the past as the present-day state of Interreligious Dialogue. It stands for the long tradition of elite approaches to inter-religious encounter. More episodes outside these meetings of experts and elites need to be uncovered and recounted—in their official and unofficial versions—in order to arrive at a complete picture of this important history.

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Karsten Lehmann
Karsten Lehmann is head of social sciences statistics at the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural dialogue. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Bayreuth University in Germany, and for the 2011 calendar year a Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs of Georgetown University. With his colleague Stefan Kurth, he publishd an edited volume on research methods in religious studies (Religionen erforschen - Kulturwissenschaftliche Methoden in der Religionswissenschaft, forthcoming 2011).
Authority, Community & Identity article

Interreligious Dialogue, Too, Can Marginalize


In my previous post on Manila 1960 as a forgotten yet fascinating chapter in the history of Interreligious Dialogue, I made a distinction between hagiography and unofficial history. In a way, I learned about the 1960 conference on “The Present Impact of the Great Religions of the World upon the Orient and the Occident” the “wrong” way around—by first getting acquainted with the unofficial story and only later with the somewhat more flattering self-portrait.

While working in the Pax Romana archives at the Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire Fribourg, I came across letters concerning the organization of the conference as well as the transcript of the discussions. The transcript had been prepared for a later publication that never materialized. Later on, I found the official documentation, published by Pax Romana and now accessible online on the Pax Romana website.

Taken together, these sources offer two mutually complementary perspectives, both of which are essential for understanding the Manila meeting.

The Official Story

A short look at the table of contents of the official documentation reveals three interesting aspects.

First, most of the people contributing papers to the conference had no formal religious authority, legitimized either by office or charisma. Second, there were quite a lot of university teachers, e.g. in history (Das Gupta, Husain, Yahia, Shibata), philosophy (Nakamura, Louvaris, Matsumoto), and education (Greenberg, Kraemer). But there was only one priest (Father de la Costa) and no monk, no bishop, and no other religious teacher. Third, all of them were linked to the Western academic milieu, whether by academic training, position, or long residence in Europe or the US. The voices of indigenous religious authority were not heard because they were not present.

Browsing more intensively through the ten public lectures given in the morning-sessions of the Manila-conference, one recognizes two further facts that help characterize the meeting.

On one hand, all the participants of the conference tried to make their own fundamental religious position known. More or less to the exclusion of all else, they worked hard to introduce each other—on a rather abstract level—to the basic concepts and categories of their respective religions. Whether this was actually necessary or not, is difficult to tell. But at least the Manila participants themselves seemed to have had the impression that the other participants needed this rudimentary background. So, here we have a group of sophisticated academics more or less describing their personal religious position to each other in the simplest and most basic of terms.

On the other hand, the participants stuck closely to the topic proposed by the organizers: They all commented on the role of religions in the world of the early 1960s. Most of them described this world as industrialized, materialist, and secular—as, in short, modern. And they described religion as adding value that was necessary though increasingly marginalized. There were actually just two exceptions to this rule. In his paper on Hinduism, S. B. Das Gupta underlined the compatibility between Hinduism and modern society, in line with nineteenth-century Hindu reformer Swami Vivekananda, and Mahmud Hussain presented a similar approach to Islam.

These exceptions notwithstanding, all the papers make clear that the conference was not only an encounter between different religious positions but also a meeting of a religious unity in the face of a modern society that was perceived as secular and non-religious. Or, as the Polish Journalist Jerzy Turowicz put it a little bit reluctantly:

« On a constaté, peut-être non sans certain surprise, des fortes convergences entre les attitudes des différentes religions. […] Evidemment elles ne constituent pas une base pour une synthèse englobant des différentes religions, un syncrétisme, qui pour les catholiques, et probablement aussi pour les croyants des autres religions ne serait ni désirable ni admissible. […] Les convergences témoignent seulement du fait que chaque religion contient une certaine sagesse naturelle et qu’une correspondance existe entre l’expression religieuse et les exigences de la nature humaine. » (TUROWICZ, Jerzy, Les grandes religions et le monde d’aujourd’hui, in: Pax Romana 14,1 (1960), p. 12f, here: 12.)

The Unofficial Story

What the official documentation does not allude to are the afternoon sessions of the conference, moderated by Olivier Lacombe. These sessions were restricted to a small number of participants. In order to learn more about them, one has to dig into the respective boxes of papers in the Pax Romana archives.

The transcripts first of all create the impression of an extremely “civilized” encounter, without a hint of contentious argument or mutually exclusive positioning.

The encounter was so polite, perhaps, because it was so contained. Whether due to social constraints or personal preferences, the discussions were actually dominated—in more or less equal parts—by Das Gupta, Pannikar, Kraemer, and Greenberg. The two Muslim representatives rose rather rarely to speak. When they did so, it was mostly to answer questions addressed directly to them. And the same holds true for the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox, the Buddhist, and the Shinto representatives.

The UNESCO representative, Jacques Havet, who had already attended the human rights seminar of Pax Romana in Limburg an der Lahn, nine years earlier, actually seems to have taken a back seat, too. However, he raised two interesting questions that concern UNESCO even now. One was the question of the compatibility between technological development and religious attitudes. As it happens, in fact, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) was just about to be established, in 1965. The other was the question of religious exclusiveness in the face of religious plurality.

An Interest in the Non-Monotheist Other & in the Everyday

Finally, the transcript highlights two seemingly contradictory realities.

On one hand, it was not Islam that triggered the most intense discussions in Manila. It was rather the East Asian and South Asian religions that were the subject of sustained inquiry and discussion. In this respect, the conference seemed to be dominated by the religious interest of the monotheistic speakers in the religious traditions they considered most distant from their own position.

On the other hand, the discussions were much more down-to-earth than the official papers might suggest. Most of the time, the participants did not discuss abstract religious questions. In contrast to their own presentations, they focused instead on practical and immediate issues, such as the social position of the family, the everyday side of missionary work, and the influence of increasing leisure time on religious observance.

So what do we learn from these complementary stories? To answer that question, we need to pursue two further questions: Why did Manila 1960 take place under the peculiar circumstances described so far? And why did Manila 1960 remain a forgotten episode of Interreligious Dialogue? We’ll pursue these questions in my next and final post on Manila 1960.

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Karsten Lehmann
Karsten Lehmann is head of social sciences statistics at the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural dialogue. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Bayreuth University in Germany, and for the 2011 calendar year a Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs of Georgetown University. With his colleague Stefan Kurth, he publishd an edited volume on research methods in religious studies (Religionen erforschen - Kulturwissenschaftliche Methoden in der Religionswissenschaft, forthcoming 2011).
Gender, State & Society article

The Hijab Hurdle in Sports

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The International Federation of Association Football, better known by the acronym FIFA (because of the French name of the organization), is joining other athletic governing bodies in derailing the aspirations of some Muslim women to excel in sports. This month a referee in Bahrain barred the Iranian national women’s team from competing against the Jordanian women’s team in a bid for a spot at the 2012 Olympics. Also this month USA Weightlifting barred Kulsoom Abdullah of Atlanta, Georgia from the Senior Nationals competition this July in Iowa.

In both cases the reason cited was the hijab included in their uniforms.

At stake is much more than the configuration of athletic uniforms. With modern advances in hijab design, these decisions are unnecessary from an athletic point of view. Of much greater significance is the negative impact of such poor decisions on the advancement of Muslim women in society and, more broadly, on the participation of religious believers in public life.

A Wall Instead of a Wahl

In both international soccer and weightlifting, Muslim women are woefully under-represented. This is not due to a lack of desire among Muslim women to participate. Instead, from North America to Iran we see Muslim women desiring to engage in the modern world, seeking opportunities to develop and share their talents, including their athletic prowess.  Yet these women face artificial barriers erected by others.

It is important to note that men per se are not the barrier, for some men are partners with women in dismantling the obstacles to female advancement. This spring sportswriter and women’s barrier-basher Grant Wahl ran for President of FIFA on a platform that included a commitment to appoint a woman as general secretary of the all-male FIFA leadership.  Yet 74-year-old Sepp Blatter, who has staunchly kept FIFA leadership all male, all the time, was reelected for a fourth term. Thus, alas, the Iranian women hit a wall instead of a Wahl inside FIFA.

Between Cultural Rocks and Secular Hard Places

The real barriers Muslim women face are cultural prejudice and lack of religious accommodation, or sometimes even anti-religious sentiment.

On the one side some Muslim women face culturally (not religiously) rooted attitudes on the part of some Muslim men that militate against women’s advancement.  On the other, some secularists seek to ban all religion at all levels and among all participants in public. Both block public engagement by Muslim women who wear a headscarf according to their understanding of feminine modesty in their faith. (Ironically, more than a few anti-religion secularists pride themselves on their support for women’s rights.)

Of course, safety is vital in sports. And some opponents of hijab-wearing athletes cite safety concerns.

But there is an obvious way forward: Create sports-safe hijabs.

Fortunately, someone has already thought of this, devising practical ways for hijab-wearing Muslim women to participate—safely—in modern sports.

Practical Alternatives to the Sidelines

In 2007 in Quebec Canada, during a U12 (under the age of 12) Quebec Soccer Federation tournament, a referee demanded that eleven-year-old Asmahan Mansour remove her hijab because by having it on, she was violating a soccer rule on safety. Mansour refused to remove her hijab and as a result, she was prohibited from participating in the tournament. The Quebec Soccer Federation supported the referee, stating that he was adhering to the rules of FIFA , namely: “A player shall not use equipment or wear anything (including any kind of jewelry) that could be dangerous to himself or another player.”  The danger cited was the potential risk of strangulation.

However, savvy hijab design could offer an alternative to the sidelines such as a hijab with Velcro or other emergency-release.

Elham Syed Javad, an Iranian-born French-Canadian Muslim, had precisely this idea in mind when she created her sports attire design company ResportOn.

In 2007, after hearing that five Muslim girls in Montreal were dismissed from a tae kwon do tournament for wearing hijabs, Elham Javad decided to create a hijab that would allow Muslim women to participate in sports with full movement and safety. After observing Muslim girls playing sports, Elham created the ResportOn head covering, which is attached to a camisole, from athletic material that is not only flexible but also clings firmly to players’ bodies.

She assigned the product the perfect tagline: “Be Yourself. Unveil your performance.”

If the ResportOn design does not meet the safety requirements of international sports, then organizations such as FIFA should at the very least offer Javad and others the opportunity to unleash their design creativity on this problem—one that is surely solvable.

Naked Public Square?

“Extremism” was how Mustafa Musleh Zadeh, the Iranian ambassador to Jordan, described FIFA’s decision, comparing the FIFA ban on women in headscarves playing soccer to the Afghan ban on women in sports under the Taliban.

Labeling the decision “extremism” seems a bit, well, extreme. Yet the Iranian ambassador may have a point. One can’t help but wonder to what extent secularist extremism, which tries to block religious actors from engagement in the public square, had an impact on the decision of FIFA, a Euro-leaning organization, to uphold the ban on the Iranian women’s team.

But does this space need to be devoid of all religious expression in order to be “public”?

Religious Symbol vs. Religious Practice

According to FIFA regulations (Law 4, Decision 1):

Players must not reveal undergarments showing slogans or advertising. The basic compulsory equipment must not have any political, religious or personal statements.

 

A player removing his jersey or shirt to reveal slogans or advertising will be sanctioned by the competition organiser. The team of a player whose basic compulsory equipment has political, religious or personal slogans or statements will be sanctioned by the competition organiser or by FIFA.

But is the hijab a slogan? Or something different—and something more?

It is important to differentiate between a religious symbol or statement, e.g. a cross on a t-shirt, and a normative religious practice, e.g. wearing the hijab as do some Muslim women in order to follow their faith’s call to feminine modesty. For a Christian, wearing a cross on a t-shirt is an option—nowhere prescribed by Christian scriptures or tradition—and the cross would be a symbol, however revered by Christians. By contrast, for a Muslim woman, wearing a hijab is less a “slogan” or “statement” meant to communicate something to someone else than a matter of her own obedience to the binding commands of God.

(It is true that Muslim women are not commanded to wear the hijab in so many words. However, as Notre Dame professor Mahan Mirza explains elsewhere on the Contending Modernities blog, “the classical consensus [is that] Muslim women are commanded to be modest and ‘hide their beauty’ except for when they are with an inner circle of males. This has always been understood…as suggesting that something akin to the headscarf should be worn, although the extent of its practice and its exact form have varied in different societies through history.”)

One measure of difference between a religious symbol (or a slogan or statement) and a normative religious practice is what we might call “the bumper sticker test.” That is, would it retain its meaning on a bumper sticker?  A cross could go on a bumper sticker—it is a symbol that makes a statement.  By contrast, the religious meaning of the hijab is in its wearing. The hijab is a response of faith by the believer who chooses to wear it, whereas a hijab on a bumper sticker would be just a picture (and, all by itself, an opaque one at that). Even if the hijab picture symbolized something religious it would not in any way be on par with a Muslim woman’s personal act of wearing one.

Come as You Are

In a world filled with inter-religious tensions, precisely non-religious activities such as sports can provide a public space in which those who are different can find ways to participate together.

However, requiring sameness in public spaces strips them of their public character, holding them hostage to narrow, private prejudice. If our public realms are to be inclusive and reflect the true diversity of humanity, then these spaces, including soccer fields and weightlifting mats, need to include the freedom for religious believers to be who they are—and to come as they are.

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Jennifer Bryson
Jennifer S. Bryson is a Visiting Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. from 2009-2014 she served as Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. She studied Political Science as an undergraduate at Stanford, medieval European intellectual history for an M.A. in History at Yale, and Greco-Arabic and Islamic studies for a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, also at Yale.
Sajda Ouachtouki
Sajda Ouachtouki works at the Walt Disney company on the digital economy and Global Internet governance. She received in Master's in public affairs from the Woodraw Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 2017. She graduated from Princeton in 2013.
Gender, State & Society article

Contending Modernities in France: Muslim Expression vs. Secular Integrity


Last month, on April 11, 2011, France became the second country in Europe, following Belgium, to ban the wearing of the full Islamic veil or burqa. The law was approved in October 2010 after a year of intense debate. Nine out of ten French people support it, according to a recent survey. France had already banned the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols such as veils, Jewish skullcaps, and crucifixes in schools in 2004.

Under the new law, women who wear face-covering Muslim veils in “public places” in France face a fine of about $200, compulsory “special classes” on citizenship, or both. Husbands and fathers found to have forced women and girls to wear the full veil risk a year of prison and a fine of about $40,000, with both penalties doubled if the victim is a minor.

Within hours of the ban becoming law, two women wearing full face veils were arrested. Apparently, however, they were arrested for participating in an illegal protest—outside Notre Dame cathedral in central Paris—and not for wearing the veil. Police say they were released shortly after being questioned.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has described the burqa as a “sign of debasement.” Michele Alliot-Marie, the former interior minister, said it “cuts [women] off from society and rejects the very spirit of the French republic, founded on a desire to live together.”

This direct clash between the religious practice of some Muslims and a law that many French leaders and citizens believe is a logical extension of France’s secularism could not be of more direct interest to Contending Modernities. We therefore asked two of our regular commentators—M. Christian Green and Mahan Mirza—to offer their reflections on France’s burqa ban.

1 Comment on Contending Modernities in France: Muslim Expression vs. Secular Integrity Array
Timothy Samuel Shah
Timothy Samuel Shah is Editor of the Contending Modernities Blog. He is Associate Director and Scholar in Residence of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and Adjunct Research Professor with Notre Dame's Kroc Institute. With Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott, he is co-author of God's Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics.
Gender, State & Society article

Burqas, Blobs, and Bans in “La Belle France”


A recent search of the term “burqa” on CartoonStock.com turned up a plethora of images of women in black and blue veils.  In one image a black-clad woman in a delivery room gives birth to a tiny, similarly garbed miniature, as a nurse proclaims, “It’s a girl!”  In another, a woman in a black niqab, with only her eyes exposed, sits in front of a computer featuring the webpage “Hidden Facebook.”   In yet another, a close replica of the angst-ridden figure in the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream,” stands before a minaret and a woman in a blue burqa symbolizing Europe’s horror at the specter of Islamic symbols in its midst.  The black and blue images call to mind the big red blob—creeping Communism, of course—that terrorized American moviegoers in the 1950s.

“Burqa Chic” in Chicago

In a clothing boutique in Chicago’s famed shopping mecca, Water Tower Place, I was recently approached by a woman in a black headscarf and body-covering cloak, her face exposed and offset by rimless eyeglasses, one of the boutique’s signature mohair scarves in a bright and plummy shade draped around her shoulders and over the veil.  She asked if I needed assistance.  I thanked her and replied that I was just looking.  As I left the boutique to run a few errands, something about her seemed familiar.  Sometime during the next hour or so I remembered. More than the face, it was her voice that cinched the realization. I returned to the store, approached the saleswoman, and addressed her by name.

It turned out that this saleswoman, of South Asian origins, had previously represented the clothing line at a nearby department store, before going to work for the company for several years in New York, and then returning to Chicago.  She mentioned that not all of her previous customers recognized her “with the veil.” I was intensely curious about the veil, but as a stalwart for privacy in world in which privacy—including privacy in faith, where desirable—is increasingly an antique notion, I demurred.   Even as the American public has embraced the practice of demanding faith statements from its political leaders, it occurred to me that this woman’s religion was really none of my business.

Secularism and Dissimulation

On April 11, 2011, the controversial 2010 “Burqa Ban” law, officially the Bill Against Facial Dissimulation in Public Places took effect in France, banning face-covering veils—the burqa and niqab, but not the hijab or headscarf—in all public places.  Even as someone who studies law and religion, this issue—dating back to France’s 2004 Law on the Principle of secularism and the Wearing of Symbols or Clothing Denoting Religious Affiliation in Schools, Colleges and High Schools or even back to France’s 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State or the French Revolution for the historically minded—just never grabbed me.  As a feminist concerned about the hypersexualization of women’s bodies in our culture, I was more likely to be concerned about women taking off their clothes, not covering up.  And what was with the constant scrutiny of what women wear anyway?  It all reeked of that pernicious “women-in-miniskirts-deserve-to get-raped” mentality.  As a child of the 1980s “preppy” era, I remembered, from a fashion perspective, when “status” meant piling on as many clothing layers as possible, a practice which spawned many interesting innovations and embellishments to the uniforms in my Catholic girls’ school, even in hot and humid southern Louisiana.  I was the first to get away with a black leather biker’s jacket, soon followed by others who, like me, interpreted the meaning of the school’s “Rebel Girl” mascot a bit too literally.

But as the rhetoric rose, I pricked up my ears.  In January 2010, the French National Assembly considered a 188-page report on the wearing of the “voile intégrale” as a threat to the French republican values of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” and, above all, as a challenge to the French program of secularism known as “laïcité.” With the several hundred pages of accompanying testimony transcripts and other appendices, the documentary behemoth comes in at 658 pages. Printed and bound, it resembles one of those volumes of the United States tax code that some American politicians like to trot out in the halls of Congress every April 15. But the French law that went into effect this April 11 apparently won’t deplete anyone’s bank account, unless you count the salaries to be paid to instructors in the “special classes” that French women will be required to attend, along with paying a fine, if they are caught publicly en voile.  In a down academic job market for instructors in religion, ethics, and political theories of citizenship, teaching those classes could be a pretty good employment gig.

At Once Ancient and Modern

The lengthy first section of the French’s parliament’s report takes pains to note that the wearing of the veil is, at once, of “ancient origin” and a “recent development.”  Like many such arguments, and with a commitment to originalist interpretation that United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would admire, it emphasizes repeatedly the practice’s lack of a specific textual basis in the Qur’an, aside from general commands of modesty.  Even in the face of testimony from women who wear the veil on their motivations for doing so and the meaning of the veil in their lives, the report drafters, in their theological and anthropological wisdom, constantly return to their insistence that the veil is not an “obligatory prescription” in Islam.  But whether it was originally obligatory says nothing about its modern meaning.  As French historian Joan Wallach Scott has impressively argued, for the women who wear it, the veil may be part of the very essence of being a modern, French, Muslim woman.

Of course, those more “recent” meanings, in a context in which the majority UMP party French President Nicholas Sarkozy last month decided to emulate the New York Congressman Peter King in conducting a national debate on secularism and Islam, are potentially even more problematic.  The debate was retitled “Secularism: To Live Better Together” and produced a 26-point “Pacte Républicain” to better instantiate “laïcité” in French politics and society.

The French veil report, which contains way more than 26 points, suggests that the veil is a “rogue sign of a quest for identity” (signe dévoyé d’une quête d’identité) and the “standard of radical, communitauriste movements” (l’étendard des mouvements communitaristes et radicaux”).  Among the specific supposed threats to French values, no Western feminist can avoid some amount of concern about liberty and equality, particularly if women are coerced by their families or communities into wearing the veil, which could involve violations of their civil or political rights, or if their wearing of the veil disadvantaged them in education or employment, which would violate their economic, social, and cultural rights—not to mention their religious freedom.  But then then state, particularly a state with as grand a mission as suggested in the French veil report, should have the mission and the duty to protect women—and men, too—who wear religious garb from those sorts of human rights violations.

Refusing to Be a Person

Where the French veil report gets really interesting, at least to this reader, is in its assertion that the veil is a threat to “fraternity.” For “fraternity,” it turns out, invokes a number of conceptions of citizenship and civility that the French are concerned to protect.  In a May 4, 2010, New York Times editorial provocatively, and rather sexually suggestively, titled “Tearing Away the Veil,” Jean-Francois Copé, majority leader of the National Assembly and mayor of the town of Meaux, where some of the early headscarf cases emerged, maintained that the wearing of the veil represents a “refusal to exist as a person in the eyes of others” and renders the wearer a “shadow among others, lacking individuality, avoiding responsibility.”  In Copé’s view, these veiled women are faceless—and possibly threatening—blobs within the French body politic.

The Copé editorial was followed in the Times just over a month later by philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s spirited defense of the veil, inspired by the Spanish rejection of a burqa law and titled, “Veiled Threats?,” which elicited 757 reader comments from around the world, many of them quite incendiary in their opposition to the veil.  That article was followed by response by Nussbaum, titled “Beyond the Veil,” which drew an additional 199 responses. Clearly, between the French veil report’s many pages and Nussbaum’s many responders, much ink has been spilled and many electrons transmitted over the veil issue.  How had this been under my radar for so long?

“Mirror of the Soul” and the Reciprocity of Recognition

Aside from legitimate security concerns that would require women to submit photos of their faces for identification and passport purposes, could there be so much riding on the presence of a face-obscuring cloth when it comes to citizenship and civility? Just a few weeks before the Copé editorial I had read an article, also in the New York Times, about a condition called Moebius Syndrome—a rare, conditional condition that causes facial paralysis and leaves those afflicted with it unable to form the facial expressions that are so important in social interactions.  Another article around that time in the Chronicle of Higher Education described an economic recessionary trend away from conference interviews for academic jobs and toward telephone interviews instead, noting that this could be disadvantageous for candidates who “don’t come across as well to potential employers if they’re not looking them in the eye.” My search for the telephone interview article turned up another article titled, “Why Darwin Would Have Loved Botox” on Darwin’s theories about the evolutionary origins of facial expressions as the “language of emotion.”  For their part, the French veil report drafters drew upon French, Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’ theory of the face as the “mirror of the soul.”

I find myself somewhat persuaded by these medical, professional, and evolutionary psychological testimonies to the importance of facial expression—but not to the extent of banning the burqa.  Perhaps the most compelling concern that I have against the veil involves considerations of reciprocity, a term that does come up in the French discussion of fraternity, and is also crucially linked to justice in the Aristotelian theory from which I draw frequently scholarly sustenance.  One could also draw on contemporary German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ theories of communicative action and intersubjectivity, as well. They can see me, but I can’t see them.  More pointedly, in my unveiled and emotion-reflecting state, I make myself vulnerable in a way that they do not.  This bugs me.

But what irks me equally and also raises vulnerability concerns—and it is a trope that occurs again and again in the French veil report—is the overwhelming scope of the French public sphere.  Reflections on the relationship between public and private are a staple of liberal political thought, and feminist theory has often noted the ways in which women are relegated to—and sometimes trapped—within the private realm.  But full publicity is frightening, as well.  There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape those aspects of community that seem threatening, including the omniscient and omnipresent State.

My ultimate conclusion that the saleswoman’s reasons for wearing the veil were, in a sense, nobody’s business but her own was a plea for this kind of privacy—and of individuality.  My continuing curiosity about those reasons, on the other hand, suggests the demands that recognition of religious identity makes of us in a pluralistic society.  Recognition exists in an interesting tension with reciprocity.  Does reciprocity demand a certain amount of recognition? Is it possible to recognize—even respect—another’s religion without full reciprocity of belief? These are some of the crucial questions when it comes to religion—and the veil—in a pluralistic and democratic modernity.

3 Comments on Burqas, Blobs, and Bans in “La Belle France” Array
M. Christian Green
M. Christian Green is a scholar, teacher, researcher, writer, and editor working in the fields of law, religion, ethics, human rights, and global affairs.  Green is currently a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, a general co-editor and the book review editor for the Journal of Law and Religion, and editor and publications manager for the African Consortium for Law and Religion Studies. She blogs at Cakewalks and Climbingwalls.
Gender, State & Society article

Religious Expression or Female Oppression?


In the wake of France’s total ban on the burqa or full-length veil, which took effect last month, on April 11th, it is an appropriate time to address “the” Islamic interpretation of the headscarf and its significance for Muslims. Scholars of religion inevitably get nervous when they are asked to speak about “the” interpretation of anything. Moreover, though I am a specialist in Islamic studies, I do not focus on women’s issues. So that makes me doubly nervous addressing this issue.

So I propose to draw on my personal experience as a Muslim and as an observer of Western politics and society to establish some context that may lead us to be more aware of certain uncritical areas in our framing of the question at hand.

The Present Context: Muslim Marginalization

Not only has France implemented its outright ban on the burqa, but the United States Congress conducted now notorious hearings in March on Muslim radicalization in America, which inevitably raised suspicions about anyone who happens to be an American Muslim. The state of Tennessee is entertaining a law to ban the practice of “shari‘a” in the state, going further than a similar law that was recently passed in Oklahoma. Last year, Muslims were being accused of insensitivity, if not outright transgression, for a proposed mosque and community center near “ground zero.” The issue was framed as a violation and affront to American “sacred space.”

All this is happening at a time when we are engaged in protracted wars in Muslim countries. Although the reasons that were originally offered in support of these wars ranged from “revenge,” “defense,” “security,” and “the spread of freedom,” nobody can deny that underneath may lie other motives, mostly tied to economic interests but not entirely free of more ambitious cultural agendas. Consider Laura Bush’s remarks less than a month after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001: “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

Challenging Modern Stereotypes of the Veil

This is perhaps why, in a book entitled Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes, Katherine Bullock is incapable of separating the question of the “veil” from broader issues in Western culture. Bullock contends with feminist theory, Muslim thought and practice, and politics to challenge what she considers the problematic assumptions of those who criticize the headscarf as oppressive. She identifies six themes that antagonists use to oppose covering. For them, the veil:

  1. 1. covers up (hides), in the sense of smothering, femininity;
  2. 2. is apparently linked to essentialized male-female difference (which is taken to mean that by nature, male is superior to female);
  3. 3. is linked to a particular view of woman’s place (subjugated in the home);
  4. 4. is linked to an oppressive (patriarchal) notion of morality and female purity (because of Islam’s emphasis on chastity, marriage, and condemnation of pre- and extra-marital sexual relations);
  5. 5. can be imposed; and
  6. 6. is linked to a package of oppressions women in Islam face, such as seclusion, polygyny, easy male divorce, unequal inheritance rights, and so on. (Bullock, “Introduction.”)

In addressing these assumptions, Bullock has the following to offer. She says that covering:

  1. 1. does not smother femininity;
  2. 2. brings to mind the ‘different-but-equal’ school of thought, but does not posit essentialized male-female difference;
  3. 3. is linked to a view that does not limit women to the home, but neither does it consider the role of stay-at-home-mother and homemaker oppressive;
  4. 4. is linked to a view of morality that is oppressive only if one considers the prohibition of sexual relations outside marriage wrong;
  5. 5. is part of Islamic law, though a law that ought to be implemented in a very wise and women-friendly manner, and
  6. 6. can and should be treated separately from other issues of women’s rights in Islam. (Ibid.)

Katherine Bullock’s study came about, in part, from her own experience of embracing Islam and choosing to cover in graduate school in Toronto—a choice that evoked an immediate and overwhelmingly negative response from others.

The question for us is: What should we do with Bullock? Should we tell her she is wrong, that she doesn’t know she is oppressed, that she should go back home—to Australia?

We are complex individuals in a rapidly changing world. Simplistic distinctions of the past, such as “Islam is over there in that part of the world,” no longer hold.

Don’t Judge a Face by Its Cover

Take, well, me for instance. I am a Muslim who identifies with my local Muslim community and takes the shari‘a as a set of guiding principles in my life. I have female family members who both wear and don’t wear (mostly don’t wear) the headscarf; my children are American Muslims of Pakistani and German descent; I also have nephews and nieces who are half-Dutch, half-Pakistani-Europeans; and cousins who are half-African, half-Pakistani Africans from Botswana, and others who are half-French and half-Pakistani Pakistanis who live in Dubai!

Consider the following story. When I spent a year in Germany as a graduate student (2003-2004), one of the German provinces was grappling with the issue of a Muslim teacher of Turkish origin who was teaching Islam in a public school while wearing a headscarf. She was banned from teaching, the chief argument being that it would be a negative influence on the young children, and that the public schools are supposed to be neutral spaces. The controversy resulted in a number of town hall discussions, with opinions flying from all sides in all directions. During one of these exchanges, a “secular” Turkish woman stood up and scolded her fellow Turks: “Why don’t you go back home and fix your own society before coming here to corrupt this one,” to which a thoroughbred German woman in headscarf offered the following rebuttal: “What destination do you suggest for me?” (Not exact quotes, mind you, but this is my dramatized recollection.)

Women may cover for any number of reasons. Someone might be wearing a scarf or a veil as a hippie, or a Nun, or might be cold, dressed as Zorro or as a Ninja (as my wife has sometimes been lovingly called by our nephews), or may simply be a practicing Muslim woman. Others may be masked in a veil of plastic surgery. Are we going to single out only one of these kinds of women as “oppressed”?

Muslim women wear the headscarf or the veil for many reasons, which are inevitably explained in the public sphere in our “immanent frame” of secular discourse: they may offer that “it is liberating,” “it is my identity,” “I choose it because I am free,” “it is my right,” “you have no control over my body,” “I want you to engage my mind, heart and soul where true beauty lies,” “it makes me feel safe,” “without it I feel exposed,” “it is simply more convenient than having to dress-up all the time,” “I don’t want men to stare at my body.”  And yes, it is true that some may wear it because they are commanded to wear it by their husbands, fathers, or mothers. But so what? After all, are there no non-Muslim husbands, fathers or brothers out there who expect their wives, sisters or daughters to dress in this or that way? Could it be that a noble tradition is being lampooned because of some bad apples? Don’t we all have experiences with bad apples in our communities?

God-Ordained Modesty

Regardless of the worldly reasons, many devout Muslim women ultimately choose to wear the headscarf because it is their understanding of what God wants from them. According to the classical consensus, Muslim women are commanded to be modest and “hide their beauty” except for when they are with an inner circle of males. This has always been understood by (admittedly mostly male) Muslim jurists as suggesting that something akin to the headscarf should be worn, although the extent of its practice and its exact form have varied in different societies through history. Many, if not most Muslim women, choose to obey God’s command to be modest by avoiding clothes that are too revealing, without wearing a headscarf.

What precisely do states hope to regulate? Are we going to tell those Muslims who choose to wear a headscarf or a veil, in conformity with an accepted understanding of Islamic law from within the tradition, that this longstanding Islamic practice is universally oppressive, and subsequently either tolerated or banned, irrespective of individuality, choice, society, and traditions and beliefs, as precisely some prominent politicians and commentators have done? How is this to be viewed as anything other than an assault on the religion of Islam?

Do women in Muslims societies have problems? You bet. Do women everywhere have problems? Yes. For every Muslim woman who cries out for help from an oppressive individual, family, or the pressures of society, I’m sure we could also find a Western counterpart.

What Are We Afraid Of?

To conclude, let me return to Bullock’s sixth point: “that covering can and should be treated separately from other issues of women’s rights in Islam.” I suggest that this may not be simply a subjective personal view, but is backed-up by empirical evidence in a recent Gallup survey of the global Muslim population, according to which Muslim women are overwhelmingly more concerned about issues such as poverty, security, and development. They are not begging to be saved from their men, or from the banning of shari‘a, and in fact often find solace from oppression by turning to the shar‘ia (Esposito and Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, Chapter 5, “What do Women Want?”).

I believe that the prevailing discourses around Islam in the West stem from an increasing consternation with Islam itself, or “Islamophobia,” which is an irrational fear of all things with an Islamic ring: mosque, headscarf, Allah, Qur’an, Muhammad, shari‘a, Palestine, or even the very presence of practicing devout Muslims in our society, or in the world.

The last two minutes of the remarks of Rep. Keith Ellison (who is a Muslim Congressman) at the hearings on Muslim radicalization on March 10, 2011 were spent weeping. He wept as he told the story of a paramedic who disappeared on 9/11, while both he and his mother were subsequently reviled in rumors that he might have been an inside-man on behalf of the terrorists. Until, of course, the discovery of his remains revealed otherwise. He was a Muslim. He was a hero. He was one of “us.”

The question on whether or not the headscarf is religious expression or female oppression, says, to my mind, as much or more about America and the West, as it does about Islam and women. So let us ask the real question: Who are we?

5 Comments on Religious Expression or Female Oppression? Array
Mahan Mirza
Mahan Mirza was appointed teaching professor and executive director for the Keough School's Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion on July 1, 2019.

An Islamic studies scholar and expert on religious literacy, Mirza brings extensive pedagogical and administrative experience to his roles at Notre Dame, including serving as dean of faculty at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college. Prior to his appointment as Executive Director of the Ansari Institute, Mirza served as the lead faculty member for Notre Dame's  Madrasa Discourses project, which equips Islamic religious leaders in India and Pakistan with the tools to confidently engage with pluralism, modern science, and new philosophies. 

Mirza holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. from Hartford Seminary, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University. He has taught courses and lectured on Arabic-Islamic studies, western religions, and the history of science, along with foundational subjects in the liberal arts, including logic, rhetoric, astronomy, ethics, and politics. He has edited two special issues of 
The Muslim World and served as assistant editor for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (2018).

He is a fellow with the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the Keough School and continues to serve as an advisor for Madrasa Discourses.
 
Authority, Community & Identity article

A Forgotten Episode in the History of Interreligious Dialogue


One often gets the impression that the history of Interreligious Dialogue (with the capital “I” and “D” standing for a specific social setting rather than a theoretical concept) is told in the form of hagiography, starting with “mystical figures” such as Akbar the Great or the Emirs of Granada, going on to the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religion in Chicago as its founding “Council of Jerusalem” and leading up to “present-day saints” such as Hans Küng, the Dalai Lama, and Mother Maya.

Like all hagiographies, this kind of history is highly selective and written with a particular audience in mind. There is, however, an important history of interreligious encounters that is generally excluded from the hagiography—a history that does not focus exclusively on shining examples and peaceful saints, a history that includes failure and dissent as well as understanding and comprehension, a history that has to be rediscovered in order to grasp the structures, potentials and losses of Interreligious Dialogue more completely.

Another Episode in the History of Interreligious Dialogue

A few weeks ago, digging into the Archive-materials for my research project on religious NGOs inside the context of the United Nations, I stumbled over one episode of this “other” history.

This episode deserves the special attention of the Contending Modernities project because it brings together all its main subjects: Catholicism, because this episode was centered around the Catholic student organization Pax Romana; Islam, because Muslim scholars played an integral part in the episode; and, last but not least, the Secular, inasmuch as the history is closely linked to the context of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The episode took place in Manila in the year 1960. From January 2nd to 9th in that year, Pax Romana organized a conference in Manila under the theme of “The Present Impact of the Great Religions of the World upon the Lives of the People in the Orient and Occident.”

Pax Romana, or the International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs (ICMICA), invited several distinguished scholars of diverse religious and national backgrounds to comment on the theme of the conference. These scholars included Olivier Lacombe, Professor of Sanskrit and Indology from the Sorbonne; S. B. Das Gupta, Head of the Department of Modern Languages, Calcutta; Simon Greenberg, among other things founding President of American Jewish University; Hendrik Kraemer, at the time with the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches in Bossey, Switzerland; Raimon Pannikar, who later became professor for religious studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara; Mahmud Husain, Head of the Department of International Relations at the University of Karachi as well as Pakistan’s Minister of Education; and Osman Yahia, editor of the works of the Muslim mystic Ibn ‘Arabi.

Catholic Students…Inspired by Luther

The beginnings of the story of Manila 1960 actually date back to 1958. They were recounted by Ramon Sugranyes de Franch, who served as the first Secretary General of the ICMICA, from 1947 to 1961, and who, as it happens, died just a few weeks ago in February 2011. In the telling of Sugranyes de Franch:

Dans ce domaine [des Nations Unies], la page la plus intéressante s’est ouvert le jour où le Directeur général de l’UNESCO, Luther Evans, ‘in spite of my nage’—comme il l’a dit plaisamment—, est venu à un congres catholique (celui de Vienne) pour nous demander d’aider l’UNESCO à réaliser une partie primordiale de son projet majeur Orient-Occident (Ramon Sugranyes de Franch, Pax Romana: Son histoire, in: Urs Altermatt and Ramon Sugranyes de Franch, Pax Romana 1921-1981, – Gründung und Entwicklung -, Fribourg 1981, p. 31-48, here: 43).

So, in 1958 the parting Secretary-General of UNESCO with the name of Luther Evans was succeeded by Vittorino Veronese, a former Vice-President of Pax Romana as UNESCO Secretary-General. As he departed, he asked an international Catholic lay movement to organize an inter-religious encounter to take place in the wider context of an effort to foster reconciliation in the midst of the Cold War. This constellation was surprising indeed.

A Three-Fold Surprise

First, this proposal was formulated in a period when most UN institutions, including UNESCO, were reluctant to deal with questions of religion—so reluctant that Luther Evans needed to engage Pax Romana as a partner in order to “outsource” the conference on religion he dreamed of organizing. From this point of view, Manila represents a general shift in the orientation of international organizations— a shift towards the recognition of religious topics that began in the periphery of the United Nations system and preceded later developments by many years.

Second, the Manila meeting occurred four years before the establishment of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Non-Christians, which was renamed the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in 1988 into the Secretariat for Non-Christians). In other words, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a Roman Catholic organization was not an obvious candidate for hosting an inter-religious encounter. Pax Romana was a logical choice only because of its unique status and remarkable links with the United Nations system.

Third, beyond the boundaries of the Holy See, Catholic organizations—such as those that were members of the “Conference of International Catholic Organizations—were among the first non-state organizations to be active in the institutions of the United Nations. Among these Catholic NGOs, Pax Romana was one of the best known and most active. This helps explain why American scholar Luther Evans chose Pax Romana as the critical institutional partner for launching his interreligious project.

But it was more than the mere occurrence of Manila 1960 that was significant. What was said and done at Manila was also important. So… What did happen?

To answer this question, one needs to return to the distinction with which I began: the distinction between the official story and the unofficial story. Specifically, one must distinguish between the official story of Manila 1960, told in the published proceedings of the conference, and the unofficial story, buried in the archives of the Pax Romana in Fribourg, Switzerland. That unofficial story will be the subject of a future post.

3 Comments on A Forgotten Episode in the History of Interreligious Dialogue Array
Karsten Lehmann
Karsten Lehmann is head of social sciences statistics at the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural dialogue. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Bayreuth University in Germany, and for the 2011 calendar year a Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs of Georgetown University. With his colleague Stefan Kurth, he publishd an edited volume on research methods in religious studies (Religionen erforschen - Kulturwissenschaftliche Methoden in der Religionswissenschaft, forthcoming 2011).
Deadly Violence & Conflict Transformation article

Hope in the Face of Tragedy


In the face of unspeakable tragedy and loss of innocent human life, whether because of terrorism on 9/11 or the natural disaster unfolding on a massive scale in Japan, human beings are compelled to ask: Why? Why me? Why them? How do we cope? Where is God in all of this? The answers to these questions are not easy. One of the fundamental teachings of the Qur’an is that God has power over all things. An immediate response of a believer to tragic events should be in reference to this ultimate reality. God, of all things, is aware. No matter how incomprehensible, nothing happens without a higher purpose.

Belief in the absolute unity of God, as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, Agent Supreme, has led many down the path of a theology of predestination. A surface reading of certain passages of the Qur’an lends credibility to such a conclusion: “No calamity befalls on earth, or within your souls, that is not already inscribed in a book before we bring it to pass, and this is easy for God.” The reason follows: “So that you may not excessively grieve over that which escapes you, nor rejoice in that which you are granted, for God loves not every arrogant boaster.”

These verses of the Qur’an say more than what first meets the eye. Although apparently leaning towards predestination, they open a window into something more. On the one hand, events are out of our control in some ultimate cosmic sense. On the other hand, we choose how to deal with them, and so are free to adopt a range of attitudes, including grief, arrogance, and contentment.

Equanimity in the Face of Blessing & Bereavement

Most significantly, the Qur’an exhorts human beings to assume a posture of equanimity—the attitude should be constant (within human limits—“as much as you can” according to other verses) whether we have been afflicted and bereft, or gifted and enriched. It is an attitude of “islam” or submission to God’s will, and a realization that both situations are, in fact, fleeting. Our individual existences are infinitesimally brief moments, blips, in the movement of time. In this perspective, we err gravely if we assume that enrichment is God’s blessing and bereavement is God’s punishment.

The Qur’an tells us: “As for when man is tried by his Lord, who showers him with (worldly) blessings, he says ‘my Lord has blessed me.’ And as for when he is tested with poverty, he cries ‘my Lord has forsaken me.’ Nay! But you are not generous to the orphan, nor do you encourage the feeding of the needy. You greedily devour that which God has caused you to inherit, and hoard wealth with intense devotion.”

This is a Test

So the two conditions come together, fashioning the perfect test: the rich need the poor as much as the poor need the other; the materially impoverished, while tried through poverty, are needed to test those who have been enriched as trustees of God’s bountiful resources. “Verily,” says the Qur’an, “We have made everything in the world as an adornment for it, to test which of them is best in conduct.”

To add a twist to the story, other places in the Qur’an also indicate that our condition in this world may, in fact, be a sign of God’s pleasure or displeasure here on earth. And that our actions actually do matter, and have consequences. Is this a contradiction? For believers, a contradiction would be impossible. So reconciliation is called for, and one is at hand. The key is recognizing that one can never know whether one’s material condition is the result of God’s test, or of recompense for one’s deeds and good intentions. One simply has to accept one’s lot, not knowing where one stands. This is perhaps a reason why, according to Islamic theology, “[T]he heart of a believer should remain balanced between fear and hope.” One does their best in every given circumstance, fearing that they have fallen short, but hoping for God’s reward, and for God’s love. In the words of the Qur’an: “God loves the doers of beautiful acts” or “agents of excellence”, inspired in all they do by virtue, not malice.

Taking a legendary story from the Islamic tradition that every Muslim child learns while growing up… One of the heroes of Islam, Ali, was once dueling with the enemy. Ultimately overpowered, the adversary spat on Ali’s face as a final and desperate act of defiance. Instead of striking him down, Ali immediately sheathed his sword and walked away. When asked for what reason the opponent was spared, Ali replied that initially he was engaged in a battle for truth and justice, in an attempt to spread God’s mercy, but had he struck his opponent down at that moment of defiance, it would have been out of spite, which is something for which he would “fear” the reckoning upon meeting his Lord.

Such themes are not uncommon in popular culture. Many of us are familiar with the epic saga of Star Wars, where Yoda, Jedi Master, cautions young Anakin Skywalker: “Fear leads to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” To speak in direct reference to the 9/11 attacks, one can follow this precise trajectory of emotions in the collective American response. Fear-anger-hate-suffering. Yoda apparently missed one important element, however—the element of grief. But perhaps, grief and fear stem from, and are aspects of, one single sensation—the sense of profound loss.

To Hope or Not to Hope

We experienced and suffered unfathomable loss on 9/11/2001. The immediate and direct victims of the tragedy are gone. The question of whether to fear or to hope is relevant to those who have been left behind—those who have lost loved ones, been displaced, called to respond, or watch from afar. Fear lies in hate and revenge, hope lies in forgiveness and understanding. Fear lies in selfishness and greed, hope lies in charity and sacrifice. Fear lies in perpetuating indifference and dehumanization, and hope lies in the pursuit of beauty and embracing our common humanity. Fear lies in feeding our anger and despair, hope lies in thirsting for a better world.

It is in this light that I propose we see the topic of “hope in the face of tragedy and loss of innocent life.” Tragedy and loss come in different ways. To some it happens suddenly through random accidents or unspeakable acts of violence. We are all confronted by events that are beyond our control.

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan on March 11, 2011 are compelling, recent reminders of this reality. But they are not the last. No matter how the final reminder comes to any one of us, by sudden calamity, illness, or the natural process of aging, we are all dying.

What matters is what we do in the time we have. According to one Prophetic tradition, we are told to plant the seed for a tree even if you know that the world will end tomorrow. In other words, it is not the end product of the tree, but your act of planting it, that is sacred. The teachings of Islam, as I have understood them, seek to direct our ethical conduct in the here and now, with the imperative to place our trust in a higher power for what lies beyond. Hope lies here. Plant your tree.

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Mahan Mirza
Mahan Mirza was appointed teaching professor and executive director for the Keough School's Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion on July 1, 2019.

An Islamic studies scholar and expert on religious literacy, Mirza brings extensive pedagogical and administrative experience to his roles at Notre Dame, including serving as dean of faculty at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college. Prior to his appointment as Executive Director of the Ansari Institute, Mirza served as the lead faculty member for Notre Dame's  Madrasa Discourses project, which equips Islamic religious leaders in India and Pakistan with the tools to confidently engage with pluralism, modern science, and new philosophies. 

Mirza holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. from Hartford Seminary, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University. He has taught courses and lectured on Arabic-Islamic studies, western religions, and the history of science, along with foundational subjects in the liberal arts, including logic, rhetoric, astronomy, ethics, and politics. He has edited two special issues of 
The Muslim World and served as assistant editor for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (2018).

He is a fellow with the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the Keough School and continues to serve as an advisor for Madrasa Discourses.