Category Archives: Critical Religion

Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness

21 Thursday Mar 2013

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Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness. Ashgate, 2012.

Pamela Sue Anderson has just published her second full-length book on the feminist philosophy of religion and I would argue that it has been well worth the wait! The ruling metaphor of the book is taken directly from an essay by poet/feminist Adrienne Rich (“When We Dead Awaken,” 1971) who wrote about the necessity of ‘re-visioning’ the past. Re-visioning indicates the vital life-giving work of looking back at the traditions of the past, ‘seeing with new eyes,’ entering from a new critical – in this case, feminist – direction. Only by confronting powerful past assumptions about women contained within their styles and stories can we hope to move on from the distortions all of us – men, women, the transgendering – have suffered on the account of sexist or misogynistic structures and systems.

In this spirit of re-visioning Anderson provides us with a range of meticulously worked through examples. Feminists of course have been discussing the issues for a while – in 1998, the year in which Anderson’s first essay into this area – A Feminist Philosophy of Religion phil, Blackwells – was published, another feminist philosopher of religion, Grace Jantzen proposed her own solution – Becoming Divine, Manchester University Press – to the problem of sexist or misogynistic structures in ‘religion’ by suggesting that what women needed was a parallel concept of the feminine divine, that could contest the violent, death-obsessed stories of masculine divinity in the Christian west. Now as then Anderson resists this path on the grounds that divinity is not a free-floating concept, but one already caught up in a web or gendered interpretation. Yet for those who think the issue is ‘over and done with’ Anderson’s book shows clearly that she thinks a kind of scepticism and complacency about gender still very much exists, not the least in discussions that take place under the heading of the academic study of the philosophy of religion. It is a kind of scepticism or complacency made apparent, for example, in the words of a theologian like, T J Mawson, who claims that ‘“no sensible theist has ever thought that God really does have a gender”’ or in the view that provided one is ‘clear-headed’, patriarchal bias can be avoided (Anderson, 2012, 176). As Anderson patiently but quite relentlessly, persists “the point is to question whether ‘clear-headed’ thinking can avoid any gender-bias in the traditional philosophical arguments for Christian theism, especially when such terms as person, action and love, along with adjectives like personal, incorporeal, loving and the pronouns he, his and him are all applied to God’ (Anderson, 2012, 176). There are also many references in this book to the work of French philosopher, Michèle Le Doeuff and to her idea – the ‘philosophical imaginary’ – that whilst gender bias and sexism are not very often on display in plain sight in our civilised western society, they invariably inform the spaces behind or inbetween, where we find ‘stories about men and women, myths about divine and human, imagery and asides about male omniscience and female humility’ (205-206). In other words, the fact that someone like Mawson can afford to ignore his own ‘epistemic locatedness’ has as much to do with the philosophical imaginary that is sustaining his unacknowledged privilege as a male academic theologian – the assumption of male neutrality – as it has to do with any genuinely universal validity to his argument, philosophically interrogated.

And this is what Anderson dares to do in a field that is notoriously challenging for women, defying in a spirit of love and justice, any suggestion that women cannot be philosophers of religion or that they cannot enter and offer insight to any philosophical discussion they might choose. She is rigorous, tenacious and undaunted, equally at home with the broad traditions of analytical and continental philosophy and always ready to challenge, on reasoned grounds, the implication that ‘here at least’ there is no ‘gender issue.’ So for example, in citing a discussion held in 1999, between the ‘continental’ philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Oxford ‘analytical’ philosopher, A.W. Moore on the ineffable – already a rich and lively philosophical debate touching on knowledge, truth and the infinite – she does not dismiss the discussion but neither does she flinch from making the point that these considerable thinkers do not make reference to gender when it would be philosophically appropriate to do so:

There may be a common core concern in the variety of masculinist, feminist and other philosophical attempts to show what is ineffable. Yet when we add gender to the mix it suddenly becomes clear that values are added to the task: philosophy is called to be serious or playful, sense-making or nonsense-producing, effable or ineffable, rational or corrupt; the values of these terms and their gender seem initially arbitrary; but they matter when it comes to ethics and justice, if not a sort of truth, that is worth having. Certainly, if we follow Moore an urge to orientate our finiteness, in knowing how to be finite, exists and it seems most valuable. However, to exploit this urge, in order to establish a (more) common concern: to better orientate our finiteness, we do perhaps need to admit the gendering of our relations. (Anderson, 2012, 85-86).

Critically speaking, whatever ‘religion’ might be in this philosophical context – and Anderson recognises other kinds of assumptions about the use of the term, aside from those relating to privileges of gender – this re-visioning or rich philosophical probing of epistemic locatedness in relation to traditional so-called ‘religious’ stories about love, reason and truth, provides us with an impressive model of how to ‘come at’ the philosophical imaginary, not simply destroying or dismissing the texts and discussions of the past, but having the courage to take them on from new perspectives – and therefore being able to ‘live afresh’ (“When We Dead Awaken’’).

Performing Gender and Sexuality in Early 20th Century India

25 Monday Feb 2013

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Contemporary understandings of Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam (also known as Indian classical music and dance, respectively) as ‘religious’ arts that represent Hinduism and Indian culture originated within a very specific historical context: the Indian nationalist movement in the 1920s colonial city of Madras; Partha Chatterjee, discussing a similar movement in Bengal, describes this as ‘Classicization’ (Nation and Its Fragments, 1997, p73). The nationalist movement in Madras was a ‘culture-defining’ project in which music and dance were carefully re-constructed by pruning specific practices and traditions to represent the ‘pure’ inner sphere of spirituality that would displace the outer sphere of colonial politics. Such re-defining of performance arts mystified music and dance performances as ‘religious’ (read: Hindu) experiences and gendered the performances by defining femininity within the politics of nationalism. According to this emerging nationalistic patriarchy, whilst the outer/’material’ world belonged to men, the inner/’spiritual’ world ‘assigned’ to women had to be protected and nurtured. The nationalist politics created a new hyper-feminine middle-class woman defined by monogamous conjugal relationships as the Hindu way of life. This woman was defined by her sexual propriety who, through her spirituality, had to maintain the cohesion of family life whilst the man succumbed to the pressures of the material world.

Discourses on women’s sexual propriety as a pivotal point of re-defining performance arts specifically targeted communities traditionally performing music and dance, the devadāsis. Devadāsi (literally: ‘Servant of God’) referred to diverse categories of women (and occasionally men) who learned and performed dance and music within diverse settings such as temples or royal courts, festivals and private ceremonies for their patrons. They lived in a matrilineal set-up within a patriarchal society in which they had the right to education and property and enjoyed a high societal status as nityasumangali (eternally auspicious). However, in the early 20th century discourses on ‘purifying’ performance arts focused on two aspects of their tradition: a) they were not bound by monogamous conjugal arrangements; these courtesans went through dedication rituals after which they entered concubinage of the king or became mistresses of their patrons; b) traditionally they performed (among others) compositions that were erotic poems portraying explicit sexual acts (usually between the hero and heroine of the poem/story). A focus on the devadāsi community, which had a historically significant presence in South India, as a symbol of immorality emerged due to a set of historical developments beginning in the mid-19th century. As court patronages diminished devadāsis moved to Madras and set up salon performances for the newly urbanized audiences, both native and European. The mid-19th century saw transformations in colonial representations of devadāsis from performers of arts (from a tradition outside of monogamous conjugal relationships) to ‘prostitutes’ who could perform dance and music. This description, ‘prostitutes’, was affirmed by a series of Anglo-Indian laws passed during the late 19th century modeled after Britain’s Contagious Diseases Act that targeted ‘prostitutes’ catering to British soldiers, and brought devadāsis under the laws. Judicial definitions, coupled with the influence of the Purity Campaign in 1880s Britain, triggered a politics of morality that resulted in a ‘devadāsi-reform’ movement, which saw devadāsis as moral deviants from whom sacred music and dance had to be rescued.

The early 20th century focus on nationalism and Hinduism, in addition to transforming perceptions of devadāsis, resulted in the movement that defined female sexuality in the public sphere by drawing distinctions between the divine and the erotic. Thus, not only was the divine redefined to indicate a nostalgic pure religious and Hindu past, but the erotic was also redefined as sexual impropriety. Reformers petitioned the government to abolish the devadāsi tradition; the movement was spearheaded by Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, who was born into a devadāsi family but rejected the tradition. Her movement received support from (among others) the theosophist Annie Besant and Gandhi, who argued that music and dance were sacred but had been despoiled by devadāsis who had to be rehabilitated to become respectable middle-class women bound and defined by their monogamous conjugal relationships. Despite opposition from the devadāsi community, the Devadāsi Abolition Act was passed in 1947. Devadāsis were thus banned from performing dance and music within a salon set-up.

Whilst the vacuum in the performance space left by devadāsis was being filled by middle-class Brahmin women encouraged by nationalists and organizations such as the Madras Music Academy, these spaces were also being deified. Specifically, Rukmini Devi Arundale, a prominent theosophist and protégé of Anne Besant, employed stagecraft that reified Bharatnatyam as ‘religious dance’ by conducting a series of performances where she incorporated chants of Sanskrit verses and displayed an icon of Natarāja, an incarnation of the god Shiva in his form as a cosmic dancer, thereby representing the cosmic connection between art and the divine. She introduced sets of compositions in her performances that extolled Natarāja. While the devadāsi repertoire was removed from temple settings, Arundale adopted temple settings to her performance stage through portable temple background sets, thereby deifying the performance space. In contemporary Bharatnatyam performances, the presence of Natarāja idols and temple-setting backgrounds are ubiquitous.


(In this video, The image in the background is of Shiva, of whom Natarāja is an incarnation. The song is about Natarāja.)

The history of Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam posits a focus on (among other issues) questions of embodiment and the female body. That the female body is impure had been established in the case of devadāsis within the politics of nationalism: music and dance representing the divine, their ‘sacred’ (read: ‘Hindu’) past therefore had to remain ‘pure’. The dimension of embodiment of music and dance permitted by patriarchy represents a dichotomy between the soul and the body in which the soul is the pure inner sphere that connects the performer to the divine, whilst the body represents the material outer sphere that needs to be removed from the context. Women as custodians of this inner spiritual sphere were to learn and perform these arts, thus embodying them, but had to remove the erotic from their performances, which were seen as belonging to the sacred inner space. This solidified the understanding that ‘true religion’ was sacred and must be distinguished from the non-sacred.

Approaching contemporary Christian faith in the Western academy

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

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Our general efforts of bridging the gap between our own socio-cultural parameters in research of other faith traditions no doubt has developed its own tradition and its own ethics of interdisciplinarity. It might then be necessary to reflect on the fact that aside from phenomena such as New Age or so-called sectarian fringe groups in society, it is also important to take stock of the course taken by once dominant and normative traditions, notably the Christian churches. In many ways their practices continue to be pervasive to many formative choices in constructing a symbolic imaginary – be that consciously in affirmation or rejection, subconsciously in modi of repression, or pre-consciously, i.e. without a prior awareness that elements adopted within a socio-cultural or political symbolic have had Christian “religious” origins. This is in part what the Critical Religion project is seeking to address.

The bold declaration of a “post-Christian secular” West, as has been elaborated across various fields and disciplines, has changed the influence and public emphasis ascribed to the institution of the Church (I mean this at a conceptual level, where denominational differences merely amount to a diverging implementation of its institutional character). Heralded almost as a revolutionary struggle to destabilise the institution(s) and its (their) insidious hierarchies, secularisation ushered in an era of research in alternative forms of spirituality (itself a crucial buzz-word), that was to displace the institutional, traditional religiosity of a former age. The phrase “I’m not religious, but…”, to my mind, stems from this particular antagonism between a view of traditional Christianity as naive and ritualistic, and the emergence of a popular, deregulated “spiritual search” which aims to find a relationship to “something sacred” in life, free-from disciplinary boundaries, a peculiar form of religious diet. Our postmodern sensibilities thrive on this kind of absolved freedom that does not need to submit to the regulation of the norm, does not have to answer to the need of the many. “I’m not religious, but…” is an idiom that identifies the wish for spiritual liberation without the risk of material relationship. In other words, each to their own!, even if that means rendering personal spirituality in splendid isolation, both from society and the demands of the public, as well as ultimately from an encounter with oneself as another. ‘I positively feel, in my hideous modern way that I can’t get into touch with my mind’ (as Katherine Mansfield wrote in her Journal (ed John Middleton Murray, NY: McGraw-Hill 1964 repr., p82).  There is no encounter with an o/Other, only a reflection of one’s own urge of spiritual transcendence into nothingness.

What does and what can a critical view on the Christian tradition reveal standing outside of its institutional hierarchy, if not altogether outside its disciplinary conceptions? The history connecting the two institutions, academy and church, is long, and fraught with its own struggles of independence from theology and divinity faculties. The disciplinary differentiation between, for example, theology and (what has become known as) “religious studies”, was seen to follow the trend implicit in the secularisation of the academy that would posit critical rigour and scientific validation of varying research perspectives into competition with each other. The plurality of methods in the field of religious studies amplifies the problematic (and capitalist) ideological assumptions that become apparent when researching questions of institutional power, so tangible in matters ecclesial. Whereas the former is free to identify its self-interest in the hermeneutical horizon that focalises on the church and aspects of Christian living, faith and doctrine, religious studies, in an attempt to question not only the very assumptions of what constitutes any of these elements in interaction with other socio-political and geo-economic concerns, it also has to reflect on its own validatory methods drawn from a range of fields outwith the parameters of classical theology. Thus, its perspectives often drive at a philosophy, psychology, sociology or anthropology in deconstruction of “religion”, instead of organising and constructing frameworks by which to orientate a religious ethics in view of a Christian conception of divinity.

The emphasis I put onto the ethical dimension of disciplinarity here is crucial to the way I rationalise the critical capacity and impact for research into Christian institutional life in the West at present. Ethics, with its emphasis on right relations, on the means of such relationship and the modalities of their interactions offers a sufficient model for conceptualising interdisciplinary inquiry at the level of the text and its metanarrative discourse. Not by chance did discussions on “secular theology” popularised in the works of, for example, John A. T. Robinson (Honest to God, 1963), Paul Tillich (Theology of Culture, 1964) and Dorothee Sölle (Christ the Representative, 1967) tie themselves to a discussion of the ethics of incarnation, establishing theological enquiry at the intersection between anthropology and sociology on the one hand and the political and ideological impact of the institution of doctrine on the other. Whereas philosophy of religion has paved a way for the inquiry into the role of doctrine, and much has been written within and outside of the theological faculty to consider the psychology of worship, I want to suggest that the route to situating the current state of the churches, as institutions and as instituting bodies to the life of participating believers, can be helpfully illuminated by a focus on liturgy, conceptually and practically. In its multidimensional engagement, liturgy can be understood to intersect with every aspect of Christian living, inside and outside strictly ecclesial spaces (Peter Cornehl offers an argument to this effect in Die Welt ist voll von Liturgie, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005). To be reading liturgy outside of a strictly theological concern, I suggest, not only allows investigation of crossing points between spiritual concern and physical embodiment, between individual participation and collective identity, and between a faithful repetition and innovative response to tradition, conceptualising liturgy also allows for a critical assessment from outside the institution that it perpetuates, and invigorates. Liturgy is an invitation to shift disciplinary emphases.

REF and the changing face of Academia

21 Monday Jan 2013

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A while back I was doing a roundtable discussion for the Religious Studies Project and during the discussion one of the participants, Kevin Whitesides, refused to be allowed to be confined to a particular “box”. As is the way of this sort of thing myself and a couple of the other participants turned this into a running joke that Kevin doesn’t wear hats. Unlike Kevin the rest of us are quite happy to wear our academic hats that mark us out as anthropologists, sociologists, phenomenologists or whatever.

I happen to like my phenomenology hat and I imagine all those that do wear hats enjoy wearing them too. In fact our hats are quite important to us, putting on a hat helps us approach our subject because contained within our hats is a wealth of background knowledge. More exactly while I’m wearing the phenomenology hat, it determines the way in which I go about studying my subject. In a similar fashion if I were to wear the sociology hat I would go about my subject in a very different fashion. Now, to talk about wearing or not wearing a hat has always had the flavour of a joke but recently Michael Marten wrote on this blog about the encroaching REF and I started thinking about the wearing of hats in a more serious fashion.

The REF is meant to develop “overall quality” profiles of various departments to assess how much funding they should be recieving and sifting through the website which is sparsely detailed you can find the criteria for assessement here. The overall profile has five levels, four stars to no stars, that will determine how much money a department is due. Stars are awared according to the “quality” of the work an institution provides. I have placed quality in scare quotes because quality is a highly subjective terms and the REF does its best to assess this in terms of the department’s “originality”, “significance” and “rigour”, another set of highly subjective terms that have no definition whatsoever on the REF website. However, these terms don’t really need definition for REF because really the quality profile is determined by three further subprofiles, all graded from four stars to no stars, entitled “Outputs”, “Impact” and “Environment”. Of these three subprofiles “Outputs” occupies a whopping 65% of the overall profile and this again repeats the terms of “originality”, “significance” and “rigour” and again there is no definition as to what is meant.

What I suspect is that “Outputs” will have very little to do with “originality”, “significance” or “rigour” at all. It’s hard to see in fact how the words connect with one another. The title of this subprofile is a quantitative word suggesting that what this subprofile is concerned with is the amount of content a department can produce in a given amount of time. This association is all the more obvious when you notice that it is “Outputs” and not “Output” which is the only plural title among the profiles and sub-profiles on REF. Yet the criteria for this subprofile are all qualitative words which puts them at odds with the quantitative overtone of the profile title. There is no such thing as an originality scale where you can number your work on a scale of one to ten, and even if you could originality is one of the most elusive qualities to be found in academic work. Speaking personally I am acutely aware that more often than not the brilliant ideas I come up with have already been had by some previous scholar. But this does not as such invalidate the work that I do and certainly some of the best work going on right now is building upon what others have already done. Not everything needs to be original in order to be good.

There is a tension between quality and quantity and its one I feel quite regularly. In another podcast I found myself quite intimidated by Carole Cusack’s take on getting a job in academia when she advocated a much higher output of material than I have so far achieved in the second year of my Phd. And having attempted to increase that level of output I’m certainly feeling the strain as various commitments have ground together as they vie for supremecy (book reviews, article publications, tutoring, Taekwondo, my job, the actual thesis itself…). As Nietzsche pointed out, a person led by many virtues will find themselves in situations where those very virtues tear them apart. REF intends to exacerbate this situation by expecting four outputs (articles) by each researcher for each of its submissions. The chances of my getting two “outputs” done by the time I finish my Phd are slim at best but that’s what REF expects. Eventually the choice will have to be made to go with either quantity or quality because I doubt very few people would be able to successfully manage both. And ironically if REF pays attention to the level of journal your “outputs” are going to then the situation becomes ever more difficult. In order to reach the four “outputs” the researcher would have to scimp on quality and thereby send their “outputs” to lower end journals only to have REF deny them because the “quality” isn’t high enough. Admittedly I should temper this by pointing out that four is the maximum “outputs” expected of a researcher for a submission. But with funding becoming scarcer and competition fiercer I wonder how long it is before four becomes the minimum.

There are signs that departments are beginning to favour quantity over quality as pointed out by Michael Marten already which is why I started off speaking about hats. What it comes down to is that in an effort to work REF and get as much money out of it as possible we are starting to take off our hats, but unlike Kevin who refused to wear a hat we are putting on a new hat. The REF hat. What I see with the emerging REF is that people are going to start to cast off our sociological, anthropological and phenomenological hats because these hats won’t gain an institution any money.

It may seem as if there is some defence against this when we look at the neat little categories that make up the 36 units of assessment. But do departments really fit into nice neat little boxes like that? Departments that straddle the nice neat units of assessment (like this one) will suddenly find themselves in danger because they don’t fit so easily. We might be called Critical Religion, but the work done here and by those departments like us covers all 36 of the REF’s units. We belong nowhere and everywhere, and even though our work can and does cover many units this is not likely to score us any points – quite the contrary. If funding is determined by unit and a department covers multiple units it is at a disadvantage because it is not clear which unit it should draw from. Could it mean that when applying for funding in one area, this will be denied because the department doesn’t match all the criteria for that unit? And the danger is that when the pressure’s great and the money’s thin we’ll allow ourselves to remove our hats and wear the REF hat as the only way to survive. But what would the cost of that really be? What sort of work can any department achieve when it is fenced into a little box with no room to manoeuvre of its own accord? Unfortunately, we may find out in 2013/2014…

Creativity, academia and Critical Religion

17 Monday Dec 2012

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It is widely acknowledged amongst those who still care that academia in the UK is in very serious trouble.  The most infamous embodiment of the current malaise is a mechanism imposed upon universities by successive Westminster governments: a system of ‘research assessment’ driven by an ideology of neo-liberal commodification.  Until 2008 it was called the Research Assessment Exercise; it now operates under the equally Orwellian name of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  Readers fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the blight that is the REF may need an explanation: universities submit publications by their scholars to subject-oriented panels of academics, who will assess their relative ‘excellence’, awarding them scores from 1-4 to indicate just how ‘excellent’ they really are.  An accompanying ‘environment’ narrative describing how wonderful these scholars’ departments are is also assessed, as are so-called ‘impact studies’ (the devising of specious measurements of the supposed ‘impact’ of academic work upon non-academics, an idea that barely works in the classical sciences, never mind the humanities).  From all this, an overall score for the department will be given.  That score, in turn, will determine the funding that the state gives each university, though perversely, the exact methodology for that decision has not (yet) been made public.  Of course, many academics and most university bureaucrats have strong vested interests in these outcomes.

The broader ramifications of the REF are apparent in numerous contexts, long before the REF submission deadline at the end of 2013.  Most universities appear to have appointed yet more managers, directors and deputy principals whose primary responsibility is to maximise their institution’s overall score for the REF.  It goes without saying that many of these people are on salaries that far exceed those of the academics they are supposed to be ‘helping’.  Varying levels of competency, transparency and accountability characterise such institutional engagement, as conversations with almost any UK academic will verify.  The REF and its implementation corrodes the UK academic environment on all levels: for example, Phil Davis shows how citation records are being falsified in order to improve the supposed relevance of texts.

One of the most important elements of academic thinking to suffer in this context is interdisciplinarity.  The REF’s structures barely cope with scholars who cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as those working in Critical Religion.  A quick look through the list of scholars involved in the CRA highlights the nature of the boundaries issue: literature, gender, law, postcolonial studies, art, history, politics, philosophy, music, and a raft of other disciplinary descriptors feature prominently.  Critical Religion is in substantial part about questioning the boundaries and categories that are seen to exist in different contexts, and related to that, to interrogate the power relations underpinning these categories – who benefits from categorisations and whose position is strengthened by maintaining them?  Whether this be about interrogating ‘politics’ (e.g. here) or ‘gender’ (e.g. here) or ‘interreligious issues’ (e.g. here or here), there are innumerable categories that cannot simply be maintained in their present form without distorting the nature of human relationships.  This thinking has its origins in ‘religious studies’, but perhaps the Critical Religion Association should have been called the Critical Categories Association!

These crossings form an integral part of the creative process.  I have written here before on interdisciplinarity: it often involves a kind of creative thinking that needs a certain kind of space to be available.  No scholar I know can squeeze meaningful engagement with their research into half-an-hour between lectures.  Creativity needs a different kind of space, a space that may well lead, for example, to a loss of a sense of time or awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.  In my own writing, I sometimes find myself working through the night on a chapter or an essay, not realising that I have completed 8 or 10 hours of intensive work – and outside it is becoming daylight again.  These creative periods can lead to substantial leaps forward that push in some way at previous understandings, giving birth to new ideas or imagining new ways of interpreting old problems.  As I have argued on my personal site, academic creativity is not substantially different to creativity in other contexts, though the forms it takes may differ.  Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi calls this ‘flow’ – the creative energy that enables us to engage our creativity to the full:

As Czikszentmihalyi explains, entering a state of creative ecstasy presupposes certain training and experience.  In an academic context, the degree pattern – undergraduate, taught postgraduate, and doctorate – is a way of developing this experience.  Creativity, however, also needs more than just technical prowess, precisely because transgressing boundaries requires imagination: after all, the boundaries that we are seeking to overcome are frequently ossified and maintained (whether consciously or unconsciously) by vested interests.

The REF directly hinders this creativity, as do the endless funding applications we are expected to pursue (given the ridiculously low success rates, they’re largely pointless), the mindless form-filling for TRAC, and so on (Ross McKibbin eloquently describes some of the other manifestations of commodifying academia).  These are mechanisms ‘human resources’ management (HRM) deploys in order to control the transgressive creativity of academic research.  After all, although the REF ostensibly encourages ‘international level’ creativity that HRM desperately seeks to control, the REF’s regimentation of research activity maps onto HRM’s aims.  Hindering interdisciplinarity, requiring endless completion of ‘accountability’ exercises, and rewarding only certain kinds of work… all minimise the spaces needed for ‘flow’ – or even kill them off altogether.

And yet these things will not last: as David Jasper once remarked, we may one day be remembered for writing an important book, but we will not be remembered for our funding applications.  As the REF deadline draws ever nearer and overpaid managers exercise ever more unwanted pressure on academics, I sincerely hope that mechanisms of solidarity, perhaps through the union or the CDBU etc., can enable resistance to these attempts at commodification to flourish.  If we care about our universities, we need to resist, not least by constantly reaffirming that the preservation of creative ‘flow’ leading to boundary transgressions are the things that really matter.  In so doing, we may yet manage to subvert the rampant managerialism that is destroying higher education.

(I would be interested in comments that discuss more specific ways in which this might happen…)

——-

Warm thanks to Jason Theaker (photographer and academic at Bradford University, who sent me the video link in relation to a discussion about this image and text), and to Alison Jasper and Richard Roberts for helpful comments on a draft text).

Critical Religion and Female Genius

10 Monday Dec 2012

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What are some of the implications of the discussion of critical religion for feminist and gender theory making?

If part of the rationale for critical religion is to explain the ways in which the terms ‘religious’ and ‘religion’ frame and perpetuate forms of colonialist or western-centred thinking and acting in the world, then there is a clear connection: the nature of colonial discourse and the manner of its practices, have commonly been aligned with forms of Christian theological authority, carried in wide ranging missionary activity throughout the world.  The gendered binaries of spiritual/material or spirit/flesh, derived from or supported by Christian theologies, still haunt us in the tendency to regard women and the female as better fitted for certain roles that tend to be less well rewarded in terms of money and influence.  Recent analyses of the colonial subject/other strongly resonate with feminist and gender analyses of the hegemonic, patriarchal subject/other; woman like the non-westerner continues to be viewed as hostile, constantly in need of control or repression as they threaten the structures and boundaries that colonial, heteropatriarchal societies set up to maintain their privilege and security.  The force of male normativity, often still difficult to detect, continues to hinder and hamper attempts to level the playing field.

In this context, it seems that a sizeable proportion of western feminists have also found the binary categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ – i.e. what is critiqued within discussions of ‘critical religion’ – useful, on the grounds that it allows women to dissociate themselves from powerful ‘religious’ – i.e. arbitrary – justifications of male authority. In a hopeful manner, they have  put their faith in the autonomous exercise of reason that produced this distinction at the beginning of the European enlightenment, because here at least in the realm of so called ‘secularity’ they believe there is some chance of proving themselves the equal of men.

But of course forms of hegemony are resilient and deeply rooted.  Even when the idea of a divine warrant for female culpability – and thus for the blameworthiness and moral inferiority of all women as daughters of Eve – began to lose its hold  on the popular imaginary, there were still plenty of other ways to challenge a woman’s free access to what might be called equitable female subjectivity.  In my book, Because of Beauvoir, I look, for example, at the notion of ‘genius’ as one way in which the idea of male superiority has been sustained from the earliest years of European Romanticism right down to the 2010 Channel 4 series, Genius of Britain.  In this series about key British scientific figures, four male and one female commentator – physicist, Kathy Sykes  – present the ‘genius of Britain’ in relation to a series of exclusively male figures: Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke. Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley.  The fact that such an obvious gender imbalance provoked little if any disquiet at the time – are there really no British women in the field of science worthy of the title, ‘genius’? – seems significantly to support my argument; male hegemony cannot be neatly isolated within so-called ‘religious’ entities like ‘the Christian Churches.’

At the same time, is it just or fair to represent all women who call themselves Christians, for example, as either victims of, or collaborators with patriarchy?  In my book I focus on four women writers, who might qualify as female geniuses all of whom have strong connections with English Christianity; drawing on ideas proposed by Julia Kristeva and Christine Battersby amongst others, that our western idea of ‘genius’ has been overwhelmingly gendered as male in the past and that this needs to change.  Kristeva boldly claims that the achievement of an equitable subjectivity within the context of an unavoidable male hegemony, is itself a matter of genius.  She herself nominates three notable women – philosopher, Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein and writer, Colette – but her definition of genius in each case, stresses the sense in which they bring their creative ideas and actions to birth without denying those things that make them female – pre-eminently in the value they apportioned to the desire and embodiment of the non hegemonic fe/male which are discounted in definition by the male.

In other words, this redefinition of genius, opens the title up to a much increased range of women and forms of creative activity by going beyond the disembodied and god-like, and frequently also melancholic and isolated configuration of  towering masculine genius, whose work contributes to a normatively male culture and economy; it can include both women scientists working with mixed gender teams and women giving birth to children and educating them.  And of course, it can include women who are inspired as visionaries as well as by revolutionary or highly critical movements of all kinds.  What comes into being as a result of this female genius can have just as profound an impact for one person or many of different genders, but more significantly, it is, above all, the joyous achievement of forms of female subjectivity in unpromising circumstances that are not usefully divided up and evaluated as either ‘secular’ or ‘religious’.

Blurring the boundaries – punk rock and religion

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Ever walked into a music shop? What do you find? Shelves or boxes – depending upon your predilection for large stores or small independents – which are labelled with the music ‘type’ found within. Metal, jazz, country, rock, pop, opera, classical and everything in-between. Why? On the simple premise that it makes it easier to find the type of music you want and so increase the likelihood of expenditure on your part. What is the danger of presenting music in this manner? It makes discovery much harder and exploration much less likely. You go straight to the genre you like, find what you want, have a quick look around for anything else in that genre and then head straight to the tills. Potentially missing out on undiscovered gems in other genres, classics that influenced the music you liked or even simply misfiled music.

Rock and roll has always inspired tribalism, the music genres being one manifestation of this. On a larger scale there were the mods versus the rockers, the bikers versus the hippies and the punks versus basically everything and anything! Despite its love and promotion of various notions of anarchy, punk itself is replete with labels. Terms such as crusty punk, surfer punk, skater punk, street punk, hardcore punk, 77 punk, and straight edge punk and so on are rife. Why? To delineate borders, to define identities, and to attempt to create order and control in a world which can all too easily be wrested from them by profit focused companies.  What is the danger of presenting identity in this manner? It assumes that identity, behaviour and presentation is rigid and definable, it assumes a shared understanding and therefore tradition of these identity labels, it creates a necessary ‘other’ within a subculture and finally it actually results in co-option and control being easier to obtain for large companies.

Identities are not static, but fluid as cultural theorists John Storey and Dan Laughey and sociologist of religion Gordon Lynch have argued. The boundaries between cultural and/or subcultural affiliation have become significantly less rigid and defined. It is now quite common, almost expected, that individuals will merge one or more – sometimes disparate – identities within their overall sense of self.  The multi-faceted sense of self and identity formation is partly a feature of the consumerist, choice based West, partly a feature of the rise in significance of the self/individual and partly as a result of globalisation.

This has forced a re-think on what do we mean, understand and intend in utilising terms such as ‘world religions’, ‘religion’, ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’. In conducting my own interviews amongst straight edge punks in the UK and the USA (2009 – 2011) the issue of what we mean by these terms was repeatedly raised, discussed in depth and featured prominently in graffiti, tattoos, flyers and band imagery.

As much as punks utilise labels they are carefully chosen and carry a deep significance. Each denotes an important political or musical derivation that enables deviance and recognition in addition to the more negative connotations outlined above. For example, surfer punk was the term attached to the punks who came from the Huntington Beach area of Orange Country and were involved with the sport. It denoted the difficulty and danger of surfing that particular area of the California coast. The ultra-aggressive stance of these punks demonstrated this new culture of physical extremism, which they rode as one would a wave. Would the same careful labelling be applied to terms and concepts such as ‘religion’?

Overwhelmingly, a sharp distinction was expressed by between ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ (UK) or ‘spirituality’ (USA). This is perhaps unsurprising given punks’ stance of rejection of tradition – both real and imagined – in favour of creating something new. ‘Religion’ was applied when interviewees were referring to traditional religious institutions, texts, authority figures and evangelising individuals. In contrast ‘faith’ and ‘spirituality’ were used to describe the individual believer(s), specific practises which did not fall under one religion or another, personal beliefs and really interestingly, punk rock itself!

Punk clubs were spoken of as sacred spaces and attendees got agitated with those whose behaviour desecrated that, in their opinion, or disrespected it. Bands, specific musicians and other individuals important to the local scenes were spoken of with reverence and defended vehemently. Punk rock itself became a form of desacralised salvation for many interviewees. A form of salvation that is essentially a secular yet sacred good that has both personal and collective benefits and ramifications. A result of refusing a strong delineation between sacred and profane, religious (or spiritual) and secular; it relies on muddying the waters so to speak, blurring the boundaries.

Naturally punks would not achieve this in isolation, it is not even a stated goal of theirs. Instead they are feeding off and into a long history in the West which Charles Taylor identifies as moving from a position of belief in a specific god being the only option to a belief in any god (or none at all) as one option among many. The individual becomes the centre rather than a divine being or a numinous spirituality. Concurrently society has continuously removed authority from the divine or the ineffable and simultaneously wrested it from the hands of the institutions that function under the auspices of the divine, placing it instead in secular institutions and communities.

Consequently religion as the interviewed punks define it – practices, rituals, authority figures and to an extent ideology, can no longer be assumed to be succinctly definable or corralled into a specific notion. Instead we now face a vast range of human practices which are overlapping and do not function as religious or secular solely or discreetly. And so much like a growing subculture or indeed music shop, we have to ask, are new labels now needed, or can we do away with labels once and for all? The punk ethos of “question everything, accept nothing” seems somewhat apt here!

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Laughey Dan. Music and Youth Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006

Lynch Gordon. After Religion. London: Darton-Longman-Todd, 2002

Storey John. An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Essex: Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997

Taylor Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard: Belknap Press, 2007

Book launch: Alison Jasper’s “Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius”

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Dr Alison Jasper, Prof. Ann Loades

Dr Alison Jasper, Prof. Ann Loades

Eighty people came to Glasgow University Chapel for the launch of two books on 21. November, one by our own Alison Jasper, Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius, the second by her husband, David Jasper, The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God, both published by Baylor University Press (Waco, Texas), 2012.

Prof. David Jasper

Prof. David Jasper

David introduced a number of speakers, beginning with Professor Nigel Leask, Regius Professor Of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, who welcomed all.

Prof. Nigel Leask

Prof. Nigel Leask

Right Rev. Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, then spoke of David’s book, commending it for its careful examination of the liturgical community and the place of the community in the church and the world.

Rt Rev. Richard Holloway

Rt Rev. Richard Holloway

Right Rev. Gregor Duncan, Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway, spoke in similarly warm terms of David’s contribution to contemporary theology.

Rt Rev. Gregor Duncan

Rt Rev. Gregor Duncan

Professor Ann Loades, CBE, Professor Emerita of Durham University, and Prof. Richard Roberts, Visiting Emeritus Professor at Stirling and a member of the Critical Religion Research Group, both addressed the publication of Alison’s book.  Professor Loades commented:

I have read the book with admiration … it is beautifully organised and written, and entirely original both in its conceptual framework (female genius) and in the examples you use… the fight for the recognition of what women have and continue to do is no joke, as we wll know.

Prof. Ann Loades

Prof. Ann Loades

Professor Roberts placed Dr Jasper’s book in the wider context of Simone de Beauvoir’s argument, picking up particularly on de Beauvoir’s description of the male lack of empathy for the situation of women (‘It is… a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature’; The Second Sex, 1953/1988 edition, p26).  Marriage, motherhood and sacrifice became reified metaphors in this context.  And yet it is precisely this context that enables ‘female genius’ to achieve being and creativity.  She describes,

… the surprising complexity of many singular lives in which female genius is achieved in the pleasures of a courageous and creative dialogue with the problematic structures created as a consequence of male-normative perspectives. (Jasper, p41)

Prof. Richard Roberts

Prof. Richard Roberts

There is, therefore, a world of female achievement to be explored before the past sixty years, and Jasper does this using a variety of approaches, but with a particular emphasis on Julia Kristeva’s thinking.  Using four women as case studies – Jane Leade (b. 1624), Hannah More (b. 1745), Maude Royden (b. 1876) and Michèle Roberts (b. 1949) – she shows how they have ‘all been formed in some way by Christianity, its praxis, its beliefs, or its ethical and aesthetic sensibilities’, and all can be regarded as examples of female genius: ‘the struggle to avoid being objectified within male-normative contexts while seeking to engage genuinely with “the other”, including men.’ (p. 75)  This approach to female genius, Jasper argues,

tries to do justice to the full complexity of the lives of women who struggle against the consequences of male-normative frameworks of value while also managing to create new relationships and think in new ways that keep the temptations and perilous dangers of that framework itself clearly in focus. (p. 75)

Professor Roberts cited Jasper’s closing lines from the book:

…contemporary feminist discourse needs to recognise that we do have a past that informs a present and our ongoing discussions with each other, globally, in much more complex ways than merely in terms of a negative – for example, Christian – legacy, thankfully disposed of.  To ignore the challenging and insightful ways in which women have shown themselves able to engage with the Christian imaginaries of the past is, once again, to diminish and trivialize their capacity to survive, to struggle to contest, and thus to flourish even in the most inauspicious circumstances. (p. 158)

He praised Jasper for not letting go of de Beauvoir’s original question: ‘What is a woman?’, lauding her contribution in this book to the ongoing emancipatory discourse and the clarity with which questions of ‘religious women’ were discussed.

Professor Loades summarised her thoughts: ‘Dr Jasper’s new book is… refreshing to read in its attention to overlooked examples of ‘female genius’ – we look forward to more.’

Alison Jasper has written a short blog posting about Female Genius that you may wish to (re)visit.  Warm thanks to Professors Loades and Roberts for help in writing this update.

Visitors to the Jaspers' books launch

Visitors to the Jaspers’ books launch

Note that Heather Walton has also commented on Because of Beauvoir on the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture website.

Law, Critical Religion, and the Importance of Semantics

26 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Ottawa

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I often hear it said that the contributions of scholars in critical religion are “merely semantic”; that problematizing the category of religion and the meaning of the word “religion” an academic context has no bearing on the understanding of religion “on the ground”. The meaning of “religion”, many argue, is fluid and dynamic, and so the definition and approach of scholars studying it must reflect this. No single definition applies to “religion”, nor should there be, as people use the word to mean different things. In short, many argue that studying the idea of “religion”, and the implications of the word itself, have no real practicality beyond the academy.

I would like to offer a brief rebuttal to that argument, using as an example laws concerning “freedom of religion”. Provisions for freedom of religion have become the norm for Western democracies and their bills of rights (such as in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution), but there are several reasons why these provisions might warrant re-examination. Below, I will draw from my knowledge of North American case law to demonstrate how critical religion may be invaluable to moving towards a more nuanced understanding of the issue.

If a citizen presents a case to Canadian (or American) courts claiming their right to freedom of religion was infringed, either by another citizen or by an institution, one of the first steps in the legal process is to determine if the claim is legitimate. If the plaintiff is not a member of a recognized religion, the court must first determine if their practices qualify as “religion”. Otherwise, a case for rights infringement cannot be made. How does the court determine whether the plaintiff’s religion qualifies as such in the eyes of the law? It does so by looking at the definition of the word “religion”.

One of the main problems lies in the fact that constitutional documents which proclaim freedom of religion in North America do not describe or define “religion”. In both Canada and the United States, the interpretation of “religion” has been left to the courts. These rely on two sources of information to form this interpretation. The first consists of previous and pertinent case law, if it exists. Secondly, the court calls upon expert witnesses who can attest to the legitimacy of a claim based on their academic knowledge of religion. It is the academic understanding, and not a common or “lay” understanding, of the category “religion” that is privileged.

Still, the Supreme Court of Canada has done its best to use expansive definitions; in the landmark 2004 case Syndicat Northcrest v Anselem, it ruled that religion “is about freely and deeply held personal convictions or beliefs connected to an individual’s spiritual faith and integrally linked to one’s self-definition and spiritual fulfilment [sic], the practices of which allow individuals to foster a connection with the divine or with the subject or object of that spiritual faith.” The issue here is that, despite their best efforts to be inclusive, courts fail to realize that using vague language does not divest the concept of “religion” from its Christian and colonial history. Even the words “beliefs” and “faith” stem directly from a Christian rhetoric.

That the definition of “religion” is left up to the interpretation of courts has not shown to have a substantial impact on traditional religions like Protestant Christianity, because they are easily recognizable as “religion”. However, the question of whether religious practices are considered official or acceptable can still be disputed, as Winnifred Sullivan demonstrated beautifully in her book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. The narrowness of the definition may present problems for new groups that identify themselves as “religion”, but are not recognizable as such to the court.

An example that comes to mind is Wicca. A tradition that emerged in the 1950s and spearheaded by retired civil servant Gerald Gardner, Wicca is an un-institutionalized earth-based new religious movement that focuses on the immanence of the divine in nature. Wicca has no official tenets of faith, no designated clergy or standard ritual format, and no fixed location of worship. Wiccan groups have had considerable difficulty proving to the government (Canadian or American) that they are legitimately religious, for these reasons.

When determining whether Wicca is a religion in the eyes of the law, the semantics of “religion” are incredibly important. The large majority of Wiccan groups who qualified for tax exemption in the United States designate themselves “churches”, or describe themselves using words like “faith” and “beliefs”. In Roberts et al. v Ravenwood Church of Wicca, the granting of tax exemption for religious reasons was delayed by Justice Jordan, dissenting, who stated:

While the majority opinion states that the Wiccan church does not believe in the devil, I do not believe it conforms to the traditional concept of a religion as embraced in the preamble of our State Constitution and as expressed in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States. This nation was founded “under God,” not the “karmic circle.”

If guarantees to “freedom of religion” are granted only if a person’s religion is recognized, yet the definition of “religion” relies on Christian rhetoric, are the provisions really ensuring freedom of religion? Should provisions for “religion” exist at all? These are questions I will examine in more detail in my upcoming Master’s thesis.

The work of scholars in critical religion may indeed concentrate on the semantics of “religion”, but it is far from being “merely” an academic issue. The meaning of the word “religion” and the language used to regulate that definition are at the forefront of the constitutional cases about new religious movements. While it is perhaps unlikely that critical religion will prompt an amendment of provisions for “freedom of religion”, the continued work of scholars in the field may inform those expert witnesses called to consult in these cases, and thus help shape the legal understanding of human rights in the process.

Who defines religion in the colony?

19 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Manchester

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(This entry is a reflection on a recent workshop discussion with Professor Ahmed Ragab and Dr Aria Nakissa at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.)

On 1 September 1920, French General Henri Gouraud proclaimed the new state of Lebanon, or Grand Liban, from the steps of the Palais des Pins in Beirut.  He did so, as he took care to remind his audience, ‘In the presence of the Lebanese authorities, the sons of the most illustrious families, [and] the spiritual heads of all confessions and all rites’.  Photographs of the event (e.g. here) show Gouraud flanked by these ‘spiritual heads’, with places of honour given to the Maronite (Christian) patriarch on his right, and the Sunni (Muslim) mufti on his left.  The Frenchman used this highly symbolic foundational moment to consecrate the notion of Lebanon as a consensus between its Christian and Muslim communities, represented by patriarch and mufti.

The extraordinary paradox here is that this confessional representation performed two apparently contradictory symbolic feats.  It intentionally and overtly lent the authority of these two religious leaders to the legitimation of the state.  Yet at the same time it subtly and perhaps unwittingly (re)created the religious leaderships that these two gentlemen were seen to embody, precisely by presuming them to hold the authority to represent ‘the Christians’ and ‘the Muslims’.

Ilyas Huwayyik, the man styled by the Maronite Church as Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, was addressed by General Gouraud as ‘the Grand Patriarch of Lebanon’.  Notwithstanding the dozen or more non-Maronite Churches that now found themselves within Lebanon’s borders, many of which had protested the new state, Huwayyik and his successors ever since have been treated in state protocol and public discourse as spiritual head of all Lebanon’s Christians.

On Gouraud’s other side was Mustafa Naja, the Mufti of Beirut, a judicial functionary appointed by the Ottoman Sultan to produce fatwas, written legal opinions.  The son of a Beiruti perfume-seller, Naja’s daily routine involved issuing fatwas to the public from a market-stall near the central mosque; holding a regular study circle in the mosque and participating in Sufi gatherings; championing an Islamic educational charity; and helping at his father’s stall in the souq.

Naja resisted General Gouraud’s designs on him.  Proudly loyal to Arab nationalism, the sheikh had initially refused to attend the celebration of a Lebanese state.  The general is said to have threatened him with deportation.  At the Palais des Pins, the reluctant Naja was symbolically cast as the Patriarch of Lebanon’s opposite number, implicitly now the Mufti of Lebanon, religious leader of the country’s Muslims.

The French offered Naja the official title of ‘Mufti of the State of Greater Lebanon’, but he rejected it right up to his death in 1932.  Nevertheless, he had been set on the national stage and a continued public role came to be expected of him not only by the colonial authorities but also by Lebanese Muslims seeking representation.  Gouraud had orchestrated an iconic image of a national Grand Muftiship, and in the decades after 1920 that image would become an institutional reality.  Naja’s successor, Muhammad Tawfiq Khalid, took the title ‘Mufti of the Lebanese Republic’ and built up a national religious administration with an impressive Beirut headquarters that became the hub of a newly self-identifying confessional community.

This story seems in many ways a striking example of the transformative power of the colonial language of religion.  John Zavos has shown representation as the means by which religion or religions were objectified in India, with the colonisers’ creation of new public spaces as a key part of that process.  In Lebanon, as in India, ‘representation translated into power through the articulation of firm, clearly recognizable communities’.*  A French colonial official’s selection of Mufti Naja to represent one of Lebanon’s religions, as equal and equivalent to the representatives of other religions, gave the mufti power and articulated a new Muslim identity as a religious community.

The mufti would not previously have been called a ‘religious leader’.  Indeed his office would not have been described as ‘religious’ in the modern sense: his role was judicial, salaried from a public budget and serving society at large.  Similarly, Sunni Muslims in Ottoman society were simply ordinary citizens; they did not organise or conceive of themselves as a community in contradistinction to others.

The translation of the modern Western concepts of religion and religious into the Arabic words dīn and dīnī was accompanied by an exponential increase in their use, and an even more marked rise of the plural adyān.  Only in the modern era was Middle Eastern society said to comprise a number of adyān; and were ministries dedicated to ‘religious affairs’ (al-shu’ūn al-dīnīyya), staffed by ‘men of religion’ (rijāl al-dīn).  The Mufti of Beirut was gradually elevated to leader of this religious corps (ra’īs al-silk al-dīnī), and finally to religious leader of the community (ra’īs al-tā’ifa al-dīnī).

But just because change happened during this period, must we assume it was all driven by colonialism?  The usage of dīn has no doubt changed, but were there not similar concepts in pre-modern Islamic societies?  ‘You have your dīn and I have my dīn‘, says the Qur’an.  Classical jurisprudence opposes dīn and dunyā, the material world.  The Ottoman notion of milla recognised the rights of non-Muslim communities.  And the role of muftis – while judicial – was not merely legal in the modern sense: it was to define the proper practice of Islam.

The critical religion school has taught us to see the colonial invention of world religions and their relegation to private space.  But an emphasis on the bulldozing force of secular colonial power may obscure the resilience of local histories.  Mufti Naja may have been an unwilling participant in the colonial enterprise, but the rise of state muftis across the Middle East suggests that he was an obvious, not an arbitrary, choice for leadership.  Whoever defined religion in the new Lebanon, its result was not marginalisation from a secular public sphere but by contrast the empowerment of new religious leaders and a lasting ambiguity over the nature, boundaries and even the possibility of ‘secular’ politics.

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* Zavos, John (2010), ‘Representing religion in colonial India’, in Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, and Rajaram Hegde (eds.), Rethinking Religion in India: The colonial construction of Hinduism (London: Routledge), 56-68: 66.