Author Archives: Michael Marten

What kind of ‘minorities’ are the Christians of the Middle East?

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

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This is a comment by Dr Harry Hagopian on issues raised in an earlier article by Michael Marten here on the CR blog, and on Ekklesia.  Dr Hagopian is an international lawyer, ecumenist and EU political consultant. He also acts as a Middle East and inter-faith advisor to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales and as Middle East consultant to ACEP (Christians in Politics) in Paris. He is an Ekklesia associate and regular contributor (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/HarryHagopian). Formerly an Executive Secretary of the Jerusalem Inter-Church Committee and Executive Director of the Middle East Council of Churches, he is now an international fellow, Sorbonne III University, Paris, consultant to the Campaign for Recognition of the Armenian Genocide (UK) and author of The Armenian Church in the Holy Land. Dr Hagopian’s own website is www.epektasis.net. Comments have been turned off for this article.

First and foremost, let me say that it was a pleasure to read the recent feature article by Dr Michael Marten, lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Stirling and a fellow Ekklesia associate. In fact, reading his piece reminded me of my time both as Assistant General Secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut / Cyprus almost a couple of decades ago, and later – more briefly – as Middle East Consultant for Minority Rights Group International in London. Those two mandates might initially appear somewhat incongruous in their focus and objectives, so let me use my experience with both bodies to elaborate on the complex issues involved.

With the Middle East Council of Churches, our ethos was to veer away from any usage of the term ‘minorities’, whether in its religious, ethnic or linguistic connotations. This term was seriously unpopular in ecumenical circles – perhaps even more so now than before – by a large majority of Christians. For those indigenous communities that sprang from the region itself and whose roots predated Islam, they often felt that terms such as ‘minorities’ dispossessed them of their sense of belonging and genuineness as an integral part of the broader fabric of the region.

The term also implied – and still does in some cultural contexts today – that numerical inferiority presupposes an unequal submission to the will of the majority, and that it was (in fact still is in the Middle East and North Africa region today, in the midst of revolutions and popular revolts) reminiscent of an insufferable period of servile dhimmitude and second-class citizenship during Ottoman rule.

It felt almost like someone walking into your own house, throwing you out as owner and taking over not solely because s/he is more powerful but also because s/he has a larger number of family members! The analogy is admittedly self-limiting, but it implies a sense of relative delegitimisation, of powerlessness and vulnerability alike, and ‘minorities’ in the religious, ethnic, linguistic and even cultural senses reject the lack of ‘ownership’ that this term could breed into some psyches.

At Minority Rights Group International, however, the reverse was almost true. The whole ethos and work of this small but skilful NGO – and of many others whether at the UN in Geneva or elsewhere – was the protection of the rights of minorities through a whole raft of international legal instruments. This meant an acknowledgement of this disputatious term so that it would then become possible to deal with it.

In fact, as Patrick Mackelm from the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto queried as far back as 2008, “Why should international human rights law vest members of a minority community, either individually or collectively, with rights that secure a measure of autonomy from the state in which they are located?” But as his argument would proceed, there also exists an alternative account of why minority rights possess international significance, one that trades less on the currency of religion, culture and language and more on the value of international distributive justice.

On this account, international minority rights speak to wrongs that international law itself produces by importing international political reality into a legal order. This tortuous account avoids the normative instabilities of attaching universal value to religious, cultural and linguistic affiliation and challenges instead the international legal order to remedy pathologies of its own making.

In fact, some of those tensions remind me of the revolutions that occurred in Europe since 1989 and reawakened many minority issues that had ostensibly lain dormant during the Soviet era. After all, as Goeff Gilbert from the University of Essex reminded us recently, those issues served as catalysts in formulating the Framework Convention (FCNM) of 1995.

But back to the present Middle Eastern context, though. Here, I am perhaps a bit more familiar with those arguments, perceptions and benchmarks that are prevalent in the sphere of minorities’ existential realities or rights. I dare say that these fears are at times being magnified disproportionately across the board. And so whether in the dealings of the various Christian hierarchs with state institutions and leaders, or else in the osmosis between the older generations of various faith communities, there is one school of thought that says that Christians can best protect their interests ‘under the shadow’ of other, stronger groupings.

After all, if we reel back history, this has been the case with many Christian communities such as the Melkites or Jacobites who sought affiliation and protection with kings and bishops as their statuses became increasingly precarious. Sadly enough, we also witness those same examples in some quarters such as in Syria or Egypt today. But this is also why many Middle Eastern Christians convulse at the idea of being labelled a ‘minority’ and why the contradictions I touched upon between the Middle East Council of Churches and Minority Rights Group International, that appear at first glance to be mutually exclusive, could actually turn into an alliance of purposes. After all, it is perhaps possible to speak of ‘minorities’ – almost teleologically – if that were to avail those communities of the whole spectrum of legal remedies that preserve their rights but still distinguish the definition of this term from its more disparaging, negative, intimidating and unhelpful resonances.

Michael Marten also refers in his piece to a colloquium at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany, where Professor Sidney H Griffith’s The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque was mentioned by one of the speakers as a softer alternative to ‘minorities’. I would assume that the speaker was trying to be sensitive to the allergies associated with this term. But interestingly enough, the very title of this book – whilst highly valuable in itself both in terms of its clarity and simplicity – is not straightforwardly accepted by the culture of many Christian communities in the Middle East and North Africa region either.

In fact, much as this book challenges the scholarship on both Islam and Christianity and should therefore be read carefully, its title has lent itself to some divergent interpretations and it seems to me that some non-Arab Christians have not perhaps taken fully on board the subtleties it evokes in local minds. Nonetheless, the book makes many valid points, not least when it helps dismantle the political (and almost apologetic) propensity in interreligious fora these days of referring to Abraham as “our” common forefather. After all, Jews, Christians and Muslims have often differed and even competed on this important figure from Ur (near Nasiriya, not too far from modern-day Baghdad) rather than agreed upon his legacy and the homopolar nature of its inter-faith significance.

Finally, to conclude my fleeting thoughts with a postscript of my own, let me add that I am delighted that Michael will be teaching an under-graduate module on Minorities in the Middle East. Other than the fact that the term might well work as a ‘quick and dirty’ identifier (as he self-depracatingly puts it!), I would also imagine that the module will address the definition and classification of minorities, and perhaps even raise the hugely pertinent point as to whether minority rights belong to the minority or to its individual members. After all, the younger generations of the Middle East and North Africa region might well feel differently from their elders today in view of the different cultural baggage they bring with them into this ongoing discourse.

So while accepting that the term ‘minorities’ might well stay with us, should we perhaps not be a tad more sparing in its definition and usage, in a way that ensures we do not end up colonising the perceptions of the ‘minorities’ themselves?

Christians as ‘minorities’ in the Middle East?

27 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Many attempts to think about the population groupings in the contemporary Middle East, however that is defined, tend away from terms related to nation-states – a relatively new creation, often on the part of colonial powers – towards other forms of grouping people.  Whilst in terms of international relations analyses, thinking about Jordanians, Iraqis, Egyptians and so on might often make sense, there is also a long-standing tradition of political scientists and anthropologists regularly using tribal and other markers in an attempt to discuss circumstances and events.

One of the most common of these descriptors is an apparently religious marker that breaks down populations into ‘Muslims’ and ‘others’, with the ‘others’ often being called, more charitably,  ‘the minorities’ of the Middle East.  There are many problems with this: primarily that it feeds into binary understandings of the world exemplified by the ‘clash of civilisations‘ model of the world (recently regurgitated in related form by Niall Ferguson, the TV ‘historian’ who has become a rather odious neo-liberal apologist for imperialism), but it also lumps together very different people with different identifiers from an undefined but large area – for example, Berbers in Morocco are a minority, as are Christians in the Gulf, but that does not mean they are connected in a particularly meaningful way.  Apart from anything else, these two minorities are based on constructions of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’ respectively, making it extremely problematic to put them together in a generic ‘minorities’ category, especially one that uses another ostensible ‘religion’ identifier as the main demarcation point.

At a recent Christians in the Middle East and KU Eichstätt conference in Germany that I was involved in organising, this was a topic that came up again and again in subtle ways as participants discussed Relations between Christian churches in the Near and Middle East – theological, historical and political-cultural aspects.  In his keynote lecture Anthony O’Mahony, from London University’s Heythrop College, argued that we should not be seeing Christians in the contemporary Middle East as minorities.  Instead, he suggested using the expression ‘the church in the shadow of the mosque’, which comes from Sidney Griffith’s book with that title.  This, O’Mahony felt, communicated something more: after all, from the mid-seventh century for about 400 years, half the world’s Christians lived under Muslim rule, something most contemporary understandings of church history have ignored altogether.  Under these circumstances, to talk about Christians as a ‘minority’ represents a truth, but only a partial truth, and the widespread links between different communities – Christian and Muslim – belies the vulnerability that the term ‘minority’ often suggests.  Indeed, other speakers confirmed this view in different ways.

Several papers pointed to the links that existed between churches across the region and western institutions.  For example, Robert Clines discussed two Jesuits,  Giovanni Battista Eliano and Tomasso Raggio, sent to reform Lebanese Maronite practice in 1578; the Catholics being in a minority position vis-à-vis the Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations meant that there was great wariness about how these two conducted themselves and what this said about different communities’ identity and relationships to one another.  Within the region, Carsten Walbiner’s contribution discussed the different historiographies of a schism in 1724 between the Greek Orthodox and Greek Melkite churches, and how these divergent understandings even today impact on relations between the two communities and the resultant ideologies that have helped to solidify boundaries between them over time.  In contrast, Christine Lindner (one of my co-organisers, together with Heinz-Otto Luthe), discussed contemporary practices around the Feast of St Barbara in communities in northern Lebanon, which is marked by Greek Orthodox and Maronite Christians, as well as Druse and Muslims.  My own paper looked at how a group of Scottish missionaries in the early 20th century did their best to ignore the differences between Christian communities altogether, almost creating a category of ‘Middle Easterners’, regardless of whether they were Christian, Muslim or Jew.

What these approaches help with is not just a better understanding of the relationships between the churches as hoped for in the original call for the papers, but they also remind us that there is still much to learn about the individuals and communities who engaged with Muslims and the wider world around them in the past, as well as the present.  This also applies beyond the Middle East: for example, it is estimated that 30-40,000 Chaldean Christians from Iraq now live in Australia, and the Patriarch of the Church of the East now resides in Chicago, USA – these changes are just two indicators of the significance of emigration and diaspora for Middle Eastern Christians, and much more research needs to be carried out in this field.  The generic term ‘minorities’ does not do justice to the complexity of the relationships involved, nor does it adequately reflect the nuance of the relationships between the communities and the supposed ‘majority’, itself anything but a monolithic and uniform entity.

– – – – –

As a postscript, I should add that in the coming spring I am teaching an undergraduate module that I have titled… ‘Minorities in the Middle East’.  Why?  In substantial measure it is because despite the objections noted above, in some ways it works as a ‘quick and dirty’ identifier, and I can then, in the first sessions, use the problems with the term to show how difficult and variegated these issues are.  Perhaps I can be accused of making a lazy compromise here, but it seems to me that there are times when terms in common use are helpful, provided their usage is conscious and the problems associated with them can be elucidated.  I’ll see what the cohort of students make of it all…

Harry Hagopian has written a comment piece on this article here.

Musicology and philosophy, religion and political science – the issue of interdisciplinarity

15 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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I have for some time been reflecting on why it is that so few ‘secular’ scholars engage meaningfully with ‘religion’, or to put it another way: why is it that so many of us as religion scholars depend upon and practice disciplinary heterogeneity, whereas many of the scholars we use do not appear to engage substantially with what we write.  My thinking on this has been further prompted by reading a blog entry by J.P.E. Harper-Scott, Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.  He recently wrote about a conference he attended for musicologists and philosophers.  The frustration evident in his posting is clear: the musicologists at his conference engaged actively with a variety of philosophers, but from his perspective at least, few if any of the philosophers engaged seriously with musicologists that he regarded as central to his work.

He outlines his main point as follows:

The musicologists at the conference are interested in philosophy. They read major figures such as Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and so on, and they read the secondary literature too… at least enough to gain perspective on the principal debates… In the main, however, philosophers who are interested in music… do not read musicology. If they did, then their frequently catastrophic failures of definition and unwillingness to engage with – or even conceive of – political, economic, cultural, and historical context for the music, composers (where there are any), performers, listeners, and critics who jointly make up the world we call ‘music’ would show up to them as glaringly as an elementary error in a syllogism. The short form: there will never be meaningful exchange between philosophy and musicology while philosophers fail to read anything as obvious as the major writings of Richard Taruskin.

That I can do no more than acknowledge knowing Taruskin is a musicologist limits any further comment I might make on Harper-Scott’s argument about musicologists and philosophers.  However, as I asked in a comment on his blog, why is it that some disciplines seem to be more interdisciplinary than others?  After all, the experience he describes is far from unique.  I want to develop my relatively unformed comment a little in this blog posting.

Many of us working in the field of ‘religion’ depend upon a variety of other disciplines – such as political science, philosophy, history, linguistics, phenomenology and more – to help us understand the phenomena we are dealing with.  Consequently, numerous scholars who are not directly involved in ‘religion’ as a discipline inform the work that I (and many other colleagues) pursue.  For example, in a relatively short essay soon to appear in what promises to be a useful collection on Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (eds. Hilde Nielssen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Karina Hestad Skeie), I refer to the following scholars (in order of appearance): Gen Doy, Simon Gikandi, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler, Benedict Anderson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edward Casey, Jeremy Black, Hélène Gill, Victor Turner, Homi Bhabha, Karina Hestad Skeie, Pierre Bourdieu, Christine Lindner, Andrew Ross, Susan Thorne, David Richards, Lester Irwin Vogel, Bill Marshall, Robert Young, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.  This list reveals a fairly clear ideological bias, but it also suggests a wide range of disciplines that I draw on for my paper – and in this regard I see myself as a typical religion scholar: most of the interesting ‘religion’ work I read uses these scholars and many more.

However, few of the scholars I mentioned not explicitly working in the field of religion (such as Skeie, Lindner, Ross, Thorne, Vogel) appear to engage very much with religion scholars of any hue, even if we think of ‘religion’ in extremely broad terms.  Why is it that so few ‘secular’ scholars fail to engage meaningfully with ‘religion’?  For example, Said’s dismissal of missionaries in Orientalism has been commented on adversely by many – though that has not stopped scholars using his work creatively (one might think directly of work such as Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East).

However we understand ‘religion’, whether as a category or as a field of study – and there are issues here that go to the core of what we think the discipline of ‘religion’ is about – Harper-Scott, in his response to my comment, identifies the problem in ontic/ontological terms.  I can see a validity to this understanding, though I would express it slightly differently and perhaps point to the idea of ‘professionalism’, as Said called it in his 1993 Reith Lectures (Representations of the Intellectual, New York: Vintage, 1994: 73-4; rather wonderfully, the BBC have made it possible to listen to his lectures online).

Said argues that amongst other things, professionalism induces specialisation.  One very clear way in which this manifests itself in the contemporary context is in governmental assessment exercises.  In the UK, for example, academics are required to write several pieces of work that can be entered into the RAE, or REF, or whatever the government’s lackeys of the day decide to call the arbitrary quantification of academic ‘output’ – even the word induces nausea – as if writing an article is being equated with factory production.  These ‘outputs’ are assessed by other academics in ‘the same field’, the idea being that political scientists are best placed to peer review and assess the work of other political scientists, religion scholars can best do the same for their colleagues, and so on.  Of course, there is an inherent logic here, but one of the problems with this approach is that it fosters increased specialisation, and in turn, Said argues, this leads to shutting out other disciplines; from the perspective of a literary scholar:

Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge; as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies.  To be a specialist in literature too often means shutting out history or music, or politics. (p77)

The production of ‘impersonal theories or methodologies’ fits the stereotype of the academic in the wider public, but this is core of the problem.  What happens to the disciplines that have been shut out?  Simplistically put, they often tend to shut out other disciplines too, the consequence being atomisation – whilst this makes control by university administrators and management much easier, it tends to deaden wide-ranging intellectual and public engagement.  And it is precisely engagement – in the academy and the wider world – that Said argues for.  Not as a ‘professional’ he points out, but as an amateur, engaging in ‘an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization'(p82); this sounds remarkably similar to Harper-Scott’s description of musicologists’ approach to philosophy.  Said is not suggesting that this is easy, far from it!  His Humanism and Democratic Criticism (esp. ch. 5) discusses further some of the immense difficulties involved (and he is not the only one to deal with these issues, as, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus demonstrates).

However, the obvious difficulties involved do not obviate the necessity of such engagement.  Of course, if it is impossible to see how one’s academic life might relate to the wider world, it will be difficult to see how it could relate to other academics, and how other academics could relate to it.  What connects the list of scholars noted above in relation to my essay is their general willingness to engage across and beyond the boundaries of ‘their’ discipline, whether this be politics, economics, or history etc., however hard it may be.  Indeed, it is probably appropriate to argue that some of the most stimulating scholars are those who explicitly engage with other disciplines and the wider world.  The apparent failure, often, to engage with religion is therefore all the more puzzling.

There is, of course, a difference in the way musicologists and religion scholars have dealt with some of the issues raised by postmodern thinkers: I think it is probably impossible for most musicologists to deny the existence of ‘music’ and the attendant emotional and physical engagement that the practice of music, however defined, can offer.  Engagement, as Said calls it, has multiple levels; with some scholars essentially denying the existence of religion as a phenomenon enabling emotional and psychological engagement and seeing it only as a category of study, it is perhaps understandable that scholars from other disciplines might see what we think of as important as actually being irrelevant.

I suspect this is perhaps part of the issue for many who see themselves outwith the discipline of religion: a lack of personal engagement with religion – however defined – means they regard themselves as ‘secular’ without ever really thinking about what that term means (in other words, they ‘don’t believe in god’ and therefore they must be ‘secular’).  In this kind of thinking, ‘secular’ is the mainstream and ‘religion’ is seen as an optional but largely irrelevant add-on.  From such a starting point there is no reason to think an understanding of religion might have a substantial bearing on political science, history, economics etc.  Perhaps this stems from a mistaken understanding that there is ‘a universal definition of religion’ that can be compartmentalised away, failing to recognise historical contingencies and discursive constructions arising from and impacting upon politics, history, economics and so on (as Talal Asad would perhaps argue).  That precise problematic is, of course, one of the key issues that the Critical Religion Research Group is seeking to address in its programmes, and my colleagues and I seek to explore different aspects of this in our various blog postings.  As the summer is upon us and we look back at nearly six months of postings on a variety of topics, it is to be hoped that a helpful contribution to the furtherance of interdisciplinarity and understanding of the place of ‘the study of religion’ has been made.

‘The study of religion’ (as it is often called) is ‘an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary mode of engagement: incorporating many disciplines, but also going beyond the limits of any one discipline’ (as we say here).  Reflecting on what it is we are thinking about when we think about ‘religion’ helps us cross disciplinary boundaries and engage with wider questions, and can, in fact, only happen by doing so.  Perhaps the philosophers at Harper-Scott’s conference left with a greater awareness of the importance of engaging with musicologists’ work; similarly we hope that ‘non-religion’ scholars will find what we do stimulates further engagement with some of the questions we are dealing with.  Conversing with other religion scholars is good – conversing with people from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds is even better!

(I would like to gratefully acknowledge comments from Richard Roberts on an early draft of this posting, though he is not, of course, to blame for any inconsistencies etc. in my text.)

The murder of Osama bin Laden – the end of the beginning of the clash of civilisations?

02 Monday May 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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This morning I awoke to the news that Osama bin Laden was dead, murdered by the United States of America in a what appears to have been a heavily fortified compound in Pakistan; more precise details will no doubt emerge over time. The news is currently being presented in such a way as to suggest capture, not death, was the objective, though whether that was in any way realistic is open to serious debate: surely resistance was expected, and so the statement that bin Laden ‘did resist the assault force’ should come as no great surprise.

Although bin Laden was regarded as significant in many western policy circles, serving as a very useful oppositional figure (and one we will no doubt see replaced in a short time), he was not highly regarded by most Muslims, who saw his understanding of Islam as being no less abhorrent than many Christians’ perspectives of Hitler’s understanding of Christianity. His significance lay in substantial measure in his elevation to a position as ‘super-terrorist’ by US Presidents Clinton, Bush (the Lesser) and Obama on the one hand, and every self-serving dictator claiming to be an ally of the USA-led actions against ‘international terror’ on the other: indeed, one might reasonably argue that bin Laden was emboldened by all the attention he received.

In substantial part this way of thinking about bin Laden arose from a racist strand of thought that was articulated in American neoconservative thinktanks, represented most publicly in two different though related books: Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Samuel Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Fukuyama has since distanced himself a little from his thesis, though he is still firmly in the neoconservative camp).  Huntingdon’s book in particular has been influential well beyond its literary or intellectual merit. His thesis of distinct civilisational or religious blocs – one of them being Islam – that were in competition or even war with one another dominated Bush’s administration, in particular as it suited his own simplistic dualism of good and evil struggling against each another. Although strenuously denied by Obama and especially by his immediate supporters, this kind of thinking has continued without change, albeit in more nuanced form, as the ‘drone war’ amply illustrates.

This thinking is not confined to conservative thinktanks and policy-makers, however, as the cheering crowds outside the White House celebrating bin Laden’s murder demonstrate. There is clearly no understanding of bin Laden’s significance or otherwise beyond American (and to a lesser extent, European) interests, and the conflation of his thinking into ‘fundamentalist Islam’ (as Tony Blair and others called it) simply highlights the paucity of intelligent reflection and comment (for a better assessment, the Independent’s Robert Fisk offers careful engagement with bin Laden and his changing thought in The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East). In fact, bin Laden’s death is largely irrelevant to most Muslims in the Middle East and South East Asia, beyond perhaps removing a stigma that had become attached to idea of Islam – this is how we can read the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s statement that bin Laden’s death has removed one of the causes of violence in the world. Bin Laden was not a cleric, had no formal training in Islamic law, spoke for no government, no substantial movement and had few followers: it is hard to underestimate his irrelevance to most Muslims, who might have agreed with his assessment of the cause of problems faced by Muslims, but disagreed with his proposed methodology for dealing with these problems, as Tony Karon has argued.  In so far as localised movements used or use the al Qaida name, whether in Iraq, in the Arabian Peninsula or elsewhere, it was and is always as part of a nationalist or irredentist movement, riding on the coat-tails of a wealthy supporter of attacks against a perceived enemy of Islam. As the name itself suggests (it translates simply as ‘the base’), people don’t really ‘join’ al-Qaida, they simply adopt the name if it suits them at that particular moment in time.

And that is a key issue: these nationalist movements will not go away unless some meaningful compromise or agreement can be reached on issues they are addressing. We might not sympathise with their modes of engagement, but their causes are often at least partially legitimate. None of this is about what we might think of as ‘religion’ in the sense of Islam being a key issue: these are struggles over land, rights, political engagement, freedom and the like, though they may be presented as being about Islam by some. Even bin Laden saw nationalist struggles as significant: one of his most important early demands was the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia (he saw this as a violation of the land of Mecca and Medina, the two foremost holy cities in Islam), and his aim of defeating America in the same way (he claimed) he had defeated the Soviet Union was at least in part about liberating Muslims from American influence.

So if Americans and Europeans now think that they can begin to relax over the prospect of ‘international terror’, they are very mistaken. US policy in particular is catastrophically misaligned in the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia (where the majority of the world’s Muslims live), proclaiming democracy, whilst propping up regimes that clearly only serve US interests rather than the interests of the people of these countries. For those who hitherto refused to see this reality it has been made very clear over the last year, with two key factors playing a role: the first is Wikileaks and the unprecedented insight into US-policy making it offers, and the second is the ‘Arab spring’, as al-Jazeera elegantly calls the uprisings across the Middle East. Bin Laden was a minor, irrelevant issue in this context: he had not commented significantly on any of the current issues, had not engaged in any noticeable way with the rebellions, and so his murder, whilst perhaps a satisfying act of violent revenge for Americans, serves no useful or meaningful purpose in resolving these wider global conflicts.

After all, US and European policies towards Muslim-dominated countries in the Middle East and South East Asia are unlikely to change simply because bin Laden is now dead, and so rather than this really being the end, this is more likely to be the end of the beginning. So long as Americans and Europeans continue to think in simple dichotomies of good (us) and evil (them), advanced (us) and primitive (them), having rights (us) and threatening our rights (them), and so on, the ‘clash of civilisations’ will continue. Huntingdon thought he was describing a reality, when in fact he was describing a choice – in classic Marxist/Leninist terms we can see this as an ideologically-driven reversal of cause and effect designed to preserve existing systems of dominance. When viewed through a Fukuyama/Huntingdon lens, religion, culture, civilisations all become more important categories of analysis than they deserve to be in the wider struggle for rights, self-determination and freedom. If US and European policy continues to follow a doctrinaire view of the world as split into competing or warring blocs based on misappropriated understandings of religions, civilisations and cultures – note the plurals – rather than understanding the hybridity and connectedness underpinning our world, continuing conflict and equivalent resistance is assured.  Sometimes that resistance will take the form of so-called acts of terror. Whether the tears of an Afghan mother or father mourning the death of a child in a drone attack ‘defending American freedom’ are worth the same as the tears of an American mother or father mourning the death of a child in an attack on ‘imperialist invaders’ is an active choice we make. We can make that choice and we can vote for governments that make that choice, but if we choose to prioritise our needs, our understanding of culture, religion or civilisation, then we must always expect that others will contest that. Murdering bin Laden does not help with these choices, rather it is simply more of the same: unless we make choices that subvert the dominant paradigm propogated by those that determine our countries’ foreign policy, this might just be the end of the beginning, rather than the beginning of the end of the clash of civilisations.

A polemic on the World Interfaith Harmony Week

28 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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On 26.10.2010, the United Nations General Assembly voted unanimously to create World Interfaith Harmony Week, a resolution first proposed by King Abdullah II of Jordan, who, together with his brother Prince Hassan, has long been a proponent of such things, partly also for domestic political reasons.  The first week of February has been designated as World Interfaith Harmony Week, to be marked around the world, with governments encouraged to support and promote the aims and objectives of this week.

But I think there is a fundamental problem here: I don’t think there is or can be any such thing as interfaith (or interreligious) dialogue.  I do not, of course, have any objection to the creation of a week dedicated to greater harmony in the world.  Nobody could really deny the merits of increasing harmony between people and peoples on personal and global levels: after all, the problems of sexism, racism, war etc. are all around us, and indeed, often seem to overwhelm us.  The problem here lies with the ‘interfaith’ element.  Of course, there can be dialogue between individuals who might describe themselves in particular faith terms.  But whilst acknowledging that there are differences between the terms ‘faith’ and ‘religion’, and that what 10 or 20 years ago used to be ‘interreligious dialogue’ is now ‘interfaith dialogue’ (and I caricature only slightly here!), I want to argue that the premises of such dialogue as ‘interfaith dialogue’ do not stand up to substantial critical scrutiny.

Tracing the usage of the term ‘religion’ over the centuries, we can see it changing in different contexts.  For example, in the Catholic/Protestant West, we can point very broadly (and, admittedly, rather simplistically) to changes in understanding over recent centuries:

  1. initially seen as being Christian (having religion) OR being apostate (not having religion), this changed with colonialism to
  2. an understanding of religion predicated upon a different form of normativity and closely connected to racism: people were either religious (Christian or some other – generally ‘inferior’ – recognised form of belief that western Christians considered to be in some way similar to their understanding of Christianity; the ‘creation of Hinduism’ being a perfect example of this, as scholars such as Geoffrey Oddie have discussed), OR they were superstitious or heathen (their practices were not understood by western missionaries and colonialists; so-called ‘African traditional religions’ are a perfect example of this), on to
  3. a more contemporary ideological understanding of many religions, of which Christianity is but one amongst equals, alongside the so-called ‘other great religions of the world’.

The main problem with this understanding is that it equates an essentialised understanding of what Christian faith is with an essentialised understanding of what Muslim tradition, Jewish practice, Hindu belief etc. is.  In doing so, all of these traditions are divorced from the individuals who see themselves as adherents, practitioners, devotees etc. – even the description of what people do and are in these different contexts is problematic!

If we think about the term ‘faith’ we can point to similar problems: for example, what does faith mean for a Christian, and what does it mean for a Jew?  Firstly there is again the problem of essentialisation – ask one Christian or one Jew about their understanding, and their Christian or Jewish neighbour may well offer quite a different one.  But even if we could put this aside (and I don’t think we really can), we might say that a Christian would point to the centrality of salvific belief through the death and resurrection of Jesus for her ‘faith’, whilst a Jew would point to the centrality of grateful obedience and freedom in God’s law for his ‘faith’.  In other words, we are comparing almost entirely different understandings of belief and practice – whilst pretending that all these things can be described equally as ‘faith’ (or indeed, religion).

We can see these problems even on the WIHW website, which has the byline ‘Love of God & Love of the Neighbour, or Love of the Good & Love of the Neighbour’.  An ‘or’ clause is certainly one way of attempting to cover all bases: it is, after all, something of a cliché to ask who the ‘God’ is that a Buddhist might be directing their attention to (a Buddhist from Britain, India, Tibet…? again, essentialisation), but whether ‘the Good’ is an appropriate alternative universal truth comparable to any given individual’s understanding of God, has to be open to question.  The sentiment behind the creation of ‘Harmony Beads’ for use in prayer by Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Catholics is another example of such muddled thinking.

So if neither faith nor religion can serve as useful comparative or relational concepts, it is perhaps intellectually more honest and practically more fruitful to abandon the pretence of ‘interfaith’ dialogue in favour of simple ‘interhuman’ dialogue.  It is, after all, in relationships that we discover ourselves and one another, rather than in monolithic ideological constructs founded on varying precepts.  If our theologies, principles, religious laws or injunctions hinder or prevent such relationships, then that is surely what we should be seeking to address and change.  After all, if dialogue between individuals can be centred around a demanding common task such as the creation of just economic systems and sustainable ecological environments, the overcoming of patriarchy or liberation from oppressive political regimes (the list could go on!), then these human connections will also lead to improved understanding of what moves and motivates engagement by each individual, whether they describe this as faith, religion, belief, practice, ritual… and that will be a more meaningful encounter than any World Interfaith Harmony Week can possibly lead to.

Performative prayer and ‘comparing’ religion

14 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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It is often acknowledged that Christian tradition in what we commonly call ‘the West’ was transformed after the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian: what had been a subversive and marginalised practice originating with a poor man at the insignificant edge of the Roman Empire became part of the imperial power structures.  This intimate connection of Christian belief with the exercise of power persists: think, for example, of Anglican bishops exercising power in the British House of Lords (even that connection with lords is deeply problematic for many).  Christian complicity with power has often been criticised for underpinning patriarchy, colonialism, racism and other forms of oppression.  Stanley Hauerwas and others describe this as ‘Constantinian Christianity’.

One of the consequences of Constantinian Christianity is what we might call the privatisation of belief, by which I here mean that only forms of practice supportive of existing power structures can take place in the public sphere, whereas practices that might question such power are repressed and consigned to the private sphere.  For example, whilst in Britain both Houses of Parliament are routinely opened with prayer, attempts to engage in prayers of protest outside nuclear submarine bases often result in arrests.  Such connections with power – and resistance to it – manifest themselves in other contexts too, as we have had the opportunity to witness these last few days in Egypt.  Egypt’s revolution has not been an ‘Islamic revolution’, but Islam has been used by some protesters as a powerful tool to subvert the dominant paradigm.

Though direct comparisons between ‘Constantinian Christianity’ and the situation in Egypt are extremely problematic (as I’ll explain below), it is not unreasonable to note the ‘Constantinian’ nature of Mubarak’s regime, which, building on measures by his predecessors Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdul Nasser, sought to control every area of public life, including the mosque and the church.  For example: Ahmed al Tayeb, the head of Al Azhar, one of the world’s premier institutions of Sunni scholarship, was a loyal Mubarak supporter and senior member of the National Democratic Party (none of the three claimed attributes in that name were in any way connected to reality), and both Tayeb and his predecessor, Sheikh Mohammad Sayed Tantawi, had been appointed by the president, resulting almost automatically in a certain measure of complicity with the regime.

Despite these factors, after the internet in Egypt was turned on again after several days of disconnection, reflections on resistance from within Al Azhar began to emerge.  This short text regarding an appropriate response to the protests is clear about the way in which Muslims could respond to the protests:

A person may ask “How can we help them when some of them (who are protesting) are not religious?”

The principles of this religion, particularly enjoining the good and forbidding the evil, proves that we should be in the aid of anyone who works towards establishing a good or eradicating an evil, even if they are corrupt themselves. This is because we all, collectively, are included in the statement of Allah: “And cooperate in righteousness and piety, but do not cooperate in sin and aggression.” (Qur’an, 5:2)

The revolution has been notable for the diversity of the participants, but resistance has at times incorporated Muslim practice, perhaps building on opinions such as that from Sheikh Muhammad Abdul Maqsood quoted here.  This video clip of protesters in Cairo overcoming the armed security services is well worth watching to the end (it’s just under 10 minutes long).  Note the use of prayer beginning at about 3:25: even though the might of the forces railed against the protesters (including the violence of the water cannon) may have led them to feel a need for prayer, in this setting it is anything but a ‘privatised’ action.  It is a performative act that serves to temper the aggression of the security forces who are directly facing the praying protesters, even as they are being attacked by the water cannon.  Towards the end of the video, from about 8:15 onwards, the protesters successfully take the bridge, and many of them engage in renewed prayer.

For those seeking to compare Christian and Muslim prayer using examples such as these, many traps await, from Orientalism and racism, to methodological dead ends and intellectual dishonesty.  The suggestion that we can equate what Christian and Muslim prayer means and does in these contexts is far from helpful in trying to understand what is taking place here.  The parallels we can observe centre most dramatically on the extent to which these power structures seek to claim for themselves hegemony over all areas of life, and the creative ways in which such claims might be subverted.  Whilst in no way seeking to diminish the power of the prayer for the participants, the performative nature of the Cairo protest perhaps works because the security forces recognise what is happening and it undermines the connection between the power they represent and the (supposedly) privatised practice that Muslims are expected to engage in.  We are likely to understand such situations more readily by examining the social and political pressures involved for both the protesters and the security forces, rather than seeking to make broad statements equating Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices.