• Home
  • What is Critical Religion?
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Scholars
  • Links
  • Recordings
  • Organisation
  • Ekklesia
  • Contact

The Critical Religion Association

~ Critical Approaches to the Study of Religion

The Critical Religion Association

Tag Archives: identity

The “No true Scotsman” fallacy and the problem of identity

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Antony Flew, Christian, identity, Judith Butler, Muslim, Sara Ahmed, secular

The philosopher Antony Flew (1923-2010) famously described a fallacy that has become known as the ‘No true Scotsman’ fallacy.  It was even published in the (real!) Scotsman newspaper obituary:

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again”. Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing”. The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing”.

This analogy is often used uncritically in thinking about the way in which identity informs understandings of religion. For example, after the 11.9.2001 attacks on New York and Washington many argued that although the aircraft used to crash into the buildings were being flown by Muslims, ‘True Islam is a peaceful religion’ and the perpetrators were therefore not true Muslims. True Muslims would not kill thousands of people in an attack like that – and, of course, the vast majority of Muslims around the world condemned these attacks.  Maybe, therefore, even though they described themselves as Muslims, the attackers were not true Muslims?

In a Christian context, we can see something similar happening. Most Christians would argue that, according to their Scriptures, killing others is prohibited. And yet there are plenty of instances in which Christians kill other people. We don’t even need to look into distant history for that: George Bush and Tony Blair both professed themselves to be Christians, and yet they presided over devastating attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq resulting in hundreds of thousands of people being killed.  But if true Christians do not kill, perhaps neither Bush nor Blair are true Christians?

This way of thinking, as Flew wanted to show, leads us nowhere.  Can we comment on whether someone is a true Scotsman (or Muslim/Christian etc.)?  Perhaps the problem here is the reification of a position into an identity marker.  Hamish McDonald might have a certain idea of what a true Scotsman is, but this idea centres around an abstract imaginary of the concept ‘Scotsman’ (and the Aberdeen sex offender clearly didn’t fit that image).  Using that kind of fixed notion, we will never find agreement on what a true Muslim/Christian (or even Scotsman!) might do.  We clearly need to find other tools.

Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, cited by Sara Ahmed (p12), discuss the difference between ‘location’ as a fixed point and ‘position’ as a relative concept, and perhaps this offers us a helpful way forward: ‘”In geographical terms, ‘location’ fixes a point in space, usually by reference to some abstract co-ordinate systems…” while “‘Position,’ by contrast, implies location vis-à-vis other locations and incorporates a sense of perspective on other places.”‘

If we understand self-descriptions of individuals in terms of positions, rather than fixed locations or identities, we might find it easier to comprehend the 11.9.2001 attackers or the Bush and Blair warriors.  After all, a statement such as ‘I am a Muslim/Christian’ (etc.) is usually made in relation to others: most obviously, perhaps, affirming commonality or marking difference.  It is, to use Smith and Katz, an implied location in relation to other locations, with a sense of perspective on other places.  This kind of positioning changes all the time, relative to our context.  We can perhaps understand this relative positioning better by thinking about Judith Butler’s ‘turning’ when a police officer calls out, ‘hey you!’  We change our position in response to the call: we turn to see if we are the one the police officer is addressing, and our position relative to everyone and everything else around us – not just the police officer – therefore changes as a result of that address, even if the call is not really meant for us.  Our location might not have changed, but our position has.

This kind of imagery can help us in thinking through some of the language used to describe positions.  We can understand the Muslim or Christian attackers and their statements of belief as positions taken in relation to others, rather than as fixed locators or identities.  This does away with the need to understand the true Scotsman problem in contexts such as those described above: we don’t then need to explain that true Muslims or true Christians would never kill others even if these particular Muslims or Christians did so.  Rather, we can look at how others who position themselves as Muslims or Christians (etc.) understand these contexts, and construct an understanding on the totality of these representations, intelligently assessed.

This also helps us to understand the adoption of certain kinds of language in contexts that at first appear to be misplaced; in this sense it is very easy to see how some of the ideas underpinning Critical Religion could lend themselves to a simplistic racism and Orientalism.  For example, it is important to think about how we understand an imam in Timbuktu who says that ‘Since the beginning of time Timbuktu has been secular.  Timbuktu’s scholars have always accepted the other monotheistic religions.  After all, we all believe in the one God, each in our own way.’*  The CR scholar might protest: aren’t terms like ‘secular’ and ‘religions‘ (as opposed to ‘religion’, maybe) concepts that originate in a Western context, with little meaning in Islam?  And yet: essentialising Islam in such a way, as if Islam in Timbuktu were the same as in Mecca, Beirut, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Detroit, is a failure to understand the positionality of the imam.

We need to take his statement seriously: he knows what he means with this language, and whilst we might understand the interview with the Western journalist as framing his comments, we also need to understand the Butlerian turn here: he is not (just, or even at all) necessarily moulding his language to suit her, the journalist, but is seeking to articulate a position, and in the articulation itself there is also a movement.  Seeking to pursue a constructivist position as far as we can possibly take it enables us to hear the imam and understand his reworking of the terms that we thought we understood – he is repositioning these terms and this language in adopting it and making it his own.  Whilst it might be of historical interest that terms like ‘secular’ and ‘religions‘ originate in the West, understanding the re-positioning and re-use of these terms should enable us to begin to better understand those who might appear to be the Other, leaving the No true Scotsman fallacy and our essentialist historical notions behind.

—

* “Seit Anbeginn der Zeit war Timbuktu säkular. Die Gelehrten von Timbuktu haben die übrigen monotheistischen Religionen immer schon akzeptiert. Wir glauben schließlich alle an den einen Gott, jeder auf seine Weise.”

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2006.

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Recent blog postings:

  • Politics of Love: Secularism, Religion, and Love as a Political Discourse 18 November 2020
  • The Contagion of White Christian Libertarianism and America’s Viral President 30 October 2020
  • “Walk to Buchenwald” – Thoughts on Collective Mourning 7 October 2020
  • New Book out: Critical Religion Reader! 28 September 2020
  • On Making a Critical Shift 16 July 2020

Frequent blog tags:

academia Africa art Bible Biblical criticism body capitalism categories Christian church clash of civilisations concept of zero crisis Critical Religion culture economics economic theory education epistemology female genius feminism freedom of religion gender global higher education Hindu Hinduism humanities impact India interdisciplinarity interfaith dialogue international relations Islam Israel Japan Jew law liberal education managerialism Middle East mission history modernity music Muslim Naomi Goldenberg negation Northern Ireland nothing Palestine patriarchy performance politics postcolonial power REF religion religion-secular binary religious education religious freedom religious observance religious studies ritual sacred schools Scotland secular spiritualities stained glass theology United Kingdom university University of Stirling vestigial states women

Follow us on Twitter

  • RT @GPhilosophies: Philosophy without religion is a Eurocentric construct - RSA thersa.org/comment/2020/1… 2 weeks ago
  • RT @relcfp: New Tumblr post: "Religious Studies Conference 2021 : RSSO Religious Studies Undergraduate and Graduate Research Conference 202… 3 weeks ago
  • RT @HeraldOfHallows: @relcfp @StirlingReligi1 might be of interest to Stir UG & PGT students? Especially ones working towards their dissert… 3 weeks ago
Follow @CriticoReligio

‘Like’ us on Facebook

‘Like’ us on Facebook

Our blog is published in association with

Ekklesia

Top Posts & Pages

  • Home
  • What is Critical Religion?
  • The myth of religion and the tyranny of Richard Dawkins’ discontinuous mind
  • Ivanescu, Carolina
  • The O of Giotto
  • Fitzgerald, Timothy
  • Critical Race and Religion
  • Scholars
  • Why is there still ‘interreligious dialogue’?
  • Tibetan self-immolation between religious practice and political statement

The Critical Religion Association…

... an international scholarly association pioneering intellectual engagement with questions on 'religion' and related categories.

About this site

This site is mostly maintained by Dr R Nadadur Kannan. Please contact us with any queries.
You can keep in touch with our work on Twitter, on Facebook, and through our mailing list.

About the blog

The Critical Religion blog is a shared (multi-author) blog.
The views represented are the personal views of individual authors and do not represent the position of the Critical Religion Association on any particular issue.

Copyright and Funding

Please note that all text and images on this site is protected by copyright law. Blog postings and profile texts are the copyright of their respective authors. We warmly welcome links to our site: each page/blog entry includes a variety of convenient sharing tools to help with this. For more information, see the note at the bottom of this page. Please do not reproduce texts in emails or on your own site unless you have express written permission to do so (if in doubt, please contact us). Thank you.

For a note about funding, see the information at the bottom of this page.

The CRA and the CRRG

The Critical Religion Association (this website) emerged from the work of the University of Stirling's Critical Religion Research Group created in early 2011. Interest in the CRRG grew beyond all expectations, and the staff at Stirling sought to address requests for involvement beyond Stirling by creating the CRA as an international scholarly association in November 2012. The CRRG passed on the blog and other key content to the CRA, and this is being developed here.
The CRRG website is now devoted exclusively to the scholarly work of the staff at the University of Stirling.

Critical Religion online

Apart from this website, the Critical Religion Research Group also has accounts elsewhere online:
- we are on Twitter;
- we are on Facebook;
- we have audio on Audioboo;
We will soon also offer video.

RSS feeds

  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Administration

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.