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?
On September 16, 2022, twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini died in custody in Tehran following her arrest by the Guidance Patrol (Gasht-e Ershad). Instantly, her death became a rallying cry for young Iranian women against the existing political order that has imposed and maintains unyielding patriarchal restrictions on women’s legal rights and life choices. Captured in the mantra Zan, Zendegi, Āzādi (“Women, Life, Liberty”), the protests that began in Saqqez, Mahsa Amini’s hometown in Iran’s Kurdish north, soon became a nation-wide revolt against the Islamic Republic. The judiciary, the police, and the state-controlled media made an absurd attempt to attribute Ms. Amini’s death to natural causes. But why, people asked, was a young woman in police custody for failing to observe an arbitrary dress code in the first place?
The speed with which the protests spread throughout the country and were radicalized into an anti-regime revolt surprised the government. They were ill-prepared to respond, as was evidenced in its brutal show of force on the streets and in the rapidly unfolding propaganda war inside and outside the country. Finally, after two weeks of mystifying silence, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, spoke. He blamed Western powers for fomenting unrest in the country and manipulating “naïve young people” into executing a sinister plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic. He refused to acknowledge the deep and palpable discontent over a variety of issues that had motivated the unrest. The increasing pauperization of people from all walks of life (caused partly by the crippling US-led sanctions); the anguish and hopelessness of a new generation that feels deeply alienated from the culture and values that ruling classes promote; the feeling of abandonment of marginalized regions, particularly Kurdistan and Baluchistan; rampant corruption that plagues the state agencies and top officials; and many other legitimate grievances of the nation have found no place in the state’s narrative of the revolts that have shaken the foundations of the Islamic Republic.
It is true that there are regional and global state actors who are trying to instrumentalize and exploit these protests in order to topple the Islamic Republic or to coerce the regime in Tehran into submitting to the demands of western powers. But the regime’s failure to acknowledge the legitimate grievances of an entire population will only deepen the protesters’ antagonism and further polarize the political situation.
The ongoing uprisings in Iran might ultimately end the experiment that was Islamic Republicanism. Unlike the common analyses that attribute the current events in Iran to either the total failure of the Islamic revolution or an instance of the impossibility of the Islamic state, I see the present revolt, ironically, as the realization of Islamic Republicanism. I use the term “realization” in a dialectical sense to suggest that the Islamic Republic negates itself through its own realization. In other words, the republican process—with references to teachings of Islam—unleashed massive participation of otherwise excluded social groups (particularly women) who would eventually question the dominant ideology that made that participation possible. This dialectical process began to unfold from the moment when Ayatollah Khomeini, for the first time during his exile in Paris in 1978, spoke of the establishment of an Islamic Republic. He made that declaration with the full consciousness of the essence of republicanism that lies in the principle of peoples’ sovereignty and their right to self-determination.
Unlike the common analyses that attribute the current events in Iran to either the total failure of the Islamic revolution or an instance of the impossibility of the Islamic state, I see the present revolt, ironically, as the realization of Islamic Republicanism.
From the very beginning of the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, the conflicting institutional sources of sovereignty and legitimacy of the state became a contested political predicament. The Majlis (Parliament), the office of the presidency, the prime minister’s office, the office of the velāyat-e faqih (the guardianship of the jurist), and the Guardian Council all struggled to reconcile the sovereignty of the people with the Islamic character of the new republic. The constitution of the Islamic Republic recognized the right of self-determination, so long as its exercise does not contradict the principles of Islamic creeds. In practice, however, rather than a point of reference, Islam became a contested body of religious discourses with competing interpretations from inside and outside of clerical establishment. The framers of the constitution believed that once they established the form of governance, Islam would shape its substance. They wanted to establish a religious state by sacralizing politics, making Islam the point of reference for good politics; in practice they secularized religion, making the state’s expediencies the arbiter of the right interpretations of Islam. In other words, rather than a religious state, the clerical establishment created a state religion. By doing so, not only did they suppress voices of dissent from outside of the polity, but they also marginalized the seminaries and the seminarians and turned them into an appendix to the state and its interests.
The struggle over who could legitimately claim authority in interpreting Islam and its teachings on good governance gave rise to a reformist movement in the 1990s. Now lay intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, women activists, young seminarians, and other social groups claimed authority in interpreting Islam and in defining the meaning of the right of self-determination and its relation to Islamic principles. The reform movement that culminated in the two-term presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) emerged from the unintended consequence of making Islam the point of reference for good governance. The remarkable mobility of women, their unprecedented access to education and health care, and their demands for equal rights, particularly in the cases of divorce, children’s custody, and inheritance, had a constitutive significance in this movement.
Although the reformists theorized their movement on the principle of “bargaining from the top and pressuring from the bottom,” for the most part, they remained a movement for participation in political power. Civil society—the publication of private newspapers, the strong publishing industry, the formation of vibrant intellectual circles, and various forms of women’s groups (reading groups, sports, professional associations)—flourished in precarious terms. Nevertheless, it generated and sustained a deep sense of transformative power among people of all walks of life. Despite the omnipresence of state repression, this collective sense of empowerment and civic engagement grew rhizomatically, without a vertical hierarchical structure. The state, with its complex and oversized system of intelligence gathering and surveillance, remained suspicious of all political parties, professional associations, and other formal institutions that could possibly mobilize their constituents for any form of political and/or civil action. But these informal and loosely connected, or disconnected, networks grew exponentially among a new generation that cared little for the revolutionary mores and values that defined both the ruling classes and those who had hitherto defied them.
The economic crises that were perpetuated by the US’ crippling sanctions, which had intensified during the two-term presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013), hastened the separation and antagonism between the state and civil society. Rampant corruption and virulent crony capitalism, disguised as the privatization project of the state-owned industry, increasingly deepened this antagonism. To reframe this growing discontent, to justify its own patriarchal repression, the state adopted an instrumental relation with Islam, labeling all expressions of discontent conspiracies against Islam and the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic.
Since its inception, there has been a major divide within the polity of the Islamic Republic between those who advocate a totalitarian ideology that operates based on the notion of insider/outsider and friend vs. enemy, and a disappearing minority who promote something similar to an agonistic democracy. The latter aims to turn enemies into adversaries and transform all antagonisms into agonism. The final nail in the coffin of the agonistic tendency was the election of Ebrahim Raisi to the presidency in 2021. Raisi prevailed in an election in which the Guardian Council disqualified all other viable candidates from running. Popular participation was the lowest in the forty-year history of the republic. The conservatives cynically seized all three branches of the government and took a major step toward the realization of their totalitarian dreams.
Women stand at the forefront, driving this nationwide revolt because there exists the deepest contradiction between their massive participation in social affairs (artistic-cultural production, journalism, education, civic engagement) and the patriarchal laws and denigrating regulations that seek to govern their bodies and appearances.
The Supreme Leader, along with the Guardian Council, tried in vain to delink the regime’s legitimacy to electoral participation. For the first time since its inception, the absence of competing factions in elections created a clear rupture between the Islamic Republic’s polity and its constituents. By monopolizing all three branches of the government, the conservatives created a state that defined itself in the self/other binary terms without leaving any institutional forms for the expression of dissent for the “other.”
The protests of the past few months demonstrate how this binary of self/other was translated into open hostilities and seemingly unresolvable antagonisms fought on the streets of every urban center in the country. Women stand at the forefront, driving this nationwide revolt because there exists the deepest contradiction between their massive participation in social affairs (artistic-cultural production, journalism, education, civic engagement) and the patriarchal laws and denigrating regulations that seek to govern their bodies and appearances. We do not know whether this movement will lead to regime change or a major overhaul of the existing order. Those at the top might succeed in using the uprising to entrench the authority of the Islamic Republic through a brutal reign of terror. We all hope fervently that the latter does not come to pass. But one thing is certain as Iranian women have demonstrated these past several months: A nation that has inherited a revolutionary spirit and has perpetuated it through collective expressions of discontent over the past four decades will not easily submit to naked repression, regardless of how it is exercised or justified.
*I would like to thank Julie Livingston for her comments on an earlier version of this essay.
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Professor and Chair of Near Eastern Studies Department and Director of Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (O/R Books [Counterpoint], 2016). He works on topics related to social theory and Islamist political thought and is currently working on a project on Mystical Modernity, a comparative study of the philosophies of history and political theories of Walter Benjamin and Ali Shariati.
March 24, 2022; Prof. Ebrahim Moosa speaks at the Mirza Family Professorship Dinner. (Photo by Peter Ringenberg/University of Notre Dame).
This essay is adapted from the Mirza Family Chair Inaugural Lecture given by Ebrahim Moosa on March 24, 2022. To learn about the gift that established the chair, read more here. A video recording of the lecture is also availableas is a recap of the event. A PDF version of this lecture is also available.
Introduction
Map of the famine in India in 1897, published on page 10 of the Chicago Sunday Tribune, January 31, 1897. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1897 a famine affected the Bombay Presidency in India. Also known as the Bombay Province, this administrative territory of British India included some regions south and north of what is today the city of Mumbai. A drought preceded the 1897 famine, which continued into 1899. Famines in British India, the Nobel prize winning economist, Amartya Sen found, were not due to a lack of food (338–54). Instead, inequalities in the distribution of food and the absence of democracy, especially media coverage of the famine, were their main causes. In short, famines had political origins. My ancestors too were refugees affected by a combination of colonial mismanagement and ecological catastrophe long before these terms were invented.
In 1898, at the height of this particular famine, the fourth son of Essa Vally named Moosa was born. His village was known as Vahalu and was located 12.8 kms/8 miles away from the city of Bharuch. Today it is an overcrowded city on the banks of the great Narmada River. As subsistence farmers, my great grandfather’s family was badly affected by the drought. As a result, some started to look for job opportunities outside India, this time made possible by the ability to travel and work in other British colonial holdings. At the turn of the twentieth century, Moosa and his two brothers, Bagus and Adam, followed in the path of several Gujaratis who made their way to southern Africa. When they reached the port city of Durban on the coast of the Indian Ocean, they found the place over traded. They thus travelled further south to Cape Town, which is where they settled around 1902. If we allow for some errors in documentation, one can with some confidence say that Moosa Essa, as he was known, was somewhere between 12 and 16 when he arrived in Africa with his two brothers. Life in the Cape was difficult. There were few people of Gujarati descent, and as such the place felt alienating. His two elder brothers found the rigors of the Cape so unbearable that they hastily returned to India.
Not knowing how to read or write in English, Moosa Essa often used his thumb imprint as his signature on official documents. Our family took his first name as our family name, Moosa. He persevered as a fruit seller, carrying his produce on his shoulders and hawking it to customers in the city of Cape Town. He took up residence in the area known as District Six, which the planners of apartheid destroyed in the 1970s because it defied the policy of racial segregation. Later he opened a store on the famous Grand Parade and by the time he died was known as a fierce businessman, specializing in the banana wholesale trade popularly known as Moosa Cape Town. As a subsistence farmer he knew the value of land. He invested most of his wealth in property both in South Africa and in India. By the time he died, he accumulated a substantial amount of farming land in Vahalu and not an insignificant amount of property in Cape Town.
From famine-ravaged poverty to modest wealth, Moosa Essa never forgot his origins nor his duty to society. He was instrumental, for example, in the building of a mosque in the District Six neighborhood of Cape Town. He also never forgot his origins in his village in India and did not abandon his faith and culture in the very westernizing environment of colonial South Africa under British and later Afrikaner rule.
One could say that my great grandfather was obsessed with his duty to serve his village and community in India and South Africa. No, he loved and reveled in service. This devotion to service stemmed from his faith. He personally supervised every major construction project he undertook. He embodied the truth in the sense that, as Vikram Chandra puts it in his breathtaking novel, Sacred Games, “Love was duty, and duty was love.”
Using his own wealth but also contributions from others, he was the pioneering spirit who oversaw the building of a mosque in Vahalu as well as a grand elementary madrasa, the equivalent of a Sunday School for the daily religious instruction of young girls and boys. He also constructed a water-tower for the storage of well water and built stairs leading into the village pond for the safety of women who used the pond for sundry purposes, including the washing of clothes and utensils. This was long before the village had running water installed in homes. In addition, he built a grand three-level house for himself hoping that his offspring would one day return to enjoy the respite offered by village life and its pastoral environment. No one returned, though I did visit the village during my student years in India. A secular primary school was incomplete at the time of his death on May 15, 1965, but was later completed.
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Moosa Essa with groups in village, at the stairs to well, attending a ribbon cutting in the village, the water tower he helped construct, and the school he constructed
In 2005 the entire school building was rebuilt. The doors of the old school that were handpicked and paid for by my great grandfather were preserved and retrofitted into the new school in preservation of his memory. My great grandfather was a man of strong character. He was resilient and kind, but he also had a fierce determination to get his way. A lover of fine horses for his carriage, part of his daily routine in India was to stop and get off his carriage at the shrine of an unnamed saint in the village square, offer a prayer, and then go on to the city of Bharuch to conduct his business. He never stopped trying to improve himself and his community.
The Mirza Chair
I am honored to be the inaugural holder of the endowed Mirza Family Chair in Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in the Keough School of Global Affairs and with an appointment in the Department of History. One of the key themes of the Keough School is integral human development, an idea drawn from Catholic social teachings. In different iterations, however, this value is espoused by other faith traditions, including Judaism and Islam, but also secular ideologies like Marxism and socialism.
When I study my grandfather’s legacy, I can honestly say that integral human development was baked into his DNA. His philanthropy and altruism centered around service to humanity. His means to these ends were the mosque, faith, and his practical knowledge of the Islamic tradition. He also had a sense of the importance of education as he was not formally educated. Even though he was not literate in matters of faith—he could not read the Qur’ān—and did not read books about religion, he embodied the tenets of his religion in a unique way. He integrated his faith with his society. My wish is for some of these tenets that my great grandfather inculcated in himself to continue to run in our DNA and in our practice as his descendants.
With the inauguration of the Mirza Chair, the irony will not be lost on you that two diasporic legacies come to fruition at the University of Notre Dame, the premier Catholic University in the United States. My family’s history goes back to colonial pre-partition India, then to colonial apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and now the United States. Muzzafar Mirza, the late husband of Susan Scribner-Mirza, who endowed this chair in memory of him, came from Pakistan to study in the US and then later made this country his home with Sue.
I am relating this story of my ancestors and some parallels to the history of the late Mr. Mirza for two reasons. One is to locate myself in my family’s history, a journey that now connects me to three continents. The other reason is because of the themes which are central to this lecture: history and progress. Many people have the experience of coming from distant lands and locales to this country. Each migration story makes history in one or another way. Does it also represent progress from a worse situation to a better one? What do we mean when we use the language of progress? How does one imagine it and what is its relationship to history? How can we go beyond common sense to grasp these issues? And what does any of this have to do with human flourishing?
The Question of Progress
The idea of progress originates from certain biblical themes of an apocalyptic end along with a mechanistic view of the world wherein its inhabitants aim to create a New Jerusalem. “The idea of progress . . . represents a secularized version of the Christian belief in providence,” wrote Christopher Lasch in his 1991 classic, The True and Only Heaven (40). In numerous apocalyptic writings, according to Ernest Tuveson, history was endowed with a plot and encompassed a narrative of what happened before and what was expected to come. Building on the Hebraic tradition, Christian thinkers and pioneers adapted the Bible’s moral narratives into their own special interpretations of the divine. Saint Augustine, for example, found compelling the idea that history was ultimately progressive, leading to an eschatological end. Later Protestant attitudes also implicitly held that history moves through divinely preordained and revealed stages to a final resolution of human dilemmas.
After centuries of experience, we can now see that there are more deterministic and less deterministic versions of progress. In its strongest posture, progress signifies a particular relation to history: that history has an end (telos) and a predetermined goal. In a more benign way progress could mean advances in knowledge, the betterment of the human condition, and the acquisition of some abilities and the loss of others. In short, on this more benign and less deterministic account, progress might be reframed as improvement.
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin meditates on Swiss painter Paul Klee’s (d. 1940) Angelus Novus. This painting of an angel for Benjamin represents the beguiling angel of history. Benjamin’s caution and deep ambivalence towards historicism surfaces in this analysis. Historicism is the theory that social and cultural phenomena are determined by history or that history is the most basic aspect of human existence. In Benjamin’s view, adherents of historicism tend to empathize with the victors in history. They might forget that there are other claimants of history, a lesson Francis Fukuyama ignored in his book, The End of History and the Last Man.
What intrigues Benjamin in the Klee painting is how the angel flies: his wings are spread but his face is turned towards the past. The wings of the angel cannot close because they are kept open by a violent storm from Paradise that propels him into the future. With a strong dose of irony, Benjamin comments: “This storm is what we call progress” (257–58). Even before Benjamin, earlier Romantic thinkers like Herder, Jacobi, Haman, and T. S. Eliot refused to accept the inevitability of progress. In modernity, the possibility of change for the better is a crucial element in how we conceptualize history. This focus on change in history was central to the Enlightenment episteme of ethics and moral philosophy. Modern science as well during this time began to give us a very different understanding of nature than the medieval Aristotelian worldview. The revelations of nature continuously challenged the truths that were taken to be immutable in earlier stages of human history. In late modernity, as I will later explain, we are beginning to question the assumptions of the Enlightenment and its truth because of the ecological challenges we face. Even as the Enlightenment upended certain aspects of the medieval worldview, it maintained its teleological focus on an ultimate “end’ towards which human action tended. In doing so, it recast a Christian worldview that set up humans as having dominion over nature in secular terms. Today the study of history grapples with all the philosophical challenges in late modernity and the Muslim tradition is no exception.
Philosophy of History in Muslim Traditions
What kind of trajectory of time and change does the Muslim tradition offer? To answer this question, I turn first to the period immediately prior to Islam known as the Jahili period. This era was renowned for its poetry, and the Arabs took pride in it as their choicest repository of wisdom. It was a repository in the sense, writes Tarif Khalidi, that it “supplied much of the wisdom and the practical moral standards handed down from one generation to the next.” Proverbial wisdom involved a heroic conception of life where the “unforeseen change from prosperity to wretchedness, the fleeting character of life and friendships, the exhilaration of love and wine, pride in lordly generosity or even-handed revenge” featured in human life (4).
History also often seeks to understand what moral lesson every epoch provides, and thus what improvements might be made as we move into the future.
With the advent of Islam, some of this wisdom was translated into Islamic categories. The Islamic vision of history added a sense of space and time to them. Space and time were ideally inhabited by those who acknowledge God’s lordship and majestic power in creating the world for the use of humans. Human responsibility involved being a witness of God on earth and undertaking the task of stewardship. Time, however, is less of a chronology of events in the Qurʾān and more of a continuum in which past, present, and future are collapsed. Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Muhammad are “eternally present” says Khalidi, and all of history is present to God in terms of divine omniscience. Humans are invited to see the parables in the scriptures and in the handiwork of God in nature. Truth is captured in knowledge and humans are obliged to seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. By the fifteenth century the writing of history in Islamicate societies had already “transitioned” to new a new conception of history. The earliest phase was a transition from prophetic wisdom to history; from “providential to communal history.” “[F]rom the overwhelming and monumental Qurʾānic time,” writes Khalidi, “to the sequential listing, dating and recording of individual actions performed by members of a community that was beginning to realize the merit of its progress in time . . . and the coming into being of a time scheme which strove to historicize early Islam and to use it to establish hierarchies of moral or social seniority or prestige” (34). History, in my view, can best be described as a series of responses to contingencies and explanations of the conditions in the world. Sometimes these contingencies are expressed in distinctive genres and topics. In some eras, history is preoccupied with the exploits of prophets and kings. At other times, it meticulously documents the lives of influential scholars and pious figures as servants of knowledge and learning. History also often seeks to understand what moral lesson every epoch provides, and thus what improvements might be made as we move into the future.
Two brief illustrations exemplify how history is conceived of in modern Muslim experiences.
In his book, The Road to Mecca, Muhammad Asad documents six years of his travel on camel-back in Arabia after his conversion to Islam in 1926. He talks movingly about his very close friend Zayd with whom he traveled the length and breadth of Arabia. Asad also had a close relationship with King Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia. Zayd however was a member of the Āl Rashīd, a rival kinship group to the Āl Saʿūd clan. In the early years of the 20th century the Āl Rashīd lost out to the Āl Saʿūd in control of the Arabian Peninsula. At one point in the book, Asad and Zayd reach a city called Ḥāʾil. Zayd had not been to the city for many years because the city was now in the control of the Āl Saʿūd.
“How does it feel Zayd, to be back in the town of thy youth after all these years?” Asad asked his companion. Zayd had always refused to enter Ḥāʾil whenever he had the occasion to visit. “I am not sure my uncle,” he replies slowly. “Eleven years since I was here last. Thou knowest my heart would not allow me to come here earlier.” After citing a passage from the Qurʾān about God being the one who gives and takes sovereignty, Zayd adds:
No doubt God gave sovereignty to the House of Ibn Rashīd, but they did not know how to use it rightly…they were reckless in their pride. So God took away their rule and handed it back to Ibn Saʿūd. I think I should not grieve any longer—for is it not written in the Book, ‘Sometimes you love a thing, and it may be worst for you—and sometimes you hate a thing, and it may be the best for you?’ (italics in original)
Muhammad Asad’s comment that follows this exchange is illuminating and wise:
There is a sweet resignation in Zayd’s voice, a resignation implying no more than the acceptance of something that has already happened and cannot therefore be undone. It is this acquiescence of the Muslim spirit to the immutability of the past—the recognition that whatever has happened had to happen in this particular way and could have happened in no other—that is so often mistaken by Westerners for a ‘fatalism’ inherent in an Islamic outlook. But a Muslim’s acquiescence to fate relates to the past and not to the future: it is not a refusal to act, to hope and to improve, but a refusal to consider past reality as anything but an act of God. (159) (emphasis mine)
In this example there is not only a sensibility of history from below, but also an experiential philosophy of life of which history is only a reflection. Important to note is his insight into how Muslims have dealt with the past as an immutable fact. It is a sense of history that leaves the future open, for humans will not achieve except that for which they strive (this is according to a piece of Qurʾānic wisdom). It is that striving that is critical to making history.
If the past is rendered immutable it does not preclude one to act, to hope, or to improve, as Asad put it. Nor is it a future that is preordained, as in the secularized version of progress. In this past century especially we have learned that progress can come at a cost to humans and nature. One thinks of the rain forests in the Amazon that are cut down in the name of economic “progress.” Such actions render the earth more vulnerable to global warming and deprive Indigenous peoples of their homes. Such examples remind us of the importance of Asad’s insight. If the end of history is already set, then there are no contingencies—whether they are ecological or planetary disaster—which might require us to reset or reconfigure our aims.
Fazlur Rahman was a Pakistani émigré scholar to the US and professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago who influenced my thinking early on in my career. He expressed his conception of history in the following words: “Islam is the first actual movement known to history, that has taken society seriously and history meaningfully because it perceived that the betterment of this world was not a hopeless task nor just pis aller [a last resort or expedient] but a task in which God and man are involved together” (86).
While history and society feature as crucial elements in Rahman’s writings in the 1960’s, his task at the time was to depict Islam as a civilizational force as well as a faith tradition for individuals. The idea of history nonetheless played an important role in Rahman’s thought. His various studies led him to an understanding of history that allowed one to reshape the normative questions in Islamic thought. For Rahman the story of the advent of Islam, its scripture, norms and symbols, the actual forces of Arabian culture, were all constructively manipulated for a moral cause. “If history is the proper field for Divine activity,” Rahman wrote, “historical forces must, by definition, be employed for the moral end as judiciously as possible” (21). In other words, early Islam revealed the proper end of human action, but it was up to humans to progress towards that end.
Rahman was, of course, a Muslim modernist. He proudly wore that label and thus had a different viewpoint from Asad. Muslim philosophy of history, or more accurately philosophies of history, are somewhat compelled to discern the providential element in history. In the hands of earlier historians, the past was dissected as an act of God. For modernist Muslim thinkers like Rahman, however, there was a greater emphasis on historicism that was similar to that of his earlier counterparts in Egypt, notably Ṭāhā Ḥusayn. On this view, it was necessary to inscribe moral ends as the telos of history. We see here that the secular idea of progress did indeed impact certain trends in Muslim thinking. And on the face of it, few can quibble with these moral ends. The question is: Whose morals are we trying to bring into being? How do you know which morals are the right ones to hold? And should the moral ends necessarily be hitched to the wagon of history? Even when Rahman does rethink his position, he cannot extricate himself from the modern moral circle. “‘Progress’ we all want,” Rahman the philosopher-theologian clarifies, “not despite Islam, nor besides Islam but because of Islam for we all believe that Islam, as it was launched as a movement on earth in the seventh century Arabia, represented pure progress-moral and material” (70).
Here I have hopefully more than telegraphed two modern Muslim modes of thinking with competing accounts of the meaning and end of history. For Asad, the present and the future we create can be an improvement upon the past, but there is no end or guarantee of this. For Rahman, however, history has a moral purpose that ties the past and future together in the march of progress.
Philosophy of History in the West
As already suggested above, the story of history in the west has also shaped the story of history around the globe. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck has explained how the idea of history changed in modernity. For Koselleck this change occurred with a new way of conceptualizing time. Part of this new conceptualization stems from modernity’s prioritization of immanence, in other words the preference for human indwelling in the here and now, over transcendence. For Koselleck, “time is no longer simply the medium in which all histories take place, it gains a historical quality. Consequently, history no longer occurs in, but through time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its own right” (246).
If in the pre-modern world we recounted what happened in the past and called it history, in modernity things have changed. Koselleck says that time is not independent from us, nor does it transcend us, because history is now more about the future and the modern historian is intimately involved in the making of that future. We are time: in our performance of history we embody time. In other words, the individuated self is coterminous with a modern historicism that has now taken center stage in service of “growing united of world history” in pursuit of a collective singular progress (256). A radical insight that requires greater reflection and critique is when Koselleck writes: “History was temporalized in the sense that, thanks to the passing of time, it altered according to the given present, and with growing distance the nature of the past also altered.” (250)
Given the impact of colonization in different parts of the world, history itself acquired a world-historical quality. Because of colonization, it was not unusual that the modern conception of history also affected Muslims around the world. They too wanted to imagine themselves as coterminous with time itself, moving towards an eschaton, be it improvement in the view of some or progress in the eyes of others. During the first half of the twentieth century, many modern educated Muslims emerging from the dark night of colonialism surely wanted to better their lives. To do so, they often willingly adopted certain notions of western and colonial history. In that era to be a progressive or a modern Muslim was a badge of honor; this is no longer the case today in light of the resurgence of both traditionalism and fundamentalism. It is surprising to find that even some thinkers with a traditional background accepted this almost Whig idea of history as progress.
Some Muslim traditionalists thought of every epoch of history as different and an improvement on the past. They argued that this view dated back to a long tradition in Muslim history, which easily fed the modern historical narrative of progress. So, in the view of a fairly broad spectrum of writers, especially those with a predisposition to modernity, one can glean from their writings a sense of a world that can be improved upon. But more generally the accumulation of experiences, technologies, wealth, and resources do make things easier for those who have it compared to those who did not—hence the rich have a duty towards the poor. The idea of progress, in the modern western sense, was embraced by modernists but approached with a sense of ambivalence by Muslim traditionalists. Nevertheless there was indeed a sense of advancing in history and making things easier for people: instead of laboring like a beast, it was better to use a beast and employ tools and implements to make human life more comfortable. There was also a sense that when you use a beast as a means, the treatment should be humane and with integrity; this too was an improvement upon the previous ways animals were treated.
The Ironies of History
Over time, my own work has shifted in dramatic ways. For the story of how I ended up in the madrasas of India for my formative education in Islamic thought I invite you to read my book What is a Madrasa? Post-madrasa life, for me, had several stages. First, I took up journalism in the UK and then South Africa. This was followed by community activism in the Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa as national director—alongside Professor Rashied Omar who was president of the same organization—which combatted apartheid on an Islamic platform. Following this public service, I attended graduate school and began my life in academia.
My extensive studies of tradition, social practices, and the need to develop solutions for faith communities confronting the challenges of modernity often led me to one question: How does a faith tradition—with its myriad practices, beliefs, morals, and ethical ideals—countenance change over time? A faith tradition with seventh-century Arabian imprints that develops and grows into multiple cultures and civilizations must cope with change. Different aspects of a religious tradition, in my view, change according to different rhythms: law and theology has a slower momentum of change compared to economic and political practices. By now you probably have realized that the discursive tradition of Islamic thought has always been a central thread of my practice and intellectual life, as well as to my identity and professional preoccupations.
In pursuit of this question of change, I studied the work of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, (d. 1111), a Persian scholar who enjoys an enviable stature in the Muslim tradition. Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas are figures of similar stature in the Christian tradition. Some of my ideas were documented in Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination and have bearing on the discussion here concerning history and progress.
In my view, Ghazālī made two major contributions to Islamic theology and philosophy. One was to expand the knowledge framework with which he explained his faith tradition. The second was to allow for spiritual and mystical experiences to also have a place in the epistemic realm. He robustly introduced philosophical and logical arguments in his many theological writings to frame his tradition in the elite idiom of his time, which consisted of philosophical and metaphysical arguments. He was so enamored by philosophy that fellow scholars, both during and after his time, chastised him for grafting Greek and Persianate ideas onto the tapestry of knowledge provided by the Arabian Prophet. He frequently drew on the experiences of mystics to elaborate the inner meanings and subtleties of religious practices. Ghazālī gave equal weight to intuition and discursive reason in a dialectical sense. Ghazālī realized there was a need to ensure religious practices produce ethical outcomes and the “technologies-of-the-self” developed in Islamic mysticism met these goals (see chapter 5). He perceived that there was a need to improve the articulation and practice of Islam that was consonant with a living tradition.
What for Ghazālī might have appeared to be an improvement, development, even progress with a small “p,” was for others the very opposite. And let’s remember that this contestation happened long before the advent of what we call the era of modernity. One such critic was the Kurdish thinker Ibn Ṣalāḥ (d. 1245), a Shāfīʿī traditionalist and an expert in prophetic traditions. Ibn Ṣalāḥ lamented Ghazālī’s claim that whoever did not master logical thinking was not qualified to delve into matters related to legal theory and jurisprudence, a critical discipline in Islamic religious discourses. Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1201), a Ḥanbalī, was extremely critical when Ghazālī endorsed a controversial sufi practice whereby a spiritual novice who was consciously combatting his pride and arrogance sought out means to be humiliated. One technique was for the novice to go to the bath house and “steal” the clothes of the patrons, and then slowly walk out in order to be detected and thus berated as a “thief” or worse, being beaten. In theory, with such rebuke or beating the novice subdues his ego. In endorsing such a practice, Ibn al-Jawzī proclaimed that Ghazālī disqualified himself from being a jurist, i.e., an expert in legal and ethical topics.
Portrait of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī by Kahil Gibran, 1917. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Another critic of Ghazālī was the famous Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymīya (d. 1328). Most philosophers, as well as some theologians and mystics, held the fairly standard view that prophecy was a divine gift. Prophecy was not something one could attain based on one’s effort. However, many orthodox authorities nevertheless held that the essence of prophecy was the imagination. Imagination was related to the quality and luminescence of the soul. The gift of the imagination enabled the Prophet and his followers to deal with the contingencies of life guided by the creative imagination burnished by prophecy. Coupled with this view on prophecy, Ghazālī also viewed the development of the soul through spiritual practices to be the culmination of a religious life. Here he welcomed and endorsed many of the practices adopted by Muslim mystics known as sufis.
Ibn Taymīya, by contrast, was clearly opposed to a concept of prophecy that gave an opening to the imagination and certain forms of sufi practices, especially if such spiritual practices had no scriptural mandate. The fear was that these might corrupt Islamic doctrine and practice. In his view, revelation depended on a fideistic, no questions asked, commitment to God. Only such a commitment could demonstrate one’s utter reliance on the teachings of God. This was accompanied by a belief that these teachings were transmitted to prophets via angels. Ghazālī, of course, accepted the traditional doctrine of revelation. But he also made it more expansive to create a significant place for the imagination, since this was, in his view, the highlight of the prophetic event. Ibn Taymīya consistently refuted Ghazālī and later he also targeted the Muslim mystic Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) with even stronger theological accusations. Ibn Taymīya was unable to come to terms with how revelation affectively works through the power of the soul. To do so would require reexamining the theological guardrails that he insisted such a doctrine must adopt. In Ibn Taymīya’s view, Ghazālī swallowed too much philosophy and this poisonous dose corrupted his thinking and made him divert from strict scripturalist renderings of the faith. Ghazālī, in other words, had betrayed tradition in an attempt at improving it.
For all his fascination with philosophy, Ghazālī nevertheless found fault with the views of the philosophers. He singled out Ibn Sīnā or Avicenna (d. 1037) as someone whose philosophical claims clashed with three theological doctrines. The philosopher, he argued, firstly, denied bodily resurrection and claimed that resurrection on the day of judgment would be in the form of the soul and not the body. Secondly, Avicenna believed that God only partook or knew things that were universal, not particular. And third, the philosopher claimed that the world emanated from God and thus was eternal. On all three issues Ghazālī took a harsh line and declared that such beliefs placed one outside the standard and accepted doctrines of Islam. In my opinion, Ghazālī could have found extenuating circumstances and explanations for the ideas of the philosopher, but he showed no leniency. Later, Averroes, also known as Ibn Rushd (d.1198), in a heroic defense of the philosophers, did a point-by-point rebuttal of Ghazālī’s arguments. He showed that Ghazālī contradicted some of his own canons of interpretation in his theological critique of the philosophers.
Ghazālī thought that he was engaged in improving the discursive tradition of Islamic theological thought through his forays into philosophy, and many welcomed this as an advance on the old ways. In a certain sense this development represented improvement. While his ideas did receive broad reception across the sectarian divide, his approach, as I have shown, was not seen as an improvement by everyone. For some purists his work was a distortion of the original purity of Islam. So already in the eleventh century we can see the contestation over improvement.
History and Tradition
After the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1922, a range of Muslim thinkers in both Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic speaking regions took stock of their fortunes in order to deal with both their civilizational challenges and the need to engage modernity and the nation-state. One resource these intellectuals and Muslim thinkers turned to was “the heritage or tradition,” called the turāth. The turāth is technically the archive of the Islamic tradition, but the use of the term signifies tradition, broadly speaking. The call to study the tradition stemmed from the fact that the thinkers who made this call were a class of intellectuals who benefited from the West, but were also seeking validation from within Muslim societies. Hence engaging tradition was critical in their efforts to refashion society. In the face of Europe’s rise and of the virtues of enlightenment reason and rationality, Muslim thinkers also wanted to build a civilizational future based on the virtues of rationality. They asked: Why did Muslims miss the boat of enlightenment when Islam and Muslims had a civilization that valued reason and rationality? Did Islamdom not preserve and advance the wisdom of the Greeks and the Indians? How did they lose this wisdom despite the Qur’ān’s constant exhortation to deploy one’s thinking? The answer they landed on was a rather flawed one: they erroneously concluded that Muslim civilization had neglected reason and abandoned rationality for other alternatives such as mysticism. Their fingers often pointed to Ghazālī as the thinker that sparked this turn away from reason.
Those who made this diagnosis claimed that rationalism declined because philosophy was evacuated from Muslim culture. This argument, however, was not substantiated by any sustained and serious historical analysis. Often times, these investigations were animated by nationalisms of different sorts, including Arab nationalism, which was shadow-boxing Iranian and Ottoman claims to preeminence in Islamic thought. Several recent studies have shown that these rather shallow analyses of the tradition as proposed by thinkers like the late Muhammad ʿĀbid al-Jābrī and Ḥasan Ḥanafī are palpably wrong, but the myth continues. The myth continues because it makes for an easy scapegoat. The twentieth century diagnostic myth is as follows: rationalism was replaced around the eleventh century by superstition and an extreme reverence for charismatic spiritual authorities, irrespective of whether the latter were dead or alive. Living spiritual authorities created the cult of saints who exercised their power at mausoleums and shrines. This power was exercised on the minds of their unwitting followers with debilitating consequences, the allegation went.
Many today continue to swat at Ghazālī like one beats a piñata at a birthday party. You will also find this narrative that blames Ghazālī for the decline of Islam in popular discourse, such as in public television documentaries like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
For a more robust vision of how to grapple with history and tradition than these critics of Ghazālī we can turn to Tunis-born historian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn (d.1406), who enjoyed a distinct reputation in the past and present for his exacting empirical standards in history but also his philosophy of history. His ideas circulated widely, especially among Ottoman intellectuals and later Western scholars interested in Islam. Among the things a historian needs to know, Ibn Khaldūn impressively lists:
The author of this discipline of historiography needs to possess knowledge of the rules of politics, the true nature of existing things, the differences between different commonwealths of people, locations, periods with respect to ways of living, character traits, customs, sects, schools of learning and all relevant and associated conditions. And how the present is comprised by these elements. The historian must be able to gauge the similarities between the present and the past and the distance between the present and past in terms of their differences. And the historian must be able to analyze the causes of the similarities and the causes of the differences. So too must the historian grasp the foundations on which political dynasties and religions were established; the causes that made them become manifest; the reasons they came into existence and the incentives for their being as well as the conditions of those who established these dynasties and religions and their respective histories. This is necessary for the historian to fully grasp the material cause of every event and the rational principle behind every account. Then only can the historian evaluate transmitted reports based on what he possesses of rules and rational principles. If the narrative complies with the rules and principles and meet their criteria it is deemed sound; otherwise, the historian deems it spurious and dispenses with it. (1:55–56)
Ibn Khaldūn also laments the fact that much historiography fails to account for the changes that occur among a collectivity of people. When one political dynasty dies and another is given birth to, various customs and political practices will undergo change. Additionally, after several decades of rule practices might look very different from how they did at the beginning.
A historian must not project her or his own subjective experiences onto the past when examining it, he warned. But this is also a warning against presentism: reading history in terms of our own experiences. Ibn Khaldūn admits that it is natural for humans to see similarities and analogies at first blush. But often this is a recipe for error. Someone even well-versed in history can sometimes be oblivious to the changes that societies have undergone. Unhesitatingly the person projects the knowledge of the present onto the past and then measures the past based on one’s own experiences. This is a capital error on Ibn Khaldūn’s understanding. Many modern historians of Islam project the experiences of the present to bizarre causes in the past.
At the beginning of Islam and through the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, Ibn Khaldūn asserts, knowledge was not a craft or discipline. Knowledge was equal to a handed-down body of teachings, a tradition that enjoyed a different status. Knowledge was what one had heard from the Lawgiver, meaning from the authority of the Prophet and what he taught of the Qurʾān. The main function of knowledge of the faith was to guide people in specific ways of living.
Bust of Ibn Khaldūn at the entrance of the Kasbah of Bejaia, Algeria. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
More importantly, knowledge of the tradition in this early period was shouldered by persons of prestige, dignity, and influence who wielded the power of persuasion (aṣabiyya), like the Umayyad governor Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī (d. 714), who hailed from a family of influential teachers. In other words, the knowledge actors were also in a sense the political leaders. Hence, the knowledge of faith was baked into the political system of early Islam. Today we will say that the faith tradition was mirrored in the political theology of the early community and vice-versa. If worldly success and ethical living are the requirements for afterworldly success, as the Qur’ān taught, then it was not inconceivable that there should be a relationship between the order of the political and that of the spiritual realm. The Prophet appointed his most senior Companions to the task of transmitting knowledge because it was critical to the identity of the community, reported Ibn Khaldūn. His crucial point is this: in this early stage the transmission of knowledge of the faith was closely associated with people of prestige, influence, and those who had ties of solidarity with the political dynasty that Islam established. It was in the form of a tradition, naql, that they grasped what Islam meant.
Several generations later the character of the knowledge of the faith tradition changed. Ibn Khaldūn is a bit vague on when this exactly happens. But based on his experiences in Mamluk Egypt in the fourteenth century, he was confident that knowledge of the tradition was no longer part of a founding political narrative during his time. The political tradition became somewhat quasi-independent, with profound consequences for the knowledge tradition that regulated theology, law, and philosophical ethics. Muslims had by his time, seven centuries later after the founding of Islam, developed an entire corpus of laws dependent on the early tradition. The corpus of knowledge also advanced different understandings of these laws compared to the early tradition. So, examining Islam as a fully-fledged discursive tradition, as Talal Asad describes it, requires a complex sensibility of the various mutations of tradition, especially the role of politics in the making and practice of tradition. Multiple understandings of tradition were made more complex by debates centered on knowledge of the tradition, a perspective seriously ignored in earnest contemporary studies of tradition.
As part of a unique Muslim Republic of Letters across multiple geographical regions, this discursive tradition not only expanded in terms of substance but also in terms of space. It consisted of contributions from Muslims in Persia, Central Asia, India, North Africa as well as the regions of Western Sudan and the Iberian Peninsula. This vast emerging corpus of scholarship gradually became canonized via an extensive and dizzying array of disciplines, each with protocols and rules of interpretation. In other words, diversity was a major hallmark of Muslim knowledge traditions. Gradually organized scholarship became part of a habitus, an organized way of living. But this organized way of living around a knowledge tradition was now arranged differently and conceived of differently compared to how it was imagined at the very inception of Islam.
Given the needs to educate the emerging communities of early Islam, scholarship became separated from the centers of political power and was independent from the individuals who now led the political enterprise, according to Ibn Khaldūn. He observed that in the later period those who conducted royal and political affairs were too arrogant and preoccupied with their governmental authority to devote attention to education related to the faith tradition. Hence, less powerful people now took up the mantle of education. Some of them were descendants of former slaves and others came from humble backgrounds. As a result of the esteem conferred upon them as carriers of the knowledge tradition of Islam, their status was elevated, but their status was different compared to the political classes.
Ibn Khaldūn’s somewhat jaundiced view of the disinterest of the political elites in knowledge of the faith tradition might be clouded by his personal experiences. Nonetheless, the critical insight Ibn Khaldūn offers is a persuasive account of how knowledge of the tradition also changes with a change in time, place, and political context. It augurs improvement as well as difference.
This insight ought to be helpful to contemporary Muslims and their thought leaders, for it is precisely in the domain of knowledge and how to construe knowledge of tradition in which there is a great deal of hesitation for promoting change today. But what remains unsolved and a dilemma for scholarship to this day is this: If the founding template of knowledge was very much hewed to the order of obedience to God and tied to the order of the political then how can one unscramble the teachings of obedience to God, dīn, from political obedience? Is the political order merely the domain where practical questions are taken up? In the past, the rise of Sufism created some distance between the concerns of the soul and the realm of the political by insisting that faithful living should avoid the realm of the political as much as possible. And in the modern period this historical template is still very much the arena in which Muslims are experimenting with different kinds of approaches to unscrambling or reassembling the architecture of religious thought, especially in relation to the rise of the secular and secular politics. Debates in this sphere involving political and intellectual discussions goes under the moniker of Islamic reform. The question we can now turn to is: What constitutes progress in this schema?
The Ambivalence of Progress: Progressive or Critical Traditionalism?
Muslims in modernity are not immune to the dominant view of progress. In other words, the secularizing influences in the Islamic world are real. What distinguishes a dyed-in-the wool modernist from someone who is less enamored by everything modern is that the modernist believes in the inevitability of progress. However, the opposing view, say the critical traditionalist perspective that I have been advocating, sometimes grudgingly concedes to the possibility of change or improvement. Improvement as fortuitous, rather than as inevitable, holds the promise that change might occur in diverse and multiple forms. This stands in contrast to the totalitarian narrative of progress driven by scientism and liberal capitalism. The deterministic or apocalyptic theory of progress locks everyone in a suffocating straitjacket of a singular modernity. Ignoring this subtlety can produce some of the most irreconcilable dilemmas and forces one to choose between science and religion, rationality and faith, and progress and tradition.
In my work with recent graduates of the madrasas of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in the Madrasa Discourses program which operates within the Contending Modernities project at the University of Notre Dame, we confront endless dilemmas about how to deal with a plethora of knowledge traditions, the histories and geographic locations of dominant knowledge traditions, and the multiplicity of human ecologies they serve. The invitation to help prepare the next generation of madrasa graduates to meaningfully deal with their lived realities came from the leadership of a section of the madrasa community. Mawlana Amin Usmani, the secretary general of the Islamic Fiqh Academy of India, repeatedly implored me to help him train the next generation through a stream of letters and emails. This invitation was acted upon when I moved to Notre Dame and started the program with the generous funding of the John Templeton Foundation.
Participants in the Madrasa Discourses Intensive in Doha, Qatar at the site of the 2019 Winter Intensive.
In the same way as I once learned to encounter the challenges of modernity, many of the participants in our program also wanted to engage modernity while still retaining their Islamic tradition. Here it is a question of negotiating multiple literacies while being aware that modern literacy can be both enchanting and alienating when it is brought to bear on a historical tradition.
This kind of grappling with tradition in the face of modernity is not new, though it is perhaps underexplored in the scholarly literature. An exemplar who wrestled with tradition is Abul Kalām Āzād (d. 1958), the famous anticolonial activist and political figure who served in the post-independence Indian government as minister of education. Āzād is well known for his significant political role as a leader of the Indian National Congress alongside the peace activist and freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi and independent India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. However, there is another dimension of his formation that has received less attention. He was also a virtuoso traditional Muslim scholar, whose education was meticulously crafted in his father’s madrasa. Few have paid attention to his subtle and insightful understanding of tradition against a backdrop of doubt and anxiety produced by the rigors of modernity.
In dealing with his own Islamic tradition there is something poignant, if not tragic, that haunts Āzād. As an innovator of ideas, Āzād sought to remake his state of mind, in short, his psychology. We can follow Nietzsche’s wisdom on this matter. Nietzsche urged one to turn against oneself and arouse fear of oneself, in one’s quest “to overcome the gods and the tradition in themselves” (115). Āzād was fully aware of the burden and risk of turning against oneself and one’s tradition.
At some point as a young adult, he sought out a teacher in the fringe neighborhoods of Calcutta to teach him to play a musical instrument. This was a scandalous desire for a Muslim theologian who was destined to become his father’s spiritual successor. Why? Listening to music was already controversial and viewed as unlawful in the eyes of some who identify as orthodox guardians of the Islamic faith. Āzād knew that in such an environment becoming a musician was suicidal and reckless. But his transgressive search to play a musical instrument was part of a wider questioning attitude that overtook Āzād. This episode of self-questioning is not uncommon to people who study at a madrasa, yeshiva, or seminary. Āzād wrote that at the age of fifteen the certainties provided by tradition began to disintegrate and “the peace of my mind began to tremble, and the thorns of doubt and skepticism pierced the heart.” He continues: “In addition to the voices I heard from all sides, I also felt that something else was lacking. I felt that the universe of knowledge and reality is not limited to what was in front of me. As I advanced in age these pricks of conscience continued to grow” (99–100).
Assailed by doubts, all his beliefs disintegrated and he himself pushed over the remaining ramparts of his convictions. He then set out to find new fortifications.
Indian postage stamp featuring Abul Kalām Āzād. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Āzād not only found rhetorical support in literature, but also deployed literary resources to reach into the depths of the human condition. Dwelling on his conditions of doubt and the remaking of the constitution of his mind, he found solace in the poetry of the Persian émigré poet to India, Kalīm Kāshānī (d. 1651), who was buried in Kashmir.
Kāshānī wrote: “My desire to know has never ever thwarted me/Even on the day of the richest harvest, I still do go out in search of sustenance” (100). In one passage from his famous memoir and literary masterpiece titled Accumulated Dust, which consisted of letters written from jail, Āzād very honestly grapples with the multiple worlds he has to negotiate:
One’s traditional convictions are the biggest obstacles in the path of one’s mental development. No power can incarcerate a person as much as the chains of traditional convictions can fetter one. One is unable to break these chains easily because one does not really wish to do so. In fact, one prizes these fetters of tradition like precious ornaments. Each doctrine, practice and viewpoint gained through one’s family heritage and by means of one’s foundational education, accompaniment, and apprenticeship (sohbat) will be cherished as a sacred inheritance. One will defend this heritage at all costs. But one will never have the courage to meddle with it. Sometimes the grasp of inherited convictions is so strong that even the most effective education as well as environmental changes cannot unshackle its hold. Education will to some extent influence the mind, but it cannot influence the constitution of the mind. One’s mental edifice is always constituted by a line of descent, by family and by centuries of successively transmitted traditions, and whose hand will always effectively do the work of tradition. (100)
Here Āzād exemplifies the dilemmas produced when one must negotiate very different legacies of knowledge at a time when the space for difference and multiplicity is radically shrinking. His words speak to us today as much as they did to those during his time.
History and Tradition in the dihlīz (interstice)
What I have learned from my studies and experiences has made me more tentative in pronouncing muscular solutions to complex problems. What I learned from Ghazālī was the immense value of the in-between space (dihlīz) of daily living and reflection. The spatial metaphor of a threshold or portal, a dihlīiz—an intermediate portal separating the Persian home from its exterior—represents a productive dialogical space. From Ghazālī and countless others we learn how intellectual productivity was enhanced at the interstices of cultures. Ghazālī imagined and theorized all thought and practices to be a continuous dialogical movement between the inner and the outer; the esoteric and exoteric; body and spirit in a productive fashion. He did not configure the dialogic in a simplistic binary relation, but he imagined these to be the multiple nodes in a force field.
Suspended within this force field was the subject diligently tending to the needs of both matter and spirit. Underlying all our critical activity is a complex hybridity and fuzziness, despite our every pretension to smooth it out. And while over the longer duration we can sometimes observe dramatic shifts in knowledge, on most occasions we pass through transitions, creases, and folds in knowledge and time. Improvement is possible, in other words, but progress is halting.
The perpetual quest is to seek emergent knowledge arising out of our struggles and transitions for alternative futures. We do know one thing taught by experience: the dominant paradigms need to be continuously contested with alternative ways of knowing, different types of knowledge, and novel models for society-building. The future, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos pointed out, has become a personal question for us, a question of life and death. Or, as Amitav Ghosh tells us in The Nutmeg’s Curse, something more fundamental needs to be addressed: we have to revise our understanding of matter and the vitality of natural and celestial objects. As he put it, “The hold of the economy on the modern imagination has progressed to the point that capitalism has come to be seen as the prime mover of modern history, while geopolitics and empire are regarded as its secondary effects” (116).
We do know one thing taught by experience: the dominant paradigms need to be continuously contested with alternative ways of knowing, different types of knowledge, and novel models for society-building.
In order to pursue better and improved futures we also need the past, we require the insights of history. We need history to help us imagine, not ready-made solutions, but creative problems to be addressed. “Certainly we need history,” Nietzsche wrote. “But our need for history is quite different from that of the spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge,” he continued, adding: “…[W]e require history for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and action, or even to whitewash a selfish life and cowardly, bad acts” (7).
Many of the thinkers I have discussed were in one or another way compelled to reread the past and now view it as an immutable act of God empowering us to hope and act in search of an open future. Unfortunately, too many thinkers have understood the betterment of civilization in stoutly economic terms, linking the division of labor to the development of society. It may well be part of the truth, but certainly it is not the whole of the truth. For it is practice, as secular moralists would describe it, or the prophetic activity as religious actors would articulate it, that allows us to dedicate ourselves to life. A life premised on balance and distribution is one that avoids a nihilistic end. The improvements we make in giving shape to that prophetic spirit—a life of practice and the will to power—opens the possibilities for new histories, not the inevitability of history and certainly not the end of history. For those, like Ahmet Karamustafa, who view history as a continuous struggle, a gift carrying the possibilities of improvement, the cultivation of civilization remains inviting and utterly tempting.
In conclusion, I want to share from the writings of the littérateur, proponent of mysticism and philosopher, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d.1023). Tawḥīdī was the protégé, if not the “Boswell,” meaning an amanuensis, of Abū Sulaymān al-Manṭiqī al-Sijistānī (d.c.985), his mentor. It captures the messiness of the human condition and especially our earnest efforts to understand complex realities and mysteries. The citation comes from Tawḥīdī’s meditations on coincidences and oddities. But the terms coincidence (ittifāq) and the unexpected (falatāt) do not do justice to the meditation. I think what he intends to say is that things like history, progress, and improvement are complex, imbricated, meshed and messy, yet also distinguishable, and appear to us as the unexpected. Tawḥīdī attributes the fulsome nugget of wisdom to Abū Sulaymān who says:
Things are distributed according to the limitations of nature, psychical powers, intellectually indivisible elements, and divine wonder. What exists here on earth is therefore necessarily either something familiar that is related to nature, or something rare related to the soul, or something unique that is related to the intellect, or something wonderful that is related to the divine being. The unexpected is among the last-mentioned kind; I mean it permeates these various classifications.[2]
History is about contingency. The unexpected is perhaps the most fertile ground of history and where the possibility of improvement, rather than progress, exists. What Tawhidi’s insight reminds us of is that the unexpected is enmeshed in our understanding of nature, our psychology, and divine wonder. Nature, the person, the human mind, and the role of the divine cannot be separated in our understanding of history. If we ignore them, we do so at our own peril. But more so, the result is an impoverished understanding and appreciation of history and the discontents it brings.
*The author wishes to thank Joshua Lupo for his editorial assistance in preparing this post.
[2]Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, Kitāb Al-Imtāʿ waʾl-Muʾānasa, ed. Aḥmad Amīn and Aḥmad al-Zayn, 2 vols. (Beirut: Manshūrāt Dār Maktabat al-Ḥayāt, c. 1960), 2:160; With emendations the translation is from Geert Jan van Gelder, “On Coincidence: The Twenty-Seventh and Twenty-Eight Nights of Al-Tawḥīdī’s Al-Imtāʿ wa-l-Muʾānasa. An Annotated Translation,” in Medieval Arabic Thought: Essays in Honour of Fritz Zimmermann, ed. Rotraud E. Hansberger, et al. (London; Turin: Warburg Institute; Nino Aragno Editore, 2012), 216.
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
The Erez Barrier, the only crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Photo via Flickr user Michael Rose. CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
In the introduction to our edited volume When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism we investigate the sacralization of politics in a variety of nation-states and highlight three modes in which states engage in such sacralization. Sacralized politics sanction the power of one group over others in the same state or territory and empower that group’s exclusive sovereignty, political authority, and belonging to a homeland. The first modality centers around managing consciousness, including the construction of self-identity in relation to others. The second works through territoriality and the expansion or exclusion of land at the expense of other groups. The third operates through political governance and employs violence and a necropolitical regime of control dictating who may live and who may die. Of these three modalities that create religio-racialized constructions of the nation-state and produce exclusivity within the political space, violence has attracted the most attention and debate.
This volume is an effort to respond to a major gap in the western literature that has focused on non-state actors when discussing sacralized politics in general, and violence in particular. We suggest that when multiethnic states employ sacralized politics, particularly in cases of intrastate conflict, colonialism, and settler colonialism, the state produces some groups, including groups of citizens, as legal, cultural, spatial, and/or political “others.”
The four insightful reviews engage critically with main themes of the volume and with its various chapters. The reviews strengthen some arguments, question others, broaden the context of sacralized state politics, offer astute challenges for future research, and most importantly pose vital questions that require sharpening the arguments of the chapters in this volume.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s review criticizes the goal of liberal secularism to purify politics of religion—a critique that we acknowledge and the contributors to the volume focus on in some chapters that address Zionism and the Israeli state. She asks an important and challenging question focusing on the modality of violence. In our introduction, we write, and Hurd quotes, “Ethnic and religious nationalism . . . can play the destructive role of promoting an ethnically exclusive state, and the religious claims can play a double purpose—not only to increase the extent of exclusivity but also to provide legitimation for such exclusion (usually translated into political domination) and means of violence. These means can take extreme forms, precisely because of the religious legitimation” (emphasis added by Hurd). Hurd then adds: “As I interpret this account, the problem with Israeli Jewish nationalism—and perhaps other nationalisms as well—is that it is violent because it is insufficiently secular. Religiously based justifications are ‘particularly venomous.’ Yet would the challenge posed by (settler) state violence be resolved if nationalism were freed of religionism, or in this case, ‘Israeli Jewish nationalism from religionism’” (17)? The answer to this question is empirical and it is hard to answer definitively. Yet, our argument contrasts with what Hurd seems to suggest and is neither based on secularist critique nor secular/religious dialectic. In the case of Israel, for example, it is not that the violence of Zionist nationalism is extreme because its form of nationalism is “insufficiently secular.” Actually, some of Israel’s worst forms of violence—the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of the native Palestinian population, dozens of massacres, destroying hundreds of towns, and taking over the natives’ lands—were enacted under what many Israeli scholars called “the secular phase” of Zionism (which we believe was always undergirded by religious claims).
But since the continued unfolding of the settler colonial project was masked by religious claims, it is much more difficult for Israeli society to face its own reality or to even acknowledge Zionism and its defining and continuing state violence as a settler colonial project. The religious claims also help interpret some global politics, particularly Western international politics, that resist seeing Israel as a settler colonial project despite the overwhelming evidence that it is. Therefore, this example of settler colonialism is more lethal than a settler colonial project obliquely masked by religious claims. Furthermore, whether in the discussions of India, Israel, Sri Lanka, or elsewhere, our concern was not religious-secular dialectics per se, but rather the justification and legitimization of violence with claims anchored in sacred texts. Such anchoring moves the logic of violence itself into the space of the sacred—a space in which a deity is claimed by its followers to be the single authority and arbitrator.
Some of Israel’s worst forms of violence—ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of the native Palestinian population, dozens of massacres, destroying hundreds of towns, and taking over the natives’ lands—were enacted under what many Israeli scholars called “the secular phase” of Zionism (which we believe was always undergirded by religious claims).
But violence is not the only modality we highlighted. Let us look briefly at constructing consciousness based on religious claims. We will give a recent example to further explain our argument. The minister of religious services in Israel’s “center-left” government told Israeli high school students in June 2022 that “[b]ecause we were expelled from our country 2,000 years ago, for 2,000 years we dreamed, we prayed, we wrote songs, we returned to our country. We believe that God, gave us the country, promised it to us in the covenant . . . , the Bible is our Kushan. No one will tell us that it is not ours, all of it. But the Arabs have a different story. We know it’s nonsense, we know it’s not true . . . ” (italics added). Even though Zionism emerged as a modernist/secularist discourse drawing on the language of nationalism, it has been undergirded and authorized by this biblical covenantal narrative. So if one’s God makes a promise based on a covenant, political and religious consciousness are constructed accordingly and the views that fall outside this promise become simply “nonsense”; in such a context, only God can change one’s views. This is different and much less self-conscious than how other forms of settler colonialism progressed, let us say South Africa or North America, in which God has stakes—albeit in the contexts the “promised land” was used metaphorically. A fundamental and defining difference is that while in other cases the bases for legitimacy were transformed by invoking democracy, equality, recognition of past historical wrongs, and facing the settler colonial realities, Zionism has been moving in the opposite direction. Not only is Zionism, in most of its political streams, doubling down on invoking religious claims as foundational for legitimacy, it is also making them increasingly central to its project in Palestine. It openly speaks and acts the sacred, non-negotiable, word of God.
The analyses offered in the various chapters of the book are context- and time-bound, as Raef Zreik’s intervention points out. While highlighting many of the same main points on the relationship between nationalism and religion in different historical contexts and different political arrangements of power relations, he asks a challenging question. Focusing on Zionism, he asks what the discussion would look like if the volume’s title (and the research it has undertaken) was reversed and instead focused on “when the sacred is politicized”? While this would have been an interesting intellectual exercise, it does not address the new intellectual space the book seeks to bring to the public discussion: a focus on the state which invokes sacred texts in order to justify modern politics. Zionism is a case in which the political project came first (albeit always with an underpinning of religious claims), and its overt religious claims came later and continue to this day with a more earnest pace (in Zreik’s view, the political followed the sacred). Yet reversing the question can help us better understand the current stage of hyper-religious Zionism. It is, for example, sometimes difficult to distinguish between a political act and a religious act, and which one is following the other (such as in Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem and Nablus). In this regard Zreik is right to contrast the “here and now” of Zionism when it comes to the relationship between religion, nationalism, and (settler) colonialism. One needs to “dig deep to reveal the intimate relation between these concepts” in Europe’s past, particularly in relationship to colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Indeed, the book poses the challenge about the present: What states are using religious claims drawn from religious texts to justify their policies of ethnic politics and state identity, violence, land grabbing, and international politics? It is most revealing that while other settler colonial projects gradually moved away from the religious discourse used to justify their project of overtaking lands of other groups, Zionist religious claims increased with time. This is an inevitable development meant to obscure the ongoing settler colonial project.
A mural by Irish Republican artist Danny Devenny on the Solidarity Wall in the Republican Falls Road area of Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Arabic text translates “Palestine will return no matter how long it takes.” June 2008. Image via Flickr user Philip Hopper. CC BY 2.0
Gladys Ganiel rightly observes that colonialism and settler-colonial theory is at the heart of the book. Thus, referring to Lloyd’s chapter on Northern Ireland, she points out that while the postcolonial conditions in the Republic of Ireland after 1922 gradually dimmed the salient differences between Protestant and Catholic identities, in Northern Ireland, which remained a settler colonial state, the social and political structures continued to manufacture colonial mentalities. Ganiel highlights the importance of external support for structures—like those in Northern Ireland—that can counter colonial practices, consciousness, and mentalities. This observation is of great importance to our central argument: how can external support initiate structures that counteract mentalities of exclusion and racialization anchored in religious claims?
Ganiel emphasizes the two cases where religious claims are not integral to national politics: Palestine and Northern Ireland. But even if religious claims are not significant at the national level in Northern Ireland, religion still operates as a group marker and therefore might carry significance in other forms. While she welcomes O’Dowd’s concept of vernacular religion in which religion is not reduced to belief but is part of everyday practice, she warns against “reducing religion to high-level religious claims.” Both her own scholarly work and her review of the edited volume resist the reduction of religion and religious claims and emphasize the way the mundane invocation of religious claims and practices construct, transform, and sacralize the political. She argues that in many cases the clergy played a peacebuilding role in Northern Ireland out of intense personal convictions and in doing so have resisted “sacralizing politics.” This observation is important to keep in mind when thinking of positive role that religion can and does play in various settings.
Joram Tarusarira makes an insightful comparison between the current political context in Zimbabwe and some of the case-studies discussed in the book such as India, Israel, and Iran. He discusses the troubled postcolonial constitutionally secular Zimbabwe to show how religion and politics are intertwined. In this particular context, he argues that “the fusion of religion and nationalism is not a necessary outcome.” For example, the fusion between religious claims and nationalism in the legitimation of land and power-politics is often used as an instrument “by political elites to justify and legitimate particular political policies, actions, and imaginaries.”
Tarusarira’s point about the instrumentality of the fusion between religion and nationalism is essential. When are religious claims employed for political sacralization? Are they inevitable? In what cases? For example, in the case of Zionism we argue that sacralization is inevitable because it is necessary for claiming legitimacy. But in India and Sri Lanka such sacralization was not necessary. So, under what circumstances are religious claims invoked and how do they relate to nationalism? Tarusarira uses the case of modern Iran to highlight what Banuazizi also shows in his chapter, namely that religious claims and nationalist claims were interchangeably used as state legitimizers. Religious claims were undermined in favor of nationalist ones after the 1979 revolution in Iran. But the revolution conveniently invoked religious rhetoric as needed during the 1980s war with Iraq. Tarusarira concludes, “The lesson we might take from Banuazizi is that the relationship between religion and nationalism depends on the political interests of those drawing on them. Both religion and nationalism ultimately serve the same purpose, namely political mobilization and state legitimacy.” This same logic of political purpose was employed in Zimbabwe: “What makes religion so powerful and compelling in this context is that it dogmatically sacralizes, and thus provides an absolute and non-negotiable quality to policies and actions. Sacralization thus closes off debate over policies.” This non-negotiability, supported by the sacred text, can potentially bring political debate to a dead end. This conclusion prompts some of the same questions raised by reviewers: Can nationalism not supported by a religious claim can bring politics to a dead end? We argue that indeed, it can. But, as in the question about violence discussed above, violence and political deadlocks that are not anchored in religious claims are contested in a space that remains outside the prescription of the scripture. As Tarusarira notes, the contestation over policies is not locked by the sacred text, and this difference matters for how legitimacy is constructed and maintained.
When Politics are Sacralized seeks to comparatively reveal racially based nationalist-religious claims, along with the social, cultural, and political articulations of those claims and their significance.
Engaging with the insightful reviews leads us to emphasize that our concern in this volume was not religion per se, but rather the justification and legitimization of violence (as one of the other modalities of sacralizing politics) with religious claims. The political impact of this process engenders racialization as religious difference. Thus, in Israel, our central case study, theorizing the state as solely a settler colonial project is complicated by the fact that its ideology is also embedded in claims derived from a religious text. These claims were also employed to construct racial differences, exclusivity, and national identity that were inseparable from its religious justifications/politics. When Politics are Sacralized seeks to comparatively reveal racially based nationalist-religious claims, along with the social, cultural, and political articulations of those claims and their significance. What the various chapters and case studies point out is more the political than the religious per se. They seek to show how political, colonial, or settler-colonial violence often relies on religious text. This text, in turn, is also employed to ensure the privileging of one religious/ethnic group over another in every socio-political, legal, and territorial domain. The book stresses how the sacralization of politics and the invocation of religious differences has become the modality through which power politics, racism, and colonialism operate. Hence, the state’s sacralization of politics turns religious differences into racial differences and legitimizes a racially constituted division of rights, space, and modes of life.
Nadim N. Rouhana is Director of the Fares Center for Eastern for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His research includes work on the dynamics of protracted social conflict, collective identity and democratic citizenship in multiethnic states, the questions of decolonization and transitional justice in settler colonial regimes. His publications include Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (Yale University Press, 1997) and Israel and its Palestinian citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State (Ed., Cambridge University Press, 2017). He has held various academic positions in Palestinian, Israeli, and American universities including at Harvard University, Boston College, MIT, and Tel-Aviv University. He was a co-founder of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs where he co-chaired the Center’s seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution from 1992-2001.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian feminist, is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her scholarship focuses on knowledge production in relation to accumulative trauma, state criminality, surveillance, gender violence, and law and society. She is the author of of Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She is the co-editor of Engaged Students in Conflict Zones: Community-Engaged Courses in Israel as a Vehicle for Change (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2019); When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is currently finalizing The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press, 2023).
Gazi Husrev Beg Mosoque, Sarajevo. Painting by Spiro Bocaric (1909). Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The Balkans are somewhat of a challenge for those thinking and writing about colonialism and its afterlife. Before the decolonial turn in the human and social sciences scholars debated whether the Balkans belonged to the colonial world at all. There were, on the one hand, those who argued that the Balkans ought to be considered as part of colonial experience and an aspect of the study of orientalism. Larry Wolff, Milica Bakić-Hayden, and Vesna Goldsworthy, among others, produced influential studies of the region and broadened the horizons of postcolonial scholarship—even as other, non-regional postcolonial critics, were very slow to acknowledge their insights, as Dorotea Kołodziejczyk’s has shown.
On the other hand, however, there were scholars who resisted the view of the Balkans as a subspecies of orientalism. One of the most recognized in this group was the historian Maria Todorova. For her, the Balkans merited investigation on their own terms, rather than under the umbrella category of the colonial. In the Balkans, Todorova notes, there is an absence of self-understanding as colonized peoples. Moreover, neither the Ottomans nor the Habsburgs—which dominated the Balkan region for centuries—could be described as colonial empires. In these two instances, Todorova elaborates, we can find “no abyss or institutional/legal distinction between metropole and dependencies”; “no previous stable entity which colonized”; “no amelioration complex, no civilizing mission obsession comparable to the French or the English colonial projects”; “no hegemonic cultural residue” that would be “comparable to the linguistic and general cultural hegemony of English in the Indian subcontinent . . . or of French in Africa and Indochina.” Finally, Todorova identifies the distinctive character of the Balkan religious experience. She stresses that Balkan religious heterogeneity is among the chief reasons why Western Europeans have perceived the region as ambiguous and anomalous—so different from the Western European drive for religious homogenization that was part and parcel to the rise of modern Western European nation-states.
Todorova’s remarks, especially her highlighting of the Balkan religious in-betweeness, provide the starting point for the challenge I want to pose to scholars and activists from this region who identify with decoloniality, especially those who trace connections between postsocialist and postcolonial trajectories and politics while overlooking the role of religion in social life and in the modes of “being and living locally” (16). It is plausible that their inattention to religion is an extension of the secularist bias that characterizes postcolonial approaches more generally. It is also possible to see their inattention as a problem for their own decolonial practices and goals. As An Yountae and Nelson Maldonado-Torres contend elsewhere on this blog, if one is to follow Frantz Fanon, religious ideas ought not only to be subjects of critique but also explored as sources of radical change. On my reading, the absence of a focus on religion in decolonial studies of the Balkans merits probing because the region’s religious experiences fit neither the patterns of the Western European religious homogenization nor of religious colonization. As such they can be analytically, normatively, and politically generative. Defined by multiple peripheralities—as neither the colonizer nor the colonized— the Balkans and their religious-national configurations emerge not only as a reflection of the established nation-states but also as border-living that, through the local experience of life, contests those nation-states.
Examining the complexities of the religious in-betweeness of the Balkans and what they imply for our understanding of nationalism in relation to the nation-state is especially relevant since, as Nikolay Karkov has shown, decolonial scholars and activists from the Balkans follow the lead, among others, of Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo as they attempt to bridge post-Soviet/post-socialist and subaltern considerations and resistances, in order to “revisit the local histories . . . within the colonial matrix of power” (6). Decolonial thinkers from the Balkans thus reject the questioning of the region’s colonial status and posit that everyone is part of coloniality/modernity: “Its totalizing reach,” writes Nikolay Karkov, “leaves no place untouched and no stone unturned,” so that the Balkans (as constitutive of Eastern Europe), “while formally never colonized by the West,” are “no exception to coloniality’s logic” (46).
Defined by multiple peripheralities—as neither the colonizer nor the colonized— the Balkans and their religious-national configurations emerge not only as a reflection of the established nation-states but also as border-living that, through the local experience of life, contests those nation-states.
Moreover, the new generation of decolonial scholars from the Balkans considers the incorporation of this region into the European Union a neocolonial event. They turn to decoloniality as a frame of analysis and a reminder of the radical power of decolonial praxis against neoliberalism, And, while the region’s thinkers and activists are careful to separate their decolonial resistance to the neocolonial transnational projects from the populist nativist politics that rejects Western European modernity, they reassert the view of nationalism prescribed by the subaltern decolonial experiences, imaginaries, and practices. They follow thinkers like Ramón Grosfoguel when he contends that nationalism can provide only “Eurocentric solutions to a Eurocentric global problem as it reproduces an internal coloniality of power within each nation-state and reifies the nation-state as the privileged location of social change. . . . Nationalist responses to global capitalism reinforce the nation-state as the political institutional form par excellence of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (25).
Within the decolonial framing, where the whole problematic of nationalism is, then, identified as the domain of nation-states and, in turn, as constitutive of the colonial matrix of power, the phenomenology of Balkan nationalisms cannot be explored as arising from the complexity of the local border-living. Rather, it is relegated to the “right-wing . . . activist, and violent politics,” the “narratives and movements [that] remain subscribed to an ontology of difference that categorize spaces and people according to frameworks of race and nation,” and “the exclusionary and dehumanizing logics of the self-proclaimed national emancipatory agendas” (28). Put another way, despite the in-betweeness of the Balkans in relation to the abyssal line—despite them being neither on the side of the colonizer or the colonized—decolonial thinkers from the region see nationalisms primarily or exclusively as the embodiment of the nation-states’ logic, ideology, and power.
Balkan religious heterogeneity—also shaped by border-living as a historical reality for centuries—complicates this straightforward picture. As the Bosnian Islamic theologian Enes Karić underscores, in one thousand to two thousand years of history, the Balkan region never “entrusted its whole to one religion alone.” The centuries of proximity of Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, and Muslims shows “the meaninglessness of theories that divide religions into ‘native’ and immigrating ones”; they also demonstrate that the decolonial framing of Christianity as another aspect of domination invested in western colonial modernity does not have much in common with the place of Christianities in Balkan local life and experience. There is nothing here that resembles the spread of Orbis Christianus to the Americas where colonization and Christian missionary endeavors were a joint enterprise. Christianities, western and eastern, arrived to the Balkans early and, from being central to the power of various local medieval states, often became constitutive of the Ottoman Empire’s millet system. Balkan religious history, in other words, is one of constant shifts in power constellations among different religious groups; it is also a long history of proximities, both conflicts and encounters, among Orthodox and Catholic Christianities, and Islam.
These shifts in power relations and the “movement” of borders that accompanied them, provide the backdrop for the ways in which both Christianities and Islams in the Balkans have enabled religious-national connections expressed as border-living, rather than merely boundary-maintenance. In my considerations of the Bosnian Franciscan radical peacebuilding in the 1990s and the Rhodopes’ Christian-Muslim living in the context of komshuluk—“good neighborly relations”—I uncover the ways in which particular religious and national identities are affirmed while also remaining open. For the Bosnian Franciscans, the latter meant the affirmation of the Bosnian identity in the midst of violent conflicts as an identity that embraced but did not abolish religious or national particularities. It demonstrated, in the words of Father Mile Babić, the possibility of both freedom and belonging. For the Rhodope Christian-Muslim komshuluk, this word, of Turkish origin but perceived as part of the Bulgarian language, was lived as “a closeness in separation” and “the efforts to maintain it.” While keeping alive the memories of conflict and violence among different groups, all members of komshuluk also work to sustain the ideals of good neighborly relations as a moral good justifiable in religious terms. Put another way, in both the Bosnian and Bulgarian examples, the ways of border-living have long faced, responded to, but also resisted the attempts of various nation-states, including those of communist provenance, to determine and regulate the religio-national categories in these regions. And in both instances of border-living, religious and national intersubjectivities remained irreducible to nation-states: when they were rooted and embedded, national without being nationalistic, religiously humanistic yet particular, these configurations of religious and national intersubjectivities promoted deep pluralism while contesting whichever nation-state they faced.
Balkan religious history, in other words, is one of constant shifts in power constellations among different religious groups; it is also a long history of proximities, both conflicts and encounters, among Orthodox and Catholic Christianities, and Islam.
The religio-national border-living I retrieve in the Balkans might not be as critical or radical as envisioned and enacted by either the subaltern or Balkan decolonial thinkers and activists. It is, however, border-living and doing through which, as Tlostanova and Mignolo suggest, it is possible to evade the colonial matrix by way of not belonging to “its memories, feelings, and ways of sensing” (7). Why, then, work to fit in the Balkans in either postcolonial or decolonial frames, if it is their liminality that is valuable? I don’t posit this question to circumvent but rather to engage a decolonial understanding of border-living, and to do so in a way that can complicate and perhaps even deepen that notion. The Balkan religio-national in-betweeness also challenges the decolonial approach to nationalisms as the phenomena that is first and foremost embodied in the structures of nation-states. If we consider religio-national connections and configurations in the Balkans as instances of border-living, isn’t it plausible to ask whether the decolonial view of nationalism is another iteration of methodological nationalism—the understanding that nation-states are the dominant formation and representation of modern political life, which in this particular iteration would imply that nation-states absorb the complex collectivistic phenomenology of national belonging?
My invitation to take the Balkans in their singularities rather than fitting them into the pre-established decolonial frames of thought also reflects an ethical concern. In my view, only when the Balkans are, to follow Romina Istratii, considered as succumbing to neither Northern nor Southern theoretical or praxis-oriented frameworks, can we ensure that all ways of being and living locally are truly listened to, rather than considered through a gradation of levels exploitation (as sometimes happens in decolonial considerations). And, only if the Balkan experiences and stories, modes of resistance, and affirmations are taken not only on their own but also as constitutive of those knowledges that have far too often been silenced,[1] can we enact an expansive vision of pluriversality, in which decoloniality, as Walter Mignolo puts it, is only one option, and it is always a truth in parentheses (115).
* This post draws on the proposals that the author develops in two essays, “Linking Identity and Solidarity: A Reflection from the Periphery” (forthcoming) and “Neither Exclusionary Religious Nationalisms, Nor Abstract Religious Humanisms: Belonging and Border-Living in the Balkans,” in Balkan Contextual Theology, ed. Stipe Odak and Zoran Grozdanov (Routledge, 2022). I am grateful to Stipe Odak and Zoran Grozdanov for their comments and for permission to use some material from the essay I published in their volume. I am also grateful to Joshua Lupo and Atalia Omer for questions and suggestions in the development of this piece.
Slavica Jakelić is the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Valporaisio University. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and nationalism, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Jakelić has worked at or was a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the United States—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia; the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University; the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame; and the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion & Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. She is also a Senior Fellow of the international project "Orthodoxy and Human Rights," placed at Fordham University.
Participant of a demonstration in favour of Zimbabwe’s independence from British rule. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-2.0
While reading When Politics Are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, I was drawn to compare the arguments of some of the contributors to the book to the recent political situation in Zimbabwe, on which I have conducted extensive research. Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 following a protracted war of liberation against Great Britain. The liberation war was fought with a nationalist ideology as its motivating force and Zimbabwe today is constitutionally a secular state. However, like in India, as Tanika Sarkar shows in this book, true secularization in Zimbabwe is difficult to imagine because the society continues to be highly religious, and religion and politics intertwine. Political elites often appeal to either Christianity or African religion to ground their nationalist positions.
What follows from the arguments presented in the book and my own reflection on the Zimbabwean context is thatthe fusion of religion and nationalism is not a necessary outcome. Rather, fusing the two is an instrument used by political elites to justify and legitimate particular political policies, actions, and imaginaries. This proposition converges with Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Nadim N. Rouhana, and Yaacov Yadgar’s assertions in the book. They show how religion and nationalism—or religion and the state—are connected, and how religious terms are deployed to legitimate and establish entitlement to land and settler colonialism. As Yadgar points out in the book, when dominant religious traditions cease to serve political purposes, new ones are invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition).
The Construction of Religious Justification: Iran and Zimbabwe
The religious justification for political processes are often invented and/or constructed by those with political aims. As Yadgar again points out in his chapter, the language used in the conflation of religion and nation is deliberate and not neutral. A good example that demonstrates that there is nothing necessary about using religious claims in pursuit of political ends can be found in the history of modern Iran, which Ali Banuazizi describes in his chapter. Under the reign of two monarchs in the twentieth century (1925–41 and 1941–79), religion was undermined in favor of nationalism. This changed after the revolution in 1979 when Iran became an Islamic republic. When the war with Iraq (1980–88) intensified, however, the regime again relied on nationalist propaganda. The lesson we might take from Banuazizi is that how religion and nationalism relate depends on the political interests of those drawing on them. Both religion and nationalism ultimately serve the same purpose, namely political mobilization and state legitimacy.
In Zimbabwe, political elites often invoke African religion and Christianity to similar ends. The link between African religion, Christianity, and nationalism dates to the liberation struggle of the 1970s. It persisted during Zimbabwe’s two republics, from 1980 to 2017, under the late President Robert Mugabe, and has continued into the present under President Emmerson Mnangagwa. What makes religion so powerful and compelling in this context is that it dogmatically sacralizes, and thus provides an absolute and non-negotiable quality to, policies and actions. Sacralization thus closes off debate over policies.
African Independent Churches and Nationalism in Zimbabwe
An example of this sacralization is the fusion of African Independent Churches (AICs) with nationalism in Zimbabwe. AICs provided a sacred canopy to the policies and actions of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) under then-President Robert Mugabe—who held office from 1987 to 2017—and continue to do so in the present under President Emmerson Mnangagwa. The arguments that emerged from the churches were colonial critiques that protested against all kinds of oppression (Isabel Mukonyora, “Religion, Politics, and Gender in Zimbabwe,” 146).
The fusion between religion and nationalism is not inherent or necessary. It is an instrumentalist relationship that is used to justify and legitimate particular political policies, actions, and imaginaries.
In post-colonial Zimbabwe, most of the churches endorsed the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) and Mugabe, who was then its leader. This was because of the ideological convergence of their messages with the political aspiration for independence, indigenization, and sovereignty. To this day, AICs have become dependable support bases even as ZANU PF’s urban support has gone down (Ibid., 137). Thus, instead of pursuing social justice, they have prioritized loyalty to the individuals and movements they supported during colonial times, even as the latter has engaged in practices similar to those of colonial governments. This confirms my proposition that the fusion between religion and nationalism is not inherent or necessary. It is an instrumentalist relationship that is used to justify and legitimate particular political policies, actions, and imaginaries.
Religious Rhetoric in Zimbabwe’s Politic
As Peter Berger notes in The Sacred Canopy, “religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing an ultimately valid ontological status, which is locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference” (33). People take the sacred to be the absolute, normative reality that exerts an unquestionable claim on the conduct of social life (Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World). Religious legitimation involves transforming human products into supra- or non-human products: the humanly made world is explained in terms that deny its human production (Berger, 89). In the early 2000s, the regime used religious rhetoric to seize land and mobilize for land redistribution.
Graffiti calling for Zimbabwe’s independence from Great Britain (2008). Image via Flickr user Ben Sutherland. CC-BY-2.0
To give a concrete example, the government ran an advertisement on television which went as follows: “In the beginning, was the land. The people were on the land. The people owned the land. As it was in the beginning, so shall it always be. Welcome to Zimbabwe. We are down to earth.” The land question was ideologically linked to the creation story of Genesis 1 (Ezra Chitando, ‘“In the Beginning was the Land,’” 224). Mugabe was likened to the biblical Moses who delivered people to the Promised Land. His leadership was depicted as fulfilling a divine prophecy. The government also appealed to Indigenous religion. President Mugabe was said to be acting in accordance with the demands of the ancestors and obeying ancestral oracles (see Mukonyora, 137).
While the mainline churches, including the Catholic church, as well as many Protestant churches may not always be as direct as the AICs in enabling the ruling regime, they have also been a part of this fusion. When postcolonial Zimbabwe found itself in a situation of political instability, the mainline churches responded with diplomacy and rationalization, addressing peoples’ need for order and engagement through ritualistic theological and pastoral statements. The stance of the mainline churches and apex bodies works in favor of political elites. It allows no change of order or political system. This corresponds to what the book captures about Israel, Iran, and India and Berger’s assertion (Berger, 59) that religious positions may function to legitimate a particular institutional order. This however does not mean that there are not any non-conformist religious actors from the institutional churches (Joram Tarusarira, Reconciliation and Religio-political Non-conformism in Zimbabwe).
Selective Application of the Policy on Religion
What also emerges from reading the book and reflecting on Zimbabwe is that political elites selectively apply the policy of religious freedom. They form an alliance with religious actors who support them and condemn those that challenge them. Thus, in the process, they define what is good or bad religion and how religious actors should participate in politics.
Political elites selectively apply the policy of religious freedom. They form an alliance with religious actors who support them and condemn those that challenge them.
They restrict religious actors who criticize them as holding only humanitarian and/or social roles rather than as critical contributors to political issues. In other circumstances, they co-opt other church denominations so that they can also provide them with a sacred canopy. This compromises what Francis Verstraelen sees as the ideal attitude of the church: to exercise a prophetic mission, denouncing policies of injustice perpetrated by governments and standing up in support of the poor, rather than remaining neutral, which itself is also to be co-opted or to require accepting compromises.
Sign calling for the separation of church and state from a manifestation in Paris, 2013. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0
Let’s imagine the title of When Politics areSacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism,edited by Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shaloub-Kervorkian, going the other way around: Instead of investigating when politics are sacralized what if we examined when the sacred is politicized? If we were to investigate the latter, rather than the former, would the book look the same in terms of content, analysis, and conclusions? And if so, then what does that tell us about the main contribution of the book in particular and of the literature on nationalism, religion, and the sacred, more generally? Further, let’s ask another question: What imaginary do we inhabit when we ask about the sacralization of the political? Has there been any time, era, or epoch when the political was not sacred, when it was detached or divorced from the religious? And what does a politics devoid of the sacred look like? Can we identify such a politics? In addition, is it even possible to identify such a religion before it has been political? And does religion stand by definition as the opposite to politics? Or does the title assume a certain specific conception of the political that is by definition secular? The chapters in this book bring these tensions to the surface and shed some light on these old questions that have been and continue to be at the center of the narratives of modernity and secularization.
It is common within critical circles to note that it is almost impossible to think, write, or conceptualize the secular without thinking of religion, the sacred without the profane, science without myth. It is common knowledge that these concepts are mutually constitutive, socially constructed, have different meanings in different historical epochs, and are always part of a power game. However, to argue that they are mutually constitutive is one thing, while to argue that they are one and the same, is different. It is hard to find scholars who will consider the sacred and the profane and the religious and the secular as one and the same. We know that the boundaries are always shifting, and we know that there is a politics of definition in drawing the line between concepts. We also know that drawing the line is subject to power relations and the distribution of control and symbolic resources. Still, despite the mutual constitution of these concepts, we still feel some need to use and deploy these different concepts and we are never ready to collapse them into one concept despite their mutual constitution and the fact they are socially constructed. How are we to account for this persistence of differentiation of concepts, spheres, and disciplines? My claim is that we should be able to continue to use concepts such as these while historicizing them at the same time. This requires that we stay aware that they are part of power game and avoid the trap of essentializing them.
Modernity as the Autonomy and Purity of Spheres
One way to view the project of modernity writ large is as a project of differentiation and purification. Philosophically, it was probably Immanuel Kant who managed, with a series of endless distinctions, to separate science from religion and knowledge from faith, nature from freedom, and following that, “is” from “ought,” happiness from morality, and morality from legality. Kant offered peace between these conflicting concepts/disciplines by assigning a separate “jurisdiction” for each of them that did not invade or conflict with the jurisdiction of others. Sociologically, it was both Émile Durkheim, through his theory regarding the division of labor, and later Max Weber, who gave this separation a sociological account. Historically, it was the French revolution as a historical-political event that gave this scheme concrete content by separating the economy from politics, and politics from religion. The post-revolutionary era is one that allows us to imagine a poor person holding a high political position, and a highly rich person who lacks social or political status; it also allowed religious people to live in what looks like a secular state. The bracketing of property as a condition for entering politics—which meant the privatization of property—meant the democratization of politics and the entry of masses into politics, while the privatization of religion meant the secularization of the modern state.
The trick to establishing democracy and secularism has been achieved by introducing the distinction between the private and the public, assigning the private all those aspects that make us particular—including property, religion, and perhaps culture—leaving to the public an abstract formal domain where people meet each other as citizens within an imagined community of equals. It is this latter idea that made the modern nation a possibility.
Much of the work in critical tradition from G. W. F. Hegel to Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt to Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt to Bruno Latour, Duncan Kennedy to Catherine MacKinnon, questions this neat separation, and the purity of these categories. Between the moderns and the pre-moderns there are more commonalities and continuities than we imagined; there is too much myth in science and there is some rationality in myth; “is” and “ought” are not as distinguishable as we thought them to be; and while politics is separated formally from economy, the economy still controls politics indirectly. The opposition between the rational, secular, and national to the irrational, mythical, and religious does not seem to hold anymore. That is what Talal Asad, Jose Casanova, John Milbank, and many others have been arguing for years. Asad questions our ability to speak meaningfully about religion or the secular discourses and practices of power that have shaped and reshaped them continuously. Casanova, meanwhile, questions both the descriptive accuracy and desirability of the category of the secular. When it comes more specifically to the relation between religion and nationalism, one finds an increasing amount of literature that questions our ability to draw a line between religion and nationalism, and that in many cases both perform similar functions and use/deploy each other almost to the point of indistinguishability. The writings of Anthony D. Smith, Carlton Hayes, Carl Schmitt, Adrian Hasting, Saba Mahmood, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, and Roger Friedland are only a few examples of thinkers who make this point.
Between the moderns and the pre-moderns there are more commonalities and continuities than we imagined; there is too much myth in science and there is some rationality in myth; “is” and “ought” are not as distinguishable as we thought them to be; and while politics is separated formally from economy, the economy still controls politics indirectly.
Still, no one claims that religion and nationalism in the 21st century are the same as those that were around in the 18th century. In addition, despite the mutual constitution of these concepts, we still experience a certain need to deploy the concepts of religion and nationalism despite the fact that we know that they penetrate, influence, deploy, and constitute each other and despite the fact that we are fully aware that they are socially constructed and do not occupy a fixed core. In this sense, alongside the continuity and commonality between the modern and the premodern, or the secular and the sacred, it is important not to lose track of discontinuities, ruptures, and distinctions.
Is it still meaningful to speak of religion, nationalism, and secularism given the ongoing shifting meanings of these concepts and given the ways that they have been deployed as part of the mechanism of power in the context of colonialism, antisemitism, imperialism, capitalism, and anti-Muslim racism?
What Comes after the Disintegration of Concepts?
One thing When Politics Are Sacralized does—perhaps even unintentionally—is problematize its own title by showing the endless varieties of the meaning of religion and its different political deployments in different regions and by different groups. The richness of the test cases that the book covers—Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, Northern Ireland, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Serbia, among others—has a destabilizing effect that shows the endless variety of conceptions that lurk beneath the concepts and give them a concrete historical materiality. In doing so, the book offers a very important contribution. Still, the authors do deploy the terms. The terms survive the critiques somehow, despite the fact that they lose their core stable meaning. Is there a way to deploy those terms in a non-essentialist, non-metaphysical sense? The deployment of a concept is metaphysical, in my view, when the author thinks that the mere deployment of the concept can replace the need for further arguments, data, information, and descriptions in a way that makes the concept trigger an endless series of casual and logical conclusions/inferences that are not necessarily mandated. Thus, for example, there are those who deploy the description “religious” for a certain group as a surrogate for arguing that the group is “irrational” when they did not accept a certain proposal or offer. The same happens when the deployment of the concept lumps under its wings too many varied concrete conceptions and practices, subsuming too many phenomena under one name and thus erasing differences. Given this ongoing fear, the question is why simply not replace such loaded concepts with other less abstract and more concrete terms that have less metaphysical baggage?
I do not plan to offer a full answer to these questions here, but only to offer a few remarks as an initial response to them. My first remark questions the hope of finding a better vocabulary that is by definition less metaphysical. Karl Marx spent his life trying to escape from metaphysical German idealism, but it is far from clear whether the vocabulary that he deployed—the most obvious and simple among them is property—is any less metaphysical. Ask any legal scholar about the concept of property and they will dismiss the concept as being an utterly metaphysical one that has no core and must be disintegrated into a bundle of rights (a right to use, to transfer, to destroy, to rent, to control and manage, to mortgage, to bequeath, etc.). We are always being pulled into two directions in this regard: the more the level of abstraction is higher the more there is the risk of metaphysical thinking in a way that obscures rather than reveals what the object in question is. The issue is not simply obscuring things, but that abstract terms create a feeling of “false necessity” (to use Roberto Unger term). We start to draw conclusions that seem to us as necessary logical outcomes that flow from the abstract concepts themselves. This mode of arguing closes our imagination and fixes our thoughts, and we fall into dialectical illusions (to use Kant’s terminology this time). This entails confusing politics with logic, assuming that the realm of politics (which is the realm of freedom per excellence, as Arendt reminds us, and acts according to logical necessity).[1] This also entails the denial of our radical freedom and our political agency as it makes it appear as if these cannot be otherwise than they are, and that we are thus not the collective authors of the world that we inhabit.
The case of Zionism is revealing and allows a certain insight into the nature of the relation between religion, nationalism, and colonialism.
On the other hand, however, we have to speak in abstract terms in order to allow a conversation to take off and in order to conduct a comparative study, and to allow others to join in. For example, we might have different conceptions of what justice requires as a concept, but we are still able to recognize a conversation or a debate that tries to pin down the right conception of justice from one that is trying to pin down the right conception of art or love. The concept that hovers loosely above the conceptions allows the conversation to continue and makes it possible for differences to emerge and be discussed. Without this very loose “concept”—as a heuristic tool, not as a fixed essence—controversy becomes impossible, and instead we will talk past one another. I do not know how, when, and what level of abstraction might become mere ideology masquerading as universal truth, but that is always a risk. It is a risk that we must be fully aware of and learn to live with. It is true that our concept should hover as low as possible above the material world to avoid gross generalizations, but some level of abstraction is necessary.
But in these short comments, I would like to refer more concretely to the section of the book that deals with Zionism (as I will not be able to do justice to the richness of the book as a whole). The case of Zionism is revealing and allows a certain insight into the nature of the relation between religion, nationalism, and colonialism. In many other contexts, mainly European, one must dig deep to reveal the intimate relationship between these concepts. When I say “dig deep” I mean that one must go back to history to reveal the role of religion in the development of both nationalism and colonialism.[2] Second, in terms of geography, one must reconnect Europe to what seems to be disconnected from it—to Africa, Asia, the Americas. In Zionism, all of these are here and now in terms of time and space. But what is interesting in this section is the double movement that almost all the authors do offer. The critical move to interrogate liberal European societies is the one that usually aims to uncover the universalistic, seemingly neutral face of these countries in order to show the persistence of the particular, to question the myth of neutrality and neat separation, and the weaknesses of formalism. But in fact, that is what Zionism does all the time to Europe: it forces it to face its past in order to show that Zionism’s particularism, its deployment of religion and ethnicity, its demographic obsession, and even the colonial practices it performs, are common to it and to Europe. Zionism insisting to view itself as part of the same tradition becomes in itself a mode of critique of Europe. It reveals what Europe is trying to hide.
Image from the first Zionist Congress in Basel, 1897. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The double movement that most critics of Zionism do is to first join the critique of Europe’s past and the secularization thesis. But here they then find themselves too close to Zionism in terms of the persistence of the public role of religion, the impossibility of complete separation of church and state, and the critique of the formalism of the neutral modern state, etc. This forces them to offer the second move of distinguishing Zionism as a special and unique case (this is most clear in Rouhana and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s chapters but is also present in Yadgar’s and Raz-Krakotzkin’s as well). The first move suggests that Zionism is not that different from the European model and a sincere critique of Zionism requires a critique of the original European model, which means a critique of the whole idea of the nation-state and modern sovereignty. The second move suggests, however, that despite commonalities, Zionism offers a unique case in modernity that renders the process of its secularization more problematic. It is more problematic mainly for two reasons. One is the audience, and the second is the mission. With regard to the audience, Judaism as a religion is not simply used in the service of nationalism, for Zionism’s nationalism is unthinkable without religion. It is true that Irish nationalism, for example, is saturated with Catholicism and the Irish-English divide maps onto the Protestant-Catholic divide. Still, we can imagine Catholicism without the Irish people and Irish nationalism devoid of religious discourse. Religion is a marker, not constitutive. In Zionism, the audience of the Jewish Rabbi and the audience of Ben-Gurion or Herzl (as national figures) are almost one and the same. They almost converge. But even if they do not fully converge (and they do not) as the definition of Jew in the law of return teaches us,[3] still the issue is that there is no way to define the nationality of the Jew without resorting to the religious definition of the Jew. Thus religion is a decisive factor as to who belongs to the tribe of the nation and the Rabbis are at the end of the day the gatekeepers of the nation. The gate might be narrow or wide, but the keys are held by the religious establishment. The second element relates to the message itself: Zionism writ large is an old religious desire transferred to the realm of earthy politics. At its core, Zionism is not the political being sacralized, but the religious being politicized. Zionists took upon their shoulder a mission that presumably was assigned to God himself and claim to accomplish it. The vocabulary of Zionism is borrowed completely from the religious myth: return the redemption of land, a promised land, and so on. Religious discourse lies at the heart of Zionism as its moving power, not mere servant, and as such, it is explosive, as Gershom Scholem anticipated a century ago.[4]
In this regard, even if we accept for a moment the European model, acknowledging nationalism and colonialism as constitutive of this project, and accepting the limits of the European secular project and the claims to the neutrality of the secular state, still Zionism scores badly on that model. If one compares present-day Israel to present-day France or Britain one discovers that the role of religion in public and political life is different in substantial ways. One need not step outside the modern model to criticize Zionism, and one can accept some level of identity politics and national discourse, but still offer a genuine critique of Zionism. I must say that this double movement seems to me necessary in order to capture the complexity of Zionism and the complexity of modernity as well.
[1]This cuts through and through all of Arendt’s writings. See mainly chapter 5 from The Human Condition that discusses “action” as being distinguished from labor and work, and escapes the logic of necessity and fabrication as the site of human freedom. See as well Arendt’s skepticism of the French revolution given that it succumbed to the temptation to meet the necessities of supplying the needs of the poor and as such it subdues itself to the realm of necessity. For Arendt, politics should remain the realm of freedom, not a necessity. See also, Arendt On Revolution, 61. Arendt most clearly expresses this approach in her essay, “What is Freedom.” She ends the essay with these words “ In the realm of human affairs, we know the author of ‘miracles.’ It is men who perform them—men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own” (Between Past and Future, 171).
[3] According to the Israeli law of return, and for the purposes of the right of Jews to immigrate to Israel and to acquire Israeli citizenship, they do not have to be proved Jewish in the religious sense. Rather it is enough that their spouse or one of their parents or grandparents is a Jew according to the Jewish definition.
[4]As he wrote in his letter to Franz Rosenzwieg in 1926, “This country is a volcano! It harbors the language! One speaks here of many matters that may make us fail. More than anything else we are concerned today about the Arab. But much more sinister than the Arab problem is another threat, a threat which the Zionist enterprise unavoidably has had to face: the “actualization” of Hebrew. Must not the conundrum of a holy language break open again now, when the language is to be handed down to our children? Granted, one does not know how it will all turn out. Many believe that the language has been secularized, and the apocalyptic thorn has been pulled out. But this is not true at all. The secularization of the language is only a facon de parler, a phrase! It is impossible to empty out words which are filled to the breaking point.” Quoted in William Cutter, “Ghostly Hebrew, Ghastly Speech: Scholem to Rosenzweig,” 417.
Raef Zreik holds an LLB and LLM from Hebrew University, an LLM from Columbia University, and an SJD from Harvard Law School. His dissertation deals with Kant’s philosophy of right. He is an associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono academic College, Israel and senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute. His main fields of research include legal and political philosophy. Recent publications include “Historical Justice: On First Order and Second Order Arguments for Justice," Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2020): 491–529; “The Ethics of the Intellectual: Rereading Edward Said,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 47.1 (2021): 130–48; “On the Political Theology of Zionism,” forthcoming in Political Theology; “Kant on the Future,” forthcoming in Iyyun, and he just finished a book titled Kant’s Struggle for Autonomy: On the Structure of Practical Reason (forthcoming, Lexington Books).
Painting of Jerusalem, Israel, by Miner Kilbourne Kellogg. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
In an episode of the Israeli television drama Shtisel, set in Jerusalem’s Geula neighborhood, the show’s main character, school principal Shulem Shtisel, forbids his yeshiva students from going outside to watch a traditional flyover during an Israeli Independence Day military parade. His son Akiva, also a teacher at the school and facing protests from his class, allows his 10 year-olds to peek out the window to watch the flyover on the sly. The show emphasizes the disagreement within the Haredi community about the celebration; one elderly Jewish woman chastises a lifelong friend for expressing interest in it. The political entailments of their religious commitments remain subject to debate. As Ruth Margalit notes in a review for the The New Yorker, in watching this episode, “Israel appears like the contrails of those Air Force planes: blurry, ephemeral.” If only.
I was reminded of this scene in reading Nadera Shalhoub-Kevokian’s damning account from a different perspective of Jerusalem Day, another Israeli national holiday celebrating the “reunification” of Jerusalem, in her chapter “Sacralized Politics: The Case of Occupied East Jerusalem,” in a new volume that she co-edited with Nadim R. Rouhana, When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism. Jerusalem Day is also noisy, even violent, with large Zionist parades held in the Old City in what Shalhoub-Kevolkian rightly portrays as an affront to Palestinian self-determination. In both the television show and Shalhoub-Kevolkian’s real-life experience, and without suggesting any equivalency between the two, the State of Israel is perceived as having illegitimately usurped power and autonomy from the protagonists, threatening their ways of life, and perhaps their very existence, all in the name of a particular form of Jewish nationalism.
The sacralization of the Israeli state is especially noxious to the two prominent Palestinian editors of this volume, and understandably so. Noting that most discussions of religion in politics have focused on non-state actors, their collection ably turns the tables to examine and critique the sacralization of the state and its role in perpetuating settler colonial violence in Israel and beyond. To this end, the editors thoughtfully juxtapose case studies that are rarely considered side-by-side, including Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Zionism in Israel/Palestine, competing nationalisms in Northern Ireland, and Hindutva in India—even as Zionism gets the lion’s share of attention. I was eager to dive in.
The introduction describes the volume as an “effort to contribute to highlighting the dangerous impact of sacralization on national and international politics” (5). Religious claims, the editors suggest, “confer sacredness.” Violence ensues. Discussing various modes of sacralization, they suggest that, “Ethnic and religious nationalism… can play the destructive role of promoting an ethnically exclusive state, and the religious claims can play a double purpose—not only to increase the extent of exclusivity but also to provide legitimation for such exclusion (usually translated into political domination) and means of violence. These means can take extreme forms, precisely because of the religious legitimation” (emphasis mine, 9). A few pages later we encounter a similar reference to “religiously based legitimations that are by definition conflict instigating” (14). Their aversion to politicized religion leads the editors to conclude that “religious concerns” and “religiously-based justifications” are necessarily “particularly venomous” (15).
As I interpret this account, the problem with Israeli Jewish nationalism—and perhaps other nationalisms as well—is that it is violent because it is insufficiently secular. Religiously based justifications are “particularly venomous.” Yet would the challenge posed by (settler) state violence be resolved if nationalism were freed of religionism, or in this case, “Israeli Jewish nationalism from religionism” (17)? In her chapter, Shalhoub-Kevokian convincingly exposes “the various modalities of violence apparent in the ongoing Judaization of Jerusalem” (19). It is an important discussion and her account of the cruelty of the Price Tag movement is horrifying and effective. Yet I was left wondering whether one effect of attributing Israeli state violence in Jerusalem to Judaization may be to reduce Judaism to the violent form that it takes in this context while subordinating other factors that contribute to the violence. Might it not risk handing over too much power to the Israeli government’s interpretation of Judaism? Might it make sense for Palestinians and their allies to consider opposing the Israelization, or the colonization of Jerusalem, in whatever mode it presents itself, including but not limited to the expressions of Judaism/Zionism that are so tirelessly mobilized in its defense? In short: if the problems we face are power, greed, territoriality, and human aspirations for total mastery and control, then is purifying politics of religion the solution? Might it not exacerbate the situation by handing the floor to the most extreme voices who claim to speak in its name?
The urge to purify politics of (bad, violent, and exclusive) religion is an expression of a modernist tendency to seek to stabilize and master religion as an epistemological category. This is evident in the introduction, in which the category of religion is asked to do some heavy-lifting. This approach is ably critiqued most recently by Brent Crosson in his book Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad. Crosson explains that liberal secularism has long identified “modern” or “good” religion by its alleged lack of entanglement with either supernatural power (evil/superstition, magic, and witchcraft) or the state:
The idea that good religion (or good governance) can be separated from coercive force is the foundation for the ideals of liberal secularism. Rather than simply leading to a reality in which church and state are separate and political power is a matter of consent, this ideal masks and distorts empirical realities of power. Religious movements, state violence, and security interventions are entangled in contemporary nation-states…” (44)
Despite such critiques, many social scientists are captivated by religion’s purported epistemological coherence and convinced by the need (for the state to) to contain or evict bad religion, a conviction that threads through the introduction to this important book. Critical secularist discourse, even if undertaken with the objective of challenging the violence of settler colonialism, as in this volume, risks reproducing particular modern categories of the religious and the political. It elides the possibility that, to varying degrees, all forms of politics embody and express what moderns call the “religious” dimensions of human experience. There is no superhuman field that can be infiltrated or distorted beyond recognition by religion or the sacred. In this instance, broadening the interpretive frame might allow for the identification of alternative voices, actors, and histories that embody dissenting forms of religion-politics and the empowerment of new collective imaginaries that reach beyond the secular-religious dialectic. The challenge, then, is to step away from the secular-religious dialectic as a viable interpretive framework in the study of settler colonial violence.
Critical secularist discourse, even if undertaken with the objective of challenging the violence of settler colonialism, as in this volume, risks reproducing particular modern categories of the religious and the political
A number of contributors to the volume take up this challenge. In his chapter, “Religion and Nationalism in the Jewish and Zionist Context,” Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests that in the Israeli context what is known as “secularization” is the “articulation of messianic imagination…as a political-national narrative in the modern sense of the word” (34–35). “The centrality of the political theological aspect in the formation and definition of the State of Israel,” he continues, “is undeniable, and consequently any attempt to separate religion from the state is impossible” (35). I agree. There is no way to separate “religion” and “state” in Israel, or anywhere else.
Liam O’Dowd’s chapter, “Does Religion Still Matter? Comparative Lessons from the Ethno-national Conflict in Northern Ireland,” also resists the modernist framing by challenging the idea that religion ever left the domain of the political in the first place. As O’Dowd underscores, and in line with other contributors to the volume, “the links between religious and nationalist antagonisms first developed in the heartlands of Western imperialism” (358).
In his call for “transcending a simplistic secularist epistemology” (94), Yaacov Yadger’s “Zionist Theopolitics and Jewish Tradition” likewise resists the siren-like temptation of the modern secular-religious dialectic. Instead, he asks, “How does the Israeli nation-state’s theopolitics—constituted, as it is (symbolically, at least), on an ‘invented’ national tradition—approach Jewish traditions that preceded it and continue to live alongside it?” For Yadger, “the ‘problem’ with those Jewish traditions is that they do not fit easily, if ever, into the commonly used categorical frameworks such as ‘nation,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘race,’ and, perhaps most importantly, ‘religion,’ which originate in modern Western discourse” (101). In this reading Zionism is understood as a counterreaction to the transformation of Judaism into a “religion,” which itself “has to do with the modern ideological innovation and practical transformation that originated in Europe, mostly in Germany, from the eighteenth century onward, which allegedly sought to reinterpret Jewish traditions so as to render them applicable to the allegedly universal (and, again, essentially European Protestant) category of religion, in itself a contemporaneous invention” (102). One tragic, and paradoxical, result of this history is that Jewish Israeli secularism is unable to conduct meaningful dialogue with the Jewish traditions from which it emerged (107). Zionism, at least in its current, dominant Israeli instantiation, is deaf to dissenting Judaisms. As Raz-Krakotzkin suggests along similar lines, also in reference to Israel, it “denies important aspects of even the country’s Jewish past” (47).
This volume makes a noteworthy contribution to the long and challenging process of re-centering the histories and experiences of those who have been written out of history, and the present, by modern efforts to purify the nation-state in the name of something bigger. It deserves close reading and critical engagement, including, perhaps, through an insistence on questioning what Crosson refers to as “the indifference of the secular” (192). As historians such as Jonathan Sheehan remind us, attempts to adjudicate the lines between piety and profanity, sacrifice and murder, and suicide and self-martyrdom have long been, and will likely remain, deeply contested sites of power, violence, and sacrality.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor of Political Science and Religious Studies and the Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston. She studies religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the politics of secularism and religious freedom, religion and the American border, and relations between the U.S., Europe, Turkey, and Iran. Hurd is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2008) and Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (2015), both published by Princeton, and has co-edited four volumes on politics and religion in U.S. politics, foreign policy, and international relations. Hurd enjoys speaking to public audiences and contributing to discussions on global politics and religion. At Northwestern she co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group, and co-curates the Teaching Law & Religion Case Study Archive. She is currently working on a book on religious aspects of American border politics. Twitter: @eshurd
When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism addresses urgent concerns about the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence. The use of the terms religiousclaims and sacralize in the book’s title prompt readers to move beyond taken-for-granted assumptions that religion is inherently violent or that religion in and of itself causes conflict or makes conflict more deadly.
Such assertions have been put forward in the academic literature as well as in the public sphere, especially in discussions about Israel/Palestine, the case study that comprises the backbone of the book. After Rouhana and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concise introduction, which includes a useful three-mode framework for understanding sacralized politics, the first five chapters delve into the case of Israel, while Khaled Hroub’s final chapter addresses the relationship between Palestinian nationalism and religion.
The focus on Israel allows the editors (and contributors) to argue convincingly for scholarship that pays close attention to the colonial roots of sacralized politics. Settler-colonial theory is at the heart of the book. But the value of comparative volumes such as this one lies in their ability to bring together different examples, identify commonalities and divergences, and impart lessons that can be learned about and applied across various cases.
The Trouble with Religion and Colonialism in Northern Ireland
The only other case that is addressed in more than one chapter is Northern Ireland, which is one of the world’s most-studied cases of religion and peacebuilding. It featured in R. Scott Appleby’s field-shaping The Ambivalence of the Sacred as a site “saturated” with effective faith-based peacebuilders. It also was the empirical laboratory for John Brewer’s theoretical framework that sought to explain faith-based contributions to peacebuilding.
The value of comparative volumes such as this one lies in their ability to bring together different examples, identify commonalities and divergences, and impart lessons that can be learned about and applied across various cases.
Apart from the work of scholars specializing in religion (myself included), however, scholars studying Northern Ireland’s Troubles (circa 1968–1998) have downplayed the role of religion, with John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary arguing strongly for religion’s insignificance. Their description of religion as an “ethnic marker” has been widely accepted. Such readings have been contested by Steve Bruce in his work on the impact of preacher-politician Reverend Ian Paisley and by Claire Mitchell in her emphasis on the social significance of religion.
Similarly, the extent that colonialism is a constituent cause of Northern Ireland’s twentieth-century violence has often been brushed aside, particularly by those advocating a “two communities” approach to understanding the conflict. This approach emphasizes internal differences between Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist (PUL) and Catholic-Nationalist-Republican (CNR) communities and underplays the wider role of the British state, particularly as a historic colonial power. Moreover, PUL understandings of the violence are often framed in terms of terrorist violence and state responses to it, in direct opposition to settler-colonial interpretations of conflict. This volume’s foregrounding of settler colonialism helps us understand not only its explanatory power, but also contestation and resistance to it across different contexts.
At first glance, the tendency to side-step the religious and colonial aspects makes the Northern Ireland case sit uneasily in the volume. The titles of the two chapters reflect this: David Lloyd writes on “Protestantism and Settler Identity: The Ambiguous Case of Northern Ireland” (emphasis mine), while Liam O’Dowd’s chapter is titled “Does Religion Still Matter?”
Settler Colonialism and Religious Claims
Lloyd argues that a settler-colonial framework helps explain how Protestantism/Unionism/Loyalism dominated Northern Ireland from its creation in 1921. Unionist elites structured politics and society to protect their interests and religious claims were constructed to justify division (and superiority). This dovetails with other chapters in the volume, which emphasize how religious claims are used to legitimate already powerful political structures.
Lloyd’s chapter contains a striking photograph of a flag incorporating the Star of David with traditional Loyalist symbols: the red hand of Ulster and the British crown. There is another photograph of a mural proclaiming Catholic-Nationalist-Republican solidarity with Palestine. Of course, these images cannot be understood as popular endorsements of settler-colonial theory. But they do demonstrate how, on the streets of Northern Ireland, Loyalists identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.
Lloyd contrasts Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, which he characterizes as a post-colonial society in which Catholic and Protestant identities have lost their salience. I agree with Lloyd on this point to a certain extent, although he does not fully acknowledge that Protestants experienced real and structural violence in the early years of the Irish state, prompting the migration of some Protestants across the border. Nonetheless, this should not detract from Lloyd’s wider point that in Northern Ireland political and social structures have manufactured colonial mentalities.
On the streets of Northern Ireland, Loyalists identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.
There is an important lesson in Lloyd’s focus on structures: when structures change, identities and ideologies may follow and also change. More than two decades after Northern Ireland’s peace agreement this process has been halting and slow. But the dramatically reduced levels of violence and increases in those who identify as neither unionist nor nationalist nevertheless provide some hope for other violent contexts—especially if powerful external actors (like the British, Irish, and American governments, in the Northern Ireland case) incentivize structural change.
How Religion Still Matters
If Lloyd’s concerns are with structural changes in Northern Ireland, O’Dowd focuses more on drawing on the Northern Ireland case to critique the secular-religious dichotomy that has been prominent in global debates. He argues that a fuller understanding of the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence can be gained by understanding religion “primarily as a category of practice (as vernacular) rather than as a category of belief.” O’Dowd’s conceptualization of vernacular practice is not rooted simply or solely in activities like churchgoing or other forms of religious observance. Rather, it is grounded in an urban geography of conflicted cities which contain religious sites that are important for place-making and marking territorial segregation.
In Belfast, such sites include church buildings, which remain focal points for marking territory in a still largely segregated city; memorial gardens and plaques for the Troubles’ dead (which are often in or near church buildings); the routes of Orange Order parades, understood as mechanisms for marking, maintaining, or claiming territory; and funerals and the memory of funerals, including those for members of paramilitaries. As such, vernacular religious practice helps keep the memory of violence alive in often divisive ways.
These observations resonate with my own research for Considering Grace: Presbyterians and the Troubles. While the book focused on the experiences of churchgoing Presbyterians, the importance of funeral practices and church-based memorialization for the wider PUL community shone through.
The concept of vernacular religion expands the category of religion to many who would not identify as religious or engage in conventional religious observance. For O’Dowd, this is how religion still matters—even as Northern Ireland becomes more “secular” in terms of adherence to Christian beliefs and practices.
But What is Religion?
O’Dowd’s contribution is valuable because it goes against the main thrust of many of the other chapters in the book: it is not describing how religious claims are used to justify state power. Hroub’s chapter also goes against the grain, concentrating on the lack of religious claims within Palestinian nationalism. These chapters provide a complementary perspective, inviting readers beyond the focus on religious claims to ask: What exactly is religion? In particular, O’Dowd invites readers to look beyond the religious-secular dualism and in doing so challenges the way that (primarily) western scholars have framed debates about religion and nationalism.
Likewise, my work on Northern Ireland resists the reduction of religion to religious claims and instead emphasizes how religion is embedded in everyday practices and assumptions about one’s own religious community. These practices and assumptions can be reinterpreted to drive transformation. For example, during the Troubles grassroots leaders in the social action organization Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland (ECONI) challenged assumptions about their own religious community, and disputed religious claims made by prominent politicians like the Reverend Ian Paisley.
Ultimately, O’Dowd’s contribution supports the book’s assumption that religious claims lie behind sacralized politics. But the question, “What is religion?” remains open throughout the volume, inviting further research.
Future Debates
My more recent research takes up that invitation, continuing to resonate with the “everyday” turn in the study of religion. It focuses on areas such as the role of prayer amongst faith-based peacebuilders and the role of clergy during periods of intense violence. For the late Fr Gerry Reynolds, the practice of prayer was intertwined with his peacebuilding activism, which was in part motivated by repudiating oppositional aspects of Catholic nationalist identity. My study of Presbyterians during the Troubles argued that reducing religion to high-level religious claims has meant that one of clergy’s primary roles in the aftermath of violence has been overlooked: acting as “first responders” who provide pastoral support for victims through prayer and presence. Many of these faith-based peacebuilders and “first responders” resist what this book describes as sacralized politics; and for them, religion is not “vernacular,” it is intense and personal.
To me, such distinctions lie at the heart of future debates in this field. This volume provides a great service in prompting us to begin thinking through them.
In the postsecular moment that the humanities now finds itself in, it is tempting to regard the questioning of the role of religion in politics as one that is old hat. Religion has always been political postsecular critics of liberalism and its secular framework have argued. In this instance, the postsecular represents the demystification of secular reason as neutral with regard to religion and invites renewed inquiry into the theological roots of secularity. Given this claim, our duty as scholars is to reveal the entanglements of religion with the state rather than contest them. And yet, without necessarily questioning the analytic truth of the co-constructed nature of religion and politics, When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, edited by Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian, reminds us that the concepts of the secular and sacred are mobilized in ways that often have devastating real world political and social consequences. More specifically, in this wide-ranging volume, Rouhana and Shaloub-Kervorkian show that religion has served states across the world in legitimating claims to sovereignty in order to justify oppressive policies.
Whether it is Zionist claims to an exclusively Israeli Jewish state, Hindutva claims to an exclusively Indian Hindu state, or Sinhalese Buddhist claims to an exclusively Buddhist Sri Lankan state, in various settings political leaders in ostensibly secular states have drawn on religious claims to shore up their authority and suppress dissent. In addition to these examples, others discussed in the book include Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, and Palestine. The risk in bringing so many different examples together under one volume is that any generalizable results will be lost in the details. However, by laying out a framework within which these essays operate in their introduction, the co-editors persuasively show how nationalism, religion, and the state have been forged in the fires of western modernity and spread around the world.
The contributors to the symposium on this important book toggle between providing their own examples of the sacralization of political claims and the wider theoretical claims with which the book asks us to reckon. Gladys Ganiel draws on her research in Northern Ireland to show the importance of analyzing political and social structures in changing political and social realities. She contends that future work on religion should also focus on the everyday, intimate experiences of religion. Joram Tarusarira, meanwhile, compares the cases in the book with that of Zimbabwe, especially in the religious rhetoric surrounding former President Robert Mugabe and the churches that shored up his authority. His claim, in the end, is theologically normative (and echoes the prophetic strain in Christianity): When Christians become more invested in shoring up political power, they risk forgetting their mission to challenge authority.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Raef Zreik move in more theoretical directions. Hurd engages with the risk inherent in the co-editors contention that secularization would lead to more peaceful societies. Unlike the postsecular critics mentioned up front in this essay, however, Hurd is keen to show that unravelling the theological roots of the secular is not simply an academic exercise, but instead is one that allows us to address substantial issues of inequality more directly. It does so by drawing our attention to different modes of religious interpretation that might otherwise be obscured if we were to assume that all religion is poisonous. Raef Zreik wrestles with the need for conceptual knowledge but also the need to tie conceptual knowledge to material contexts. He traces the desire for abstraction back to Immanuel Kant and follows it through to other major figures and trends in US and European philosophy. In doing so, Zreik asks us to reckon with the deeper theoretical stakes of comparative work like that carried out by the contributors to this book.
Given the genealogical turn that has no doubt also influenced the postsecular turn, comparative studies are often seen as inherently risky. Do they not obscure the particularities of a situation in order to advance a generalizable thesis? What Rouhana and Shaloub-Kervorkian, along with the contributors to this edited volume and symposium show, is that it is possible to engage in comparative work that is attentive to history, social and political complexity, and diversity without losing track of the more abstract concepts that are necessary to compare cross-culturally. In doing so, they remind us that we cannot restrain our work to one context. This is because even though modernity, secularization, and nationalism may have roots in the west, their effects have extended far beyond that origin.
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.
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In the postsecular moment that the humanities now finds itself in, it is tempting to regard the questioning of the role of religion in politics as one that is old hat. Religion has always been political postsecular critics of liberalism and its secular framework have argued. In this instance, the postsecular represents the demystification of secular reason as neutral with regard to religion and invites renewed inquiry into the theological roots of secularity. Given this claim, our duty as scholars is to reveal the entanglements of religion with the state rather than contest them. And yet, without necessarily questioning the analytic truth of the co-constructed nature of religion and politics, 