It is tempting to think of telling stories as the opposite of deep philosophical or theological reflection. Stories, after all, deal in the particularities and contingencies of lives, whereas philosophical and theological reflection deal in universals. In Who Are My People: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Emmanuel Katongole claims that “reality is constituted through stories,” which he rightly notes is a metaphysical claim (173). For this reason, we (that is scholars) cannot access peoples’ reality by positing abstract theories about it, but can only do so by listening to the stories they tell about themselves and those around them. We cannot, in other words, act in a top-down manner, explaining the lives of people only with scientific, sociological, or psychological theories. We must plant our feet on the same ground as those we write about if our desire is to truly understand them. This leads Katongole to adopt, borrowing from Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis, a method of analysis called “theological portraiture.” This method, importantly, entails not only “listening to a story,but [also] listening for a story” (Katongole, 7, emphasis in original).
Katongole listens not only to the stories people tell, but listens for the patterns enfolded within them, and the larger tapestry those patterns make up. In doing so, he weaves a story—which is sometimes also autobiographical—about the necessity of Christian love to act as a remedy to the violence in sub-Saharan Africa, a violence which more often than not stems from the earlier violence of European colonialism and modernity. In weaving this story, Katongole does not reject all theory. In the first two chapters of the book, he draws on significant figures in critical research on Africa to demonstrate how racism and colonialism were initiated on the continent by European powers, and how these features remain present even after the era of formal colonialism ended. These theories, however, are used to frame the portraits that Kantongole wants to paint, rather than to act as centerpieces themselves.
Following these opening chapters, Katongole reveals in intimate detail the devastation of violence in sub-Saharan Africa by listening to the stories of others. He recounts narratives from the Rwandan genocide, the political turmoil of the Central African Republic, and the challenges of climate change and ecological violence in Uganda. Katongole finds much to despair about in these contexts where violence has led people to, at times, turn on their own countrymen and countrywomen. Yet, he does not allow himself to be drowned in this despair. Rather, buoyed by the people he encounters who have sought to provide refuge from this violence, he is able to find a message of hope. Katongole’s answer to: Who are my people? is found in overcoming the logic of the national, ethnic, and racial division in favor of a Christian reconfiguration of identity into “God’s new people.” Here the earthly markers of identity are not transcended (in supersessionist fashion). Instead, they are reoriented by love into a “recognizable community, a social body whose unique mission and membership cuts across, not just mystically but concretely and visibly, the boundaries of race, ethnicity, tribe, and nation” (44).
The contributions to the symposium take up Katongole’s book in a variety of ways. Todd Whitmore asks how we should classify the genre of Katongole’s book: Is it an ethnography? A theological treatise? Or a confession? Or some combination of these? And what difference does it make to settle on one (or none) of these? Marie Claire-Klassen likewise explores the genre of the book, focusing especially on its structure in the first half of her response. In the second part of her contribution, Klassen suggests that Katongole’s work would benefit from engagement with feminist and womanist theologians, who draw our attention to the importance of considerations of justice in addition to love. Jason Springs, another contributor to this symposium, is also invested in the concept of justice. Springs places Katongole’s book into conversation with Charles Villa-Vincencio to bring into stronger relief the complementary role of justice in relation to love that is necessary when a society recovers from conflict. Cecelia Lynch, meanwhile, draws on her own experience working in different African contexts to reflect on the history of missionizing work in its countries. She also does so to point to the necessity of prioritizing Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies when confronting the climate crisis in Africa and around the world.
The final two responses focus on identity. In his contribution, William Orbih reminds us that the people’s stories Kantongole recounts in the book are not the stories of saints, but rather the stories of witnesses to the possibility of a Christianity community that is oriented beyond the signifiers of race, ethnicity, and nationality. In doing so, Orbih shows, Katongole reveals “new frontiers” in Christian theological discourse. Emmanuel Ojeifo likewise explores identity, noting that for Kantongole identity is not a theoretical, but a practical matter, one that orients the everyday lives of Africans. Ojeifo, like Klassen, also wonders what a more robust accounting of gender might have added to Katongole’s book.
Across these responses, the contributors engage religion not as part of the private, inner world of beliefs, but rather as part of the public and political work of social practices and narratives. In doing so, they reveal the folly of the secular bias in political theories which would relegate religion to a secondary role in political life. Katongole’s book reminds us why the segregation of religion in our intellectual, political, and social imaginaries not only fails to grasp the reality of the violent situations in which people find themselves, but also cuts us off from imaginaries that might envision new ways beyond them.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Screenshot from Paradise Lost. Used with permission of director.
This conversation was born out of Mara Ahmed and Shirly Bahar’s rapport and friendship over the past 3 years. In November, they were invited by their friend and interlocutor, Santiago Slabodsky, to discuss and show their work at Hofstra University. This is a continuation of that conversation, extending what transpired between them in person and in writing, and further elaborating on their ideas about the links between Palestine, Mizrahi Jews, and the imperial politics of color. The image and concept of the injured body capture these connections.
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Mara Ahmed: As an activist filmmaker, I attempt to spark discussions across differences and boundaries. Whether addressing anti-Muslim racism, the partition of India, or political questions related to the so-called War on Terror, I’ve relied on vox pops to gather public opinions and complicate interviews featured in my documentaries, as well as the dialogue that occurs naturally between film and audience.
In 2017, I gave a Tedx talk about colonial borders, the making of nation-states, and the absurdity of fixed national identities that flatten human multiplicities. The title of my talk, The Edges that Blur, was inspired by Adrienne Rich’s poetry. In Your Native Land, Your Life, she understands pain as a cudgel that maintains divisions but also as a bond that enables reconnection:
remember: the body’s pain and the pain on the streets
are not the same but you can learn
from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges
more than anything watch the edges that blur
I became more invested in this pairing of “the body’s pain” and “the pain on the streets,” as I began work on The Injured Body, a film project activated by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a stunning book of poetry that stitches together narrative prose, art, and politics. As Jonathan Farmer notes in his review, the book traces Black people’s lived, deeply embodied experiences of racial microaggressions and “the ways in which the harm done by language turns to flesh, enduring at an almost cellular level.”
Rankine’s book encouraged me to document racism in America by focusing on microaggressions, what Cathy Park Hong describes as “minor feelings” or “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed” (55).
I interviewed 17 women of color to discuss the cumulative effects of relentless microaggressions and their impact on our bodies and collective breath. The body is central. Since breath is also the gateway to expressivity in movement, I worked closely with Mariko Yamada and Rosalie “Daystar” Jones to choreograph a complementary narrative told through dance.
Unpacking messy entanglements and negotiations of Palestinians and Mizrahim with Zionism and Israel, the documentaries [examined in this book] politicize pain… The documentary performances of Palestinians and Mizrahim convey what Zionism and Israel look like on their skins, scalps, and faces, and sound like in their voices, speeches, and silences, portraying the structures of feeling of their pain. (2-3)
For me as a reader, there were countless such moments of recognition. And so I must start by asking you, Shirly, to tell us the story of how you came to write this incredible book.
Shirly Bahar: Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine is primarily anchored in three watershed moments that shifted how we view and talk about Palestine. The first moment is the early 2000s. In my book, I characterized the wave of documentaries by and about Palestinians and Mizrahim mostly living in 1948 Palestine/Israel that came out during the first decade of the 2000s, especially since 2002. Then, there is the present moment—the moment of the reception of the book. This moment in the making is a time of collective reflection on how representations of Palestine/Israel are in flux: I am thinking especially of the discourse shift we have been seeing since May 2021, when global solidarity with the Palestinian resistance to Israeli attacks outpoured on social media, at times infiltrating mainstream media too. And finally, there was the year 2014, when I wrote much of this book. Non-coincidentally, that moment of heightened awareness about how our movements have been connecting and relating to each other across struggles, and showing solidarity globally for a very long time, inspired my writing.
In the time between 2014 and now, I have been carried by hopeful pulls tightening the theoretical understandings and human bonds between those who are leading struggles for liberation around the world. One such major pull emanated from the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and the official founding of the Black Lives Matter movement. The messages of support and encouragement pouring in from Palestine to Ferguson brought about a reinvigorated examination of the historical ties between US-based and global Black and Palestinian-led movements, and anticolonial, antiracist movements at large, as powerfully articulated by Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill, as well as Angela Davis, and many others. I wrote this book as a Mizrahi Turkish-Israeli scholar. It was driven by my wish to enhance Mizrahi solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return.
As you well know, 2014 also saw the publication of Claudia Rankine’s groundbreaking Citizen: An American Lyric. Citizen is such a special book, right? No wonder it is so highly celebrated. “Yes, and the body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through…” Rankine writes (37); I know that’s one of your favorite quotes too! Because I was deeply inspired by her writing and this quote, I made it the opening epigraph for my book. Following Rankine, and other writers committed to examining the power dynamics as well as the shared fabric of life revealed in human interactions, my book explores the deep relationalities embedded in the representations of oppression and pain of Palestinians and Mizrahim as seen in documentaries: indeed, our living conditions are unequal, yet our realities are interconnected. I love that Citizen inspired our work so much, and especially this quote. It speaks to the power of this book, as well as to how closely connected our work is.
I wrote this book as a Mizrahi Turkish-Israeli scholar. It was driven by my wish to enhance Mizrahi solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return.
In 2014, I also flew to Istanbul to spend my first summer there since I was a child. The access that I have always had to Turkey means the world to me—it is a window into my family’s 500-year history there. That summer, my access to the Turkish language also facilitated my daily encounters with numerous visceral, visualized reports from Gaza in the Turkish media—reports that humanized Palestinian pain. What I found out, and later crafted into my argument, is that reconnecting to my home of Istanbul while sensing excessive rage, agony, and empathy when regarding the pain of others in occupied Jerusalem or in besieged Gaza, did not amount to politicization single-handedly. Rather, it takes perpetual learning and unlearning, and visual and sensorial training in reading cultural texts—it takes endless emotional labor—to try and relate to the pain of others in a deeply personal and politically committed manner.
Mara: Being a filmmaker, I am fascinated by how you use documentary film as a lens to unpack so much. You say that although oppression and racialization have impacted Palestinians and Mizrahim unequally and differently, the documentaries you discuss in the book share a political commitment and performative affinities. They defy the historical removal of the pain of Israel’s marginalized people from public visibility. You discuss how documentary performances of pain by Palestinians and Mizrahim, when seen together, invite us to contest the segregation of pain and consider reconnection. I am particularly interested in the word “performance” as it applies to the documentary form, which is supposed to be objective, an outgrowth of journalism. Could you elaborate on that?
Shirly: I wanted to analyze Palestinian and Mizrahi documentaries side by side and articulate what I thought they had in common, and the framework of “documentary performances” was just right for me to describe the affinities I identified in that corpus of work. What I saw were first-person testimonies of Palestinians’ and Mizrahim’s experiences of pain and oppression in their own words, voices, and bodies, and those were crafted visually, cinematically, as documentary performances. I used the term “documentary performance” to refer to an audio-visualized, mediated, documented, and cinematized appearance of a person in front of a camera and on a screen as part of a cinematic scene. It is a term used by Elizabeth Marquis in “Conceptualizing the Documentary Performance,” where she builds on both sociology and documentary film studies to offer “a framework for understanding and discussing the documentary actor’s work … which takes into account everyday performative activity, the impact of the camera, and the influence of specific documentary film frame-works (45). The book engages an approach mostly drawing on visual culture and performance studies, thinking through a person’s performance as a human medium in constant conversation with the filmmaker, filmmaking apparatus, and mechanisms, and teases out some of the most quintessential questions informing film and documentary studies as a whole—questions about authenticity, mediation, and the construction of reality in representation.
I was interested and wanted to participate in the efforts to revisit the term “performance” by documentary scholars studying reenactments, such as Jonathan Kahana and Bill Nichols. But it is important to note and celebrate—and I do in the book—that the complex, inspiring understandings of “performance” and “performativity” in all of their overlaps, have been theorized by queer and feminist scholars firstly, emerging at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies and critical race studies since the 1990s. Diana Taylor taught us that performance “function[s] as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity,” that operates as part of the overall “aesthetics of everyday life” (2–3) Judith Butler’s landmark theorizations of “performance” and “performativity” heavily drew on J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things with Words. Along similar lines, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Andrew Parker differentiated between the theatrical “performance,” and the linguistic, discursive term of the “performative.” Crucially, Sayidia Hartman illuminated the need to consider performance and performativity together (alongside her theorization of pain as relational): “the interchangeable usage of performance and performativity is intended to be inclusive of displays of power, the punitive and theatrical embodiment of racial norms … the entanglements of dominant and subordinate enunciations … and the difficulty of distinguishing between [them]” (5). This interdisciplinary push is required where documentaries are concerned, and especially in the digital age of accelerated visual popular culture defining our contemporary everyday.
Above all the performative trends that the documentaries share, I found, is their invitation to understand pain as relational through taking in and connecting to the embodied documentary performance we are viewing. As interactive sites of testimony, the documentary performances powerfully politicize pain by shaping it as a relational event that took place between the performing person and the state, and is lingering in the person’s body and ways of speaking, expressing, and representing themselves to this day. The documentary performances are multilayered encounters between bodies, affective states, speeches, and filmic apparatuses, in which the films’ participants return to the past, formative painful experiences that they still embody and endure. The hit of the bullet, the demolished home, the lost carob tree, the dried fountain, the unattainable moon, the imposed mask, the interior of the home, the fence of the camp—are all imagery communicating particular ways of living, hurting, being in, resisting, and becoming through political conditions of oppression. Sharing their told, filmed performances, the participants invite us to feel the trajectories of an oppression that became pain with them, and relate to their experience of living on.
Mara: There is one sentence in your book which hit me hard. It is the commonly held notion that you cite, claiming that “the trauma of witnessing destruction directly harms the usage of language about it” (30). To me this means that the credibility of language (and therefore people’s testimony) is damaged by violence. Consequently, those who are occupied (on whose minds and bodies violence is constantly enacted) are never seen as credible witnesses of their own pain, of their own lived experiences, based on dominant codes of credibility. Many of the women I interviewed for The Injured Body, for example, spoke about gaslighting—microinvalidations which make them second guess themselves and question their own sanity. You take issue with this notion. Could you tell us more?
The documentary performances powerfully politicize pain by shaping it as a relational event that took place between the performing person and the state, and is lingering in the person’s body and ways of speaking, expressing, and representing themselves to this day.
Shirly: You’re absolutely right, I agree that the idea that trauma directly harms expression runs the risk of dismissing and gaslighting those who underwent and/or witnessed it. And I have always been struck with how commonplace it is in Freudian psychoanalysis, and in literary and film theories that employ psychoanalytic frameworks. Critical thinkers, especially in gender and queer studies, such as Lauren Berlant have contested this idea; thinkers such as Sara Ahmed even use the word “pain” rather than trauma to politicize harm and injury—I think intentionally. I follow these thinkers in taking issue with that idea and apply my criticism to film analysis, especially in chapter 1, when I analyze the documentaries Jenin Jenin (Mohammad Bakri, 2002) and Arna’s Children (Juliano Mer Khamis, 2003). There, I show that when testifying to horrors that they have witnessed, the witnesses in the documentaries do not guarantee to posit “what had exactly happened” with any measure of empirical accuracy. Rather, the documentaries’ approach underlines whose pain gets to be filmed and shared depending on the circumstances of power informing the distribution of representation.
Yes, it has been established, the trauma of witnessing destruction directly harms the usage of language about it. But—and that’s a big but—on top of running the risk of unifying and depoliticizing the diversely positioned human experience, the Freudian genealogy of trauma carries harmful legacies of disbelief toward survivors. In this chapter, I harness a politicized view of both the testimony of trauma and of documentary distribution in Palestine/Israel to show that the precise ways in which their testimonies have been performed and cinematized, including the testifiers’ bodily gestures, chosen words, silences, and general edited sequences, provide spectators with poignant clarity regarding how pain hit their bodies when the bullet hit the executed person. Additionally and no less importantly, the testimonies communicate how the conditions of the military occupation that pulled the trigger also made it difficult to communicate the pain of that experience outside the camp, by depriving them of audiovisual means of communication, and painting all the camp residents as unreliable speakers perforce, who were responsible for their own suffering. When testifying in the films, the witnesses’ reenactments of the pain of witnessing destruction politicize their pain, framing it collectively and relationally—as injuring their bodies and mental and affective states, as well as recovering by their very telling of their stories of embodied and psychic pain. In that way, they transform from racialized and potentially targeted innate “terrorists”—whose pain is their own fault—to survivors with agency over their own becomings, personally and collectively.
Mara: I would also like to bring up the constant threat of violence—of the military mainly in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the police within the 1948 boundaries. You talk about documentaries showing Palestinian children experiencing “withheld violence,” and lingering on the threshold of death long before they die. Your words reminded me of Frantz Fanon and the “muscular contraction” of the colonized body. In fact, we shot a dance sequence titled Emancipated Breath (a prelude to The Injured Body) which addresses the policing of bodies, the containment of their breathable atmosphere, and the yearning for release. Could you explain what this implies in the Palestine/Israel context?
Shirly: It is something I observed when analyzing Arna’s Children which I mentioned above. Arna’s Children extends the message that Bakri put out there, of resisting the Israeli silencing and gaslighting of Palestinian pain. This documentary does so especially by delving into the structure of feeling of living with potential death—of a beloved one, or one’s own—throughout life. The documentary follows the wonderfully inspiring children and teenage theater students of the Freedom Theater, run by Arna Mer, Juliano’s mother, and himself. The documentary traces how these young people lived with the encompassing threat of death under military occupation much before many of them died. The formative, horrific experience of knowing the probability of death intimately in life is not only collective, but also one that challenges the temporal understanding of pain: rather than a past event, the pain of living with death is present and constant and projects onto the future, all at the same time.
In a very different way, and while they have access to Jewish privilege and supremacy, Mizrahim have been experiencing the heavy hand of police brutality too. I write about those experiences when analyzing films exploring the massive crackdown on the Mizrahi Black Panthers in Jerusalem in the 1970s—films such as Kaddim Wind (David Ben Chetrit, 2002), Have You Heard of the Black Panthers? (Nissim Mosak, 2002), and The Black Panthers Speak (Sami Shalom Chetrit and Eli Hamo, 2003). Beloved filmmaker David Ben Chetrit died of complications in the aftermath of an atrocious battering by military security forces, in the heart of Tel Aviv. But even before the first Black Panthers’ demonstration, young Mizrahi leaders of this groundbreaking movement have had to deal with police brutality, basically all throughout their upbringing: many of them would get beaten up and/or sent to juvenile prison upon merely entering the public sphere. For young Mizrahim, walking down the streets was prohibited regularly regardless of any crime they might have committed. These beatings mark the criminalization of Mizrahim’s appearance in the highly policed public sphere, thus enforcing and enabling their exclusion from it. The testimonies in the documentaries about the police’s continuous criminalization and repeated public battering paint a larger picture of the state’s racialization that Mizrahi bodies have been enduring ever since they arrived in Palestine/Israel.
Unlike Palestinians, Mizrahim’s access to Jewish privilege generally allows them to dodge the constant threat of death. To earn this privilege and enter the Jewish fold, however, Mizrahim are forced to go through a process of assimilation that involves shedding any connection to Arabness and becoming as “purely” Jewish as possible. Palestinians and Mizrahim were historically differentially positioned in relation to Jewish supremacy, society, and Israel’s system of state security—positions that are further instigated at times of heightened violence, as the films show. Sadly, Mizrahim actively participate and often lead the work of the military and police to enhance violence towards Palestinians. They have been intentionally recruited into the police since the 1950s, not unlike the intentional recruitment of people of color into the police in the US. There have also been rare, yet deeply inspiring, cases of Mizrahi organizing in solidarity with Palestinians. Kaddim Wind follows organizer Oved Abutbul who, as part of his grassroots campaign against the eviction of Mizrahi residents from Mevaseret Tzion in 1997, joined a community of activists who rented a bus to Jericho, in the territory of the Palestinian Authority, to seek asylum. Additionally, the activists sent a letter to the king of Morocco, asking to return there with his blessing.
Mara: I would like to end with something you say in the book, that “more often than not, those who care for the pain of others are found in relative vulnerability themselves—political, physical, mental—thus chancing their becoming further undone” (26). Meaning that many times, those who feel the pain of others most deeply are themselves living precarious lives. I think of the Black Lives Matter movement and its principled support for justice in Palestine. I would love for you to expand on this important point.
Shirly: I thought the same, and it’s at the heart of my writing! As I started saying above, I feel hopeful when I see those who are leading struggles for civility and liberation around the world, express and act in solidarity. After 2014, we saw these connections nourished further over the years, perhaps most notably in 2020, as demonstrations to protest the killing of George Floyd and so many other Black people in the United States throughout history and right now, swept across the world—a world hit by a global pandemic disproportionately harming the most vulnerable and racialized populations. Understanding the interconnectedness of Palestinian struggles and Black movements reaffirms them as core inspiration for many historical anticolonial and antiracist movements around the world, including the Mizrahi struggles in Israel/Palestine, especially those that emerged from the 1970s Black Panthers movement in Jerusalem. Yet, as Mizrahim, we have to reckon with our position of privilege and proactively acknowledge it. In the introduction to the book, I positioned myself in the field as a Turkish Israeli Mizrahi scholar with Jewish privilege in the Jewish state of Israel—where I am from—and with the privilege of visiting Turkey, also where I am from, unlike many of my fellow Arab Jewish Mizrahim. This attempt to transparently explicate my identification and viewpoint from the outset fuels my intersectional intervention of considering interrelated oppressions and relational pain.
In acknowledging our indebtedness to interconnected, anticolonial and antiracist movements, especially Black and Palestinian ones, and in endorsing our solidarity with them, I am encouraging more Mizrahi filmmakers, scholars, and organizers to also step forward. To that end, my book advocates for the transformative power of relating to another fellow human’s mediated vulnerability and taking on the risk of complicating, confusing, and even adding to our immediate experience of our own pain, for the sake of holding space for their humanity in ourselves. That quote from my introduction you mentioned above, comes right before I myself quote Tourmaline, who writes in her preface to the gorgeous new edition of The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions: “If we are to ever make it to the next revolution, it will be through becoming undone, an undoing that touches ourselves and touches each other and all the brokenness we are … to become undone is the greatest gift to ourselves” ( viii). Documentary Cinema from Israel-Palestine hopes to be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand their own feelings of powerlessness as not one with them privately and naturally but, rather, as public, political, relatable, and changeable.
Mara Ahmed is an interdisciplinary artist and activist filmmaker based on Long Island, New York. She was born in Lahore and educated in Belgium, Pakistan, and the US. Mara’s work aims to trespass political, linguistic, and geographic borders and challenges colonial binaries. She has directed and produced three films, including The Muslims I Know (2008), Pakistan One on One (2011), and A Thin Wall (2015). Her films have been broadcast on PBS and screened at international film festivals. She is currently working on The Injured Body, a documentary about racism in America that focuses exclusively on the voices of women of color. Mara’s artwork has been exhibited at galleries in New York and California. She was recently awarded a NYSCA grant for her multimedia project, Return to Sender: Women of color in colonial postcards and the politics of representation. Her websites are www.NeelumFilms.com and www.MaraAhmedStudio.com
Shirly Bahar’s writing and curatorial work explores the relationships between representation, politics, and the body. Shirly’s first book, Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home came out in July 2021 with Bloomsbury/IB Tauris. Shirly has published articles about film, performance art, literature, gender and queer representation from Israel/Palestine, Turkey, and the US. Since 2013, Shirly has been curating art shows, public programs, and community events in New York City and across the US. Shirly earned her PhD from New York University (2017), MA from Brandeis University (2010), and her BFA/Ed from Hamidrasha School of Arts (2006), where she specialized in sculpture and video installation.
Beemapally daragh entrance, Thiruvananthapuram. Image courtesy of author.
Minarets are a vital part of mosque structures. Their primary objective is to amplify a muazzin’s call to prayer. However, they also serve as visible markers of the presence of Muslims and their culture in a society. As our plane descended towards the Thiruvananthapuram airport, our eyes zoomed in on the city’s surface. This descent in a plane is always a sort of mystical experience for me: as if I am becoming a part of something bigger than myself. Soon, my friend and I who were on the journey together could discern the structures amidst the thick web of palm trees. Some minarets and domes, in their striking colors, stood out. The distinct structure of these minarets and domes hinted at their beautiful architectural style. These views piqued my interest in exploring the mosque structures and Muslim culture in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, also known as Trivandrum.
This was my first visit to a city in South India. I have many Muslim friends from this region who currently live in New Delhi, where I also live. They come from racially and culturally distinct backgrounds, yet share many similarities with those native to North India. Even North Indian Muslims, who have lived for many years in India, have not fully assimilated into the local traditions, at least psychologically. As per my own observations, the North Indian Muslims are still proud of their foreign ancestry and culture and the distinct traditions that they developed after their arrival, which persist in the lives of local converts still today. In contrast to this, the South Indian Muslims’ cultural ancestry germinated from their native place in India and seems to have more strongly affected their religious identity. I have always been fascinated with these striking differences. So, when my friend invited me to join him on this trip, I saw it as an opportunity to witness firsthand and explore it by myself.
Thiruvananthapuram is the capital city of the state of Kerala. Like many other Indian cities, it is also a home for multiple religious communities, but here they are all blended in a similar ethnic tradition. However, the specific religious affiliations of its people cast a distinguishable tinge on their cultural identity. The city is dotted with magnificent temples, mosques, and churches, the monuments of history narrating an age-old story of the diversity and coexistence within the city. When I arrived here, I realized that I wanted to explore how the pluralistic nature of the city had impacted its Muslim inhabitants and their culture. I was drawn to the city’s pluralism because it was on such clear display in the architecture, dress, and customs of the people living in it. For me, pluralism not only denotes a tolerance towards others, but also offers an opportunity to intermingle and exchange and thus mitigate differences. Because they are pluralistic, societies like those in Kerala tend to be more welcoming of societal changes. As I will discuss later, it is this pluralism that led Keralite Muslims to be the first in India to introduce changes to their madrasa curricula. I believe that the Muslims of India, and India herself, need this kind of pluralism today, rather than the kind of split between different cultures and communities that the current political climate is promoting.
Early Muslim Interactions in Kerala
The seaside of the region where the state of Kerala is located has been inhabited since antiquity. And Islam, soon after its birth, found a home here. Historians believe that even before the emergence of Islam in Arabia, Arabs had established trade relations with the people of southern India. The trade between the two communities might have precipitated civilizational transactions as well. Arabs respected Indian people, and many Muslim travelers who traveled to India have admired the country and its people in their travelogues. Sulaiman, an Arab merchant, was one of the earliest writers who wrote about the coast of Malabar, which he is believed to have visited in 851 AD. He observed that Quilon (Kollam) was “the most considerable port in South India at that time” (11–12). The port of Quilon is around 67 km (about 42 miles) from Thiruvananthapuram. The most illustrious Muslim traveler, Ibn Battuta visited the Malabar region multiple times and provides a detailed account of its kings, people, their customs, markets, and trades. Ibn Battuta mentions that there were no Muslim residents in Malabar. Therefore, Muslims traveling to the region had to rely on the natives for food and lodging. However, as per the customs, neither were Muslims allowed to dine with the natives nor were they welcomed in their houses. The Prophet Muhammad is also reported in a weak tradition to have said that he felt a divine (rabbānī) fragrance coming from India (3). According to a popular Muslim tradition, the first man, Adam, descended from Heaven to the Indian peninsula. Such traditions have always inspired love and reverence in the hearts of Muslims for the country. The trade relationships between Arabs and South Indians continued flourishing after the conversion of Arabs to Islam. The story goes that these traders were the first people who introduced Islam to India, long before the advent of Islam in the northern parts of the subcontinent, which is now seen as its home in the nation. Islam was introduced to South India through peaceful means facilitated by the already established trade relationships, but in North India, Islam was introduced by invading armies and imperialist forces. The different ways in which Islam came into the country would later play a crucial role in determining the relationship of Muslims to their fellow countrymen in terms of social and political coexistence in both pre-colonial and post-colonial India.
For me, pluralism not only denotes a tolerance towards others, but also offers an opportunity to intermingle and exchange and thus mitigate differences. Because they are pluralistic, societies like those in Kerala tend to be more welcoming of societal changes.
I believe it was the nature of their arrival in the region of Kerala that allowed these Arab Muslim traders to assimilate into the local culture. Those who converted to Islam also followed the acculturated Muslims by retaining their unique ethnic and linguistic identities. They lived with their countrymen peacefully and prospered for centuries. These Muslims rose to high positions and participated in social and political life. Even today, one cannot distinguish a Keralite Muslim only by his or her looks and language unless he or she is either wearing a hijab/burqa or coming from an ulama class. Many ulama in Kerala wear a white turban, which is very different from the turban that some ulama and Sufis wear in North India. These North Indian ulama and Sufis do not limit themselves to the white color only. It should also be noted that not all ʿUlamāʾin Kerala wear a white turban and not every woman wears a hijab or burqa. In Thiruvananthapuram, I saw very few people observing this type of dress code. Wearing a turban is not a mandatory practice in Islam. It is believed to be a voluntary sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad, which some Muslims (especially ulama and Sufis) observe in an attempt to imitate the Prophet as much as possible. Not only does the turban signify their supplementary commitment to piety, it also differentiates them from the non-ulama class. Other than the turban and the hijab/burqa, there are no noticeable features that could contrast the Muslims in this region with other Keralites. This cultural and linguistic continuity across religious differences in Kerala society is remarkable and makes it unique in our country.
Kerala’s Diverse Architecture
This sense of rootedness and belonging is also reflected in the modern and elegant structures of mosques in Trivandrum, many of which were designed by a Hindu architect, Govindan Gopalakrishnan, who is also known as the “Mosque Man.” Gopalakrishnan worked with his father in the reconstruction of Trivandrum’s famous mosque, Masjid-e-Jahan Numa (commonly known as Palayam Pally or Palayam Mosque), and designed by himself another beautiful mosque in Beemapally. The designs of both mosques are exquisite examples of the Indo-Islamic architectural style. In what follows, I describe this architecture by drawing on the information I gathered while visiting the mosques and the people I spoke to there.
Masjid-e-Jahan Numa (Palayam Pally), Thiruvananthapuram. Image courtesy of the author.
On my way to Beemapally, I spotted the Palayam Mosque. Facing a busy road, the sight of the mosque is a treat for sore eyes. Its majestic façade accentuated by slender columns and a double arch fills its beholder with excitement. The towering minarets standing on the two corners of the façade further contribute to its grandeur. Through the middle of the arch, one can also see a chhajja hanging on the inner wall, which is used as an ornament of the arch. Chajja originated in India as an architectural element and was widely used in mosques and palaces during the Mughal period. The heads of the minarets are adorned with chhatri, another Indian architectural element, and their body with lotus petals. The Lotus flower has religious significance in Hindu culture and architecture. One of the Hindu goddesses, Lakshmi is usually depicted standing on a lotus flower. It also has an elegant white onion dome in the middle of the mosque, whose base is also embellished with lotus petals. The edges of the roof and the walls of the mosque are decorated with chhatris and chajjas. This eclectic design of the mosque, which incorporates the Hindu and native cultural and religious symbols, expresses an inclusive tradition of the Muslims in southern India.
Beemapally is a coastal region in the district of Thiruvananthapuram. It is the home of one of the most prominent and elegant religious structures in the state: a mosque and a dargah, the resting place of a saint or saints where people come and pay their respects. Even though the foundation stones of the current buildings were laid in 1967, the shrine and the mosque have been there for almost 800 years. According to local tradition, the dargah enshrines the grave of two saints, one of whom is female, Syedunnisa Beema Beevi, and the other is her son, Syedu Shuhada Maheen Abubacker. “Beemapally” means “the Mosque of Beema,” signifying the affiliation of the place with this female saint. Now the whole place is referred to by the same name. It is said that Beema Beevi came from Mecca to this region along with her son 800 years ago and settled there, becoming one of the first Muslims who preached Islam to the people living here.
For hundreds of years, the mosque and the dargah were housed in small buildings, which almost 50 years ago were replaced by the current grander structure. Designed in a T-shaped plan, the mosque and the dargah are two independent structures, with the entrance of the mosque facing towards the east, and the dargah towards the south. The central doorway of the dargah leads through a projected full-height façade positioned between two recessed front doorways, which are ornamented by pointed arches, slender columns, elegant motifs, and Arabic calligraphy. Two lofty minarets are placed on the corners of the façade. The dargah has four onion domes, three of them, beautifully proportioned, are situated on the front, and the fourth, the big one, is in the middle of the structure indicating the place of the burial of the two saints. Both buildings are painted in pink and white, an unusual combination that is hard to find in northern India. Together, these elements exhibit a graceful and astonishing view. Even though the mosque structure does not have any dome, it does have a colossal front. Flanked by two massive minarets, the front of the mosque is adorned with two arches and a chajja on the inner wall. Like the Palayam Mosque, the walls and edges of the roof are decorated with a series of chajjas and chhatris and lotus flowers.
As much as the exterior of these structures offers a sight of magnificent craftsmanship, the bleak atmosphere of the inside of the buildings leaves their visitors disappointed. The inside of the mosque and dargah is structured into huge plain halls. As I entered them one after the other, I found devotees and worshipers scattered around the halls, sitting, worshipping, or just lying on the floors. I tried to talk to some of them, but I could not because they could speak neither Hindi or English nor did I know Malayalam, the native language of Kerala. I stared at the lifeless walls of the halls, interspersed by large dark-colored windows, and I wondered how they could not make the interior of the buildings as elegant as their exterior. Religious places are not merely places of worship. They are supposed to inspire the imagination of the followers of the religion they are devoted to. A mosque should be meant to offer an experience of the two aspects of the divine, which according to Muslim tradition, are referred to as Jalal, the glory, the greatness, and Jamal, the beauty, of the divine. If a mosque fails to offer such an experience to the worshippers, it loses a substantial part of the purpose of its existence. Muslims in medieval India were aware of the aesthetic importance of religious places in influencing the spiritual experiences of worshippers. They built exquisite mosques and decorated them with elaborate artistic expressions. Modern mosque structures in India miss the old complex creativity. Sometimes, the outward appearance of these structures captivates their beholders. But their insides, as in the case of Beemapally, seem to be deprived of any imagination. Aside from distinct features, such as niches or arches, the interiors are just combinations of walls, beams, and roofs. Such comparison forces one to ask about the reason behind this withering of the once beautiful tradition. I believe it is because of the dominance of the ritualistic puritanical understanding of Islam which insists on viewing a mosque merely as a place of worship. This theological position, puritanical in the sense that it views the accretion of other cultures into an Islamic one as unorthodox, to some extent is also opposed to pluralism. It has led to a cultural bankruptcy whereby Indian Muslims lack confidence in creatively engaging with their tradition and their past.
Religious places are not merely places of worship. They are supposed to inspire the imagination of the followers of the religion they are devoted to.
The dargahs in North India, such as the dargah of Nizamuddin in Delhi, or the dargah of Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, have as their central parts the places of the burials of the saints, and these are accessible to devotees to offer their tributes to the saints. However, the graves of the saints in the dargah of Beemapally are off-limits to devotees. Instead, these devotees are mediated by some individuals, who in North India we call mujabir or khadim. They stand at the gate of the chamber which contains the graves of the saints and offer a spoonful of water and oil to the people who reach them. But they do not allow them inside to pay their respects to the saints. Near the dargah is a well, whose water is believed to have healing qualities. The dargah and the masjid of Beemapalli are managed by a trust, which also runs a madrasa outside the campus of the dargah.
After these mosques, I planned to visit a small local madrasa that is run inside an al-Rifa Sunni Jamia Masjid, Tholicode, Thiruvananthapuram.
Visiting the Madrasa
The building of the Madrasa located on the premises of al-Rifa. Image courtesy of author.
I have found that talking to authorities in masjids and madrasas is a challenging task during my many visits around India. Often, they are suspicious and refuse to talk. In this madrasa, however, I found some senior-year students who seemed interested in talking to me. I asked questions about the curriculum they were studying and we discussed some contemporary issues that are challenging the classical madrasa system. I learned that they have been studying some classical key texts on Islamic sciences along with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE, a national-level board of education in India for public and private schools controlled by the Government of India) curriculum and have cleared the Secondary School Examination (10th) and are preparing for Senior School Examination (12th). They told me that their madrasa runs classes for both curriculums so that after graduating from the madrasa they can pursue higher studies in universities as well, which many of them expressed interest in doing.
The curriculum of the madrasa in Tholicode is not exceptional in Kerala: Other madrasas are treading the same path. One of my friends, who studied in one of the famous madrasas of Kerala, Darul Huda, in Malappuram, explained to me how this conjoined system of modern and classical curriculum functions. From the morning till the late afternoon, classes are conducted on Qur’an, Hadith, jurisprudence, Arabic, and modern subjects. He also told me that after graduation, most of the students of his madrasa studied social sciences in central and state universities and were able to obtain the highest degrees in education.
The Entrance Gate of al-Rifa Sunni Jamia Masjid, Tholicode, Thiruvananthapuram. Image courtesy of author.
As I mentioned earlier, pluralistic societies, in their nature, are more welcoming of changes. A religious society interacts with others as far as its theological doctrines allow. The more the theological doctrines are flexible the more the society in which it is located tends to be adaptable. The religious societies that are pluralistic today have maneuvered through their theological doctrines, developing them to be more open and accommodating. Conversely, non-pluralistic societies tend to be rigid and unaccepting of changes since they have developed their theology in ways that do not allow them to be so. This distinction can be observed in terms of culture and education, which I have discussed in this essay, in the two different societies that Muslims inhabit and help create in northern and southern India.
The visit to Tholicode concluded my trip. I spent four days in the city. During this short duration, I could visit only a few places. But many times, a little peek through the windows of mosques, churches, and temples was enough to cause a sensation. Many mosques in white, green, blue, and pink colors, which I caught glimpses of on my way are still circling in my head. It was an enlightening adventure. I learned so many things in just a few days. I learned about the eclectic nature of the Muslims of Thiruvananthapuram, which is represented in their culture, architecture, and even in their religious education system. Madrasas in these regions are trying to bridge the chasm between their classical curriculum and the needs of modern times. The eclectic model of the Muslims of the city can offer great lessons to the Muslims of North India and help them reduce their cultural differences and introduce reform to their madrasa education.
Mohammad Ali is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India. He is also a graduate of the Madrasa Discourses program.
I am grateful to Khan Asfandyar Shairani for raising a series of points about my book, Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science. Here I will focus on two of them. As for the first, Shairani illustrates why Redeeming Anthropology is not only for anthropologists. After all, anthropology, so my argument goes, is but one instance of the exercise of sovereign secular reason in the modern university. While I seek to articulate a particular critique of a particular discipline inhabiting a state of “Anthropodom,” I contend that any intellectual “beneficiary” of Europe’s reason stands to benefit from interrogating its complex relationship with theology.
Relating Redeeming to his home discipline of history, Shairani asks about the “idols” that may obstruct historians’ access to understanding their own motivations. He formulates a particularly sensitive question, indeed an aporia: “I find it difficult to imagine that the choice of historical queries, the topics of our interest are somehow simultaneously ‘interests’ and yet paradoxically disinterested.” Shairani asks that historians probe who they are and who can they become by digging into their reasons for digging up the past.
As a Muslim historian and student of peace studies, Shairani also seems to contend with this very question in investigating the “cosmologies that oriented thinkers in the pre-modern past” of India. Here Shairani admits that he must address “the theological within the limits of historical reason,” which he faces when confronting questions such as: What can historians do with their historical subjects’ dreams and visions? Invoking Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s concept of falatāt (the unexpected), Ebrahim Moosa here offers an answer: “The unexpected is perhaps the most fertile ground of history.” In thinking about “the limits” set to and by historical “reason,” I also wish to recommend as a resource Amira Mittermaier’s excellent ethnography exploring the place of “un-real” in the making of the ethical and political “real,” Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Yet in doing so, I worry that historians may fear digging up “imagination” (and certainly the imagination of those vanquished by victorious History) or “divine wonder” as falling outside their rightful purview. Perhaps my concern could be mollified should, for example, art historians more regularly teach in “proper” history departments.
Shairani concludes his comments with a call for “epistemic humility,” which he sees my book as inviting. Perhaps his sense follows from my aim to find a language other than that of sovereign power (principally of the state and its secular reason). Yet, I cannot help but wonder in what ways such a venture as Shairani proposes (historians finding legitimate reasons to study dreams) requires not only humility, but boldness as well. Such boldness would have us bring those forsaken by sanctioned History (e.g., poets, prophets, and our grandmothers) back into the reality of existence in whose making historical time participates. Might academic historians who include dreams (“signs”?) in their materials of study (and thereby heed an “extra-historical” sense of time) appall their secular profession with such heretical pursuits?
This question brings me to reflect on the next set of comments by Joshua S. Lupo for whose sentient reading of Redeeming I am also grateful. Lupo begins where in some sense Shairani concludes. Lupo rightly notices a risk I took in inviting theology to the proverbial table, a risk compounded by an absence of specification as to the type of theology I welcome. In response to this concern, I wish to say that I am neither capable nor interested in defining what type of theology may or may not join the conversation. This is because “theology” in my account serves to signal a space in which: (1) something that we might call “theistic reason” can find a home; and (2) secular reason claiming itself sovereign can face itself. I see this space, I think Lupo would agree, offering freedom and risk at once. Freedom comes by “opening up” to the voice of the Other of a given authoritative discourse, entering a long-prohibited conversation, while taking the risk (among surely countless others) of not being sure what might also find its way in.
Lupo leaves me with two good questions that require further thought. The first asks about the “added value,” analytically speaking, of the concept of “idolatry,” as I use it, over the “fallibilism” concept he associates with the American school of philosophical pragmatism. While I must learn more about “fallibilism” to properly consider whether “idolatry” offers any analytical advantage, I hope that I make it clear that in evoking idolatry, I also aim to recognize an error that exceeds mere “cognitive fallacy” or a “mistaken state of mind.” Rather, recognizing and rectifying this error could induce a form of life whose allegiances, trust, alertness, and fear would be continually shaped by this recognition.
The second question asks about the type of criteria that, consciously or not, I apply when drawing upon this or that concept from theology. Quite honestly, I have no ready answer. As far as I can recognize, I did not work with any select set of concepts to the exclusion of others from theology, with one exception. A concept contending with “revelation” as a potential “sovereignty-slayer” (epistemically speaking), that I consciously excised from my argument is “tradition.” To make a banal point, my reason was because there is nothing decidedly nor inherently theological about tradition, even if such ascriptions might be part of its vast disavowal by social sciences and humanities.
Lupo concludes his commentary hoping that reason and revelation can be “co-inhabitants of a common world” wherein theology and anthropology could humble each other. I wish to express two responses to this hope. First, in Redeeming I was barely able to muster a word or two about how anthropology might be humbled by theology; I can hardly imagine how the modern discipline of anthropology might humble theology (which is not to say that the discipline of theology does not need humbling). By extension, if revelation is arguably the humbler of reason, when might we reasonably expect reason to be capable of humbling revelation? When might a rock humble the rain?
Khaled Furani is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. He researches and teaches in the areas of language, literature, secularism, the history of anthropology, theology, sovereignty, and Palestine. His current research focuses on the relation between reason and revelation. His most recent article is "Khalifah and the Modern Sovereign: Revisiting a Qur’anic Ideal from within the Palestinian Condition," Journal of Religion 102, no. 4 (October 2022): 482–506.
View of the walled city of Babylon. Within the city walls are houses, the Hanging Gardens, palaces, and the Tower of Babel. Numbered top left: XXIV, and top right: P. 296. C. The print is part of an album. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Khaled Furani’s Redeeming Anthropology is an incisive, bold, and polemical book which asks anthropologists to re-examine their attempted severing of ties from theology. While aimed primarily at the field of anthropology, the book poses questions that are relevant to the wider humanities. I see Furani’s book as an intervention that will push scholars of religion, literary theorists, theologians, and others to re-examine the fundamental theoretical tools with which they engage their disciplines. Drawing on interviews and archival research, Furani uses anthropologists’ own words to challenge the idea that the field has ever been as distinct from theology as it claims. It has constructed what he calls an “anthropodom” via various metaphorical “panes” and attempted to seal itself off from theology. It has done so primarily by claiming reason as its sovereign guide and culture as the object of its study. This claim, of course, has not gone uncontested. And yet, even those who argue that theological residues or resonances remain in the anthropological project have never seemed to escape the appeal of secular reason as a guidepost.
Drawing on interviews and archival research, Furani uses anthropologists’ own words to challenge the idea that the field has ever been as distinct from theology as it claims.
The book can be divided into roughly two parts. The first deals with how anthropologists have erected and maintained the anthropodom via various strategies. The second deals with how opening anthropology up to theology as a critical tool might prove useful. While the first part of the book proves fascinating in its details and erudite in its scholarship—particularly relevant and interesting for scholars of religion is Furani’s interview with Talal Asad, where the latter reveals the importance of his mother’s religious practice as part of the impetus for his critique of Geertz’s belief-centered approach to religion—I want to focus in this brief post on the second half of the book. Here Furani shows how anthropologists might draw on theology to enable them to dethrone secular reason in favor, if not of theology per se, then a theology inflected vision of the world that is willing to extend itself beyond the modern secular sciences. I’ll argue that this vision of theology is (1) welcome insofar as it breaks down artificial barriers between the humanities, social sciences, and theology; and (2) risky insofar as it does not delimit what kind of theology it might bring into these fields when it does so.
Fallibility and Idolatry
For Furani, it is the concept of idolatry, born out of the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that proves most useful for his purposes. Idolatry is the mistaking of the finite for the infinite; God for an idol; the representation for the real. In the case of anthropology, Furani argues,
To recognize idolatry in anthropodom, constituted as a particular disciplinary application of secular sovereign reason, means in part to recognize ways in which modern anthropology builds itself upon false worship, misplaced trust, and categorical conflation when taking the Cultural (or its categorical cognates) to be all that there is to multiplicity in and of the world. (149)
In other words, in setting reason up as the means by which the anthropologist understands the culture of the “other,” anthropology necessarily limits the way it encounters diversity in the world. Everything the anthropologist sets his sights on becomes subsumed under the category of culture and is deciphered by reason. A ritual sacrifice, for example, is read as a means of establishing a hierarchical social order rather than an act done to appease God. The anthropologist can see this through her interpretive lens, even if the practitioner does not—indeed the practitioner is more likely focused on establishing a relationship to God rather than the social outcomes of the practice.
This way of incorporating theology into the field of anthropology, in my mind, is a welcome intervention. Given the persuasiveness of genealogical accounts from anthropologists like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood and scholars of political theology like Bonnie Honig and Paul Khan, it seems that such a move is a logical next step for those who do not wish to remain beholden to the false God of secular reason.
Yet, as I read these pages, I began to wonder if the category of idolatry, while offering a heft to the critical approach that Furani is advocating, is all that different from the less provocative, though similarly oriented, concept of fallibility. Indeed, fallibility is built into the exercise of secular reason, at least it is when it is practiced well. Pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, for example, held up fallibility as an epistemic virtue that was necessary in light of our finitude as human beings. Truth for the pragmatist is contestable and unresolved. And it is the lack of settlement that makes it possible for the pursuit of knowledge in various fields to continue. A doubt arises about some settled truth, we form a hypothesis that might change our understanding of what is true, and then we test this hypothesis.
Why, then, do we need idolatry to recognize our false claims to possess the absolute when fallibilism will do? Is it just to offer religious people a piece of the secular pie? Or is it a concept that bears more weight upon further investigation?
Whose Revelation?
This leads me to the second point that I want to make, which concerns the kind of theology we are letting into the humanities when we take this route. The idolatry that Furani wishes to mobilize against the sovereignty of secular reason is one I imagine will sit comfortably with the current postsecular moment in the academy. Furani’s claim in the conclusion, however, that we should also be more attentive to revelation, is one that I think might ruffle the feathers of the more sensitive seculars among us.
On the value of revelation, Furani writes:
Theology offers revelation as a chief means for averting confusion as to where sovereignty justifiably belongs, for precluding it from realms where all is finite and transient, where none can ultimately be self-sufficient. I see revelation as a possible resource in revitalizing anthropology’s forms of reasoning, by helping it first to recognize and then retrace its steps, this time away from sovereignty’s stalemates and degrading entrapments, where all that is asked is only what—in sovereignscape—can safely be answered (180).
To allow revelation to speak for itself rather than to try to discipline it via secular reason is a task that Furani sets before us. To do so would allow for a kind of multiplicity that is currently taboo not only in anthropology but also in the wider humanities. Using religious studies as an example, to employ revelation as an analytical concept would be considered by most scholars of religion to cross over from the field of religious studies to theology—to violate a boundary marking an epistemic divide. Following Furani, I think we would be right to be suspicious of the claim that the two were ever as sealed off from one another as we might think. Yet what this means for how we engage theology requires more scrutiny.
Why, then, do we need idolatry to recognize our false claims to possess the absolute, when fallibilism will do? Is it just to offer religious people a piece of the secular pie? Or is it a concept that bears more weight upon further investigation?
My worry here though is not that we will allow the kind of theology Furani describes throughout the book—this is one that can humble claims of the secular human sciences. Indeed this is a theology that I have suggested is pragmatic. It is fallible, open to multiplicity, and suspicious of claims to sovereignty. But what of the more controversial concepts that theology might bring to bear on anthropology?
In the conclusion of the book, Furani writes, “one is not to suppose that all [theology’s] lessons merit heeding.” But exactly how we make the judgment as to which theology is worth heeding and which is not requires the use of reason, adjudication, and interpretation. It requires an interpretation of theology that picks up what it finds useful and discards what it does not. However, Furani does not really explain his criteria for letting in some theological concepts and not others. In advocating the importation of theology without the burden of secular reason, Furani does open up space to let in forms of theology many I suspect would be less comfortable with. The risk of allowing, for example, dogma, gender complementarity, patriarchy, and other “theological” concepts is not foreclosed in Furani’s analysis.
At the End of the World
I want to move toward a conclusion via an allegorical story from the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. I do this in the spirit of both Furani’s book, which I think is beautifully written and employs analogical thinking usefully in making its argument, and in the spirit of Ebrahim Moosa, whose inauguration as Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies is the occasion for this symposium on Furani’s work, and for whom literature has often served as a guide for his thinking.
In “The Tower of Babylon” (from Stories of Your Life and Others) Chiang reimagines the story of the tower of babel from the perspective of a miner who is employed to climb the tower and dig upward into the vault of heaven, a vault that it turns out is made of granite and requires human ingenuity to crack open. Along the journey up the tower many of his fellow workers wonder if what they are being employed to do is an act of hubris. There is story of a flood that led to a great deal of destruction which resulted from previous attempts to crack open the vault. Further, as they climb they pass by all the features that make the natural world humans inhabit familiar, including the sun, stars, and villages that people have built along the path up the tower. They are treading in unfamiliar and dangerous territory. Nonetheless, the miners proceed up the tower, finally arriving just below the vault to heaven in order to complete their work. Over the span of many years they slowly chip away at the granite by warming it with fire so that it will crake more easily. They then employ their pickaxes to break up the loosened granite. Eventually our protagonist miner cracks open the vault and is nearly drowned when a deluge of water follows. He finds himself trapped with a few other workers as those left behind seal them off in the tunnel to avoid being caught in the deluge. After swimming up through the tunnel that has burst open, he awakens to find himself on the ground. For some time he struggles through this new space, unsure of where he has arrived. Eventually he runs into a caravan. He is told by a man in the caravan that he is in the land of Shinar, exactly where he began his journey. The protagonist reaches the conclusion that the world is not arranged vertically with the natural world and humans living below and God above in the heavens. Rather the world is arranged like a seal cylinder where heaven and Earth are not separated but exist alongside one other. Without getting into exactly how this world looks—one can spend plenty of time on reddit looking at various people’s attempts to describe what this world looks like—the conclusion seems to be that when we look into the heavens we are in fact looking at ourselves, albeit from a different vantage point.
Black hematite cylinder seal. Main scene: three deities approach a seated figure, probably a king, the storm god holding his lightning fork and standing on the back of a bull, the moon god holding a crescent standard and standing in a boat, and an interceding goddess. Old Assyrian period, ca 1920-1740 BC. British Museum ME 22963. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I could not help but think of Chiang’s work as I read Furani’s book, especially given the metaphorical description of the anthropodom which its inhabitants have attempted to construct to separate themselves from theology, i.e. the heavens. Reading Furani and Chiang together I wonder if we might begin to think of the anthropodom and theology not as separate spheres arranged vertically but as overlapping and indeed inseparable ones. Here, rather than leaks of theology showing up in the anthropodom we might imagine theology and the secular as already breathing the same air, so to speak; immanence and transcendence are not above and below but intermixed and porous.
And here we might also find ourselves in a position where sovereignty does not reign as there is neither an “above” or “below” and neither reason nor theology is king. Rather both exist alongside us as fallible sciences.
This is perhaps not so far from where Furani wants us to go as we reach the end of the book. And yet, I want to push here the metaphorical distinction between theology and reason to say that they have never really been separate. If this is the case, then the distinction between theology and anthropology falls away all the more and reason and revelation become co-inhabitants of a common world, where the desire for the purely secular or the purely theological both fall by the wayside. Perhaps then what is possible is not only the humbling of anthropology by theology, as seems to be Furani’s aim, but a mutual humbling that requires that we use practical reason in any given situation to determine which concepts to employ, and how.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Turkish Muslims are seen performing the first Friday prayer during Ramadan through a balcony railing, April 16, 2021, in the Sabancı Merkez Mosque in Adana, Turkey. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Alexander Cook. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Redeeming Anthropology
Academics can learn much from the trans-disciplinary work fundamental to Khaled Furani’s book on disciplinarity and the limitations of western epistemologies. Redeeming Anthropology allows us to see beyond the blinders we wear as we trot along the path carved out by an Enlightenment reason. Some of us can’t see the forest for the trees, while some of us might see the forest, but miss the horizon. Others of us are in the cave still watching shadows on walls, perhaps even unaware of the light of the sun itself. Simply put, secular reason limits and defines objects worthy of human knowledge and subsequently leads to a meager and unsatisfying relationship to the fullness of reality and human experience. Perspectives coming from different religious traditions such as the Islamic tradition are differentkinds of knowledge. Yet, Islamic knowledge is only valid or acceptable for modern disciplines once it is curated by Reason with a capital R; Reason with a very particular and Eurocentric, and I would say, colonial, genealogy. Furani’s work shows us that the sovereignty given to secular reason maintains hegemonic control of knowledge. Thus, western knowledge gives itself the authority to narrate the stories of “Others” in the past, and tries to shape their present and future.
From my perspective as an Islamic historian and peace studies scholar, I found in Furani’s book an affirmation of the values of interdisciplinarity. We look at the same issue from the vantage point of different disciplines and sometimes it leads to a valuable critique of our own discipline. This fresh view can help us articulate questions that have haunted our work without us being aware of them, as ghosts on the peripheries of our vision. Furani defines anthropology as the study of alterity, or difference, in a world where the role of the divine has been significantly reduced in our politics and social lives; a condition that Nietzsche defined as modernity. In place of the divine, the categories of Reason, Culture, and State become idols for worship, placed on altars to the “infinite” when they are, in fact, finite and limited.
Historical Reasoning vs. the Past
Fundamentally, Furani reminds us that our idols ultimately reflect ourselves and our relationship to our past. Thus, we find ourselves thinking about how to resolve global problems with deep historical roots from reasonable premises. But we find that others disagree about the facts, historical and otherwise, that we think are perfectly obvious, logical, and reasonable. Furani’s engagement with theology reminds us that “talking about God, the infinite,” as anthropology’s Other is a valuable tool for critiquing the unthinking worship of finite idols that not only do not deserve worship but also dismiss valuable and essential parts of our own humanity as beyond the scope of knowledge itself. Such aspects of humanity include value, truth, aesthetics, and practices of peace and justice. In particular, it includes those humans whose knowledge has been denigrated as irrational, and they themselves as incapable of producing knowledge at all, never mind that their perspectives may point towards lacunae or aporia in our own assumptions about reason.
Furani’s engagement with theology reminds us that ‘talking about God, the infinite,’ as anthropology’s Other is a valuable tool for critiquing the unthinking worship of finite idols that not only do not deserve worship but also dismiss valuable and essential parts of our own humanity as beyond the scope of knowledge itself.
My own work also deals with the theological within the limits of historical reason. I study cosmologies that oriented thinkers in the pre-modern past, before the secular came into being and formed our disciplines. Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, a Muslim scholar in 18th century Mughal India, was not “modern” because he was not forced to limit the role of the divine within the scope of his own intellectual tradition. Yet, he was a rare liminal figure whose intellectual oeuvre asked questions of Islamic history that had broad ethical, aesthetic, and social outcomes. He dealt with questions of religious and cultural alterity within the Islamic tradition by engaging the ideas of Greek philosophers, Islamic theologians, and Sufi mystics. Yet, for a modern historian in the academy, there are values and reasonings that Wali Allah holds that create epistemic difficulties. How, for example, does the modern historian read hagiographical material that ascribes true visions to such a figure when oneiromancy in our worldview reflects the interiority of individuals rather than having external causes and consequences? The limits of our reading makes only certain questions possible to answer historically. The texture of the dreams of an eighteenth century mystic lies beyond the scope of historical research, and his solutions to friction between different kinds of Muslim communities are value-laden and inadmissible. Yet, Wali Allah’s work offers rare insights into potential critiques of fundamental values, such as his insistence that the divine cannot be thought of in terms of universals and particulars because these are fundamentally human constructs. [1]
Living Scholars and Living Traditions
What makes working on Muslim thinkers even more fraught is that they are not simply figures of the past; they are constantly referenced and constitute a major anchor for South Asian scholars to this day. In other words, I am writing about a living tradition through a western epistemological lens. There are scholars of Shah Wali Allah in the subcontinent that I rely on, yet their work is categorized as “theological work” and thus can only be selectively included in the Western academy through citations. This is an example of an epistemic injustice for scholars that help buttress the modern academy in invisible ways, on the peripheries of our vision, yet are denied access to it. The historical and the theological are cousins to the anthropological and the sociological. But the family of knowledge is much, much broader than our modern disciplines, and the scope of knowledge is open and infinite.
Furani’s text reminds us that as anthropologists search for difference abroad, historians delve into the past. One is a spatial quest, the other primarily temporal. The questions that arise, however, resonate deeply, because we are all asking a simple question: “Who are we, and even more importantly, who can we be?” For historians who have often fallen prostrate before the state, producing nationalist discourse that deifies the state for the purposes of national unity, that question was answered differently than it is for historians today. [2] From framing India as historically beset by “Muslim invaders” to the trope of secular Indian nationhood being the natural arbiter of “communal” violence between Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, the state has effectively birthed modernity in South Asia, midwifed by the British presence starting in Shah Wali Allah’s lifetime. It is certainly not the case that there were “pure indigeneous ideas” polluted by “modern British ideas.” Rather, it is that a violent relationship between British and indigenous peoples premised on Western notions of human nature and politics imposed these ideas and organized the subcontinent anew, and that violence continues to express itself in moments of crisis according to the historical logics that gave birth to the state in the first place.[3]
History and Secular Methodology
But if we write a history that decenters the state, what kind of history would we produce? This is a question that historians have taken very seriously in the last twenty years. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe tries to encapsulate the shortcomings of history in precisely this mode when it tries to focus attention on the agency of non-Europeans in writing their own history. Rather than an obsession with objective Truth, or the “laws of history” and the “rise and fall of civilizations,” a new kind of history tries to engage Indigenous critiques of Euro-American mores, the ethics and aesthetics that these people held that reified a particular human relationship to the environment, and the irresponsibility of modern humans to others.
Yet calls for Enlightenment reason continue to reverberate in our temples to Reason, the modern university, not only in the United States, but around the world. That view of teleological Reason, one which culminates in carbon copies of Euro-American ideals, limits historians’ perspective on the past. Rather than taking a good hard look in the mirror of history, we end up staring into a funhouse mirror instead, one shaped primarily by a limited view of human nature, the environment, and the divine. This is largely due to the fact that anachronistic modern reason reduces the motivations of a plethora of Others in the past to self-interest, economic profit, religious bigotry, and irrationality. These narratives limit the motivations of humans, suffocates the spirit, and gives meager sustenance to human creativity. These explanations speak much more to our demons today than they offer a candid and impartial view of people in the past. For a richer history that also allows us to become more than we are, historians as well as anthropologists need to smash some idols.
Rather than taking a good hard look in the mirror of history, we end up staring into a funhouse mirror instead, one shaped primarily by a limited view of human nature, the environment, and the divine.
Historians are motivated to dig up the past. Some do it because they apparently just like digging, regardless of where or when they are digging. However, I find it difficult to imagine that the choice of historical queries, the topics of our interests are somehow simultaneously “interests” and yet paradoxically disinterested. Recent generations of historians have thus started digging with an ear towards finding a useful story, a thoughtful parable or allegory, in service to our collective futures. Historians’ work has to engage with the present because their work, in fact, never reaches the past. It is written for living and breathing people today and in the future. Removing misconceptions and misapprehensions of the past and breaking the idols of the present is an admirable part of the work of historians precisely because many historians’ work is deployed in the service of power and ideology.
It is, however, something many historians have long disavowed, saying instead that they represent the Truth as it was, a positivistic conceit that is slowly unravelling in the face of the infinite complexity of the past and our limited ability to access it.[4] Anthropologists, in a similar vein, immerse themselves in the soil of foreign lands. Some of us even excavate the ground for a necromantic fuel made of the long-dead living things: petroleum. All of this digging, albeit “productive,” comes with a series of both epistemic and, importantly, ethical pitfalls. What do anthropologists owe their subjects? How strongly should the historian hammer the idol of the state and whose history do they rewrite? Fossil fuel use allows for unimaginably complex human systems but it causes climate change, endangering the most disadvantaged among us. Who has to bear the burdens of our choices in the world that we live in today? Who reaps the benefits and who has to pay up when those costs come due?
Conclusion: Going Beyond the Limits of Secular Reason
All of us can learn from these epistemic and ethical challenges that Furani places before us. The sovereignty of secular reason limits the questions that can be asked in the modern academy, and binds scholars to a meager and frail view of reality and humanity. What we sacrifice is a complex and creative engagement with our world, but hope is not lost. Even within the sovereign secular dome of modernity, the “theosphere” seeps in, bringing with it alternatives, and glimpses of a world where our disciplines are not entangled within the “epistemic intestines of the modern state.” But with this hope come many new puzzles, quandaries, and contemplations that Furani might guide us through.
The first question I pose is: Does the concept of idolatry, defined as “a confusion of ends worthy of life’s devotion,” offers us a view of what non-idolatrous worship would look like? Put simply, how would breaking the hold of the State and Reason free us from the plights that we face as a global community? Secondly, what do other disciplines like history, for example, offer anthropology in dismantling the sovereign(s) in modern societies? Are other disciplines less idolatrous than anthropology? Finally, my last question is diagnostic. I think about the issue of idolatrous reason in terms of coloniality. Claude Levi-Strauss notes that “humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk,” and reminds us that monoculture was not the express choice of much of humanity (39). These idols/ideals are most often imposed through education and cultural production, and many of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, especially from the Global South, were educated at elite institutions in Europe and North America. That in itself raises many ethical questions, but to revisit the diagnosis: How can institutions decolonize their methods in order to not convert people to the religion of Enlightenment Reason and still retain value in the education that it offers students?
To begin, our curricula will have to engage more honestly with Indigenous critiques of Euro-American values and assumptions. We need to broader our framework for how we understand people’s actions in both the past and the present, and think about the goals of human communities as a naturally diverse and complex set. To think beyond the state, we also need to think about the value and impact of non-state actors in the making of their own history. This means thinking about history as defined by the people that made the decisions, not based on the impact that it had on Euro-Americans’ ideas of self and Other. Not only will epistemic humility and centering of Indigenous voices enrich the disciplines, it may bring about possibilities of mutual learning and self-critique that leads to more enduring and peaceful societies.
[1] Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, Al-Khayr al-Kathīr (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, 2008),19-20.
[2] For classical arguments about the unchanging nature of Hindus under the British, the Muslims as rapacious
invaders with fundamental differences, see Stanley Lane-Poole, Medieval India under Mohammedan Rule (1903).
Khan Shairani is a doctoral candidate in Peace Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame. Interested in the intersection between religion and peace, his work ranges from historical to modern engagements with Islamic tradition. His dissertation examines the intellectual legacy of two eighteenth-century Islamic scholars from the Mughal and the Ottoman empires who transformed the epistemologies of classical Islamic thought in response to internal and colonial challenges. In particular, he explores how Muslims can navigate tumultuous times by re-engaging and reviving their tradition. His other research interests include colonialism and post-colonialism, Islamic theosophy and, representations of Muslims in film.
Khan received his undergraduate degree in Arabic Studies and Chinese Studies from Williams College and his Master’s degree in Islamic Studies from Harvard Divinity School. While at Notre Dame, he has been a translator and instructor for the Madrasa Discourses program, an initiative funded by the Templeton Foundation that teaches science and philosophy to Islamic seminary graduates in India and Pakistan. He has also co-founded the Graduate Film Club (FLIC), which attempts to introduce intersectional and diverse cinema to students.
Khan's research has been supported by the Critical Language Scholarship, the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, as well as Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He has also received the Qasid Annual Scholarship for the study of Qur'anic Arabic in Amman, Jordan. His professional affiliations include the American Academy of Religion and the American Oriental Society.
Behind, beyond, before every policy paper, every plan, every dry account of the mechanics of governance, is a vision driving practice forward. It is not “in reality only,” as Mahmoud Youness observes in his response, but “in the imaginaries” that we should look to overcome civilizational conflict. “At the end of reasons comes persuasion,” Wittgenstein wrote, but we should also see that vision furnishes the ends of reason.
The observations of Mahmoud Youness and Atalia Omer send my mind back to the celebration of the Mirza Chair at Notre Dame, and the inauguration of Ebrahim Moosa as the first holder of the chair. That event showed me more places where our own Andalusias are coming into being. There are great resources in Youness’s and Omer’s comments on my book. I will foreground two lines of inquiry and critique: imaginaries and the sacred.
Youness puts me on difficult terrain with Richard Bulleit, Thomas Bauer, and Zygmunt Bauman. All these accounts rely on a conception of cultural unity I do not share. The idea that a culture is marked by, united by, a single trait—a tolerance of ambiguity for example—seems wrong to me historically and theoretically. I have no difficulty in finding historical moments when Muslims have sought “thorough disambiguation” or westerners have sheltered in a tolerant ambiguity. I can find as much rigidity in Ibn Taymiyya as in Cotton Mather or John Rawls. I have found tolerance—even solidarity—in western schools and on western streets. Perhaps most importantly—I am on firm theoretical ground here—cultures are not constructed in this way. Look to Wittgenstein, as Youness does, or to Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, or a host of others. As they all point out, meaning is made in difference. Every cultural affirmation calls forth its own distinctive dissents and refusals. Every trait proliferates variants. There are broad zones of ambiguity and aporia in every culture. And it is in those zones that one can find promise and potential.
There is, however, one point in Bauer that, as Youness suggests, I would absolutely affirm. It is in the moments when the west embraces ambiguity that it achieves the democratic. Democracy is founded in ambiguity, proliferates ambiguity, and requires the capacity to navigate ambiguity, uncertainty, and the unknowable. This accounts as well for my agreements with Youness on questions of solidarity, identity politics, and the political. As Adolph Reed would testify, I am less critical of identity politics than Youness believes. Identities are tools that can be used by many hands, for many purposes. I think they have, for the moment, had their day. They served to strengthen solidarities. They have given voice to the silenced. They have confronted those who were (who are) complicit and complacent. But, as Youness notes, they have been commodified and co-opted by neoliberal discourses and institutions.
Every cultural affirmation calls forth its own distinctive dissents and refusals. Every trait proliferates variants. There are broad zones of ambiguity and aporia in every culture. And it is in those zones that one can find promise and potential.
This is one reason I have been drawn to what Youness so aptly terms the “more raw kind of solidarity” in Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun’s account of asabiyya gives us solidarity at it barest. The people on the frontiers are independent, resourceful, with little refinement and fewer possessions. They are tough and self-reliant. They are also drawn, out of the need that defines their bare existence, to reliance on one another. Need makes them self-reliant, but it also drives them to solidarity. I differ from Youness in the weight I give to the possibility of anger and ressentiment. The presumption that “white middle class voters” will necessarily ally with elites against minority populations runs counter to the history of nineteenth century populism. Though populism has been distorted (principally by European elites) into a term for anti-pluralist politics, it is animated throughout the Americas by a radically democratic and redistributionist impulse. The People’s Party in the United States gave us transracial unionism. Though it faltered, that work still teaches.
I follow, with Youness, the ethical imperative that commands us to take responsibility for the wrongs done in our name. I am concerned, however, that this imperative, unleavened by the recognition that the good also has a history, distorts a more ambiguous past. The demand that only wrong be acknowledged erases the work of those who struggled for justice before us, and in doing so, lends currency to the belief that we (whoever we are) are either bad to the bone or caught in an inescapably linear historical progress. Both lead to quietism and self-exculpation.
Taking responsibility for wrongs done in our name is often little more than a desultory mea culpa and a few tears. To honestly come to terms with the work and memories of those who fought for justice in the past requires the work of recovery, analysis, reparation, and emulation. That work is easier when we remember not only our sins but the moments of struggle and success that came before us. Out of the ambiguous materials of the past it is possible to craft not just a good story but a vision, a plan for building. None of this requires emulsification. On the contrary, it is the preservation of difference that makes for strength in building. Different materials, even different aesthetics, are needed for the work.
It is for this reason that I continue to look for fragments of Andalusias to build with. In studying them, I have learned that there is no clash of civilizations. Huntington has been, as Omer, points out, a curiously insistent and perduring figure. Omer’s reading enables us to see what Huntington offers his disciples with this error.
First, this is a discourse of resentment. This is not the ressentiment of the marginalized, but the resentments of the powerful, who see their prestige waning. The deference they once commanded commands no more; the power they once wielded is falling away. The problem with affirmative action has never been the extension of “special privileges,” from this perspective, but the denial of special privileges to those who have long enjoyed them. Huntington also endures, I suspect, because he speaks to the arrogance of liberals as well as conservatives. His smug insistence that the problem with all religion is sexual repression speaks to those whose faith rests in an unnuanced understanding of science or to the narrowest apostles of the Enlightenment, as well as to latter-day crusaders.
The Andalusias I have found refute Huntington’s thesis. They testify to the possibility of common lives built on respect, to be sure, but also to the love of difference and a desire for it to proliferate. These Andalusias speak not only to the possibility of a common life together, but to the possibility, indeed, the necessity, of many common lives, the many different ways people find to live together and apart. They also put the claims of an arrogant secularism in question.
There are, as many have noted, two (at least two) forms of the secular. There is the determined, generally fictive, neutrality of laïcité, in which a republican state, laic or laïklik seeks to cleanse the public square of all signs of faith. The pretended neutrality of the secular state, so understood, has been effectively critiqued. When the streets and time itself are marked with the signs of a faith, once cannot justly claim public neutrality. That is not, however, the only problem with laïcité. This vision aims at uniformity, at the confinement, if not the erasure, of difference. Another model of secularism invites, and has proliferated, difference. On this model, the presence of other faiths guarantees the safety of all the faithful.
There is another problem with the secular that goes beyond these two.
One of the ambivalent gifts of the Enlightenment to Europe was the Enlightenment settlement. The terms of the settlement, under which we continue to live, are simple. Philosophers, academics, intellectuals, can proceed with their work: experimenting, reflecting, writing, and they will not be harmed. They will not be imprisoned, they will not be tortured, they will not be burned, but they must be silent on faith, on the doctrines of religion, on the divine. They may speak of the sacred only as one speaks of the alien. That agreement brought safety to generations of scholars, but at a price. The divine refuses boundaries and resists confinement.
These Andalusias speak not only to the possibility of a common life together, but to the possibility, indeed, the necessity, of many common lives, the many different ways people find to live together and apart. They also put the claims of an arrogant secularism in question.
At the close of her essay, Omer recalls Ebrahim Moosa’s characterization of himself as a “critical traditionalist” and asks: “What does it mean to be a critical traditionalist within the modern/secular world, but in an Andalusian frame?” An Andalusian secularism, open to all faiths, and to the doubting and faithless, cultivates both tradition and critique. Critical traditionalists hold fast to solidarities and belief. They are faced with questions, with doubts that though they may not be their own, demand their attention. They are protected from the sins of pride and blasphemy, reminded that the fullness of the divine is beyond their grasp. They are cautioned not to pretend to knowledge they do not possess, not to take pride in knowledge they believe is theirs alone. If they are wise, they will rejoice in the beauty of the forms divinity takes in the world, and learn from one another. This is very far indeed from the cold and confining secularism sought in laïcité. There is room here for many faiths and none, room for question and reflection, room for the many ways the divine speaks to the people.
The inauguration of the Mirza Chair and the work of those at the conference speaks to the possibility of faith reaching out to faith, of an unbounded longing for the divine.
Oil in Water. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
The more we think of the Muslim question as a host of questions the more we avoid the self-righteousness of the one answer, admittedly the more ubiquitous form of response. One advantage, however, to positing it as “the Muslim Question” is that it falls into a familiar register—familiar at least to political theorists. Political theorists are animated by concerns that do not necessarily feature at the heart of the more “disciplinary” study of Islam (as in “Islamic Studies”). The normative import of these concerns has a bearing on our life together as political animals, so to speak, that the inquiry of, say, the historian of Islam lacks. I will be looking at the responses of two scholars of Islam before I turn, in the second half of this essay, to a political theorist and engage Anne Norton’s book, On the Muslim Question, more directly. I conclude by reflecting on the continued salience of the role of class analysis in addressing the issues raised in Norton’s book.
In making The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization(2004), Richard Bulliet reacts to “an overwhelming urge,” as he puts it, “to do something useful” in the wake of 9/11 (vii). An examination of the historical record, he tells us, should establish the “sibling character” (16) of Islam and Christianity: “The historical development of Western Christendom and Islam parallel each other so closely,” he argues, “that the two faith communities can best be thought of as two versions of a common socioreligious system, just as Orthodox Christianity and Western Christendom are considered two versions of the same socioreligious system” (15).
Bulliet (in J. H. Hexter’s classification of historians) is a splitter, not a lumper (241–42). He works with particulars and presents us with facts. And facts belie the “long and willful determination to deny the kinship” that he postulates (Bulliet, vii). Setting the record straight should undermine this denial, Bulliet believes. But it seems to me that what motivates the more pervasive “clash” literature is something much stronger than a shortage of facts. There is, for one, the “narcissism of minor differences,” in Freud’s parlance. Here we may stipulate, against Bulliet, that the smaller the differences, the more aggressive the processes of difference making that are intended to reinforce identities. The desire for distinction is one of these processes. But there is more.
At any rate, the answer cannot be sought in reality only, as Bulliet tries to do, but in the imaginaries that govern the self-images and the narratives of origin of the respective civilizations—I use the term (civilization) loosely and my distinction between reality and imaginary is only analytical. Even if Bulliet’s arguments are true—which I think they are—they cannot have much effect asarguments; they must be made to speak to the imaginaries of his audience. “At the end of reasons comes persuasion,” says Wittgenstein (81, §612).
To the extent that an historian may entertain making a case of the sort we are dealing with, a historian of mentalities is perhaps better positioned to move past presenting reasons to the more involving task of persuasion. A historian of mentalities is usually a lumper, not a splitter. She is more concerned with structures of thinking or—which is better—feeling. Her aim is to distill totalities, systems of meaning, collective representations, life-worlds, or life-forms—choose your pick. And she studies these totalities over long stretches of time. Hers is the history of the longue durée. Since the history of mentalities involves a more gestalt take on whole situations, she aspires to effect a shift in perspective that casts facts in a new light and makes the weaker argument the stronger—or the stronger argument the weaker. (It would depend on the perspective, really.) When the western imaginary happened to be puritanical, Muslims were cast as lascivious and dissolute, when the western imaginary loosened up a bit, Muslims became sexually suppressed.
Meaning and Ambiguity
It is as an historian of mentalities that Thomas Bauer presents himself in his book, recently translated into English as A Culture of Ambiguity. Bauer weighs the virtues of the two cultures or civilizations in question by investigating the extent to which they tolerate ambiguity, with tolerance of ambiguity being a decisive psychological trait that shapes every aspect of individual and collective being. From this perspective the “sibling character” of Islam and the west proves more an oxymoron than a truism. In Islam (post-formative, pre-modern, Sunni Islam), Bauer finds, “there exists a principle—namely, the domestication of ambiguity coupled with the greatest possible theoretical openness—that guides all Islamic disciplines” (95). Not only is there “an equanimous acceptance of complexity and ambiguity,” but “an exuberant pleasure in them” (xi).
When the western imaginary happened to be puritanical, Muslims were cast as lascivious and dissolute, when the western imaginary loosened up a bit, Muslims became sexually suppressed.
Bauer detects a process very similar to what Bulliet has elsewhere called—in a rare lumper mood—“Big Bang, Big Crunch.” Whenever a “surplus of ambiguity” leads to a “crisis,” a process of disambiguation sets in. Crucially, however, it “will not be followed through to its end, because a total elimination of ambiguity would be perceived as a loss” (32). “In all these cases,” adds Bauer, “the compromise solutions have not resulted in the original positions being forgotten. Each solution merely constitutes the center of orientation around which a broad spectrum of positions continues to be constructed, which do not deny each other’s right to exist” (21).
Western thinking, on the other hand, would not settle for anything less than thorough disambiguation. It is a compulsion that drives a culture marked by what Zygmunt Bauman diagnoses as a “horror of ambiguity.” A crisis leads to a reaction, each time more aggressive than its predecessor, and each time craving more order and more clarity. It leads to an entrapment in a hall of mirrors, in a thicket of ambivalences and uncertainties that defeat the original intention (of attaining to clarity) and culminate in disaster. Indeed, according to Bauer, the contemporary woes of the Muslim World only began when Muslims wanted or were coerced to live up to this western ideal.
Nowhere is the difference between Islam and the west clearer than in the attitude towards the stranger. Whereas for Muslims “foreignness and otherness” never disturbed what Bauer calls their “serene look at the world,” for the West they become the locus of extreme anxiety, a threat “more horrifying than that which one can fear from the enemy” (240). Here, Bauer is following Bauman. For Bauman the Jews were the paradigmatic stranger: they “belonged everywhere and nowhere.” It is “the will to annihilate all ambiguity [that] has ultimately resulted in the Holocaust” (quoting Bauman, 241).
Two things prevent Bauer from concluding that a similar fate awaits the more urgent stranger of western societies, the Muslim. The first is the Holocaust itself. Such an atrocity of colossal dimensions can be allowed to happen once but, surely, no more—one assumes that the lesson has been learned. The second is democracy. Aside from music and the visual arts, democracy “constitutes the greatest Western achievement in the matter of ambiguity” even if its way “is lined by hecatombs of victims” (278).
Searching for Emulsifiers
This is a conclusion that Norton, I suppose, would not contest. It would hardly be “the Muslim Question” if it was not prefigured by the Jewish Question and the Holocaust looms large in these two-questions-become-one. The gravity of the issue does not preclude un petitjeu de mots. On the pages of Norton’s book, the Muselmänner of the concentration camps—made famous by Primo Levi’s memoir, If This is a Man—become, for all their powerlessness, the powerful bearers of a resounding moral message: “If Western civilization is to enfold, embrace, and comprehend the Jews and in so doing claim its own Judaism, that should be done without giving license to another series of pogroms. If the West is to bear true witness to the evil of the Holocaust, then it must meet ethical demands that go beyond the construction of memorials and an ethic of remembrance. The West must close the camps and take the Muselmänner as its own” (175).
On the question of democracy, I believe Norton would also agree with Bauer’s characterization of the cost of arriving at it—we are now becoming more mindful of the cost of upholding it, having taken it for granted for some time. When Bauer says: “no other culture was so easily put into question by the otherness of the other” (255), I imagine Norton nodding in approval. These are homebred anxieties, as she demonstrates, and this is where she wants to tackle them: at home. But it is in addressing the question of democracy that her subtlety as a political theorist shines through.
Norton and Bauer may disagree on a range of issues. The main point of disagreement, however, remains the extent to which they take Islam and the west, or any two cultures for that matter, to be permeable. The main problem in Bauer’s book is one that is usually detected in historians of mentalities, or in thinkers who appeal to paradigms or epistemes in offering structural explanations: these constructs become inert entities, even prisons, immune to change from within or without. For Bauer, as in the “clash” literature that he wishes to undermine, Islam and the west are like oil and water. They do not mix. Norton, on the other hand, thinks that emulsifiers are easily procured and the mixing of oil and water might have some real staying power. Norton has a nose for emulsifiers and she rejoices in the endless possibilities or recipes that bring together oil and water.
“No Muslim Ban” Protests. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
The many dissenting voices, intolerant of Islam, she interrogates with sympathy and fairness. Nevertheless, her tu quoques are sharp when she wants to cut through nonsense and blunt when she needs to shake up an obstinate interlocutor. “European journalists,” she objects, “preened themselves on their courage in attacking a minority population with little political power, subject to discrimination and continuing slights” (35). They “exchange the hazardous practice of speaking truth to power for the less risky business of mocking minorities” (40). Like Bulliet, her facts are ready and her figures give the lie to mythmakers: western reactions to the Danish Cartoons affair are out of proportion with the facts (24ff.).
More importantly, Norton detects in the dissent of the dissenters the ills that plague Western democracy. Her response is to salvage the political. “The streets of Amsterdam do not speak, as they once did, for freedom of religion or freedom of speech. They speak for the freedom to consume” (159). “[F]reedom follows not from sexual pleasure,” which is more a compulsion than freedom as she portrays it, “but from political power and the possibility of individual autonomy” (53). “Charity is not a relation between equals” (113) and for this reason signifies the absence of the political. And, finally, she insists that poverty is not an ethical as much as a political problem—the political problem?
Norton criticizes the western fixation on sex as an identity as opposed to sex as an act, a mere act—a fixation compounded by a demand to confess and an urge for transparency. I take this to be a (somewhat disguised) attack on identity politics. I hate to say as a Muslim I think so on so—I think it short-circuits honest discussion. But just for now, I will say that as a Muslim, I can see how identity politics provides a shelter for Muslims like myself and I admire the impulse that gives rise to it. But identity politics, especially when it becomes a selling point for corporations, is not making democracy more resilient. The solidarities it produces are dispersed. They cannot for better or for worse stand in the face of the more traditional solidarities of class, or religion, or nationality.
Solidarity is the key word here. Norton sees Ibn Khaldun as founding politics on friendship, as opposed to those—Jacques Derrida, Carl Schmitt, and others—who want to erect it on enmity (128ff.). She admires the effort but recognizes that the sphere of politics is agonal and that democracy is about accepting defeat. But the ʿaṣabiyyah that Ibn Khaldun analyzes and elevates into “the political fact par excellence,” as Lenn Goodman puts it, is not simply friendship (210). It is a more raw kind of solidarity. Even solidarity is just one of its dimensions. Power and prestige are two other dimensions. The solidarity of the frontiers, of the countryside, can be quite potent and is always potentially venomous, as Kathrine Cramer’s work on the Wisconsin electorate shows. Cramer portrays a constituency full of spite against an urban elite that is not willing to consider its grievances, which are true grievances. The so-called White middle class worker in the United States has seen his income reduced and his securities diminished and he misdirects his anger against the so-called left. (Notice that the masculine pronoun is part of the narrative and, therefore, I retain it.) Both are misguided. Meanwhile corporate America grows more tyrannical. When the economy dwindles, and it will, Muslims and other minorities will pay the price of that anger.
Norton has a nose for emulsifiers and she rejoices in the endless possibilities or recipes that bring together oil and water.
Finally, my disagreement with Bauer on the way he somehow reifies Western and Islamic mentalities should not make us underestimate their reality. Building on the work of Ibn Khaldun, Peter Turchin distills the centuries long processes of identity formation in the crucible of “meta-ethnic frontiers.” Since comparison illustrates best, he studies the cases of Russia and the United States in tandem. The Russian “asabiya” was forged against the Muslim Tatars who were subdued by a combination of religious zeal (Eastern Orthodox Christianity in this case) and a strong centralized government that orchestrated the frontier war efforts. American asabiya, on the other hand, was forged at the frontier against an opponent that was seen, above everything else, as racially different. The weight of the campaigns westwards was borne by organically emerging free associations (in Tocqueville’s words) that brought together formerly antagonistic European nationals. The melting pot united them in one race to the exclusion of non-Europeans. Americans might take pride in their religious tolerance and their democratic tradition, but that is not the same as taking credit for them. Nor does it make them immune to all types of bigotry.
Solidarity and Class in the US
The salience of race as a category in the United States is not, therefore, something that can be eradicated by legislation or pontification. In the presence of economic or military hardship (whether perceived or real) the affective defense mechanisms that are recruited will find in race a galvanizing force that makes possible any concerted effort, without which no threat can be countered. Such mechanisms will rely on religious faith and a “strong leader” in the case of Russia. Russia and the United States are not monolithic, to be sure. But the dominant imaginary is the one that was battle-hardened and has had the benefit of time. It cannot be dispelled overnight nor can it be weakened by being challenged by “softer” solidarities.
Protesters carry a banner at a 1996 rally to create an American Labor Party. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
In the “west,” liberalism is the force that can claim to have done the most for underprivileged groups. It is, moreover, deeply rooted in the Western imaginary. If we are to counter the rawer solidarities of nation, religion, or race, the liberal tradition is something we want to count on. Curiously, however, liberalism casts itself as an anti-solidarity school (ideology would be a better word, but it would also go against liberalism’s self-image as a neutral school of thought.) When liberalism awakens to the virtues of solidarity it takes the shape of cosmopolitanism or identity politics. While they are not mutually exclusive, the one is too diluted and the other too narrow. The other powerful contender is class awareness. In classical republican thought, class camaraderie represented a resource for solidarity upon which a healthy civic spirit could thrive. But especially in the United States, given its other historical frontier with communist Russia, class is not solidary enough to counter race.
For these reasons, as much as I would love to (naturally) share Norton’s more optimistic conclusion, I hesitate to do so. Against the many beautiful success stories of living together, of making a new America that is more Muslim, as a previous America has become more Jewish (4, 178), I keep thinking of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stulbarg) in the Coen Brother’s homecoming movie, so to speak, A Serious Man (2009): being Jewish and being American, supposedly reconciled, can still create life-wrecking tensions. The examples that Norton offers, inspiring as they are, cannot hold at bay the primeval forces that are summoned by the “ideals” of race or nation in the west. More powerful gods are being worshiped in the opposite camp and these are gods whose wrath might not be propitiated by anything less than a holocaust.
This said, I cannot think of an alternative to Norton’s fighting narrative with narrative. Solidarity is an impulse that is sustained by a good story. And a story is good to the extent that it speaks to the imaginaries of its listeners. The alchemy that produces new imaginaries is difficult to comprehend. But we already have the melting pot. Perhaps all we need is a good emulsifier.
Mahmoud Youness (Peace studies and Political Science) studied neural and behavioral sciences (M.Sc.) at the Max Planck Research School in Tübingen, Germany, and Philosophy (M.A.) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon. Mahmoud is a Notre Dame Presidential Fellow and a Mullen Family Fellow.
Before coming to Notre Dame he taught at the Civilization Studies Program and in the Department of Philosophy at The American University of Beirut. Mahmoud is the translator (into Arabic) of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.
Mahmoud is interested in questions of moral and social psychology, religion and politics, and the history of political theory. His dissertation is a comparative study of the political thought of Ibn Khaldun and Machiavelli.
On March 24, 2022 Ebrahim Moosa delivered his inaugural address as the first holder of the Mirza Family Chair in Muslim Societies and Islamic Thought. The following day a symposium was held in which two topics key to Moosa’s academic research were discussed: the place of the Muslim in the modern west and the role of theology in the study of anthropology/religion. In two panels spread across the morning, scholars from Notre Dame and abroad discussed and debated these issues.
The first panel was on Ann Norton’s powerful book, On the Muslim Question. This book not only describes the problem of Islamophobia in the modern west but also articulates where challenges to it can be found. This problem is not only characteristic of right-wing political rhetoric, Norton contends, but can be found in the in the speeches and works of otherwise progressive politicians and academics. In response to Norton’s book, Atalia Omer, Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Keough School of global affairs, thinks with Norton about the need to seek out “Andulsiasas”—here referring to the time when Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted in the early modern period in Spain. Omer laments that the question of Islamophobia remains so relevant to our discussions and reflects on her own experience of engaging the “clash of civilizations” thesis of Samuel Huntington. This “thesis” has provided an intellectual stamp of approval for Islamophobic attitudes, practices, and policies. In his response, Peace Studies and Political Science doctoral student Mahmoud Youness reflects on the continued challenge of Islamophobia as well. He contends that no amount of rational persuasion is likely to end Islamophobia in the west. He further argues that a materialist analysis of the problem of Islamophobia suggests that as long as neoliberalism runs rampant in the west, politicians will be tempted to exploit ethnic and religious differences for the sake of gaining power.
The second panel covered Khaled Furani’s book Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science. Furani’s book offers a forceful critique of the modern field of anthropology, arguing that in it attempting to separate itself from theology it has left behind valuable theoretical resources from which it could benefit. In interviews with anthropologists, he demonstrates the often-unacknowledged theological debt of anthropology to theology and argues for a reintegration of theology into anthropology. He draws on theological concepts like idolatry to demonstrate the benefit that such reintegration will entail. In his response to the book, Contending Modernities editor and writer Joshua Lupo pushes Furani to reflect further on how less theologically loaded concepts like fallibilism might fit into Furani’s argument. The latter seemingly accomplish similar goals like idolatry without tying the one who employs them to a particular religious tradition. In conclusion he draws on the work of Ted Chiang to argue that the binary that Furani sets up between theology and anthropology might exist more in our imagination than in reality. Khan Shairani, a doctoral student in Peace Studies and History, asks Furani to reflect on his argument beyond the boundaries of anthropology. What, for example, would it mean to apply Furani’s insights about the field of anthropology to the field of history? Shairani contends that where anthropologists look for differences in cultures outside their own, historians look for differences in the past. This similarity in searching for differences, however, means that historians should also hold the categories they employ to understand the past up for critical scrutiny. Shairani ends his piece with a series of questions focused on the relationship between history, anthropology, and decolonization.
In response, Furani and Norton take up the themes raised by the panelists. Norton reflects on the differences between her and Youness’s approach to understanding solidarity and engages with Omer on the ongoing problems with strict notions of secularism that continue to divide us more often than those who employ them believe they do. Furani thinks with Shairani about what it might mean to extend his reflections beyond the field of anthropology and with Lupo on the reasons for his embrace of a theological vocabulary versus a secular philosophical one.
In addressing challenging questions about how to confront Islamophobia in West and how to reimagine the study of religion today, this symposium speaks to Professor Moosa’s unique approach of combining academic rigor with timely and necessary intervention in the public realm. In the future, events that further discussion on these topics will be pursued under the auspices of the Mirza chair and Contending Modernities.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
lhambra, the complete form of which was Calat Alhambra (الْقَلْعَةُ ٱلْحَمْرَاءُ, trans. al-Qal‘at al-Ḥamrā’, “the red fortress”), is a palace and fortress complex located in Granada, Andalusia, Spain. It was constructed during the mid-14th century by the Moorish rulers of the Emirate of Granada in al-Andalus, occupying the top of the hill of the Assabica on the southeastern border of the city of Granada. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
The Long Legacy of Bad Scholarship
Why does a case of bad scholarship remain so pivotal for discussions of religion and modernity, specifically concerning Muslims and Islam, in the contemporary moment? The “clash of civilizations” thesis is a construct that Samuel Huntington did not invent but did popularize, and it is no doubt an example of bad scholarship. Huntington sits comfortably in a genealogy that includes Bernard Lewis in the twentieth century and Ernest Renan in the nineteenth century. Further, his scholarship is but another example of shoring up the power of European states under the guise of “objective scholarship.” As Dipa Kumar has shown, the vilification and othering of Islam during the time when European empires were expanding consolidated an air of Christian secular/modern superiority. Kumar’s materialist analysis underscores and traces how the othering of Muslims during this time also entailed their racialization: “the political economy of empire…creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, and Islamophobia sustains empire” (24). For Kumar, “anti-Muslim racism [is] a product of empire” and the “normal modality of imperial domination” (not only the right-wing fringe) with which the construction of “free” liberal societies in the west is constituted. Norton, for her part, reaffirms Kumar’s point that Islamophobia is not about religious intolerance but rather about racism (31) and thus requires anti-racist praxis rather than depoliticized interfaith dialogue. Norton’s book constitutes a robust addition to the genre of scholarship that contests the “clash of civilizations” thesis.
There is good reason for this continued response. There are still many in the academy and at think tanks and other sites of cultural production who affirm Huntington’s racist and jingoistic argument. This argument first seeks to attribute the causes of violence ahistorically to cultural identities, and second, argues—with all the empirical pretenses of social science—for the normative superiority of the “west.” The latter is a construct associated with modernity and secularity, which we should understand not as part of a binary of the religious and secular but rather as a politico-theological settlement. Elizabeth Shakman-Hurd exposes this settlement in Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion.
Norton’s book constitutes a robust addition to the genre of scholarship that contests the “clash” of civilizations”thesis.
Norton’s book captures how the “Muslim Question” is deployed, by whom it is deployed, and the purposes it serves specifically in Euro-American cases. Sexual politics, whether veiling, unveiling, or queering, is evident on all fronts where a civilizational logic of othering Muslims is deployed. Norton’s book illuminates the dynamics of sexual politics and how they operate to exclude, securitize, and otherize Muslims. As I demonstrate by drawing on my encounters with Huntington below, this thesis continues to hold a grip on conversations about Islam in the US academy, even as those who oppose it try to imagine new possibilities beyond it. Following this discussion, I turn to the relationship between “the Jewish question” and the “Muslim question” to help us imagine those possibilities.
Grasping for Andalusias
Norton’s book is a compelling demolition of the persistent orientalism that has defined modernity and, specifically, the project of liberal political citizenship, which was born with western Christian colonialism. Under this project, attaining freedom and capital depended upon slavery, depopulation, exploitation, and genocide in colonial spaces. This is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus which Walter Benjamin described as propelled by a destructive wind that piled up debris and suffering as it moved into the future. But the “progress” narrative conceals the debris—how it was caused and who caused it. Benjamin writes powerfully: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Norton’s book documents this barbarism.
But Norton’s book is also compelling for illuminating moments of interruption to this progressive and violent narrative. Like Benjamin’s concept of messianic time and his rejection of victors’ history of progress, Norton, to quote Benjamin, “seize[s] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” This is the memory of Andalus, a moment in Spanish history where one can find “a Europe shaped by more than Christianity” (156). Norton continues: “All three faiths still live in Andalusia. They still mix. They still exchange people and ideas. Catholic schoolchildren on field trips pose at the feet of the statue of Maimonides. Modern Spaniards, like the Spaniards of the past, still move between the Abrahamic faiths” (157). Al-Andalus, Norton underscores, is not “a singular paradise, incomparable and lost” (157). Rather, there are other Andalusias that offer “alternative pasts and open to alternative futures” (157). One such Andalusia, Norton finds in Juha, a “gay Hawaiian Palestinian” band “that challenges not only the clash of civilizations thesis but the politics of sexuality” (200). Juha, for example, weaves Hawaiian kitsch with the traditional call for prayers (201). Another historical irruption is the graphic novel Cairo by G. Wilson and M. K. Perker. The latter, Norton notes, captures an Andalusia by tracing how “the enemy [an Israeli soldier] becomes the ally and friend” (207). Norton reads Cairo as retrieving and reimagining an “ancient, non-Western cosmopolitanism” which unsettles the self-righteous certainty (the progress narrative) of “the liberal model of prescriptive cosmopolitanism fielded by John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum” (208). Accordingly, Norton tells us that “[t]he novel challenges the rule of law as a transcultural panacea; it refuses the divide between sacred and secular that buttresses the ‘clash of civilization’ thesis” (208). Her aim here is not a conservative and reactionary one that would seek to reclaim a “golden age” before the script of European barbarity began to be written on the bodies of marked humans. Neither is her aim to recover a lost tradition destroyed by the imposition of liberal accounts of the law. Rather, she hopes to find in contemporary Andalusias a robust source for an anti-racist re-scripting of the secular. Another Andualisan indicator she highlights is Paul Gilroy’s concept of “conviviality,” which denotes a life together (196) where ordinary and “everyday projects of hybridity and synthesis” interrupt the ugly world that Huntington saw (196). Norton’s Andalusias are sites for reimagining the secular rather than romantic longing for past utopias. Unfortunately, the Huntington thesis is still haunting us and before moving too quickly to these alternatives, we must spend more time countering it.
Her aim here is not a conservative and reactionary one that would seek to reclaim a ‘golden age’ before the script of European barbarity began. . . . Rather, she hopes to find in the contemporary Andalusias a robust source for an anti-racist re-scripting of the secular.
I now turn to my own experience with Huntington to show how his thesis reflects an anti-Andalusian and ideological account of history, politics, and religious traditions. Here, I will highlight Norton’s discussion of the intimate relations between the “Muslim Question” and the “Jewish Question” in Christian European modernity. I will show how it unsettles, like the recovery and reimagining of Andalusias, the Huntingtonian ahistoricity and ideological differentiation between Jews and Muslims as the former become assimilated into Whiteness and the latter remain constructed as Europe’s other.
Haunting the Syllabus
Over twenty years ago, I was a graduate teaching fellow in Harvard University’s Religion and Global Affairs course. The course was typically co-taught by my dissertation advisor David Little, and then alternately by Jessica Stern and Michael Ignatieff as well as Monica Toft as a second professor. For at least three iterations of the course, it was also taught by Samuel Huntington. The late political scientist provoked and upset many students while he confirmed the biases and ideological stances of others. I was a teaching fellow for this course multiple times. Huntington haunted the syllabi in person or through his false and harmful thesis when he was not physically present. At a particularly memorable moment, he exclaimed, “the problem with all religion is sexual repression.” During that moment, he was referring to the sex scandal in the Catholic Church. Still, his proclamation was intended for all who see themselves as religious. A robust contingent of female Muslim students, some wearing hijabs and some without covering, erupted and demanded an apology. He did not offer one. He proclaimed that this was just a fact.
As a professor, I teach versions of this course today, and Huntington is still haunting and lurking in the background and foreground, although I never assign him. Instead, I have students read Edward Said’s critique of the original 1993 Foreign Affairs piece. Huntington’s piece offered policymakers the paradigm they needed when the Cold War framework was supposedly eroding. The same Huntington of the “clash of civilizations” then wrote a book that is highly consistent with the ideological thrust of the “clash.” In the book, he looked globally at the international system and blocks of civilizations (which he used interchangeably with religions) and claimed that inter-civilizational conflict needed to be managed because of the essential incompatibility of civilizations. This value reductionism is harmful as it robs people of their complex histories, politics, and social lives. In a later book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2005), Huntington turns to a discussion of what he interprets as the religio-cultural forces threatening what he deems the “true” Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity (the tripartite Protestant, Catholic, Jewish frame) of the US. What is unmistakable here is a tragic connection between the “Global War on Terrorism,” the securitizing of Muslims globally (including at mosques and community centers in places such as the UK, France, and the US), and the emergence of Trump. Indeed, the reactionary fear around the ontological security of the US, both in terms of its physical and ideological borders, is highly connected to the policies that Huntington’s thesis has informed, the xenophobic fear-mongering rhetoric it has fueled, and the simplistic ways in which it is so deeply ahistorical.
Stencil representing a scene from the torture of Iraqi prisoners that took place at Abu Ghraib Prison during the US war on Iraq. Via Flickr User Duncan Cumming. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Over twenty years ago, in the classroom, we were preoccupied with 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Devastating events twenty years later, including a hurried and disorganized US withdrawal from this “graveyard of empires,” should have finally put this clash argument to rest and led to a reassessment of the horrific policies that informed the US in the aftermath of 9/11. Yet, this has not been the case, and given the previous years’ events, it is not surprising. Norton brilliantly takes the reader through an analysis of the torture and sexualized images that emerged from Abu Ghraib and what they signify. Here the “iconic” image of “a hooded prisoner standing on a box, his outstretched arms attached to electric wires” (181) evokes “religious images” but also one of the Klan: “the campaign against the Arab and the Muslim tried to identify Arabs and Islam with bigotry against Jews and Christians, and made the bigotry the license for invasion, war, and war crimes” (182). Indeed, this historic moment during an unjustified war—which built on the conflation of secularity with Christian democracy during the Cold War, the promotion of religious freedoms as a rhetorical weapon, and the “cleansing” of Christian Europe’s long legacy of antisemitism through its acquiescence and active support of Zionism—set the stage to pivot to anti-Muslim policies, securitizing racialized and gendered postcolonial Muslim subjects and bodies, and developing a set of policies called “countering violent extremism.” These policies were too large (and invested in) to fail even when analysts repeatedly concluded that the evidence did not support the ideological claims (as Lydia Wilson has shown). Indeed, it is not surprising that the sequel to Huntington’s “clash” was “who are we” because the securitizing of Muslims as part of the supposedly global war on terrorism directly relates to the consolidation of right-wing exclusionary ethnoreligious populist movements. These movements deploy civilizational language often through the registers of incompatibility between supposedly “Judeo-Christian values” and Islam.
What about the Jewish Question?
The emergence of racist right-wing populism in recent decades in multiple contexts—from France, Italy, and the Netherlands to the US and India—share an anti-Muslim racism that is often conveyed through the idioms of values, heritage, and religion (including laïcité). As I have already telegraphed, one of Norton’s most critical theoretical moves is to reconnect Europe’s “Jewish Question” with its “Muslim Question.” She shares this significant move with thinkers such as Yolande Jansen and Anya Topolsky, as well as Santiago Slabodsky and Gil Anidjar. This is an important move because it is an Andalusian interruption of the logic of the “clash” that assimilated (White) Jews into a civilizational discourse, as Slabodsky notes. It is an assimilation of the Jews into a Judeo-Christian construct that erases Jews and imposes violent supersessionism in the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Anidjar powerfully examines the Musselman in the death camps of Nazi Germany to explain the inextricable link between the Muslims and the Jews as Europe’s others. For Anidjar, 1492 and the Inquisition are significant points in the chronology. They denote the end of Andalusia and the beginning of the racialization of religious communities and their exclusion and targeting as a mechanism of proto-nationalism, the political project of modernity. Muslims and Jews were both targets of the Inquisition, which disrupted the interwoven socioreligious fabric of Spain.
Norton’s foregrounding of the Jewish Question in her discussion of the Muslim Question is a critical interruption of the ‘clash’ and connects with the constructive yet neither romantic nor utopian aspiration for an alternative Andalusian logic of the secular.
It is beyond the scope of this reflection to go into the historical work and contextualization of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish praxis and theologies in the formation of modernity. I’ll here only underscore that Norton shows how a certain amnesia about the “Jewish Question,” which is otherwise definitional of European modernity and the formation of secular conceptions of citizenship, obscures reality on the ground. Any discussion of the “Muslim Question” in isolation from the “Jewish Question” reflects an ideological move that must be resisted. Instead, what is necessary is an Andalusian frame or what Gil Hochberg has recently described as an “archive of the future,” where it is possible to identify messianic interruptions of violent narratives of history. This move is critical for finally pushing the “clash” out of our syllabi. Indeed, it is not so much an amnesic issue but rather a presumption that the “Jewish Question” was somehow solved with the establishment of Israel. Marc Ellis explains it in terms of an “ecumenical pact” agreed to on the backs of Palestinian natives. This is the same Europe that created the skeleton Musslemann of the camps: the racialized bare life Jewish skeleton, nicknamed “Muslim,” who was clearly marked for imminent death by starvation. The problem with presuming that the Jewish Question has been solved is not only that it was “solved” on the back of Palestinians and through settler-colonial mechanisms, but also that it is nowhere to be found in anti-Muslim securitizing discourses. What is present is a vague appeal to Judeo-Christian civilizational roots, an appeal that itself telegraphs centuries of classical antisemitism. Here it is important to recall the Algerian French public intellectual Houria Bouteldja’s interpellation to the Jews to join the struggle and to leave behind their position as a “buffer people,” which leaves them operating under a persistently colonial logic. Hence, Norton’s foregrounding of the Jewish Question in her discussion of the Muslim Question is a critical interruption of the “clash” and connects with the constructive yet neither romantic nor utopian aspiration for an alternative Andalusian logic of the secular. I conclude by referring to Ebrahim Moosa’s profound point about being a critical traditionalist. What does it mean to be a critical traditionalist within the modern/secular world, but through an Andalusian frame?
It is tempting to think of telling stories as the opposite of deep philosophical or theological reflection. Stories, after all, deal in the particularities and contingencies of lives, whereas philosophical and theological reflection deal in universals. In Who Are My People: Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Emmanuel Katongole claims that “reality is constituted through stories,” which he rightly notes is a metaphysical claim (173). For this reason, we (that is scholars) cannot access peoples’ reality by positing abstract theories about it, but can only do so by listening to the stories they tell about themselves and those around them. We cannot, in other words, act in a top-down manner, explaining the lives of people only with scientific, sociological, or psychological theories. We must plant our feet on the same ground as those we write about if our desire is to truly understand them. This leads Katongole to adopt, borrowing from Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis, a method of analysis called “theological portraiture.” This method, importantly, entails not only “listening to a story, but [also] listening for a story” (Katongole, 7, emphasis in original).
I am grateful to
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Behind, beyond, before every policy paper, every plan, every dry account of the mechanics of governance, is a vision driving practice forward. It is not “in reality only,” as Mahmoud Youness observes in his response, but “in the imaginaries” that we should look to overcome civilizational conflict. “At the end of reasons comes persuasion,” Wittgenstein wrote, but we should also see that vision furnishes the ends of reason.
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