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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’.

Who defines religion in the colony?

19 Monday Nov 2012

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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.

Disorganised Religion? We need more of it!

27 Monday Aug 2012

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I was recently invited to be part of a public conversation at Edinburgh’s Festival of Spirituality and Peace on the theme ‘Disorganised Religion’.  I was asked to offer comment on how I see understandings of ‘religion’ changing and to reflect on whether ‘disorganised religion’ is a helpful term to reflect on questions of religion.  The conversation was chaired by Ekklesia’s Simon Barrow, and Ian Milligan from Exploring Anabaptism in Scotland and the Bert community in Glasgow was the other discussant.  The event was sponsored by Ekklesia and the Iona Community.  This blog entry is a lightly-edited and slightly expanded version of my opening remarks, reflecting also some of the comments from the 60+ audience who came to the conversation; warm thanks to them for their insights.

If we’re thinking about ‘disorganised religion’, it presumes we know what we mean by ‘organised religion’, so I want to explore that a little bit before moving onto thinking about what ‘disorganised religion’ might be.

There is a long tradition in the West, at the latest from the 17th century onwards, of thinking of religion as being something distinct from other areas of life.  In the English-speaking world, this largely derives from Protestant thinking in the colonial context: Europeans went overseas and saw people engaging in what they thought were similar practices to ones they knew – so, for example, killing an animal in some apparently ritual form was seen as similar to an animal sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible, or kneeling and being still was seen as a form of prayer as described in the New Testament.  These things may not have been recognisably Christian because these people – in South America, Africa, or wherever – had obviously not heard of Jesus and the Christian God, but the Westerners understood these practices to be ‘religious behaviour’, even though that may have been a meaningless concept to the local people.  Nonetheless, these actions were being compared to and measured against what the Europeans already knew, and more than that, they were made to be like things the Europeans already knew (Edward Said, the Palestinian-American scholar, famously called this ‘Orientalism’).

From that, we have the beginnings of the so-called separation of church and state: actions and thinking seen as ‘religious’ was to be kept distinct from everything else, and ‘everything else’ was called ‘the secular’ – of course, these terms depend upon each other and if examined closely, have no consistent meaning.  It was but a short step to institutionalisation of this religious-secular distinction – through constitutions, for example – and ‘the religious’ became ever further removed from ‘the secular’, and correspondingly, the organisation of religion was seen as something that was distinct from the concerns of wider society.

So here we have one example of the ways in which thinking about ‘religion’ has changed.  On a related front, this event is being sponsored by the Iona Community, of which I am a long-standing Member, and from its early days, the Community has sought to overcome the distinction that I’ve just elaborated on.  It wanted to find ways to connect the church – by which it initially meant the Church of Scotland – to wider society, to overcome the distinction that I’ve just mentioned.  In the language of the Community, this was about connecting what people do in church on a Sunday and what they do at work on a Monday; today the Community tends to talk more about the connection between work and worship, between prayer and politics, between sacred and secular.  Of course, when the Iona Community was founded in 1938, there was a presumption that most people who describe themselves as Christian would be members of churches, but that is clearly no longer the case.  So the Community has in recent years been seeking to identify news ways of engaging, and that is where terms like ‘disorganised religion’ perhaps help us think about some of these issues.

From different backgrounds then – the Critical Religion analysis of the origins and consequences of much of our thinking about the artificiality of distinctions between ‘secular’ and ‘religion’, and the Iona Community’s attempts to find practical and honest ways of overcoming these distinctions – we can point to very exciting ways of thinking of the future of what ‘religion’ might be.  Disorganised, certainly, if that means a move away from a distinction between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ that distorts and hinders the integration of all aspects of our lives.

Of course, such attempts to move away from these distinctions have long existed – and the Anabaptist tradition that Ian is connected to is a perfect example of this – even if the larger churches that aligned themselves to a greater or lesser extent with the ruling powers have found it much harder to move away from the religious-secular distinction.  The Iona Community is another expression of this, and as it has grown, members from other Christian traditions have joined, and they have often been less fixated on institutionalised forms of religion.  Anti-institutional and non-hierarchical traditions in particular have enriched the approach the Community has taken on a number of issues: an example of this is the leading of worship, which has long been a task that non-ordained people have undertaken.

In a wider context: our world is globalising in new ways – the colonial traditions that resulted in religious-secular distinctions are gradually giving way to new kinds of seeing the global.  Globalised economics still privilege the rich, and especially the rich West, but forms of interaction are changing: in a Western Christian context, for example, we can observe the introduction of fresh ways of being church that clearly derive from the Global South, whether this be music and liturgy or sometimes even forms of decision-making and governance; the Iona Community’s John L. Bell has been instrumental in doing some of this for English-speaking communities.  Much of this kind of change relates to people seeking to engage more fully in worship and live their lives in a way that is more consonant with their understanding of priorities.  Emerging church movements and radical alternatives to church are all key to this process, as for some people that can happen in traditionally organised institutions, for others it needs to happen outwith them.

Either way, there is no doubt that ‘disorganised religion’ – in the sense of overcoming the religious-secular divide – is a useful way of thinking about what it is that many people are seeking to do.  Because they almost always perpetuate the religious-secular divide, ‘religious institutions’ are in fact perpetuating their own marginalisation.  This in turn encourages strong reactions from many so-called secularists when such institutions are seen as failing ‘to keep to religious matters’.  We can observe this in the same-sex marriage debate currently taking place in Scotland: there is a clear majority of the population in favour of the government’s moves towards equality, but many institutional religious figures oppose these moves, often arguing (incorrectly) that they will be discriminated against if same-sex marriage is legalised.  This failure to recognise that the granting of privileges that the majority have to everyone is not discrimination but equality, simply furthers the marginalisation of these institutions in wider society and deepens the religious-secular divide.

So if disorganised religion is about subverting the very idea that a religious-secular divide exists, then we need much more of it!  We often hear people say they are ‘spiritual but not religious’.  What is often meant is that people want to do justice to a desire or a need for some kind of spiritual or transcendental experience but they want nothing to do with the institutions that have grown up around what is seen as ‘religion’.  Perhaps such people are finding ways of overcoming the divide between ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ and discovering new ways of being whole human beings.  Certainly, for those on the margins seeking to live out an integrated ‘disorganised’ life, there may be mistakes made and wrong turns taken – but that element of the human condition is also what makes such disorganisation so appealing and so necessary.

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.

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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.

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

02 Monday May 2011

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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

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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.

Praying For Japan

21 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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This blog posting was written by Kat Neumann, who is writing her PhD under Andrew Hass and Alison Jasper.

After the catastrophic events in Japan, the language of secular politics and news reports on the economic and political impact on food supplies, the stock market, rising flight fares and evacuation of Western nationals, tactically evade the humanitarian horror scenarios, which meanwhile haunt our imagination, and touch base with our own privatised existences. The traditional response, in a Christian context, is the appeal to prayer. And yet, our modern minds have little if anything to go by when “prayer” is invoked – an emotional safety-blanket for some, a futile appeal to God, whom we fail to recognise in the continuous flow of “bad news” that reach us from Japan and elsewhere, for others. A clearer conception of what is meant by Christian prayer is needed if we, who may still hold to some form of Christian faith, are to find in it an adequate, that is, a sensible yet sensitive response to the situation.

The German theologian Dorothee Sölle (1929-2003), who until recently did not receive much critical attention from the academy, has been popularly known in Germany for her political activism, her engagement with the German peace movement throughout the Cold War, and her poetry. What fascinates me about this writer is the way that she engages religious sources – both the biblical text and the Christian tradition – to render her political context meaningful to personal faith without abandoning rational thought or analytical discourse, yet supplementing it with a poetic vision that reconfigures the divine after the “death of God”. What this means is, that there is no place for romantic notions of God as one who directs the world and is ultimately responsible for the workings-out of history (relieving the political subject of lasting ethical obligations, tying these to the temporality of sin). On the premise that with the Holocaust there can be no God that intervenes and directs each individual fate according to a divine, predetermined plan, Christianity is called again to uncover what the metaphor of “God” as the signifier of the Unnameable One means in the concrete reality of this world. This forces Sölle to consider prayer for this world and in this world as a means, not to gain magical favours from a metaphysical otherworld, but for enabling divine revelation in the concrete realities by which we are confronted.

Sölle, within the climate of the Arms Race and the bloc building between East and West, can serve as a model for genuine prayer today, particularly in light of the potential nuclear disaster we are witnessing in the aftermath to the Tsunami that hit Japan. Sölle structured prayer meetings concerning political events and social problems along a threefold organisation: information, meditation and collective action. “Deprivatised prayer” (Sölle, 1971) was not to be public vanity as one exposes oneself as a believer to the world, but the conscious articulation of one’s faith in relation to the world and a preparation for realising an alternative vision by concrete (political) action. Rather than denominational boundaries or institutional dogmas, this process would rehearse and reveal mutual concerns that would mobilize people into recognizing their role and potentials for changing the status quo. This aim for prayer, the self-articulation and engagement with the world that recognises the believer’s own, “private” spiritual need (for salvation in whatever shape or form to be envisioned) as bound up with the “fate” of the world, places faith firmly in the public sphere, and is the first step in manifesting compassion.

What the press describes in the ordeal of the so-called “Fukushima 50” is the human responsiveness to catastrophe. In the concrete threat of nuclear melt-down and high levels of radiation, the presence of the “Fukushima 50”, as a human symbol of self-sacrifice, draws attention to a concrete formulation of compassion, borne out of the urgency of the situation: ‘in the words of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan, “retreat is unthinkable.”’ (March 18th). It is an intercession, a bid for time for those who these workers are seeking to protect and keep alive. Their struggle to contain the direct consequences of the damages caused by the earthquake and subsequent flood is paradigmatic of “deprivatised prayer”. Their work is public protest against suffering nuclear holocaust.

The “Fukushima 50” have offered the world their petition – extending the time and space to reach out to the world. They remind us that we are not only responsible, to ourselves, and to those who come after us, but that we owe it to those that have gone before us, too, to join in their prayer. Terrifying as the ever-unfolding reports of the disaster from Japan appear, they cannot be overlooked. How then do we relate, how do we respond to the suffering these workers bring to focus? A prayer set in context of Japan published on the website of the World Council of Churches reads as follows:

Lord Jesus,
the storm is life and life is the storm
and there is no escaping it;
but what matters is that you are in the storm with us,
a beacon and a presence that is sure. Amen

What this prayer articulates is not only the inevitability of being faced with difficulties and dangers, but the assertion that “what matters” is assured solidarity. If we want to be able to turn the prayer of petition of the “Fukushima 50” into a prayer of thanksgiving, we need to substantiate our presence with these workers, with Japan. Only when we use the time that they have given to us to respond – in practical terms – to the suffering we all need to recognise, can we validate their sacrifice and call ourselves responsible. Sin is social denial of the suffering of the afflicted. Prayer is transformative contextualisation.

Performative prayer and ‘comparing’ religion

14 Monday Feb 2011

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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.

Some thoughts on body shame and plastic surgery…

07 Monday Feb 2011

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There is little if anything that is straightforward or indeed ‘natural’ about body. It is a cultural canvas constructed through metaphors: from Socrates’ and Plato’s view of it as a prison for the soul, to the Apostle Paul’s invocation of Christian communities as the body of Christ on earth; from Baz Luhrmann’s description of the body as ‘the greatest instrument you’ll ever own’ (provided you wear sunscreen) to the feeling when struggling with a bad cold that the body is a battleground – a microcosmic staging of the forces of good pitched against the forces of evil; from the ambiguities of cyborgs to the ambiguities of posthumanist bodies. The body is a discursive territory occupied or landscaped by narratives about gender, family honour, duty, devotion to God or state, individual identity, communal belonging, worthiness and desirability, power and pollution.

Situated in the ‘first world’ we have certainly inherited some very traditional Christian and colonial narratives that have acted to privilege disembodied masculine intellect and spirit over material immanence leading to ambivalence (Jasper, in Hass, Jay & Jasper, 2007) guilt and shame (Clough, 2011) about our embodiment. It isn’t, perhaps, very surprising then that ‘first world’ bodies have been so successfully shamed, that multi-billion pound industries (Berliet, Vanity Fair, February 2009 – Plastic surgery confidential; Orbach, 2009) have been able to take advantage of this sense of bodily inadequacy. Neither is it such a surprise that the majority of people who look for help or improvement through cosmetic surgery continue to be women. In the Guardian newspaper (Friday, 4 February 2011), the people’s panel feature quotes ‘Miss Wright’ who admits that after one successful procedure, costing over £1K she is ‘hooked’ by the ‘carrot of a promise that I might look my best ’ or that ‘more surgery will make me better somehow’.

Of course, techniques for producing the ‘better’ body from eye liners to clitoridectomies are hardly new. What is thought-provoking here however, is that we seem to be able to reproduce intense feelings of bodily shame – such that people risk their health and their lives in an often unsuccessful attempt to escape it – even within cultures that no longer see themselves as dominated by so-called ‘religious’ ideologies such as Christianity (are they any more ideological than ‘secular’ ideologies such as freemarket capitalism?). Susie Orbach illustrates one neat technique for reinventing shame through the rhetorics of empowerment (Bodies, 2009, 83). The flip side to the idea that ‘we’re worth it’, is the pressure to exercise our power to take what we apparently deserve. The failure to alter ourselves becomes a new sign of self-neglect: ‘people will soon ask why you haven’t remodelled your body, as though it were a shameful old kitchen’!

Christianity has undoubtedly played a role in making us uncomfortable in our skins but it can’t be held responsible for the whole of this more recent change. A growing sense of entitlement and/or pressure to achieve a beautiful body is also surely implicated in the recent massive increase in procedures performed by cosmetic surgeons and the willingness of people to demand and buy them. Of course it must be said that the development of surgical techniques and the greater availability of cosmetic treatments aren’t all bad. And for people dealing every day with the burden of disfigurement, whether as a result of something like bodily dysmorphic disorder, or of accident, disease and war this kind of treatment could be, in a very real way, a ‘God-send’. Nevertheless whilst cosmetic surgery has achieved some dramatic, life changing effects, it seems very unlikely that the overall market growth in the area will be balanced by an equally widespread reduction in feelings of shame or emotional pain.

Jasper, Alison, 2007, ‘Body and Word’ in Hass, Andrew, David Jasper, Elisabeth Jay (eds), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 776-792.
Orbach, Susie, 2009, Bodies. London: Profile Books.
Clough, Miryam, 2011, ‘Shame and Sexual Ambivalence’, Unpublished thesis.