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Islamic State and the ‘theology of rape’

21 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Trigger warning: this blog posting discusses the rape of women and young girls.

Important update, 24.11.15 – please read the note at the end of this blog posting before clicking the links in the references.

The New York Times published a horrific story by Rukmini Callimachi on 13. August entitled ‘ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape: Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool’.  The story details the ways in which Islamic State fighters have sought to systematically carry out a programme of rapes and sexual violence against women and girls, opening with an account of the rape of a 12 year-old girl.  The IS fighter explained to her that ‘according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God.’  Similar stories have been published elsewhere, for example, by Richard Spencer in the Daily Telegraph last October.

The women and girls affected are from the Yazidi minority, who were in the news a year ago when stranded on Mount Sinjar; since then, the mainstream Western media seems to have largely forgotten about them.  However, IS has, according to the NYT, developed a ‘detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery’ and provided theological legitimation for raping Yazidi women and girls.  Yazidis are a long-standing Kurdish minority, whose practices go back to Zoroastrianism and other traditions, including Islam; they have incorrectly been described as ‘devil-worshippers’ by Westerners in particular.  The NYT suggests Islamic State’s misunderstanding of them as polytheistic is in part the basis for their treatment, as is the fact that they are not regarded as ‘people of the Book’ in the way that Jews and Christians are (unfortunately, the NYT doesn’t explictly correct this misunderstanding of Yazidi monotheism/polytheism):

… the Islamic State made clear in their online magazine [Dabiq] that their campaign of enslaving Yazidi women and girls had been extensively preplanned.

“Prior to the taking of Sinjar, Shariah students in the Islamic State were tasked to research the Yazidis,” said the English-language article, headlined “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” which appeared in the October issue of Dabiq.

The article made clear that for the Yazidis, there was no chance to pay a tax known as jizya to be set free, “unlike the Jews and Christians.”

The NYT notes that justifications for the treatment of the captured Yazidis come from certain interpretations of the Qur’an and the Sunna, explaining that,

Scholars of Islamic theology disagree, however, on the proper interpretation of these verses, and on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.

This is somewhat disingenuous, since today, apart from those connected to IS, the systematic enslavement and rape of prisoners is not really a serious topic of discussion for Muslims.  Jews and Christians have similar texts in their scriptures (written much earlier, of course, than the Qur’an), for example:

Deut 21: 10-14: When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God hands them over to you and you take them captive, suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman whom you desire and want to marry, and so you bring her home to your house: she shall shave her head, pare her nails, discard her captive’s garb, and shall remain in your house a full month, mourning for her father and mother; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you are not satisfied with her, you shall let her go free and not sell her for money. You must not treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.

Num 31: 14-18: Moses became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. Moses said to them, “Have you allowed all the women to live? These women here, on Balaam’s advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Of course, there will be almost no Jews or Christians today who would regard these texts as acceptable guidelines for dealing with prisoners of war, and for the NYT to even suggest that Muslims today are seriously discussing whether similar passages from the Qur’an allow such things, rather than that a tiny proportion of Muslims connected to Islamic State are doing so, does not really help anyone – Muslim or not – better understand contemporary global discourses amongst Muslims.

Asking better questions about IS might also help understand IS better: for example, Jason Burke notes ‘Isis is a hybrid of insurgency, separatism, terrorism and criminality, with deep roots in its immediate local environment, in broader regional conflicts and in geopolitical battles…’ – surely this is more helpful in understanding IS than trying to shoehorn a tiny minority opinion about Qur’anic texts into a wider discourse amongst Muslims globally?

More broadly, of course, most people would agree that blind adherence to any text without appropriate understanding of its context and historical significance is evading the responsibility to think for oneself, resulting in an abdication of an individual’s humanity.  One of the outcomes of such thinking can be seen in the terrible fate of the Yazidi women and girls captured by Islamic State; though there are also, thankfully, some positive indicators about their future too, as the Daily Telegraph’s Richard Spencer described on 19.8.15.

—-

Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine mentioned by the NYT is available in various places online, including here.
The article referred to by the NYT is ‘The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour’ (author?) in issue 4, pp14-17.
Another article that may be of interest is by Umm Sumayyah Al-Muhājirah in issue 9 in the section ‘From our sisters’, and is entitled ‘Slave-girls or prostitutes?’, pp44-49.

IMPORTANT UPDATE, 24.11.15

I think it is obvious to most people that downloading Dabiq could potentially involve security services following up your interest in the magazine.

However, in the UK specifically, I have been alerted to the fact that a government minister has apparently said the government regards Dabiq as terrorist material under the provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000; scholarly research is presumably “a reasonable excuse” for doing so as outlined in 58 (3).

In the present Islamophobic climate in the UK, it therefore makes sense to advise caution in downloading the magazine if there is no demonstrable scholarly reason for you to do so.  Of course, in my view, following up the references I have given in this blog posting is a valid scholarly interest and should therefore constitute “a reasonable excuse” under 58 (3) – but I am not a lawyer and neither I nor the Critical Religion Association can take responsibility for any consequences arising from interest in Dabiq.

Michael Marten

“Becoming Recognizable: Postcolonial Independence and the Reification of Religion” – comments on Maria Birnbaum’s thesis

19 Tuesday May 2015

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I just finished reading “Becoming Recognizable: Postcolonial Independence and the Reification of Religion,” an outstanding doctoral thesis by Maria Birnbaum, who recently completed graduate work in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. Birnbaum’s work will be of interest to anyone engaged in analysis and critique of religion as a category of public policy because:

  1. it advances theorizing about how religion becomes constructed in the discourse of international relations about the recognition of states and because
  2. it illustrates why such theorizing matters in the practical functioning of international statecraft.

I expect to cite Birnbaum in my work and will recommend her dissertation to graduate students and colleagues.

Before proceeding any further with a short summary of the thesis and a brief discussion of how it relates to my project, I want to indicate a significant lacuna in what Birnbaum has written: with the exception of works by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, there is very little mention of current critiques of the depiction and use of religion in IR. Most notably, Birnbaum makes no reference to Timothy Fitzgerald’s 2011 benchmark book, Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (Continuum). This is unfortunate since Fitzgerald’s substantial interrogation of themes and authors Birnbaum engages in her text would enrich her own analysis considerably. I hope that she will remedy this omission as she proceeds with publication of her important work.

The thesis is a clear and concisely written argument for practicing what Birnbaum calls “genealogical sensitivity” in international relations theory (IR). She uncovers major flaws in the work of Daniel Philpott, Scott Thomas and Jurgen Habermas – three authorities in IR who argue for the recognition of religion in global politics. Birnbaum shows although religion is assumed to be an “already present and intelligible” phenomenon that is a powerful determinant of identity and agency, none of the three can identify what it is that ought to be recognized. Furthermore, she argues that the process of recognition they support works to create that which it purports to be acknowledging. She claims that, in general, IR theory tends to be unaware of the contingencies of history, economics and power relations that underlie what gets labeled and institutionalized as ‘religion.’ Thus, Philpott, Thomas and Habermas exemplify what Birnbaum sees as forgetfulness and naivete in IR – forgetfulness (her word) about the processes of history that have brought about social groupings and classifications and naivete (my word) about how the very rhetoric of difference and particularity functions to produce the groups that governments aspire to manage.

Birnbaum condenses a great deal of complex theory and analysis in her text. Philosophical and political discussions pertaining to “being and becoming” are summarized and evaluated. She favors an approach that would balance the necessity of stabilizing social and governmental entities – i. e. “being” – with attentiveness to constant change that requires flexibility of boundaries and group definition – i.e. “becoming.” She reviews debates and literature related to the foundation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland and Israel as a Jewish state to show how religion emerged during the twentieth century dissolution of the British Empire as a “taken-for-granted juridical, cultural and political category” that affected the lives and deaths of millions. Her moving conclusion restates her argument that religion ought not to be used as a stand-alone analytic category because such a practice represses and thus disguises what is at issue in the struggles for power and resources that continue to fuel global conflicts.

Presently, I am at work on developing theory about how the category of religion is used strategically in technologies of statecraft to at times support existing orders of authority and at other times to undermine them. I argue that ‘religion’ has emerged rather recently as a placeholder for conquered and marginalized groups that are allowed to exist with some degree of cohesion within the jurisdictions of dominant sovereignties. The dominated group is allowed a circumscribed degree of autonomy as a religion if it agrees to abide by certain limitations chiefly in regard to a renunciation of the forms of violence – i.e. police and military functions – that the ascendant state reserves for itself. Thus, I understand religions to operate as the weakened vestiges of former states within fully functioning states. However, the very fact that religions are accorded some degree of sovereignty within dominant governments gives them a platform on which to strive for increased power and recognition. Religions are always restive to some degree and therefore behave like once and future states. Likewise governments habitually aggrandize religions by invoking theistic traditions as honored predecessors in order to glorify authority wielded in the here and now with a mantle of mystified and ancient grandeur. Examples abound in the preambles of contemporary legal and quasi-legal documents that make vague reference to a divine power as the ultimate justification for the present governing order. Because such theistic antecedents are almost always male, such contrived practices of nostalgia result in the shoring up of patriarchal ruling structures that characterize current governing regimes.

The thrust of the theory I am proposing undermines difference between so-called secular and religious orders of governance. Instead, I posit the existence of two unequal registers of government that eye one another with alternating degrees of competition and collusion, that jockey each other for domains of influence and that make use of one another to maintain and increase power.

I am developing such arguments along with several colleagues in a series of essays, edited collections and a monograph in progress. Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty, edited with Trevor Stack and Timothy Fitzgerald, will to appear this year from Brill. My essay in the volume, titled “The Category of Religion in the Technology of Governance: An Argument for Understanding Religions as Vestigial States” is an overview of my position.)

By showing how theorists in international relations articulate ideology that first reifies religions under the guise of recognition and then works to create and solidify contemporary state apparatuses to manage what is imagined as already there, Birnbaum enhances understanding of how ‘religion’ is linked to processes of governmentality. She also documents a sinister side to the whole business by pointing out some of the ways in which reified religions have become carriers of rigid and policed identities that exacerbate inter-group tensions and undermine progressive politics. Her work contributes to a growing and urgently necessary body of theory that is unraveling confusions propagated in the narratives of government in which we are all enmeshed.

NB This blog was first published on the NAASR site, 11.5.15.

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

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christians as ‘minorities’ in the Middle East?

27 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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

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

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

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

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

– – – – –

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

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

A polemic on the World Interfaith Harmony Week

28 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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