Disciplining the Violent

Posted on May 8, 2013 by mattsheedy

by Steven Ramey

Monks in Myanmar encouraging violence, while that image challenges common assumptions about those who identify as Buddhists, accounts of such events often actually reinforce those assumptions. On April 30 people identified as Buddhists burned mosques and homes of a minority group identified as Muslim, reportedly resulting in injuries and one death. A recent BBC account of this ongoing conflict in Myanmar reiterates the trope that Buddhists follow a non-violent tradition. The author, a fellow at Brasenose College of Oxford who has studied conflict in Sri Lanka, drew parallels with Sri Lanka to argue that political interests corrupted the ideal teachings of nonviolence and justified violent action to protect position and power.

Three days before this particular attack on mosques and homes in Myanmar, another conflict between three European climbers and a group of Sherpas on Mount Everest raised similar issues. One account of the conflict particularly emphasized its unusual nature, asserting that the Sherpas are Buddhists who usually refrain from violent emotions or actions because such emotions pollute the mountain, which the Sherpas consider sacred. The account characterized the Sherpas as generally accepting with equanimity the economic disparity between themselves and the climbers who hire them because the Sherpas see themselves as existing in “a parallel universe.” The authors certainly reinforced a romanticized image of Mount Everest and the communities involved, while simultaneously explaining the conflict as a factor of economic disparity and tense labor relations.

In explaining these events, both accounts reflect the persistence of the trope that religion, at least in its purportedly pure, original form, is a force for good. Political and material interests generate the violence that challenges this idealized image. Thus, the Buddha, among others to whom teachings such as non-violence are attributed, remain idealized, free from any political or material interests. Dividing society between good aspects that we commonly label religious and problematic aspects that we label political constructs the first as an idealized, incorruptible space for the good and thus disciplines those who respond with violence (at least violence that we deem inappropriate) as corrupting their own religious identity, as we have constructed it and ascribed it to them.

 

Steven Ramey is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies program. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where his work focused on contemporary religions and identity in India. His book Hindu Sufi or Sikh (Palgrave 2008) analyzes issues of identity within Sindhi Hindu communities. 

Posted in Politics and Religion, Religion and Society, Religion and Theory, Religion in the News, Steven Ramey, Theory in the Real World | Tagged | Leave a comment

Bruce Lincoln’s “How to Read a Religious Text”: An Experiment of Application

Posted on May 6, 2013 by mattsheedy

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Editor’s Note: In the April issue of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Ipsita Chatterjea published her reflections as part of a round table discussion of Bruce Lincoln’s Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2012). As Kelly Baker notes in her post from last week introducing the recent issue, four scholars, including Chatterjea, Marsha Aileen Hewitt, Gabriel Levy, and K. Merinda Simmons ”engage Lincoln’s work as a venue to think about critical approaches to religious studies.” 

by Ipsita Chatterjea

In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions, Lincoln’s “How to Read a Religious Text” is anchored in decades of work with mythological or canonical texts, while the six points deployed have their origins in his prior work, Theorizing Myth (Lincoln 2012, 5-15; Lincoln 1999, 150-155).  The sections from the Chandogya Upaniʂds that Lincoln uses to illustrate his points thus fall in line with a number of his selected examples over the course of his career, and add to this the analysis of relatively discrete events.

The essay will apply Lincoln’s six lines of inquiry to Sara J. Duncan’s Progressive Missions in the South and Addresses: With Illustrations and Sketches of Missionary Workers and Ministers and Bishop’s Wives (1906) to walk through the utility, limits and necessary adaptations that surface when Lincoln’s categories are applied to other types of religious texts beyond myth and canon. The steps induce a disjuncture for the reader from the deceptively simple, elusive task of “just understanding what occurs within a text,” religious or not, and shifts the focus to how and why it was produced, contextual markers and the observable social tensions. The questions are useful in sorting through the complexities of Progressive Missions. As General Superintendent of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s (AME) Women’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society (WHFMS), Duncan’s compendium is designed to (among other things) galvanize Southern black Methodist women to action within the AME; fend off Northern AME hegemony; refute white racism, note Southern black civic and business accomplishments; include narratives of middle class and poor women as religious exemplars and assert the capacity of women to serve God as equals–if not more–to men. In the texts Duncan authors and through her editorial choices within the volume, she simultaneously acknowledges and sets aside social expectations.

Ipsita Chatterjea is completing a Ph.D on African Methodist Episcopal women at Vanderbilt University’s Graduate Department of Religion in the History and Critical Theories of Religion area. Ipsita’s research interests focus on the relationships between religion, violence and social regulation, African-American religious history as intellectual history, sociology of religion and critical theories and methods and the study of religion. She is co-founder and co-chair of the AAR’s Study of Religion as an Analytical Discipline Workshop (SORAAAD) and Sociology of Religion Group. She is a member of the Critical Theories and Discourses on Religion Group steering committee, serving since 2005. http://vanderbilt.academia.edu/IpsitaChatterjea

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Homo Experimentalis: The Place of Experimentation in the Scientific Study of Religion

Posted on May 3, 2013 by mattsheedy

by William “Lee” McCorkle Jr. and Dimitris Xygalatas

In October 2012, the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA) and the Department for the Study of Religions at Masaryk University, in conjunction with the Czech Association for the Study of Religions (CASR), hosted a conference entitled Homo Experimentalis in Brno. This event, which was the first official academic gathering of people engaged in experimental methods in the study of religion, was attended by over one hundred junior and senior scholars from around the world. The selected proceedings of this conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion.

LEVYNA, the world’s only institution exclusively dedicated to the experimental research of religion, organized a “summit”, inviting the leaders of other major international centers engaged with experimental approaches to religion to discuss the future of the field with attendees and with three towering figures from traditional religious studies. The organizers recorded and posted online a series of video interviews with these key players, making these important discussions available to the international public and other scholars in academia. Presented as a “merging of minds,” these interviews are representative of a growing movement in Religious Studies, Anthropology, History, Philosophy, Psychology, and the Cognitive Sciences towards combining methodological models from the natural, social, and behavioral sciences and humanities and collaborating on complex issues in the empirical study of religious belief and behavior.

The interviews feature the leaders of some of the global hotspots in experimental research on religion. Harvey Whitehouse represented the Centre for Anthropology and Mind (Oxford University), of which he is the founding Director. He argued that anthropologists have long developed well-formed theories of religiosity, and have also provided tons of qualitative evidence from the world’s cultures. What remains to be done is to systematically mine this data and supplement it will controlled studies to allow testing these theories against precise quantitative evidence. In order to do that, Whitehouse is leading a major research grant (among others) called Ritual, Community, and Conflict.

Paulo Sousa is the Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture (ICC) at Queen’s University Belfast, which was founded by Whitehouse in 2004 as the first and foremost center to train graduate students specifically in the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). Sousa emphasized the ICC’s commitment to training students in research methods designed to tease out certain features of religious belief and behavior.

Armin Geertz, leader of the Religion, Cognition, and Culture unit (RCC) at the Aarhus University, stressed his center’s pioneering role in bringing together cognition and culture in the study of religion and establishing the field of CSR. Aarhus has hosted several of the seminal international conferences in CSR, and is the place where the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion, a book series in CSR, and the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion were founded.

Aarhus University has recently established a new interdisciplinary centre, the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC), led by Andreas Roepstorff, who is also co-Director of the MINDLab, yet another leading centre for the study of mind and culture. Although the focus of these centres is much broader, some of the most groundbreaking studies on religion and cognition have been produced within their radically interdisciplinary environments. Roepstorff talked about the virtues and challenges of bridging the social sciences and humanities with more experimental approaches and some of the results that have come out of the bridges that have been built in Aarhus.

Edward Slingerland is co-Director of the Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture at the University of British Columbia. He is also the primary recipient of one of the largest grants ever to be awarded to a project on religion. The Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), funded by the Canadian Research Council, brings together over fifty scholars from various institutions and disciplines to study the link between religion and morality. Slingerland, a Chinese historian, argued in his interview that these types of large-scale collaborations are the way of the future for the study of complex phenomena like religion.

Finally, the organizers interviewed the respondents to the summit, three of the people who have help established the scientific study of religion more than most. E. Thomas Lawson, Luther H. Martin, and Donald Wiebe, founding members of the North American Association for the Scientific Study of Religion, commented on the development of the scientific study of religion since its inception, with an emphasis on the cognitive science of religion and the importance and limitations of introducing experimental methodologies in its pursuit.

The full interviews are freely accessible at the LEVYNA Youtube channel (www.youtube.com/user/LevynaProject) and the LEVYNA homepage (www.levyna.cz)

William “Lee” McCorkle Jr. is Senior Research Fellow at LEVYNA (Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion) at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He can be contacted at: williamleemccorkle@gmail.com*

Dimitris Xygalatas is Director at LEVYNA, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic; Department of Culture and Society; Interacting Minds Centre (IMC3) and Religion, Cognition and Culture research unit (RCC), Aarhus University. He can be contacted at: xygalatas@gmail.com

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The Questions Remain the Same

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Kelly J. Baker

This is the editorial appearing in the April issue of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, which included a round table discussion of Bruce Lincoln’s Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

by Kelly J. Baker

In November of 2012, I attended a workshop, alongside a variety of other scholars, hosted by the Study of Religion as an Analytic Discipline (SORAAAD). The workshop sought discussion about how to study religion analytically while questioning the norms and values of religious studies as a field. Over the course of an afternoon, ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and religious studies scholars interrogated the assumptions often embedded in the study of religious people and our own understandings of scholarly praxis. Not surprisingly, tensions emerged as scholars defended their positions and advocated for different versions/visions of religious studies. Questions about the discipline and its boundaries surfaced and retreated again and again. What is “religion”? How do we study “religion”? How are we training students in this study? What is the place of religious studies in the modern university? What is at stake in classifying something “religious”? What are our assumptions about religion? How do they color our approaches to certain topics? These questions are not new; some might even say that they are tired refrains that create more weariness than analysis. After this workshop, I realized that these questions, for better or worse, might be with us always. Many scholars have been pushing us to realize the centrality of these questions to anyone who studies religion. Critical approaches to religious studies cannot be avoided, nor should they be.

For this issue of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, I am happy to report we feature a round table on Bruce Lincoln’s Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2012), an edited collection including “Theses on Method” and “The (Un)Discipline of Religion” to name only a few of the essays included. This volume illuminates Lincoln’s unflinching commitment to the critical study of religion as a venue to study the shared visions, perceptions, and communities of human beings.  Four scholars engage Lincoln’s work as a venue to think about critical approaches to religious studies. Marsha Aileen Hewitt, Trinity College (Toronto), evaluates Lincoln’s focus on how language and text “support social relations of domination and submission.” Gabriel Levy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, offers a critique of Lincoln’s presentation of science. Ipsita Chatterjea, Vanderbilt University, provides a practical application of Lincoln’s methods to her own case study, the Women’s Home and Foreign Missions Society. K. Merinda Simmons, University of Alabama, argues impressively that maybe the legacy of Lincoln’s work is to scare scholars into better forms of critique.

This issue also includes a new section for our journal on teaching and pedagogy to showcase how methods and theory are important to religious studies classrooms. Please consider submitting articles about your own pedagogies for teaching and analyzing religion.

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Agonistic Respect in the Study of Religion

Posted on April 29, 2013 by mattsheedy

by Jack Tsonis

As many will be aware, the upcoming AAR meeting in Baltimore will see an experiment in format with the creation of program “Clusters.” Larger than Units, Groups, and Sections, the aim of the Cluster approach is to “cut across different kinds of Units” and to “create more dynamic, creative structures and cross-disciplinary sessions.” For most readers of this blog, the Cluster of greatest interest will no doubt be the Social Theory and Religion Cluster.

While the specific concerns of the STRC will be various, one of the key goals articulated in a planning session at the 2012 meeting in Chicago was to work towards higher levels of engagement with other segments of the AAR. Of particular concern to many in the room was thinking about how best to present the analytical perspectives advocated by the STRC to other groups in the field, particularly those perceived as having a more “descriptive” than “theoretical” bent.

It seems like a well acknowledged fact that there is a major division in religious studies between “reductionist” scholars, i.e. those who advocate a social-scientific and discourse-analytical approach to all belief and action; and “essentialist” scholars, who believe that “religion” constitutes a sui generis aspect of human life and that all religions are different responses to the same transcendent reality (which typically leads to more descriptive or phenomenological forms of scholarship).

Whilst the division is obviously more complicated and multilayered than this common caricature suggests, the STRC nevertheless advocates a form of analysis that is clearly counterposed to scholarship underpinned by theological essentialism. Critics have long argued that such scholarship too often reproduces insider accounts of religiously motivated action without sufficient problematization, and that it regularly deploys unhistoricized or even quasi-theological notions (such as “the sacred”) as central analytic categories. Yet such critics also argue that the essentialist approach is the dominant one both in the AAR and in the institutionalized structures of religious studies more broadly. Leaving aside whether this is actually the case (and how in fact it would be measured), this claim points toward one of the most pressing areas of contest in the contemporary study of religion.

Given that the issue revolves primarily around the negotiation of different intellectual and political interests within shared space, a useful point of consideration might be William Connolly’s notion of “agonistic respect.” While Connolly’s work is mainly concerned with politics, his perspectives on democratic theory provide food for thought for those interested in the broader aims of the STRC.

Connolly construes agonistic respect as an ethos of engagement appropriate for the complexities of late modern society, an ethos in which partisans of all sides approach political debates with “a certain forbearance and hesitancy” with respect to their perspective’s universal applicability (see Pluralism, 2005). This does not mean that a lukewarm middle ground is sought, for “partisans may test, challenge, and contest pertinent elements in the fundaments of others.” Connolly suggests that when such contestations are explored without resentment, they can evolve into “reciprocal commitment to inject generosity and forbearance into public negotiations between parties who reciprocally acknowledge that the deepest wellsprings of human inspiration are to date susceptible to multiple interpretations.” Agonistic respect is respectful because it recognizes this ultimate ambiguity and tempers the debate accordingly (usually with a vision of shared interest), but agonistic because it nevertheless engages in deep contestation regarding the fundaments of others’ viewpoints, as well as strenuous justification of one’s own.

On my reading, if this general orientation is taken to academic work, it allows for a form of critical, deconstructive scholarship that can be (a) insistent on the priority of its methodological commitments vis-à-vis approaches that appear less critically self-reflexive; while is at the same time (b) not guilty of what might be called “Enlightenment hubris” with regard to how this insistence of methodological priority is advocated (think Dawkins & co).

In other words, the conceptualization of agonistic respect as a civic virtue for negotiating differing religious faiths and political creeds can be easily recalibrated as an academic virtue for dealing with points of tension between competing methodologies. Naturally there are substantial differences between the competitive dynamics of political action and the competitive dynamics of scholarly debate; but the principles of agonistic respect surely provide a desirable model for contestation in both areas.

The whole purpose of the Cluster approach is to encourage ways of moving beyond the hyper-specialized conversations that take place across the disparate groups of the AAR. But being serious about that goal should also mean being committed to forging productive sites of debate between those who study religion not just with different methodological commitments, but with different metaphysical commitments. Anything less will only reinforce the fractured and often parochial divisions that have for so long marked the field.

The point is not to strike an even or harmonious balance between contesting points of view, nor to fill the air with fuzzy pluralistic affect in which fundamental differences are overlooked. It is to wage the battle of ideas with more respect for the deep wellsprings of other scholars’ commitments, regardless of the specific reasons that we do not agree with them. But it is also about bringing into the foreground the fundaments of each perspective so that they can be debated more clearly, something that is often overlooked in the critical response to theological essentialism.

The ideal today is not “objectivity” but “ideological transparency” – or, as J. Z. Smith reminds us, not “processes of proof” but “rhetorics of persuasion” – where not just methodological commitments are made clear, but also, at various stages, the metaphysical commitments that lie behind them.

When scholars advocate a discursively and politically aware form of scholarship that rejects theological essentialism as a viable standpoint for the production of knowledge in an academic context, they believe that this is not merely based upon simple affective sentiments about what they think is right or true, but that those sentiments are based upon the best readings of human history as we can construe them. Recognizing this explicitly, rather than implicitly, should allow us to argue our points robustly but without assuming that they are based on self-evident truths or universally applicable standards of judgement. If we can get others to approach the table with the same attitude, then debates about best practice in the field may take on a productive new cast.

Jack Tsonis is a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney. His dissertation is called Don’t Say All Religions Are Equal Unless You Really Mean It: A Critical Analysis of the Pluralist Theory of Religions, which examines the way in which the pluralistic world religions paradigm of the twentieth century remains structured to an important degree by the assumptions of nineteenth-century colonial discourse, specifically focusing on John Hick as an instantiation of this problem. His research areas include the history of scholarship on religion in the west, communications history and media theory, and evolutionary paradigms for the long-term history of cultural change.

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Creating the Space for god

Posted on April 26, 2013 by mattsheedy

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by Deeksha Sivakumar

It is the Tamil new year’s first month Chittirai, where several important festivals take place especially in Tamil Nadu. Madurai, home of the Tamil Sangam (Literary Council) and residence of the Goddess Meenakshi, witnesses a spectacular twenty day enactment of the wedding of Sundereshwarar (Shiva) and Meenakshi in grand procession on large chariots drawn by vast crowds. With the Vijayanagara Empire’s reign, multiple regions of Southern India together rejoiced in the celebration of this wedding festival subsequently inviting the neighboring god Kallazhagar (Vishnu), Meenakshi’s brother, also to the ritual. Bringing together deities from a number of opposing and coexisting textual and religious sects, and local gods, Chittirai Ther Thiruvizha displays the three most popular deities of the area: Meenakshi, Shiva, and Vishnu.

While this event is an auspicious crowd puller, another eighteen day ritual in the first month is celebrated in a relatively smaller town called Koovagam, further north from Madurai. In his 1988 three volume publication ‘The Cult of Draupadi’, Alf Hiltebeitel brings our attention to several folk rituals belonging to the cult of Draupadi native to the inner districts of Tamil country. Among the various rituals, he notes Kuttantavar’s festival in Koovagam as showing close proximity to rituals performed in other Draupadi cults. Kuttantavar festival celebrates Aravan, a small character from the epic Mahabharata who is Arjuna’s son out of wedlock with the naga (serpent) princess Ulupi. Aravan becomes a strong and powerful deity in the area on account of the selfless sacrifice of his own head to Kali for the victory of the Pandavas over the Kauravas. According to the narratives, Aravan asks for one last boon before his death – to be married and enjoy sexual union. Vishnu in his feminine form of Mohini agrees to marry him accepting his/her doomed fate of widowhood.

Eunuchs (Alis) from all over Tamil Nadu celebrate these eighteen days enacting this story of the Mahabharata. First they marry Aravan and then undergo a two day lamentation of his loss in the guise of a widow. The eunuchs remember Aravan and his great gift to them by violently breaking their wedding necklace or thali, which marks their status of widowhood. They beat their chests in anguish and weep for hours. They even break their own bangles and dress in white saris (traditional for widows). According to ethnographic accounts provided by Piyush Saxena, the eunuchs conclude the festival with a public donation of “blood rice” to induce fertility in mothers who are unable to conceive. The visiting eunuchs also pray to be born as fully male or fully female in their next birth vowing to always return to perform this festival. Nowadays beauty pageants are held at the end of the Kuttantavar festival, emphasizing a contemporary understanding of gender in the public space.

Vishnu as Mohini troubles the static images of gendered gods. Arjuna, Aravan’s father, is cursed to be a eunuch for one year by a celestial dancer allowing him to be successfully hidden in the inner female quarters for his yearlong exile in Virata’s kingdom. Arjuna benefits from his adoption of eunuch status, Vishnu as Mohini is the only one capable of bearing to be a bride doomed to widowhood, and dressed as widows the eunuchs can grieve for Aravan as Mohini does in the narrative. God, the male protagonist, and the worshippers display and celebrate their transgendered status in narratives otherwise riddled with gendered prescriptions. Rather than separating god as merely an object of devotion, the deities here, like Aravan, absorb and embody the qualities of his worshippers. Moreover, the eunuch’s participation as widows in a religious setting allows for the celebration of an identity usually inauspicious (in most festival contexts) like its contemporary Chittirai Ther Thiruvizha. Kuttantavar’s festival shows us that every new beginning celebrates a unique facet of human identity.

Deeksha Sivakumar is a Ph.D. student in South Asian Religions at Emory University, GA. Her current research interests surround a particular enactment of a goddess festival and its unique celebration in Southern India as Bommai Golu. Her subordinate interests include ritual performance, healing, materiality, and femininity. She is also excited to see what digital technologies can do for the Humanities and the study of ethnography. She has been an energetic TA and presented several lectures on Hindu deities, ritual practices and the Indian diaspora.

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The Canadian “Terror Plot”: Same Scripts, Different Heroes (well, sort of)

Posted on April 24, 2013 by mattsheedy

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by Matt Sheedy

News broke this past Monday about a “terror plot” that was foiled by Canadian law enforcement and security units, where two men with alleged links to al Qaeda in Iran planned to blow up a passenger train between Toronto and New York. Unlike the Boston Marathon bombings, this affair did not end in violence, though the social effects in its aftermath have followed a familiar script.

As Donovan Schaefer observes in his post on the Boston Marathon bombings from this past Monday, the Tsarnaev brothers–as white, foreign, Americanized and Muslim–did not fit the standard media scripts regarding perpetrators of this kind of violence. He continues,

This twisting of the scripts by which the media filters and processes acts of “terrorism” is important.  It sidesteps the ruthlessly simple logic of American anti-Muslim racism by reminding American media consumers that Islam is not so easily racially coded, subtly unraveling the very thick equation, in the American media imaginary, of Islam with brown/Other bodies.

The accused in this case, Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35, who were living in Montreal and Toronto, do in fact fit the standard media scripts–they are brown, foreign (from Tunisia and the UAE, with the latter being of Palestinian origin), young, male and Muslim. One has even been been described as “heavily bearded.”

While the range of popular discourses about Islam in Canada is similar (if less heated) to that in the United States, one interesting twist in this particular case is the involvement of the “Muslim community” in helping to foil the plot.

As reported in Al Jazeera English,

Superintendent Doug Best said authorities were tipped off by members of the community of one of the suspects.

“It was sort of a thank you moment,” Hamdani said.

“This tip, this lead, came from the Muslim community. But for the Muslim community we would not be talking about an arrest today.

“This is evidence and proof that the Canadian Muslim community, rather than a community that should be seen as suspect, is in fact partners for peace and here is the proof of it.”

Within the Canadian press media scripts ranged from the more muted tones of the national public broadcaster, the CBC, as illustrated with the headline “Via Terror Plot Suspects Deny Allegations,” to the more incendiary, as with National Post’s, “Two ‘religiously strict’ men behind foiled al-Qaeda-supported plot to derail VIA train.”

What I have found most interesting in the aftermath of this affair is how the involvement of the so-called “Muslim community” in helping to foil the plot reveals an interesting “twisting of scripts,” as Schaefer puts it, which serves to complicate the neat media narrative that is often coded with a subtle “us versus them” coloring. Despite the capital gained by the “Muslim community” in this affair, however, representatives were still forced on the defensive.

In a press conference in Ottawa, for example, a spokesperson for the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) condemned those “who distort and pervert our faith,” while noting that Muslims “emphasize the sacredness of life, reject any express statement or tacit insinuation that anyone should harm innocent people, and our message to anyone who espouses this ideology of violence is this—you have nothing to do with our faith.”

In a more reactionary tone, Raheel Raza, president of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, appeared on the conservative Sun News television network to denounce Muslim leaders who expressed concern with the potential for an Islamophobic backlash, and stressed that they should instead be thanking security forces for protecting our “freedoms,” while noting that “the point is that we have a problem, there is a global jihad, you have to connect the dots with what has happened in Boston, what has happened in London… in Spain and this.”

In the first example, we find a familiar dynamic where community leaders are forced to denounce the actions of a small group of people against the suspicion that they represent “Islam” as a whole, while emphasizing the essence of the faith as one of peace and not of violence.

In the second example, the guest, Raheel Raza, is empowered as an insider in this affair because she has adopted a narrative that places blame solely on Islam, however much it is framed as “radical” or “deviant” from the norm.

Here I couldn’t help but recall a parallel with Juliane Hammer’s essay from the Bulletin’s February 2013 issue, “(Muslim) Women’s Bodies, Islamophobia, and American Politics,” where she notes how one the effects of Islamophobic discourse about women is that it denies them “any agency unless they are willing to denounce their religion and their communities and societies.”

While Raza does not denounce her religion as a whole, both she and the representative of CAIR-CAN are forced, consciously or not, into the familiar good Muslim/bad Muslim dichotomy, where it is apparently self-evident that these actors have been motivated by “Islam.” As a consequence, they, and indeed the entire “Muslim community,” are lead to adopt a narrative that seeks to defend a certain version of the “faith,” and one, in the case of Raza, that is more palatable to a conservative western script.

While it is not surprising that self-identified Muslims would want to protect their communities against very real threats that often arise in the aftermath of such events, nowhere in these media scripts do we find any analysis of the broader social field that may have motivated the alleged plotters, including, for example, what formative and on-going political reasons might have led to such actions or how their experiences as racialized immigrants may have contributed to social marginalization?

Likewise, Canada’s long-standing role in the war in Afghanistan, its more recent vehement support for the policies of the state of Israel, its severing of diplomatic ties with Iran in September of 2012, and its creation of the controversial Office of Religious Freedom, which critics argue is a ploy to appease favored domestic religious groups, among many other socio-political variables, may provide some further clues in this affair.

Matt Sheedy is a PhD. candidate in religious studies at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and associate editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. His research interests include critical social theory, theories of secularism, ritual and myth, and social movements. His dissertation offers a critical look at Juergen Habermas’s theory of religion in the public sphere and he is also conducting research on myths, rituals and symbols in the Occupy Movement, which includes fieldwork at Occupy Winnipeg.

Posted in Matt Sheedy, Politics and Religion, Religion and Society, Religion and Theory, Religion in the News, Theory in the Real World, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment