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Authority, Community & Identity article

Does Islam Need to Be “Modernized”?


I don’t know how many times I have heard Christians—Catholics included, strangely—say, “What Islam needs is a Reformation.”  The normally sensible Cardinal Danneels of Brussels even went so far as to say that what Islam needs is to go through its French Revolution—which makes one want to ask when the Catholic Church was ever in favor of the Reformation or the French Revolution? And whether that would be the same French Revolution that gave us Reign of Terror and the adoption of systematic terror as a political instrument?

For good reason the Reformation is often identified with the foundations of modernity, not least for its celebration of the right of the individual believer to approach the scriptural text directly and to interpret it independently of the received tradition. Old hierarchies of traditional interpretation are broken down and a new freedom seems possible when an increasingly literate lay readership has the text in its own hands.

You Say You Want a Modern Revolution?

Yet at the same time, both Catholics and Muslims have good reason to wonder whether that “modern” liberty is the unmixed blessing it is sometimes thought to be. Scriptural texts are not private, but rather communal texts. They address communities of faith—in the case of the Christian scriptures they were created in faith by the community, and were selected because they reflected the community’s faith. All scriptural communities have learned over the centuries how to read and understand their texts together with the other sources of their faith, and in the light of their continued experience of God. The Qur’an itself (Q 3:7) warns of the danger that whose hearts are twisted will use tendentious interpretations of its verses in order to sow conflict (fitna) in the community, and insists (Q 5:48) that the truth about the matters over which were are at odds will only be revealed at the end of time. It counsels a humility that a more modern mind-set, with its confidence in the individual reader, rejects.

There is a certain irony in the way so many are calling on Muslims to “catch up to modernity” when it seems to be the modern individualism of interpretation and an abandonment of the communal wisdom of the tradition that is threatening to tear the Muslim community apart. It is also ironic that Muslims are being called to become modern at the very time when modernity, with all its premises and promises, is increasingly being called into question in the West that gave birth to it. We believe we have seen through the pretensions of modernity’s optimism and its grand narratives. And yet here we are wishing it, even wanting to impose it, on others.

So the Contending Modernities project has some risks inherent in it. We are not simply two religious traditions examining our respective relationships to modernity and to the secularism that often claims to have cornered the market on modernity. For all our protestations—and 19th- and 20th-Century Catholicism has at times protested very loudly—Christians, particularly in the West, have been content to be associated with modernity in its drive to colonial domination and the exploitation and injustice that were an inevitable part of it. Being “modern” ourselves, we could despise the “primitive” and “pre-modern” religions we encountered. From our “enlightened” viewpoint, we could set the terms of the debate and dictate the necessary outcomes.

Muslims were for the most part on the receiving end of our at times savage campaigns of modernist colonialism, and the vast majority, even if they are not living under occupation, still labor under the burden of the world’s neo-colonial economic order. They could be forgiven for wondering why such a modernity should be celebrated and accepted as the norm against which they are to be judged.

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Daniel Madigan, S.J.
Daniel Madigan is Jeanette W. and Otto J. Ruesch Family Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theology, Georgetown University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center and the Al-Waleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, both at Georgetown.
Gender, State & Society article

Islamic Feminism in Spain and Beyond


Two days last month I got up at 4 a.m. to attend the Fourth International Feminist Conference in Spain.  Why so early?  Because I participated via my computer in Washington, six hours behind Madrid time, thanks to live-streaming on Webislam.  One can only imagine in how many time zones others were also coming on board. Interacting in cyber and real space has been the hallmark of Islamic feminism since it first burst on the global scene some two decades ago.

The Roots of Islamic Feminism

Islamic feminism articulates an egalitarian Islam rooted in a Qur’anic ethos.  It unmasks the inequalities and injustices that patriarchal thinking and practices perpetuate in the name of Islam—or as “Islam” pure and simple—as antithetical to the principles or objectives (maqasid) of the religion.  From the start Islamic feminism has been a knowledge-making project—knowledge that carries s moral imperative for application. It is produced by religiously-oriented scholars and thinkers, mostly but not only women, concerned with gender equality and justice going to the Qur’an and other religious texts to take a critical look for themselves in a process known as ijtihad. They came from diverse social and cultural locations and brought to the task questions arising from their own experiences.  Islamic feminism unites analysis of text and context.

Islamic feminism surfaced as a new discourse in different parts of the globe—from Morocco to Malaysia and from America to South Africa—in the 1990s.  The rise of Islamic feminism coincided with the spread of Internet connectivity.  Islamic feminism circulated rapidly in cyberspace and instantaneously resonated among Muslims and many non-Muslims impatient for equality and justice for themselves and others.  It emerged at a moment of patriarchal resurgence pushed by Islamism or political Islam, and it was intent upon breaking through the barricades of the tired old binaries of East/West, public/private, secular/religious, and male/female that Islamism was busy re-enforcing.

While produced by Muslims, Islamic feminism is a discursive position that anyone can engage irrespective of religious affiliation. Islamic feminism is a voice that can be raised in a harmonious call with other voices demanding the practice of human rights and democracy in the multiple on-the-ground inter-connected struggles underway in many countries. Islamic feminism demonstrates the power and potential of the transnational and trans-communal work needed in the 21st century.

The Spanish Connection

The recent conference in Madrid is a prime example of this inter-connectivity. It was Spanish Muslims, mainly converts, who convened the very first International Feminist Conference.  The Junta Islamica of Catalonia organized this path-breaking event in 2005 in Barcelona, which was to be the home of the next two Islamic feminist conferences. The organizers of the initial conference—two decades into the spread of Islamic feminism—were eager to provide a venue where people could gather and examine the big picture and constituent parts. The conference—both panorama and kaleidoscope—displayed the dynamism and diversity that is the hallmark of Islamic feminism. The conference, which drew Islamic feminists, Muslim and non-Muslim secular feminists, a wide swath of women of diverse backgrounds, as well as a good number of men, created a new transnational community of individuals, many of whom participated in subsequent conferences and remained in contact through other means.

Spain is a powerful symbolic site of Islamic feminism. Spanish Islamic feminism exemplifies the dissolution of the East/West binary. As poet, writer, and a lead organizer of the conferences, Abdennur Prado, emphasizes, the Islamic feminist narrative in Spain draws from two sources.  One is the gender-progressive interpretation of the Qur’an articulated by the new exegetes within the global umma or Muslim community.  The other is the enlightened scholarly, intellectual, and artistic tradition of a past in which Spain was at the center of learning in Europe and Spain was home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews.  It was a time when a rich tapestry of many threads and colors was being woven.

The early years of Islamic feminism coincided with a signal event in Spain.  In 1992 the Junta Islamica signed an accord with the Government of Spain officially allowing Islam to be freely practiced in public for the first time since the final expulsion of the Muslims five hundred years earlier. The Junta Islamic of Catalonia as just noted arranged the first international feminist conference. The Junta Islamic of Spain—founded and headed by a strong proponent of Islamic feminism, Mansur Escudero, who died three weeks before the Madrid conference—upholds “universal spiritual values in harmony with modernity and democracy.”

In the wider looping and networking effect characterizing Islamic feminism, Islamic feminists in Spain, as elsewhere, draw upon the global Islamic feminist discourse while simultaneously contributing to its articulation.  When Amina Wadud—well-known voice of Islamic feminism and author of Qur’an and Woman (1991)—drew heavy fire (including a condemnatory fatwa from Saudi Arabia) for serving as an imam leading women and men in congregational prayer in March 2005, Prado pointed to two Andalusians, Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroes) and Ibn Arabi who had supported the case of women imams back in the 11th and 12th centuries.  At the recent Madrid conference, professor of religious studies Sa’diyya Shaikh from South Africa, in a presentation titled “Ibn Arabi, Gender and the ‘Greater Jihad,’” shared the profound humanist and mystical insights of a great Spanish Sufi with her audience.

Islamic feminism is a work in progress.  It is fed by and feeds many streams.  Textually and contextually grounded, it is fluid, dynamic, and responsive to contemporary demands for equality and justice.  Islamic feminism shows how we can retain and at the same time transcend our communal, cultural, and national distinctiveness. It also shows how we can share, give, and take in the course of navigating across spaces and time zones, building an array of complex, gender-sensitive modernities.

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Margot Badran
Margot Badran, a historian and specialist in women’s studies focusing on feminism, gender, modernity, Islam, and constructions of the religious and secular, is senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and senior fellow at the Prince Alwaleed ibn Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. Her most recent book is Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences.
Deadly Violence & Conflict Transformation article

Modern Conflict and Catholic Peacebuilding


I recently returned from an unprecedented gathering in Burundi of Catholic representatives from six countries in the Great Lakes region of Africa, a region that has become synonymous with genocide (Rwanda and Burundi), one of the world’s most ruthless rebel groups (the Lord’s Resistance Army), and perhaps the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II (the Democratic Republic of the Congo).  The church leaders met to formulate a strategic plan for regional peacebuilding so they could better address collectively the inter-locking conflicts that have brought so much suffering to their countries.

Blessed are the African Peacebuilders

I had dinner with Archbishop John Baptist Odama, president of the Ugandan Episcopal Conference, a plain-spoken, courageous cleric who has gone into the bush four times to try to persuade Joseph Kony, the brutal LRA leader, to stop the violence and sue for peace.  When Kony’s LRA did finally enter formal peace negotiations, Archbishop Odama and his Anglican, Muslim and Orthodox counterparts in the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative were given a seat at the table.

Also at the conference was Fr. Appolinaire Malu-Malu, who in 2006 chaired the Independent Electoral Commission that oversaw the DRC’s first democratic elections since its independence in 1960.  Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, the Church’s massive grassroots campaign in support of the elections was a surprising success, with little violence.  The Catholic Church could play this role because, as in many other poor countries, it enjoys a moral credibility that is due, in part, to its being one of the only functioning institutions, providing a large portion of the educational, health care, relief and development, and human rights programs in the country.

Others in Burundi included specialists in trauma healing, Church agencies involved in the politically and economically fraught process of reintegrating returning Burundian refugees, and Catholic Relief Services, the largest private development agency in the region and a major catalyst for developing the Church’s peacebuilding capacity there.

What Catholic Peacebuilding Contributes

The peacebuilding work of the Catholic Church and other religious actors in the Great Lakes region is mostly a well-kept secret.  Those from outside who are aware of it tend to evaluate it using standard social science metrics applied to political actors, NGOs, or social movements.  To some extent that is valid, for peacebuilding by the Catholic Church shares many of the motivations, practices, and concerns that shape the peacebuilding of other faith groups and a host of secular NGOs—and even some governments.

But there is more to it than that.  Unfortunately, the relatively few scholars, foreign policy specialists, governments and foundations who bother to pay attention to faith-based peacebuilding treat religion mostly as an undifferentiated monolith. And they treat peacebuilding as an autonomous package of skills, strategies, concepts and institutions to which religion offers no distinctive contribution.  What that approach misses is the peacebuilding power of faith. Not faith in general, but a particular kind of faith—in this case Catholic.

The strategic plan that the delegates developed in Burundi—the culmination of a 3-year process—is different from other plans for peacebuilding in the region because it is designed by and for people whose mission and self-understanding is shaped by a specific set of Catholic beliefs, practices and institutions—and whose effectiveness is derived in large measure from that Catholic identity.   Or at least that’s the case that a prominent Mennonite peacebuilder, John Paul Lederach, makes in a new book, Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis. In a chapter on Church engagement with armed actors, Lederach argues that the Catholic Church’s “ubiquitous presence” is a sociological phenomenon, but one that arises from a particular ecclesiology, which gives it a “unique if not unprecedented presence in the landscape” of particular conflicts.  At least in majority-Catholic countries like Colombia and Congo, the Church’s depth and breadth of engagement in areas of conflict aligns with the multilevel and multifaceted demands of peacebuilding in ways rare among religious and secular actors.

Lederach points out that secular notions of mediation, negotiation, and conflict resolution do not adequately account for the Church’s engagement with armed actors.  A local pastor in the “no-go” areas that make up large swaths of rural Colombia reaches out to the narco-trafficker or paramilitary leader, not as mediator, but as pastor, who engages and accompanies both the victims and perpetrators of violence, and prophet, who denounces and calls for accountability for violence and human rights abuses.

As pastor, he might also offer to hear the hardened killer’s confession, or invite him to celebrate the Eucharist. The sacraments, especially the Eucharist, Lederach explains, stand “as an important, perhaps unique, contribution of the Catholic tradition” insofar as “the sacramental act, symbolic and real, connects, heals, and challenges people affected by, and who can affect, the wider conflict.”

Lederach touches on just a few dimensions of Catholic peacebuilding.  In the same volume, leading theologians and scholar-practitioners also evaluate Catholic teaching on inter-religious dialogue, Christology, reconciliation, human rights, development and ecclesiology through a peacebuilding lens.

A Corrective to Modern Conflict Resolution

The authors in Peacebuilding, like the participants in the Burundi strategy meeting, offer an important corrective to conventional approaches to religion and conflict.  They show how strategic approaches to peacebuilding must go beyond the monolithic, undifferentiated, and functionalist approach to religion and conflict which characterizes so much of the academic literature and public policy debate.  They take seriously the rich variety of peacebuilding resources found in the billion-strong, complex, and diverse community called the Catholic Church—and do not assume that the peacebuilding of this community is no different from other faiths or secular groups.  They are deeply committed to engaging with other religious bodies, civil society groups, and governments in promoting peace, for that is what “catholic” peacebuilding means.  But they do not insist—as many policymakers, scholars, and foundations do insist—that religious peacebuilding initiatives such as the strategy meeting in Burundi need to be inter-religious in order to be effective.

It is long past time to take religious peacebuilding seriously.  The only way to do that is to take Catholic—and Presbyterian, Anglican, Mennonite, Orthodox, Jewish, Sunni, Shi’ite, Hindu, Buddhist—peacebuilding seriously.

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Gerard Powers
Gerard Powers is director of Catholic Peacebuilding Studies at Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He also coordinates the Catholic Peacebuilding Network and is co-editor (with Schreiter & Appleby) of Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics and Praxis (2010).