Category Archives: Islam in Global Affairs class

So much for modernity

08 Saturday Nov 2014

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Once again I find myself deeply thankful to Dr. Muqtedar Khan. I was his guest at the Jerrahi tekke, or Sufi Lodge, in Istanbul.ilminfazileti_1337523976184

The spaces are small but rich in history. The complex has about six rooms that I saw, with the main room having some attributes of a mosque. The focus is a beautifully tiled mihrab pointing the direction of Mecca. A balcony for women surrounds several sides, and the walls are completely covered in framed calligraphy – names of Allah, the Prophet, the Companions, and the founder and leading Shaykhs of the tekke. They did not allow photography, but after some searching I found this photo on a website featuring a list of tekkes in Istanbul.

We entered at about 7pm to find men sitting around in small groups, most wearing white caps. Women and kids were passing back and forth through to the balcony. There was quiet talking, and as Dr. Khan described it, fellowship. Some of the men are just members of the lodge, and some are darwishes – those who seek to follow this particular shaykh’s path to awareness of God. Over the next hour the rooms filled, and at about 8:30pm all aligned to say the Isha, or night prayer. After the prayer, people shifted a bit and the prayer leaders started to sing and chant. Occasionally there were full responses from all – mostly Amen, sometimes praises to God. Slowly the congregation took over from the prayer leaders with repetitive chanting. They began to bow slightly to one side and another. The chant was very simple – often just “Allah”.
Sometimes what is being chanted changed, and the volumes and speed rose or fell. Occasionally the prayer leaders sang a melody over the chant.

As the chants and swaying continued, I ceased registering time. At some point those less experienced shifted into the outer rooms, which had archway views into the main room. The men into main room circled and started a different chant, this with a strong breath component. The sound was “Hu” meaning, I believe, “Him” – God. The whole room breathed as one.

The circle started to rotate, with several men in the center moving counter to the main rotation. One wearing a tall light brown cap began to spin slowly, one hand up and one down. Again time was not registering. At some point the circle and the spinner slowed and stopped. The chant continued for some time, and it too came to an end. The sheik proceeded to a seat where he would deliver a sermon. We slipped out – 11:30pm.

The title of this entry, “so much for modernity”, is something Dr. Khan said to me. Consider so many people, spending a whole evening together, voluntarily, “unproductively” and with no technology. I am, generally, a big fan of modernity – especially the expanding circle of empathy, the chance for improved health, and the dissemination of knowledge. It is true, however, that we must continue to strive for genuine contact with one another and with enduring truths.

 

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Where will the influential Muslim ideas come from? Mansoor Moaddel’s theoretical framework, and a prediction

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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In his 2001 paper “Conditions for Ideological Production: The Origins of Islamic Modernism in India, Egypt, and Iran,” Mansoor Moaddel argues that Islamic modernism arose in the context of competing marketplaces of ideas and of a disruptive moment in history. He later expanded this into a 2005 book, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse.

In 19th century Egypt and India, social change led to environments in which many ideas competed and led to strong new worldviews. He contrasts these moments with 19th century Iran, in which social change was relatively small but there were still multiple discourses. Thus, he argues, Iran saw weak but still extant modernist views arise. Moaddel presents evidence to show that one needs new thinkers associated with the state in order to create enough space for the new ideologies to be produced.

Moaddel also seeks to show that while the social milieu needs to be right, the content of the ideas produced is formed in dialogue with other ideas, and not simply as a reaction to external forces.

I found his argument persuasive, though I might put it a somewhat different way. The economic, political and social environment asks the questions, and people use their cultural, religious and intellectual heritage as well as new ideas they encounter to offer answers. In the cases of Egypt, India and Iran in the 19th century, for example, a central question was “how do we respond to the material dominance of the West?” This would be one of Moaddel’s “episodes,” a moment when resources and social space produce a need for new ideologies. The answers are presented by thinkers such as those discussed by Moaddel. An example of a response to the question of Western material advances would be al-Afghani’s anti-imperialist and simultaneously modernist claims. He draws from his understanding of his own history, from Muslim religious thought, and from Enlightenment reasoning to weave together his answers. Moaddel captures this when he says, “the key factors in the actual production of discourse are the nature, the number, and the level of diversity of the targets the ideological producers face, which determine the theme and the content of their utterances.”

The statement that most raised my eyebrows was in Moaddel’s conclusion, when he said, “We contend that if we obtain an adequate picture of the role of the state in culture, the nature of the discursive field, and the kind of ideological targets that are present in this field, we may be able to overcome indeterminacy and predict the process of ideological production.” This seems incredibly ambitious – it feels to me like there are just too many variables. I partly withdraw my critique, however, upon coming upon a quote from sociology professor Beau Weston: “It is always true that ‘reality is more complex than your social theory’. And that critique is never helpful”. So to finish I will attempt at two related predictions based on a current situation.

Muslims across the world today are encountering one of Moaddel’s episodes. In my terminology, sociopolitical forces are asking them a question: “How should Muslim majority states govern themselves?” In Egypt today this question has major implications, satisfying one of the conditions for the production of new ideologies. With the military back in firm control, however, and acting forcefully to limit the dialogue, new ideologies will arise but will not obtain a sufficient foothold to become powerful. Within Muslim communities in the United States and Europe, however, there is both a historical episode and a pluralist discourse. Thus we are likely to see Muslims in the West producing new, highly influential ideologies.

Must sovereignty over holy cities be a core value for those with a strong religious identity?

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

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Should Episcopalians be willing to go to war to protect this congregation's right to visit the Holy Sepulcher, 8 miles south?

Should Episcopalians be willing to go to war to protect this congregation’s right to visit the Holy Sepulcher, 8 miles south?

Most Christians are not upset about Istanbul being in Muslim hands, or Jerusalem being in Jewish hands. Are they therefore no longer as committed to their faith? These Christians would say no, that they have transcended the need to possess a place to consider it holy and to participate in that holiness. Professor Khan, however, challenged me on this position. He argued that non-Christian sovereignty of these places is hurting their status as sacred spaces for Christians. Examples:

-Permits for Palestinian Christians to worship in Jerusalem are difficult to get. The scope of operations of existing Christian churches and schools are tightly circumscribed by the state, and the government pressures churches to sell their land. Meanwhile, synagogues and yeshivas are being built with state support, even in traditionally Christian and Muslim neighborhoods.

-The current Turkish government is undermining an 80 year-long agreement between Muslims and Christians to classify contested religious sites as museums. Most famously, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul had been the Patriarchal Cathedral of Constantinople for 900 years, then a mosque until being designated a museum in 1931. But there is more and more discussion and demonstrating to turn it back into a mosque, as the government has done to the ancient church-mosque-museum in Iznik, the town in which the early Christian church met to formulate the Nicene Creed.

Similarly, Professor Khan questioned the religious identity of Muslims who are not pushing hard enough to liberate al-Quds. He told a story of polling a large number of Muslims at a conference about the four cities they most valued. They all answered Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, (the “good Muslim” answer) and then most answered their home city. He asked them if they would take up arms if a foreign, non-Muslim country occupied their home city. Many said yes, and he responded that these must be lying about something. Jerusalem was occupied, from their perspectives as Muslims, by a foreign, non-Muslim state and they had not gone to fight. Either they valued their hometown more than Jerusalem, or they would not really go to fight for their hometown.

Despite the above example, Professor Khan argued that on average Muslims (and Jews) are more committed to sovereignty of their holy cities than are Christians. He and my classmate Bushra emphasized, for example, how it would be inconceivable for Muslims to give up Mecca to non-believers.

So, to use the language of Professor Khan in his book Jihad for Jerusalem, are holy places an incontestable core value for most Christians anymore? If so, why the lack of concern about some of those places? If not, does that show a weakening of Christian religious identity, an evolution, or something else? Does the relatively stronger passion more Jews and Muslims currently hold to control their holy cities show a stronger religious identity overall?

Encountering International Relations Theory

27 Wednesday Aug 2014

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I am learning the disputes within International Relations theory for the first time in my class Islam in Global Affairs. I find myself agreeing strongly with my professor Muqtedar Khan’s positions, which makes me suspicious of my own conclusions since following the first line of thinking one encounters is a classic tendency when in a new field. With this proviso, what follows are my first ideas on IR theory as presented by Professor Khan in the opening chapter of his book Jihad for Jerusalem.

Pursuing the academic study of religion in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, I encountered a primarily postmodern approach. The observation of Michel Foucault, that all thinkers were shaped by their relation to forms of power and powerlessness, was popular. I studied from what I believe our current readings describe as a sociological perspective. Authors I recall, and I may be wrong about how I am categorizing them, include William James, Thorsten Veblen, Clifford Geertz, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mary Douglass. When contemporary politics did arise as a topic, we often made the point that political leaders did not take an understanding of peoples’ faith commitments sufficiently seriously. Teachers and students also often agreed that if there ever were a time when societies were clearly bounded, that time had long past. “They” not only live among “us” and “we” among “them,” they are now us and we are now them. I do not recall encountering rational choice theory of international relations except by implication of its weakness and failure. Later, while reading behavioral economics for fun, I did come across “homo economicus,” the rational actor who always make choices to maximize his own gains. Behavioral economists also presented this concept as the previous paradigm that we needed to overturn.

As someone who moves quickly because of my academic interests to the religious dimension when considering international politics, I agree with my intellectual upbringing –  I am highly skeptical of the rationalist narrative that claims people only act from positions of narrow, especially strictly economic, self-interest. At the same time, I have always been and continue to be suspicious of assertions that our choices are totally subjective. This links in my mind to complete cultural relativism, which implies a pessimism about improving our lot as humans. If no approach to life is better than another, then we cannot find ways to improve and become more fulfilled. I want to believe that different societies in different ways have hit upon political, cultural, economic, philosophical and spiritual approaches to living, among others, that lead to greater happiness overall and can be copied successfully by other societies.

I am finding many of the terms used in our Voll reading and in Jihad for Jerusalem extremely helpful. The idea of agency in this context I find appealing – especially seeing the agent as interacting with his society in mutually influencing turns. As Khan writes, “Agents are to some extent rational and their rationality is circumscribed by their identity and structural constraints.” (Khan, Ch 1, Constructivism: A Middle Path, para. 14) Thus I find myself persuaded by Khan’s claim that “Constructivist approaches (as understood in the IR discipline) recognize the essential role of identity and normative/cultural values in the constitution of society, the individual subject, and in the decision processes that shape interactions.” (Preface, para. 3)

Toward the end of chapter 1, I was surprised to find the two terms frequently used in religion pop up: “moral” and “symbolic”. Khan contrasts the idea of morally motivated action to the concept of structurally motivated action. Khan argues that there are several responses an individual can make to structural forces: she can go along with the hegemony, thus following the rational actor model, she can challenge the hegemony because of her identities (moral action), or she can challenge the power in order to gain power – which he calls being counter-hegemonic. He uses the term symbol in a similar way. When political actors are not behaving strategically (in line with their material self-interest) they are behaving symbolically. Khan opens Jihad for Jerusalem by giving us language by which religious interests, among others, can be considered in the realm of international relations.