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Authority, Community & Identity article

Contending Complexities


Thank you for inviting me to speak to you this evening.  Last spring, when Scott Appleby phoned me about the launch of Contending Modernities, I was immediately intrigued.  I have worked for many years in various forums of Muslim-Christian relations so I knew that Scott was proposing a project of significant scope and consequence.  I am grateful to the University of Notre Dame for undertaking this initiative and hope that I can offer a few words that may prove helpful as the project progresses. My remarks will cluster under the three categories, or ‘contenders’, which structure the initial stage of this study: Islam, Catholicism and secularism.

The Sacrality and Sensuality of the Qur’an

Shortly after being promoted to full professor at the University of Toronto, I went back to graduate school.  My family and friends found this a little odd, but there was a method to the madness.  I had been teaching, lecturing and writing about the Qur’an for years, yet I felt there was something missing.  I knew the Qur’an as a text and had devoted decades to research on its history and interpretation, publishing books and articles that drew upon more than a thousand years of Arabic and Persian commentary. But I had never studied the Qur’an like a Muslim scholar whose advanced preparation draws upon a full curriculum of Qur’anic studies.

Jane Dammen McAuliffe

So I took a sabbatical semester and spent it as a student in the religion faculty of a Muslim university in the Middle East.  Like the other graduate students, I signed up for classes on theological hermeneutics, on the rhetorical interpretation of the Qur’an, on its legal and juridical passages, and on twentieth-century Shi’i and Sunni exegesis.  I also enrolled in a practicum on the oral recitation or chanting of the Qur’an.

The experience was extraordinary in so many ways but two snapshots from that semester can serve to introduce the subject I want to stress.  In my first days of class, I noticed that sometimes when two young women were sitting next to each other, one would turn the pages of the other’s Qur’an.  I watched this for awhile and then it dawned on me why this was happening.  The second snapshot is related.  During a class on contemporary Qur’an commentaries, I was seated with the Arabic text open on my lap.  At one point in the lecture, the professor made a comment that I wanted to capture so I set my notebook on top of the Qur’an page to record his remark.  Immediately, I felt a fairly sharp poke in the ribs and, swinging around, saw my seatmate scowling at my notebook.

As Christian users of scripture, we don’t think much about our physical relation to the text.  We’re not preoccupied with ritual purity when we pick up the holy book.  But Muslims are.  That’s why a young woman will turn the Qur’an pages for her menstruating classmate.  That’s why I was jabbed for setting something on top of God’s word.  I use the phrase ‘God’s word’ quite advisedly.  The Muslim doctrine of revelation is far closer to a doctrine of dictation.   The Arabic words on the page, the sounds heard in recitation, are exactly what God conveyed via the angel of revelation to his prophet, Muhammad.

For Muslims, the term ‘sacred scripture’ is more than an intellectual assertion.  It has a carnal quality, involving the eyes, the ears and the lips, affecting the sense of taste and touch.  In ways quite different from the Bible, the Qur’an is a physical experience.  As a father cradles his newborn and whispers a few Qur’anic verses in the infant’s ear, a life-long aural immersion in God’s word begins.  In a few years, the child may begin to memorize some short verses, practicing their proper pronunciation and intonation.  As this education proceeds, the young Muslim may advance to the study of tajwid, the elaborate discipline of Qur’anic recitation that can take years to master and whose professional practitioners are highly esteemed.

Immersion is visual as well as aural.  The colossal calligraphy of Qur’anic verses embellishes monumental architecture across the Muslim world.  The script and ornamentation of exquisite manuscript pages has drawn the gaze of believers for centuries.  A religious culture that proscribes human portrayal has beautified the written word like few others. [A small aside: by happy coincidence, a current exhibition at the New York Public Library displays some extraordinary Qur’ans and Bibles.]

The carnal experience of the Qur’an carries important consequences for initiatives, like Contending Modernities, that seek a comparative scriptural conversation.  The Qur’an and the Bible operate differently within their respective religious traditions.  One level of divergence is the physical, as I’ve just discussed.  Another lies in what I would call ‘scriptural self-consciousness.’  To an extent unknown in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, the Qur’an expresses an emphatic awareness of itself as scripture.  A Georgetown University scholar who has been involved in the planning of this project, Fr. Daniel Madigan, S.J., has written at length about The Qur’an’s Self-Image but  I’ll point to only two aspects of this phenomenon, one exegetical and the other theological.

A verse found early in the third sura/chapter of the Qur’an (Q 3:7) exhibits a strong self-reflective sense.   It establishes hermeneutical categories, dividing the scripture into clear and ambiguous/allegorical passages.    It assigns exegetical authority, lodging this with God alone or, in some readings, with God and the rightly-guided.  It cautions against the ever-present danger of malevolent misinterpretation.  All major commentators on the Qur’an from Abu Ja’far ibn Jarir al-Tabari in the late 9th century to Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i in the 20th have devoted extended attention to this verse.

If this first aspect of scriptural self-consciousness focuses inward on the text itself, the second scans externally, connecting the Qur’an to its antecedents.  Many passages in the Qur’an place it within the continuous stream of divine revelation that includes, to use Qur’anic terms, both the Tawrat/Torah and the Injil/Gospel.  But in the Muslim theology of revelation, this is not simply a matter of chronology, of what comes earlier and what comes later.  It is a matter of supersession and abrogation.  The Qur’an see itself as the culmination and completion of God’s revelatory action, superseding and abrogating all previous scriptures.

The Many ‘Catholicisms’ of Our Modernity

Again, I’ll begin with some personal recollections.  After my mother died, as we were preparing the family home for sale, I came upon a few grainy black-and-white snapshots that rekindled a long-forgotten childhood memory.  I must have been about five or six years old and still living in Madison, Wisconsin when my mother bundled me into the car and we took off into the country.  She probably drove about two hours before we parked in a big open field and began walking across the bumpy ground to join a rapidly-swelling crowd.  I had no idea what was going on but my mother kept telling me that soon we were going to see the Blessed Virgin.

Our third child was born in Rome.  My husband Dennis and I were spending a research year there with our two older children and awaiting the blessed event.  About a month after the baby’s birth, we took off for a short holiday in Sicily.  Driving down the Italian coast we stopped at famous sites along the way, including the cathedral in Reggio Calabria.   I remember that walking from hot sunshine into the cool, dimly-lit interior felt soothing and refreshing.  With our infant daughter in my arms, I began to explore the cathedral’s beauty.  Before long, a local priest in traditional black cassock and cincture approached to greet the baby.  He was about to stroke her forehead when he asked if she had been baptized.  I said, “No, that will happen in a few weeks when family can be with us.”  His face went dark and exclaiming “She’s full of the devil; she’s full of the devil,” he backed away.

Jane Dammen McAuliffe

Two years ago on just about this date, I was walking down one of the vast corridors of the Vatican toward a papal audience.  Pope Benedict XVI had convened a group of Catholic and Muslim scholars for what was billed as the first Catholic-Muslim Forum.  The audience was a formal and somewhat solemn occasion with the polite exchange of greetings and speeches.

Three stories, three quite different Catholicisms, all of which continue to co-exist.  There’s the Catholicism of my American childhood where May processions and family rosaries were as powerfully formative as the liturgy and sacraments.  Although the farmhouse shrine in Necedah, Wisconsin no longer attracts the tens of thousands that it did when my mother took me there, people still show up and pray at the site where Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to her just outside her kitchen door.  The Calabrian priest and the Roman pontiff live only a few hundred miles from each other but their Catholicisms are quite, quite different.

This collection of Catholicisms, which could be endlessly multiplied, raises important challenges to the study upon which we are embarked, the study of the intersections of Catholicism and modernity.  Which  Catholicisms—or Islams—will be welcome as representative of the traditions that subsume such diversity?  What will count as normative, as worthy of serious consideration?  From all the time that I’ve spent at academic conferences and interfaith gatherings, I can attest to the subtle exclusions of scholarly endeavor.  ‘Rapture-ready’ Christians and strict Salafi Muslims are absent from such events.

Robert Orsi, a prize-winning historian of twentieth-century American Catholicism, insightfully studies this complexity.  In his many books, articles and lectures Orsi has probed the rich reality of Catholicism lived below the level of papal pronouncements or ecclesiastically-organized activities.  His is the world of novenas to St. Jude, holy cards and relics, Marian apparitions and devotions to the Sacred Heart.  Family characters figure prominently in Orsi’s incisive analysis of the disjunctures that define modernity, disjunctures between the natural and the supernatural, the literal and the metaphorical, the officially sanctioned and the heterodox.  Here is Orsi on his grandmother:

Imagine one of my Italian Catholic grandmothers going to see a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  She climbs the museum’s steep steps rising up from Fifth Avenue and pushes through the crowds and into the rooms of medieval art, where there are many lovely statues of the Blessed Mother, whom my grandmother knows and loves.  My grandmother wants to touch the statues.  She wants to lean across the velvet ropes to kiss their sculpted robes or to whisper her secrets and needs.

But where does Bob Orsi’s grandmother fit in the project that we are launching today?  Will the Catholic charismatic movement have a place?  What will be the position of Pentecostalism and evangelical affiliations? How about an interdenominational fellowship organization like Women’s Aglow that functions as ‘church’ for thousands of Catholic women, women who practice a post-feminist theology of sacrifice and submission to male authority.  ‘Practice’ is the scholarly category to which I am pointing.

In the study of religion, our scholarly practices have privileged texts, doctrines and ecclesiastical structures.  For Christianity, we have foregrounded formal theology and the histories of the established churches.  In the last several decades the ascent of social history and cultural anthropology has focused attention on ‘popular’ religion or, as it is increasingly called, ‘lived’ religion.  But this expanded focus creates continuing tension within the scholarly community.  It’s easy to talk about each tradition’s internal plurality but quite difficult to accept or enact that plurality in specific situations.  During my years of leadership involvement with the American Academy of Religion, I saw this disquiet play itself out in dramas of dismissal or denigration.

With the recognition that most ordinary Catholics (or Muslims, for that matter) don’t operate only or primarily in the realms of doctrine and ecclesiology, the scholarly study of religion is reaching into the lives of real people with all the ensuing fluidity, messiness, particularity and ambivalence that entails.  Ethnography unearths the extra-ecclesial, the unregulated, the places of resistance and subversion.  It also becomes a rescue effort, the reclamation of forms of belief and practice that are too easily ignored or disparaged.

An important part of this multiplicity is not just geography, whether a shrine in Wisconsin, a cathedral in Calabria, or the papal apartments in Rome.  An important part is demography.  It is worth repeating that the Catholicism represented in this room may be politically dominant—for the moment—but it is a demographic minority.  In the last century the world’s population has shifted massively from the developed North to the developing global South.  Statistics from this month’s Foreign Affairs document the shift: “The North accounted for 32 percent of the world’s population in 1900, 25 percent in 1970, and about 18 percent in 2000.  By 2050, it will likely account for just 10 percent.”  The interactions of Islam, Christianity and secularism operate very differently in the global South than in the post-Enlightenment cultures of western Europe and North America.  The fault lines of religious demography also function asymmetrically in the minority-Christian lands of the Middle East and the Orthodox-majority regions of eastern Europe and Russia.

Secularism and Sexism

I’ll preface these remarks with a deliberately provocative assertion:  Most educated women in this country and elsewhere would argue that secularism has been much kinder to women than religions.  Women’s advancement in secular societies has far outdistanced that of religiously-dominated cultures.

At the entrance to my Bryn Mawr office hangs a portrait of Susan B. Anthony, founder of the National Women’s Suffrage Association.  The first quarter century of the College’s history coincided with the final push toward passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.  Although born a Quaker, Anthony increasingly distanced herself from formal religious affiliation.  A similar pattern can be seen in the life of my predecessor, Martha Carey Thomas, the second president of Bryn Mawr College and an extraordinary figure in the history of American higher education.  Bryn Mawr, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year, was founded by Quakers and daily chapel gatherings were a feature of College life for decades.  But President Thomas’ primary—indeed sole—focus was academic excellence.  She wanted to create an elite institution for women, whose undergraduate and PhD programs were on par with the best universities in the world.  She chaffed at the constraints of Quaker paternalism and found scant support for her academic ambitions in the more modest aspirations of her male Quaker sponsors.

Susan B. Anthony’s and Martha Carey Thomas’ religious withdrawal was replicated in the second wave of feminism which began to sweep North America and western Europe in the late sixties.  Stimulated by both the civil rights and the anti-war movements in this country, this second wave spawned a scholarship of recovery and resistance.  In both its theoretical and activist aspects, resurgent feminism challenged established ecclesiastical structures and time-honored textual interpretations.  Like their turn-of-the century predecessors, the women most deeply invested in advancing gender equity found stronger support in secular humanism than in institutional religion.  Despite such historical antecedents as the Women’s Bible of the mid-nineteenth century or the women’s liberation theology produced by twentieth-century Jews and Christians, contemporary campaigns for gender justice rarely invoke religious rationales.

The parallel history of Muslim feminism both replicates and realigns this pattern.  As efforts for women’s liberation emerged in Muslim-majority countries, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa in the first half of the twentieth-century, they were shaped by the forces of anti-colonial struggle, nationalist mobilization and technological modernization.  Like their Western counterparts, these initiatives were action-oriented secular social movements that presumed the protections of emerging nation-states where individual rights and religious freedom were politically guaranteed.  They were focused predominantly on the public not the private sphere and were informed by a broader modernist discourse that sought more egalitarianism in education, employment and political participation.

As several recent studies make clear, this first wave of ‘secular’ feminism in Muslim societies has been superseded, or at least supplemented, by the late twentieth-century emergence of Islamic feminism.  Islamic feminism represents a far more radical challenge because it promotes women’s rights through reinterpretation of the Qur’an and the hadith.  The rising tide of women’s education has benefited Muslim women across the globe.  Many have now taken advanced degrees in the principal fields of Islamic religious studies and are scholars of the primary texts.  They are building, along with sympathetic male colleagues, an alternative exegetical discourse, arguing that the prevailing patriarchal model of family and society does not reflect core Qur’anic assertions of human equality and gender justice.

I sketch this brief history of feminism because there is no place where the ‘contending’ between Catholicism and modernity, between Islam and modernity, has been more fraught than on issues involving women.  Perhaps the strongest accusation that secular society lodges against both Catholicism and Islam is the charge that they devalue and debase women.  As adherents of these faiths, we may argue that such judgments are deeply flawed and grossly unfair but I suspect that all of us have found ourselves in conversations where we were asked to defend our tradition’s treatment of women.

In an essay entitled, “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?” Talal Asad cites a characterization with which many advocates for gender justice would agree, referring to secularism as “a rational principle that calls for the suppression—or at any rate, the restraint—of religious passion so that a dangerous source of intolerance and delusion can be controlled, and political unity, peace, and progress secured.”

The secular discourse about women’s rights has shifted markedly in the last decade.  No longer is gender equity discussed chiefly as a matter of moral mandates.  It’s become an important foreign policy and national security concern, as well as a key factor in global economic development.  In other words, the argument has expanded from ethics to economics.  The UN’s Millennium Development Goals set women’s empowerment at the center of the fight against global poverty.  The argument for educating girls has been development dogma for two decades but suddenly it’s gaining a much wider audience.  What’s happening?

A paper prepared by a senior economist at Goldman Sachs offers an initial answer.  It focuses on the world’s emerging markets and comes to this conclusion: “Narrowing the gender gap in employment—which is one potential consequence of expanded female education—could push income per capita as much as 14% higher than our baseline projections by 2020, and as much as 20% higher by 2030.”  Quite simply, women’s education and economic empowerment will be crucial to corporate success in the fast-expanding world of emerging markets.

Last month, I participated in a conference at Harvard entitled “Closing the Gender Gap.”  The conference wasn’t held at the Divinity School or even the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  It was jointly hosted by the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Business School.  At its most effective, the economic argument intensifies the ethical, as in the recent books by the journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn and the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Will the efforts for the education, political empowerment and economic advancement of half the world’s population be driven largely by the religiously nonaligned?  Will women’s rights advocates continue to derive more support from secular humanism than from Catholicism and Islam?  I do not discount or diminish the work being done by dedicated individuals and organizations in each of these traditions.  Yet I cannot deny that women’s bodies remain ideological battlegrounds in both, and in others, as well.  More starkly, women’s bodies remain real battlegrounds.  The terrorism of the Taliban is carved on the face of the beautiful young Afghan woman who gazed at us last summer from the cover of Time Magazine.  In Congo, a predominantly Christian country, the mass rape by militias terrorizes women of all ages.

A Concluding Word on ‘Contending’

My remarks to you this evening have clustered around the three initial foci of Contending Modernities, Islam, Catholicism and secularism.  But let me also offer a comment about the word ‘contending’, a choice of terminology that I find particularly felicitous.  Having recently emerged from the near-maniacal virulence of the midterm elections, I suspect that all of us are worried about the deep decline in civil discourse.  Dogmatic assertion replaces reasoned argumentation.  Pseudofacts surge through the internet and our soundbite culture erases all appetite for nuance, complexity and critical thinking.  In the words of NYU’s president, John Sexton, “We have created a coliseum culture that reduces discourse to gladiatorial combat.”

Yet a project like this can counter the trend.  ‘Contending’ need not degenerate into unproductive contention.  Both Catholicism and Islam honor the value of sustained study and constructive argumentation. A  Qur’anic passage on which I have published urges believers to “debate with them in the better way” (Q 16:125) and commentators have drawn a developed etiquette of intellectual exchange from this verse.  Genesis 18:20-32, which certainly ranks among my favorite Biblical passages, recounts Abraham’s contending with God about the destruction of Sodom.

Too often interfaith initiatives tiptoe around certain topics for fear of sparking conflict.  If participants enter these encounters with differing levels of preparation, if they feel forced to assume a representational posture, discourse will quickly devolve to the banal—and stay there.   But that becomes a recipe for superficiality.  Contending Modernities presents a corrective with its commitment to serious scholarly research, to sustained connection and collaboration and to productive contribution to the most important contemporary conversations.

I’ll conclude with a final story that draws together my three themes.  I spent a summer in Cairo many years ago studying Arabic.  One of my tutors was a devote Muslim who often guided our conversations to religious topics.  After he’d come to know me, he pulled out his wallet one day and drew from it a small card.  It was what Catholics would call a holy card, a traditional depiction of the Virgin Mary.  My teacher talked about the Qur’anic presentation of Mary and about his devotion to her as a woman whom God had honored and blessed.  I was touched by the trust his personal revelation placed in me and the memory of that moment has remained for me a defining instance of interfaith encounter.  It was prompted by a woman, a woman who may well serve as a guide star for the work upon which we embark this evening, Notre Dame.

 

This post is the text of the remarks President McAuliffe delivered at the public launch of Contending Modernities on November 18, 2010

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Jane McAuliffe
Jane McAuliffe is a professor of history and an internationally known scholar of Islamic studies. Before becoming a senior research fellow at Georgetown's Berkeley Center, she served as Bryn Mawr's eighth president, after having been Dean of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University and professor in the departments of history and Arabic and Islamic studies.
Authority, Community & Identity article

Islam and Modernity


As the convenors of this conference note, modernity is not simply a particular epoch in the history of the world, but also a set of very large and important structural and material changes affecting people throughout the globe. It is a condition in which we all now live, and which we must confront with the intellectual resources of not only the modern world, but also our traditions and heritage (turath). It has too often been the case that to think about modernity has been to limit oneself to the European experience—the changing economic configurations, the wars of religion, and emerging political arrangements—as a model for how modernity should be understood the world over. This is no doubt in part because thinking about the concept of modernity—its nature and essence—has itself a long history within European writings.

However, as the world becomes increasingly interconnected through technological advances, we are now beginning to appreciate the differing experiences of the world’s many cultures in their encounters with the complex of institutions and ideas that we identify as modernity. In particular, we have the new concept of “alternative modernities,” a term which goes a long way in representing the diversity of the world in encountering new realities. So, whereas it was previously thought that to be modern meant to distance oneself from religion and tradition, it is becoming evident that community leaders have throughout the centuries found innovative and creative ways to merge religion and tradition with new advances in technology, politics, and economics. That is, it was, and is, possible to remain authentic to one’s religious traditions—even in the West—while still being a modern person.

A History of Inclusion

This is no less the case in the Islamic world than it is in the West or elsewhere. But this should not surprise us. Islamic cultures have a long tradition of welcoming other philosophies and civilizations. Historically, the Islamic civilization was a moral and humanistic civilization that encompassed a variety of religions, doctrines, philosophies and peoples; in short, Islam contended with diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism long before the modern West came into existence.

We see ourselves as a people who have absorbed a multiplicity of civilizations; throughout our history, we have been exposed to and assimilated the great civilizational accomplishments of the Persians, Indians, Chinese and Greeks into our cultural and intellectual life. Just as we benefited from them, we in return contributed to them. Islam places people and worshippers above places of worship. This humanitarian and cosmopolitan worldview does not allow us to consider ourselves as superior to other people. We are proud of our civilization, but we do not reject other civilizations; rather, all who work towards the constructive development of the world should be considered our partners. Since our civilization is concerned with humanity first and foremost, it brings together both the spiritual and the material, the Muslim and the non-Muslim.

This history should demonstrate that Islam is not, nor has it ever been, a static, authoritarian system devoid of flexibility. So, today, to live in accordance with Islam does not necessitate a return to the Middle Ages, nor does it require that we cease to be who we are. Islam has never required its adherents to give up their own cultures and become Arabs. This is why we see a vast variety of cultural, artistic, scientific and civilizational accomplishments, all of which can be described as Islamic, and that we can all as Muslims be proud of. These range from the Taj Mahal in India, to the winding streets of Fez, to the poetry composed by English converts that represents not only the rigor of English verse, but also encompasses the beauty of Islamic piety.

Flexibility, Fatwas, and Authority

This flexibility is not just present in the cultural output of Muslims. It is an integral part of the Islamic legal tradition as well; in fact you could say it is one of the defining characteristics of Islamic law. Islamic law is both a methodology and the collection of positions adopted by Muslim jurists over the last 1,400 years. Those centuries were witness to a remarkable intellectual diversity—no less than 90 schools of legal thought—and the twenty-first century finds us in the providential position of being able to look back on this tradition in order to find that which will benefit us today. This is one of the first steps in the issuing of a fatwa.

Many in the Western world have come to identify the fatwa with some unfortunate pronouncements of political or self-appointed religious leaders. But fatwa-giving is in fact one of the most important institutions in the endeavour to properly understand the relationship between Islam and the modern world. In an attempt to provide Muslims with authoritative guidance about their religion, muftis look not only to the vast legal tradition, but must also conduct a proper examination of the lived reality of Muslims, in order to provide them with relevant rulings. In effect, fatwas and Muftis represent the bridge between the long-standing intellectual-legal tradition of Islam and the contemporary world in which we live. They are the link between the past and the present, the absolute and the relative, the transcendent and the contingent, the theoretical and the practical. For this reason it takes more than just knowledge of Islamic law to issue a fatwa. Muftis are required to have an in-depth understanding of the world in which they are living and the problems that their communities are facing. When those who lack these qualifications issue fatwas the result is the extremism we see today.

We have to be clear about what is at stake here. When each and every person’s unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we lose a tool which is of the utmost importance to reign in extremism and preserve balanced understandings of Islam. We may point to any number of declarations posing as fatwas from extremists and terrorists as examples of how grave the consequences are of not following the historical Islamic example of differentiating between those with scholarly standing and authority and those without. The Muslim world has been particularly successful at creating institutions and bodies whose long-standing service to the community confer upon them legitimacy that cannot be had simply by someone with access to modern media. This is no time to abandon that example.

This flexibility I speak of is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it is has always been an in-built part of the Islamic legal tradition, and especially the fatwa-giving process. Scholars have long argued that fatwas are available to being modified and updated as a result of changing circumstances (ahwal), the flow of history (zaman), the reality of geographical diversity (makan), and different peoples (ashkhas). Consider the words of the famous Ottoman Syrian jurist Ibn Abidin who insists in the 18th century that one of the essential requirements of a mufti is that he be knowledgeable of the customs of his people, and that he give fatwas in accordance with them, to the extent that he should give a fatwa in contradiction to a previous fatwa of his own if he thinks it to be more responsive to his present constituency’s customs. “For many rulings change as a result of changing customs, or because of necessity, to the extent that following an outdated ruling may entail undue hardship and harm, which would be in opposition to the principles of sharia which insist upon facilitating things for people, so that the world may remain orderly and stable.”

One of the most famous personalities in Islamic history is the famous  scholar of Medina in the 2nd Islamic century, Malik bin Anas. Imam Malik is well-known for his adamant defence of the right to free thought, even in the face of persecution. However, when he was approached by the Caliph of the time with a proposal to make his entire dominion subject to the rulings in Malik’s famous Muwatta’, Malik refused, saying “Leave the people of each locality to themselves and what they have chosen.” Through this simple statement, Imam Malik set a precedent of intellectual and legal diversity in the Islamic world, that led to a vibrant culture of scholarship and tolerance throughout the centuries.

The Flexibility of Islamic Politics

Thus, it should be clear that Islamic law has always contained within itself the capacity to adapt to new challenges. However, this flexibility is present in the Islamic political sphere as well—though this is a point that is often missed. In order to further explore this contention, we may do well to concentrate on the Egyptian experience, which is at once particular and generally instructive, and carries within it many examples for our understanding of Islamic culture and politics.

It is widely assumed that an Islamic government must be a caliphate, presumably because this is the form it took in its earliest period. However, this is just one political arrangement Muslims adopted during a certain historical period, and this does not mean that it is the only possible choice for Muslims when it comes to deciding how they should be governed.

The experience that Egypt went through can be taken as an example of this flexibility. The nineteenth century was a period of cultural, social and political development in Egypt. This period of development was begun by Muhammad Ali Pasha and was continued by the Khedive Ismail who attempted to build a modern state. This meant a reformulation of Islamic law, but not a rewriting of it, nor an abandoning of previous elements of Islamic law. Many people are under the impression that Egypt adopted French law wholesale. This is not the case.

Here we must draw a distinction between form and substance. While Islamic law was rewritten in the form of French law codes, it retained its Islamic essence. The result of this process was that Egypt became a liberal state run by a system of democracy. It aimed at a separation of powers and a functional constitutionalism, with codified law, enshrining the equality of citizens and respect for fundamental freedoms. However all of this took place with a healthy respect for the prevailing culture of Egyptians, and an acknowledgement of the Sharia as one of its constituent elements. Indeed, recent scholarship on modern Egyptian history is slowly accepting that Muhammad Ali Pasha, as innovative and modern as he was, was also a product of the Islamic (Ottoman and Mamluk) cultures which he inherited, and in which he grew up.

And even when his grandson Isma’il Pasha wanted to distance himself from the Ottoman legacy by establishing a parliament, elections, and a codified legal system, he never intended this as a way to escape the Islamic Shari’a, but rather to give it a new form which would allow the faithful Muslim to emerge into the modern world as both a believer and a citizen. This is why it was established in writing in the Egyptian code of 1883, whose first article proclaimed that no other articles may invalidate a right established by the Islamic Shari’a. It is also why the early attempts at codification resembled very strongly in content the findings of earlier legal schools (madhahib). Indeed, these were carried out by prominent Islamic scholars, educated in the Islamic legal tradition, such as Qadri Pasha and Abd al-Razza al-Sanhuri Pasha. The breadth of learning of these figures was incomparable. And even though other jurists at the time may have opposed these developments, everyone recognized their qualifications and religious devotion, and none of them saw their efforts as anything approaching an abandonment of religion. Consider, for example, the position of one conservative scholar, who though he actively voiced his objection to the approach of Sanhuri, never had it occur to him that such an approach could be thought in any way un-Islamic.

It must be understood clearly that the advent of modernity in Egypt was never accompanied by the supposedly inevitable retreat of religious sentiment. Rather, religious sentiment continued to flourish even as the nation modernized. The overwhelming lesson of this example, and of Islamic history as a whole, is that Muslims are free to choose whichever system of government they deem most appropriate for them, provided they respect and uphold basic principles of equality, freedom and human dignity. Indeed, these principles for which liberal democracy stands are themselves part of the foundation for the Islamic world view; it is the achievement of this freedom and dignity within a religious context that Islamic law strives for.

Why Modern Progress Depends on Religious Authority

It is no secret to those attending this conference that the world has witnessed tremendous change over the last two hundred years. This change often came in the form of new technologies and political ideologies. New communications technologies developed allowing us to be aware of what is happening in nearly every part of the world the instant that it occurs, whereas in the past it would take months if not years for even the most urgent news to spread. New cultural and political developments have caused us to think of the world and our place in it in new ways. This wave of change has caused a complete alteration of nearly every aspect of our lives, including the way we think about ourselves and others. It is this modern occurrence that presents the greatest challenge to Muslim jurists and Muftis. The challenge is how to ensure that Muslims are participants and partners in the modern world, confronting new realities with wisdom and balance, while remaining faithful to our religious traditions.

This is something that I, as the Grand Mufti of Egypt, take very seriously. It is a responsibility entrusted to the Muslim nations’ leaders, and we must approach it with wisdom and caution. Islam is often portrayed as the stereotypical example of everything that is wrong with religious societies. And there are some key issues that are regularly pointed to as examples. However, the Dar al-Ifta or the National Fatwa Office , the body I head as Grand Mufti and which has been the central source of authority for Egyptians for more than one hundred and fifty years in matters related to Sharia, has been key in seeking to advance reasonable, religiously authentic, responses to these issues. And we would do well to pay more attention to them.

Consider, for example, the issue of women. Islam is firmly in favour of gender equality. Although Muslim sources affirm divinely-bestowed differences between men and women, both genders enjoy spiritual equality. Within the Islamic worldview, these natural differences are thought to give rise to differing roles, complementary roles that are equally necessary for the healthy and wholesome unfolding of humanity. While men are tasked with the responsibility of providing for their family, the woman also has roles as nurturer and educator, which is the reason behind the Prophet’s response to one of his companions when he was asked who was most deserving of the companion’s love and respect: “Your mother, then your mother, then your mother, then your father.”

Many have distorted this natural difference to permit discrimination, especially in the form of barbaric activities. An example of this is the very serious problem of female genital mutilation (FGM). The Prophetic example makes clear that this was not something he ever encouraged or practiced. More to the point, as I made clear in a fatwa issued after a scientific conference on the topic convened by Dar al-Ifta in 2006, it is a transgression against a particularly sensitive body part, and if carried out to an extreme degree merits proper punishment.

Another issue which has caused a good amount of consternation among Western circles is with respect to Islam’s position on certain corporal punishments. What is ignored, however, is the way in which many scholars have adapted an important principle from the Prophet to apply to the modern world. It is reported that the Prophet said: “Ward off corporal and capital punishments when possible. If there is an excuse available, avail yourself of it. For it is better that the ruler errs in the direction of punishment than the direction of forgiveness.” Many scholars have come to the conclusion that the particular circumstances of the modern world render this an era in which the utmost caution must be exercised, and therefore, such punishments ought to be suspended as it was suspended before when particular circumstances merited doing so.

Of course, the most famous—and the most unfortunate—issue that is associated with Islam is that of terrorism. It cannot be stated strongly enough that terrorism is opposed to everything Islamic law stands for. Islamic law is a sophisticated and humane system which mandates very precise rules for warfare. I have laid these out very clearly in a fatwa which prohibits the use of weapons of mass destruction. Those who undertake such activities not only commit crimes against their victims—many of whom are innocent women and children—and breach international agreements and treaties, but they overstep their boundaries, and place an unjustifiable burden on the rest of the Muslim community. The consequences of such actions are catastrophic, and will only lead to further bloodshed.

Rather than cause enmity among peoples, it is imperative that we work together in order to address some of the enormous challenges facing humanity. I have been vocal about the need for Muslims to cooperate with other communities and nations to avert the impending environmental crises. Islam contains itself within the resources, as some like the Prince of Wales have noted, to contribute towards the preservation and protection of our environment, because Islam views the environment as God’s creation to whom we must interact with love and respect. In the Islamic paradigm, creation is in a state of constant obedience to God, and nature loves those who obey God and grieves over their passing from the world.

I must reiterate, however, that these enlightened positions are only possible if we delegate authority in the Muslim world to its proper leaders. In both Islam and other religions we are witnessing a phenomenon in which laypeople without a sound foundation in religious learning have attempted to set themselves up as religious authorities, even though they lack the scholarly qualifications to authentically interpret religious law and morality. It is of course true that every Muslim—learned or illiterate, rich or poor—stands before his Lord with his God-given status as a spiritual entity given to him at birth, and judged only by his conduct and sincerity throughout his life. However, this should not distract us from realizing that a society functions through delegation of responsibilities and tasks. It is the sacred duty of those who have spent their lives in pursuit of scholarship and learning to interpret the finer aspects of morality and law—those that cannot be arrived at through the unmediated application of one’s conscience, but call for an engagement with scripture and exegesis. It is eccentric and rebellious attitudes towards the humane tradition of learning that characterizes Islam that give rise to extremist interpretations that have basis in neither reality nor Islam. The aim of self-appointed religious authorities is purely political and has no religious foundation. It is to create havoc and chaos in the world. And the first step in creating that chaos is to marginalize the sane mainstream voices of Islam’s natural and long-acknowledged leaders, its Muftis and jurists.

Our role as religious leaders who have spent our lives carefully studying our religion and our people is to re-assert our rightful authority. I have, through my present position, set out to outline an authoritative picture of Islam. This demands a proper appreciation of the flexibility and adaptability of Islamic law—perhaps its greatest asset. To provide people with practical and relevant guidance while at the same time staying true to its foundational principles, Islam allows the wisdom and moral strength of religion to be applied in modern times. It is through adopting this attitude towards the Sharia that an authentic, contemporary, moderate, and tolerant Islam can provide solutions to the problems confronting the Muslim world today, and in which Islam can partner with other religious and secular people and institutions to offer solutions to the many problems currently confronting the entire world and all humanity.

This post is the text of the remarks that were delivered on behalf of Shaykh Ali Gomaa at the public launch of Contending Modernities on November 18, 2010.

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Shaykh Ali Gomaa
Shaykh Ali Gomaa was Grand Mufti of Egypt from 2003-2013. One of the most respected jurists in the Sunni Muslim world, he headed the Dar al Ifta, which issues thousands of fatwas per week.
Authority, Community & Identity article

Another Modernity: Thanksgiving among Haitian Catholics


It is appropriate that Anne Barnard’s front-page New York Times piece on Haitian Catholicism, entitled “Suffering, Haitians Turn to Charismatic Prayer” appeared on Thanksgiving Day, for one of the strongest themes of the Haitian Catholic Charismatic movement is gratitude. During the nearly two years of fieldwork I conducted in Haiti and among the Haitian Catholic communities of Miami, Montreal and Paris for my book Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, I was also struck by how often Haitian Catholics thanked God for such blessings as food (however meager), life (however difficult) and faith (however severely challenged).

The Modern Ideal of Autonomy—and Its Discontents

Many U.S. observers have been confounded over the decades by the resilience of Haitians’ faith in the face of poverty, dictatorship and—in January 2010—the worst natural disaster in the country’s history. Perhaps their joy in the midst of suffering confuses us because we moderns so often seek security in our homes, cars, neighborhoods, jobs, and health.  We believe that we can hide out from human frailty in a fortress of material comforts. A modern narrative of autonomy and self-fulfillment so common in the U.S. leads us to believe that our happiness depends fundamentally on ourselves. To suffer, then, seems a moral failure—a failure to fulfill our characteristically modern aspiration to self-sufficient success.

True, human beings are made for happiness and fulfillment. But to find them, we need relationships. And relationships demand that sometimes we be willing to sacrifice our own desires, and to allow ourselves to receive the gifts others can give us. Human persons desire other human connections even more fundamentally than material comfort. Despite this fact, any priest, pastor, mental health professional or educator can tell you that the psychological ills of depression and loneliness afflict millions of Americans. And this may be partly because we believe so much in autonomy that we do not know how to live with others.

As University of Houston researcher Brené Brown has argued, if we flee the vulnerability that comes with human relationships, we numb our emotions—and hence we numb a basic source of joy, creativity, belonging, and love. If we believe we are autonomous and capable of self-fulfillment, what place is there for gratitude? The flight from vulnerability, suffering and dependence thus leads to isolation.


A Lesson from the “Stranger”

Appearing as it did on Thanksgiving Day, Ms. Barnard’s excellent reporting on Haitian Charismatic Catholics reminded us that there is a different way.

For one thing, it reminded us of the centrality of gratitude to the Christian Gospel. In fact, the Greek root of the word Eucharist means “to give thanks.”

At a Mass on Thanksgiving Day near my home, Father Emmanuel Katongole, the co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School, reminded us that in the Eucharist, God takes mere bread and wine and performs miracles. For Catholics and other Christians who believe in the Eucharist, it symbolizes that—each and every day—we can offer to God our meager possessions and he can work miracles in response.

At the same time, for people of all beliefs, the national celebration of Thanksgiving served as a similar reminder—and a corrective to the pervasive modern narrative of autonomy and self-fulfillment. By giving thanks for our blessings, we open up ourselves to receive the gifts only others can give us. And we open up our lives to be a gift to others.

In the Gospel lesson read at Thanksgiving Mass, Jesus cured ten lepers, but only one of them, a Samaritan, returned to give thanks. “Ten were cleansed, were they not?,” Jesus says in Luke 17: 17-18. “Where are the other nine? Has none but this stranger returned to give thanks to God?”

In the aftermath of Thanksgiving, Ms. Barnard’s Times story and my own research show that the Samaritan strangers in our midst have something to teach us. Many Haitian Catholics, strangers to most Americans, teach us how to give thanks to God even as many of us have forgotten how to live in gratitude and openness to our neighbors.

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Margarita Mooney
Margarita Mooney is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Faculty Fellow in the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2005 and a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University in 1995. Her areas of scholarly interest include immigration, religion, culture, and education.
Contending Modernities article

Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame


I’m not a cheerleader for the Fighting Irish. (I certainly don’t look like one). I’m not even Roman Catholic or a Notre Dame alum. Nor am I a Muslim. I’m not “secular” either. So perhaps I’ll be forgiven for indulging in a little rah-rah for Notre Dame and its recently initiated project on Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular.

A Notre Dame Affair to Remember

The formal launch of Contending Modernities in New York on the night of November 18th was very much a Notre Dame affair. That might make some people wince in our culture of self-promotion-only-so-long-as-it’s-subtle. But Notre Dame—in every sense—was everywhere. And yet the fact that the Contending Modernities launch was so evidently a Notre Dame event is something Notre Dame should be proud of—even as proud, perhaps, as its 27-3 victory over Army that same weekend.

Fr. John Jenkins speaks at the launch of Contending Modernities

From a lectern displaying the “University of Notre Dame” name and seal, the evening commenced with remarks by the priestly president of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins of the Congregation of Holy Cross, who began by placing the Contending Modernities project in a theological frame that Jenkins as a scholar of Thomas Aquinas was well placed to articulate: that both the Catholic and the Islamic traditions rightly consider faith and reason “twin pillars” of knowledge and of the highest human goods. In the audience intently listening to (and exemplifying) the remarks of Father Jenkins was a pluralistic intermingling of Notre Dame alumni wearing “Fighting Irish” hats, lapel pins, and fleece jackets with young Muslim women wearing headscarves. There were also numerous others of neither Catholic nor Muslim persuasion, from secular social scientists to Protestant theologians.

The stately addresses that followed—from a distinguished Muslim jurist from Egypt and two American Catholic scholars, including the dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters—all in their own way insisted on the need for a dialogue as genuinely pluralistic as the audience in attendance that evening. Perhaps it may not seem very interesting or courageous to stand up for dialogue. Who’s against dialogue, after all?

Too often, in fact, “dialogue” in our modern world is not the “inclusive” interaction of “diverse” standpoints it’s advertised to be but a constricted conversation whose participants have already been pre-screened and whose diversity has already been filtered through a putatively modern grid—whether a secularism that screens out supernaturalism or a liberal “reasonableness” that screens out any role for religious authority. Interreligious dialogue in particular often imposes a steep price of admission: emphasize the universal; play down the particular; deny altogether the possibility of any privileged path to salvation. But a dialogue so narrowly framed won’t represent very many of the world’s convinced religionists. Nor, finally, will it do much good—at least not if it aims at genuine peace and understanding between the determined believers who actually populate our world.

As Catholic scholar of Islam and Bryn Mawr president Jane McAuliffe put it in her remarks at the Contending Modernities Launch: “Too often interfaith initiatives tiptoe around certain topics for fear of sparking conflict.”

Towards a Catholic Conversation…

Spurning the dead-end of a narrow dialogue that pointlessly engages only the “diversity” of the likeminded, here a great Catholic university has launched a project that attempts something much harder but also (potentially) much more valuable: a catholic conversation, if you will, among the determined representatives of deeply divergent communities and traditions of thought—Catholic, Muslim, secular. In that sense, it is a dialogue much broader and deeper than your average “interfaith” initiative, for it directly engages the inescapable and growing realities of secularity and secularism in the world.

After all, self-identified “seculars”—or people who decline to identify with any particular religion—are the fastest growing “religious” group in the U.S., and are growing with rapidity in surprising locales around the globe, such as Brazil. As Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has outlined in his magnum opus, A Secular Age, even where religion is strong, many societies have acquired a background culture that is secular in the sense that faith is no longer the presumed, default option of individuals.

But if secularity is a stubborn and indeed expanding reality in our world, it is hardly sweeping the global board. As recently as the 1980s, a consensus of social scientists embraced the thesis that religion faced inevitable decline at the hands of “secular modernity.” Since then, numerous scholars across several disciplines have broken the presumed linkage between modernity and secularity. Rather than being supine in the face of an inexorable syndrome of modernity, they have shown, many religious individuals, ideas, and institutions have persisted, innovated, and expanded their influence across the spheres of modern society. In the process, religious actors have often constructed their own viable visions and forms of modern life.

The result is that modernity has assumed a form not predicted by the so-called “secularization thesis”: the dynamic co-existence and competition of “multiple modernities”—religious and secular—rather than the dominance of a singular “secular modernity.”

…that Modernity Needs

If all these modernities were already alike and fundamentally in agreement, there would be no need to bring them into conversation. But they are not alike, and that diversity is respected rather than patronized when it is made the premise of a genuine and inclusive dialogue.

In launching such a dialogue, Notre Dame has embarked on something that merits more than a passing glance: a Catholic university investing its time, resources, and energy into hosting a very modern kind of conversation between radically different religious positions, communities, and traditions. It does not claim to speak for these traditions. Nor is it merely conducting sterile, arms-length research about these traditions.

Instead, Notre Dame has set a rich table around which it is gathering active and devout Muslims, serious Catholics, convinced secular individuals, and, in time, representatives of other religious traditions and communities as well, in order to hear them speak for themselves in their own distinct and particular voices. In other words, an institution representing a tradition that predates modernity is hosting a very modern conversation—modern not only in that it is expansive, inclusive, and open-ended but also in that it honors (rather than patronizes) modernity by paying it the respect of honest and robust investigation. A kind of radical religious commitment has built the platform for a radically and truly inclusive project.

A hundred or even fifty years ago, few observers of the global religious scene, I suspect, would have predicted that such a conversation could be not merely passively endorsed but also launched and sponsored by a Roman Catholic institution. Surely a Catholic institution would have been the last place to find such a conversation.

I’m no Notre Dame cheerleader, but surely Notre Dame deserves at least a moment of glory for showing that sometimes the last shall be first.

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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.
Contending Modernities article

Contending Modernities on The Immanent Frame


The Immanent Frame is a widely read blog on secularism, religion, and the public square founded and edited by Jonathan VanAntwerpen at the Social Science Research Council. To mark the recent launch of Contending Modernities, TIF is hosting a lively and wide-ranging discussion. A baker’s dozen of outstanding scholars considered these questions: What is gained by framing research on religion, secularity, and modernity in terms of “multiple” or “contending” modernities?  What “new paths for constructive engagement” might such a frame afford?

Distinguished discussants include Scott Appleby and Christian Smith of Notre Dame as well as Lisa Sowle Cahill, Jocelyne Cesari, Robert W. Hefner, Sherman Jackson, Slavica Jakelić, Bernice Martin, David Martin, Martin E. Marty, Aminah McCloud, Robert Orsi, and Eboo Patel.

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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.
Contending Modernities article

“McFootball” in New York?: a Muslim Reaction to the CM Launch


Before departing for the launch of “Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular,” I got another one of those random emails: “Tony Blair’s Sister-in-Law Converts to Islam,” apparently after having a spiritual experience in Iran. A few years ago, Tony Blair announced his own conversion to Catholicism. This prompted me to reflect that one never seems to hear announcements of anyone’s “conversion” to “secularism.” In considering Catholic, Muslim, and secular modernities, it is relevant to note that the “secular” is often taken for granted, pervasive, and unshakable. It seems that it’s natural to be secular—the default option for modern people. As such, it enters the conversation as a “contender” with a distinct structural advantage over Catholicism and Islam. On the opposite end, one might say, are the underdog Muslims, who seem to enjoy a whole host of structural disadvantages. Perhaps this is because they must constantly adjust to the expectations, terms, forums and frames of others, at least in an American context in which they are a small minority. However, in spite of these structural inequities, the Contending Modernities launch managed an excellent beginning to a potentially awkward conversation.

An Uneven Playing Field?

Things seemed more than a little awkward when I pondered the details of one of the Contending Modernities launch events, a luncheon held at noon on Friday, Nov. 19th. The invited guest was a confessedly secular Muslim, not a practicing Muslim, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, and the event was scheduled at a time usually reserved for the weekly congregational prayers of practicing Muslims!

I was even more uneasy when I considered the line-up of keynote speakers for the first launch event on Thursday evening, Nov. 18th. On one side were two powerhouse Catholic academics, Jane Dammen McAuliffe, an expert on Islam, and John McGreevy, an expert on American Catholic history, both in a familiar setting and in the company of friends and colleagues, including a large number of Notre Dame alumni. On the other side was one poor Muslim cleric, to be flown thousands of miles away from his native Egypt to speak to an unfamiliar audience in an unfamiliar setting in a foreign language while wearing strange clothes. To make matters worse, he was unable to make it to New York and had to engage via an awkward video link holding on to an archaic looking telephone.

So I began to think: “The match was uneven! It was a set-up!” In light of the much anticipated Army-Notre Dame game on this past Saturday at Yankee Stadium (which the Fighting Irish won, if you haven’t already heard), a few football analogies came to mind.  From the onset, the underdog status of Muslims was on full display. The main players were John “Mc”Greevy and Jane “Mc”Auliffe, with Shaykh Ali Gomaa (Grand Mufti of Egypt) as an exotic half-time show.  Given that a large part of Kroc’s funding has come from “Mc”Donalds, I expected an evening of “McFootball” in which the likely winner was pretty obvious.

A Vigorous Exchange

Contrary to my expectations, the great Shaykh from Egypt was no sideshow—he showed up to play ball. The Muslims kicked off in the first half with an excellent speech, delivered by an assistant to the Shaykh, Ibrahim Negm, who was present at the venue in person. Looking dapper in a Western suit and tie, Negm spoke in English. Following the speech, he facilitated an exchange between the Shaykh in Egypt and the audience in New York. The second half belonged to the two “Mc’s,” who delivered as promised.

What follows are a few compelling snippets from each speaker, insofar as they relate to Muslim issues.

The thrust of Shaykh Ali Gomaa’s comments was that traditional Islamic law has within it the tools to contend with modernity. In fact, he cogently argued that the problems of the Muslim world have stemmed from a marginalization of the voices of traditional Muslim scholars. The Shaykh hinted that the West should engage these scholars, pay attention to their institutions (such as the Dar al-Ifta in Egypt, which the Shaykh represents, and which issues innumerable fatwas on a wide range of modern problems), and cooperate with them for the betterment of humanity. In a nutshell, Shariah is the answer, not the problem. This is a fascinating position, given that it goes against everything that we in the West have come to believe. I am not sure that the implications of the Shaykh’s position were immediately apparent. The Contending Modernities project will have a good time contending with it in the years to come.

But there is also a question for the Shaykh, which emerged from comments made by Jane McAuliffe on the Qur’an. What does one do with Muslims who have positions that diverge from those adopted by “traditional” Islam, not merely in substance, but also in method? What place do Muslims who engage in historical criticism of the origins of Islam and its sacred texts have in the modern world? Are they acceptable members of the umma, or must they be shunned? How does a project such as Contending Modernities bring Muslims, traditional, progressive, revisionist, to the table together? Will the project engage or privilege one kind of Muslim over another? Which kind of Muslim is more or less representative of the “Muslim world?” Are Western Muslims a part of the Muslim world, or separate from it?

Similarities and Differences

These are difficult questions that McAuliffe alluded to—though not precisely in these words—in her remarks. She spoke of a phenomenon of “subtle exclusions” that is familiar to all of us who operate in the academic world. Where will Contending Modernities draw the line of inclusion and exclusion, and how will it mediate between those who end up being included? Speaking of inclusion, John McGreevy drew parallels between the experiences of Catholics in the 19th century and those of Muslims today. Catholics were able to overcome prejudices against them by building institutions that gave them a sense of internal solidarity while simultaneously benefiting American society at large.  Muslims, in all likelihood, will also overcome opposition to their presence by building institutions such as schools, cultural centers, mosques and charities that will perform the same dual purpose of solidarity and integration.

McGreevy’s analysis is compelling, but a few critical differences between the Catholic and Muslim contexts come to mind. For one, Muslims have no Pope that could serve as an anchor and focal point of their theological universe. Second, technology tightly connects Muslims in America to Muslims “back home,” which perpetuates their detachment from local concerns in favor of attachment to de facto communities of origin afar. True, the problem lessens with second-generation Muslims, and is altogether absent from historically American Muslim populations. However, this group of “indigenous” Muslims experiences a disjuncture because of the absence of a healthy American Muslim identity and the inexorable portrayal of the Muslim as foreign. Third, Muslims today may be attached to what has been called hermeneutic communities in virtual worlds. What impact do such developments—direct byproducts of modernity—have on institutional development, solidarity, and integration? Fourth, America is involved in costly conflicts in the Muslim world that have no parallels in the 19th century Catholic experience.  To what extent does the development of a normalized American-Muslim hinge on an end to these apparently never-ending wars?

What Modernity Needs

In his introductory blog, Scott Appleby refers to modernity’s multiple “complexities.” One of these complexities, for me personally, is that of multiple identities. I am an American Muslim of Pakistani origin who studied Islam in the West with Muslim professors at a Protestant Seminary, and with a Jesuit at a secular university. I married a girl from Seattle who was born in Minnesota to parents whose parents had emigrated from Germany. Now we have three beautiful children who live with us in South Bend, where I teach Arabic and Islam at a premier Catholic university, with a Chinese supervisor, while attempting to get along as a member of the local Muslim community, which is populated by South Asians, Arabs, Bosnians, and American-Americans!

When people ask me where I am from, I no longer have an easy answer. Who am I? If Contending Modernities can help me to better approximate an answer to this basic question, I would consider the project a success.

Yet, unfortunately, one of the negative consequences of secular modernity and its handmaiden of secular scholarship is a conscious and deliberate de-centering of the self. We are trained well to write about the ideas of others, to classify groups and peoples, to coin categories. But we are seldom encouraged to discover or write cogently about “what I believe.” If I may quote from the Qur’an: “Be not like those who forgot God, so He made them forget their own selves.” Is this where modernity has brought us? Brought me? Is a modernity possible that embraces God, as understood by the shared heritage of two of the world’s great religious traditions, Catholicism and Islam—pluralism within them notwithstanding? What are the contours and consequences of such an embrace?

If the play-by-play in New York is anything to go by, it promises to be an exhilarating season. Not least because it made clear that Contending Modernities is a sport in which none of us is just a spectator. Game on!

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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.
 
Contending Modernities article

An Unlikely Conversation: a Catholic Reaction to the CM Launch


A college president who is a Catholic and a scholar of Islam cautions that a scholarly project on Catholicism and Islam should not ignore “rapture-ready Christians,” Sufi Muslims, or Christian women who have joined the “Women Aglow” movement, which preaches obedience to their husbands.

The granddaughter of an Ayatollah decries family law in Islamic countries that severely restricts women’s opportunities.

A woman who converted from Catholicism to Islam while a teenager, then became a scholar of Islam, later went on to become President of the Islamic Society of North America, and wears a head scarf to boot, criticizes modernity for attacking family and community, both laboratories for teaching virtue to children.

The Grand Mufti of Egypt holds that Islam welcomed diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism long before the modern West even came into existence.

A dean at a Catholic university tells the story of a nineteenth-century American Jesuit priest who was tarred and feathered by Protestants and then analogizes the Jesuit’s experience to that of American Muslims at the hands of many of their fellow Americans today.

Watchers of the launch of Contending Modernities in New York City on November 18th and 19th, 2010, would have been disappointed if they had been hoping to figure out which of the familiar categories the project will fit into.  Will it be liberal?  Conservative?  Feminist?  Progressive?  Traditional?  Few labels fit.  That seems to be the point of the organizers of Contending Modernities. (Full disclosure: I write as a member of the project’s steering committee, though I was not closely involved in planning the launch).

Tradition v. Modernity?

In an earlier iteration the project was to be called “Contending with Modernity.”  That title would have fit a standard narrative of Western intellectuals far better.  It suggests that Catholicism and Islam are two pre-modern, traditional, patriarchal religions that once dominated a goodly portion of humanity . . . until the Protestant Reformation came along, and then the Enlightenment, which brought liberty, equality, rationality, science, technological and economic advancement, secularism, and the liberation of women—in short, modernity.

But the title that the organizers settled on connotes far more complexity and even hints at intrigue—“Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular.”  Borrowing from the great Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt’s idea of “multiple modernities,” it suggests that Catholicism and Islam are not outdated holdovers that are now running out of steam but rather religions that have adapted to and even espouse their own version of modernity.  Within each faith tradition, too, versions of modernity contend.  Of course, there is also secularism, which is more commonly associated with modernity.  But secularism is now recast as one version of modernity among—and contending with—the others.

Contending about Gender

To convey this complexified picture, the organizers chose the anything-but-vanilla subject of gender.  The college president, Bryn Mawr’s Jane Dammen McAuliffe, averred that there is no place where contending between the three traditions has been more fraught than on issues of gender and women.

As most of the speakers described this contention, it takes place between Catholicism and Islam in one corner of the ring and western secular modernity in the other (the site of the launch was several blocks north of Madison Square Garden).  For its part, modernity either assaults Catholicism and Islam head-on or it strives to outdo these religions in winning the sympathy of humanity.  The college dean, John McGreevy of Notre Dame, described the beleaguered nineteenth-century Jesuit priest as one who—like American Muslims today—confronted Americans who considered his religion an enemy of freedom, the constitution, and Thomas Jefferson.  President McAuliffe ended her talk by saying that secularism had given women opportunities.  She quoted an economist who claims that closing the gender gap in wages and employment can substantially increase a society’s productivity.  Notre Dame law professor Cathy Kaveny pointed out several virtues of Pope John II’s feminism, but for each one of these, she offered parallel respects in which modern feminists find that these virtues sell women short.

But several of the same speakers who spoke of secular modernity’s contention against religion also spoke of ways in which Catholicism and Islam either supply forms of human flourishing that modernity cannot, or provide a critique of dysfunctions, many harming women, for which secular modernity seems uniquely responsible.  Modernity is both “a boon and a bane,” commented Patrick Mason of Notre Dame, the project’s associate director for research.  In his introduction to the second day’s panel, Mason gave the example of sex-selective abortion and infanticide, a practice in which babies are killed because they are girls.  Arising from the attempts of developing states (secular modernity’s quintessential institution) to control their populations and achieve economic advancement (some of secular modernity’s quintessential goals), this practice’s annual numbers exceed those of the genocide in Rwanda several times over.  It is within religions like Catholicism and Islam that the most incisive and intellectually rooted critiques of the practice can be found.

In one question-and-answer session, Dean McGreevy opined that religion was uniquely capable of providing a society with the solidarity it needs to cultivate sympathy for the less fortunate, a task that political parties or business, for instance, cannot.

The ayatollah’s granddaughter, professor Shahla Haeri of Boston University, is one of a wave of Islamic feminists who criticize oppressive patriarchal laws—but from the basis of the Quranic texts, not from outside the faith.

The speakers might have added to secular modernity’s debit column the multibillion dollar global pornography industry—spread by technology, enabled by prosperity, viewed within private spaces (supposedly one of secular modernity’s achievements), and justified by the principle that people are free to do what they like as long as they do not harm others (one of secular modernity’s signature principles).  Of course, pornography does not merely harm the souls of its (mostly male) consumers, but also objectifies women and destroys relationships between men and women.  Here again, it is Catholicism’s and Islam’s notions of sexuality—as a self-giving act, rooted in the relational context of marriage, which is in turn a part of the moral order established by God—that provides some of the world’s most powerful critiques of this modern phenomenon.

An Uncomfortable—but Essential—Conversation

The genius of Contending Modernities is that is allows no one—Catholic, Muslim, or secular—to rest easy in the comfort zone in which he or she entered the conversation.  All sides are challenged by the others; all benefit from the other’s wisdom.  Such multi-cornered contention, privileging no single point of view, is rare in the Western academy and is to be applauded.  Still, the fact is that the Western academy’s sympathies are overwhelmingly with secular modernity’s challenge to religion. My hope, therefore, is that Contending Modernities will take special care to highlight ways in which faith traditions supply the secular modern world with virtues—love, forgiveness, humility, mercy, gift of self, and compassion for the voiceless, for instance—that secular modernity has trouble generating on its own.

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Daniel Philpott
Daniel Philpott is associate professor of political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame.  He is a coauthor, with Monica Duffy Toft and Timothy Samuel Shah, of the forthcoming God's Century: Resurgent Religion in Global Politics, and author of the forthcoming Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation.
Contending Modernities article

What is Contending Modernities?


What is “Contending Modernities”? In a sentence, it’s an effort to confront the fact that the relationship between religion and modernity is a lot more complex than many people anticipated. This relationship has proven more complex in at least two ways.

Twin Complexities

One largely unanticipated complexity is that religion has proven pretty resilient in the face of modernity in all its forms. But the complexity is deepened when one reflects that secular communities and institutions have also proven resilient in many contexts, despite what some religious people have claimed about the unsustainability of secular ways of life. This failure of modernity to reach either a secular or religious destination has proven a disappointment to both religious and secular triumphalism. Religion and secularity are surviving and thriving together, creating a vast diversity of modern ways of life rather than the singular “secular modernity” some secular theorists predicted, or the Kingdom of God on earth some religious revivalists and reformers anticipated.

The result? We don’t inhabit one world, or a single unified “cosmopolis,” in Stephen Toulmin’s succinct description of the Enlightenment’s agenda for modernity. Instead, the result is a complexity of different visions and practices—though all within an essentially modern framework—that overlap and interlock, contend and blend.

A second complexity is that religious and secular modernities are not predestined to clash.  Some hoped, and others feared, that the world was divided in Manichean fashion into the Religious vs. the Secular. Or the Christian vs. the Muslim.

There is no denying that on some issues these traditions and communities represent distinct and irreconcilable points of view. The complex reality, however, is that patterns of centripetal and centrifugal forces are driving religious and secular actors together on some matters of public concern, and pummeling them back to their respective corners on others.

Cooperation across Deep Difference Is What’s Needed—and Possible

A practical upshot of these twin complexities is this: The major challenges facing the world—from mobilizing resources for poverty reduction, environmental stewardship, and humanitarian relief, to forging peace accords, reducing religious and state violence, and advancing rights for women, children and religious and ethnic minorities—will not be met by secular actors alone.  Clearly, religion is not going anywhere—the new atheists and old secularization theorists notwithstanding.  Nor, however, will these challenges be met by religious actors alone. Progress defined as sustainable constructive change will occur only when and where religious and secular leaders find ways to identify and respect their differences, many of which are not strictly theological, and forge partnerships for the common good.

Consider the following global realities. These realities underscore the multiple complexities of the modern relationship between the religious and the secular. And they underscore why religious and secular actors should—and can—work together.

  • Christian churches and Muslim mosques, trusted by villagers and farmers in remote rural areas that most secular aid agencies cannot reach, deliver more than half of the health care in sub-Saharan Africa.  To defeat the scourge of HIV-AIDS in Kenya and Nigeria, Catholic and Muslim women work side by side, creating their own “inter-religious orthopraxis.” The Bishops-Ulama Forum of Mindanao is perhaps the most visible of dozens of Filipino efforts to build bridges and “zones of peace” between Catholic and Muslim populations teetering on the brink of civil war.
  • Catholic scholars and religious leaders in the United States, mindful of their religion’s historical experience of discrimination and xenophobia, are reaching out to their American Muslim counterparts, who are facing similar stereotypes and hysteria in a brittle post 9/ll cultural climate. Secular agencies such as USAID and the Red Cross, along with innumerable humanitarian and peacebuilding NGOs, know from vast field experience that the way forward in development and social reform runs through religious communities, leaders and institutions.
  • Accordingly, the Obama administration, responding in part to a series of task force reports recommending steps to improve relations with the Muslim world, contemplates effective and legal means of engaging select religious communities abroad.  The hurdles are formidable: perhaps the majority of U.S. Government officials still believe that religious engagement is too hot to handle—and likely unconstitutional. (Constitutional lawyers note, however, that they are mistaken in this belief.) And religious illiteracy still haunts the corporate world, diplomatic circles, segments of the old and new media, private foundations—and even our schools.
  • Meanwhile, Europe struggles to integrate Muslim immigrants into their post-Christian but shakily secular societies, while the United Kingdom calls upon its Muslim and Catholic minorities to participate with the Church of England in charting a way forward for that nation’s vibrantly multicultural society.
  • Reflecting the Vatican’s uncertain reading of global Islam, Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg inadvertently offended millions of Muslims, inaugurated a new round of dialogue with Muslim leaders worldwide, and prayed at the tomb of Muslim-majority Turkey’s secular icon, Kemal Mustafa Atatürk.  “Turkey is a democratic, Islamic country and a bridge between Christianity and Islam,” the pope proclaimed to the Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “I wanted to come to Turkey since becoming pope because I love this culture.”

Yet none of the recent advances in Muslim-Catholic relations—including the joint paper issued last year from the Vatican by the Catholic–Muslim Forum, which set forth principles of dialogue and encouraged deeper collaboration between the two faiths; and the “Common Word” document signed by more than 300 Muslim leaders and thinkers addressed to all the Christian churches— has been communicated down to the seminaries, madrasahs, to the priests and teachers, and even less to the common believers.

“This is tragic,” says Fr. Christian W. Troll, a Jesuit priest and member of the Catholic-Muslim Forum. “If we are serious about Islam-Christian dialogue and if we do not want to make ourselves ridiculous in the public as religious leaders, it would seem to be fundamental that such important and costly initiatives on the highest level, in which a significant number of Muslim and Christian leaders have taken part, be communicated to wider sections of both religious communities and be made subject matter for dialogues on various levels.”

Father Troll gives us some insight into why such interreligious initiatives and partnerships are critical, drawing from his experience of India, where he taught Islamic studies for many years. “In India, both Christians and Muslims are minority communities and it is imperative that both these minority communities live in harmony and co-existence— not to be a collective force, but in order that both Christians and Muslims make their respective contributions (inspired by their respective faiths) to the formation and strengthening of the ‘common good’ in plural and democratic societies, societies which are secular (in the sense of aspiring to being religiously neutral) and which are committed to the human rights of all their members.” But what Father Troll says of India applies globally.

Our Response: Contending Modernities

In recognition of modernity’s growing complexities, and in the spirit of Troll’s exhortation, a network of scholars drawn from Catholic, Muslim and secular universities, colleges, institutes and other centers of learning is launching Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular.

Contending Modernities is a long-term, multidisciplinary research and public education project. Seven research teams, subdivided into fifteen or so working groups of Muslim-oriented, Catholic-oriented and secular-oriented scholars, are being commissioned to conduct original research regarding the historical and contemporary experiences of modernity shared by these three global discursive communities, in all their diversity and complexity

Neither Catholics, Muslims or Seculars have been passive recipients of the developments and processes associated with modernity. Rather, each has shaped, resisted, accommodated and adapted to the growing explanatory powers of science; the encompassing reach of the modern nation-state the differentiation between religion and state, public and private realms; the dynamics of global markets and mass media communication; and other constituent elements of “the modern world.” They have all contributed to the modern world’s diverse forms of thought and life in these and other areas.

Many of these multiple modernities will eventually be represented in the research of Contending Modernities and will contribute to its various products: books, articles, curricula, websites, video documentaries. And to blogs like this one, which provides an open forum for embryonic or fully formed ideas, opinion, applied research and old-fashioned debate and civil argumentation.

The formal commissioned research begins, however, by engaging two of the world’s largest religious traditions that antedate modernity and that have moved—sometimes haltingly—into the modern world.  Catholicism is only a place to start in covering the Christian world: after an initial phase of meetings, Eastern Orthodox, evangelical and mainline Protestant Christians will be welcomed into this particular research and education enterprise, as will Jewish thinkers—and, perhaps more gradually, the rich religious heritages of South Asia.

Join the Conversation

But that plan of expansion refers only to research commissioned on the basis of generous but still limited funding at this time. No such restrictions apply to this blog and others associated with Contending Modernities. After all, the complexities and challenges of modernity are too great to be left to any one community or tradition, or to any limited group of interlocutors.

Modernity has not turned out to be a homogeneous cosmopolis. But in our small way we seek to draw its communities and traditions into a constructive conversation. Not a lowest-common-denominator “consensus.” But a conversation that engages all of the teeming and surprising complexity of the modern world. That, at least, is our fervent hope. We hope you’ll join us.

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Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1985) is the Marilyn Keough Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Appleby, a professor of history at Notre Dame, is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1978 and received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Chicago. From 2000-2014, he served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Appleby co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.
Contending Modernities article
Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1985) is the Marilyn Keough Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Appleby, a professor of history at Notre Dame, is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1978 and received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Chicago. From 2000-2014, he served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Appleby co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.
Global Currents article

Multicultural Modernity in Montréal


A remarkable experiment in urban modernity is on display in Canada. Seeking a humane response to the reality of global capitalism and global migration, the government of Québec has enthusiastically embraced the concept of a “social economy.” Although this concept is explicitly secular, its Catholic heritage can be seen in its commitment to social justice and the common good.  Indeed, this marriage of Catholic tradition with a secular democratic structure has produced a modus vivendi for a vibrant, multicultural metropolis.  Perhaps it also offers lessons for forging community across difference in other parts of North America and the rest of the world.

Port of Entry for Immigrants

Over the last two decades, Montréal has become a major port of entry for immigrants to Canada.  Out of the detritus of Canada’s battles over language rights and Québec separatism, the city has renewed itself by offering a North American foothold for French-speaking immigrants from places like North Africa, Lebanon, West Africa, and Vietnam.  Although by law French is the primary language in Québec, as a practical matter, Montréal continues to be the bilingual city it has been for generations.

The old working-class francophone neighborhoods east of downtown have become the center of a lively boulevard culture in what has become one of the most cosmopolitan cities in North America.  In the clubs, restaurants, and galleries that line streets like Saint-Laurent and Saint-Denis in the hip Plateau district, young adults representing an astonishing palette of skin-tones and ethnicities move seamlessly between French and English.  Particularly prominent among them are recent arrivals from Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East.  Unlike the situation in many French cities, one does not sense that these young people are angry and marginalized.  On the contrary, they seem to be a flourishing part of the new cultural mainstream.

One reason that migration to Quebec is so attractive is that even by Canadian standards the province provides an impressive array of social benefits to its residents.  The government of Québec has committed itself to rooting the social economy in an understanding of individuals and institutions as members of communities and in a cooperative notion of the relationships among citizens, social groups, corporations, and the state.

Expansion of Social Democracy

Make no mistake, the social economy seeks to respond to specific failures of the American model of capitalism—the glaring income inequality, the rejection of meaningful participation of workers and unions in the management of business enterprises, the destruction or devaluation of public goods, and the destabilization of community life.  The vibrancy of Montréal and the robust social democracy of Québec stand in glaring opposition to trends south of the border.  The United States has exhibited more nativist and anti-immigrant tendencies, as witness growing hostility to Hispanic immigration and a surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric focused around proposed mosques around the country.  Meanwhile, Québec (and much of the rest of Canada) has become more open and multicultural.

Québec has invested heavily in its social infrastructure, creating a wide range of jobs, social services, agricultural cooperatives, and financial institutions in which the vast majority of the citizens of the province participate.  Indeed, the major triumphs and expansions of the social economy in Québec were achieved during a time when Montréal was becoming more diverse—a fact that flies in the face of claims that social democracy only works in “homogenous” societies.

The young citizens of Montréal are learning how to forge community while remaining open to, and proud of, their backgrounds and traditions.  At the same time, they are developing critical linguistic and interpersonal skills that will no doubt serve them well in the globalized economy that will shape their lives in the years ahead.  How will young Americans appear in comparison when they are competing head-to-head?  Will retreat into fear and hostility in the face of immigration and multiculturalism make America a more viable and competitive society? Or is greater success likely to come from seizing the opportunities created by the increasing movement of peoples around the globe? ?

Harnessing Energy and Tension

If the experience of Québec is at all illustrative, principles from religious traditions such as that of Catholic social teaching can contribute to the construction of community across differences of belief, experience, and culture.  Concepts like the social nature of the person, the universal destination of goods, and the inherent dignity of all people speak powerfully to secular and religious Canadians, as well as to migrants from the Muslim world and other parts of the globe.  Might thoughtful forms of social economy be a positive way to harness the energy and tension of “contending modernities” within a pluralist democracy?

In the months ahead, I will be following events in Montréal and other metropolitan areas in North America and Europe heavily influenced by global migration in order to explore just this question.  In the context of a modernity that is relentlessly metropolitan—one offering both the promise and the threat of a world more and more crowded into rapidly growing and increasingly diverse urban settings—all of us have a stake in the answer.

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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).