The Anti-Colonial Marxism of Mahdi Amel

The Lebanese Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel was assassinated on this day in 1987. Amel developed a version of Marxism that was grounded in the experience of colonized societies, showing how class struggle converges with the fight for national liberation.

Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel. (Archives of Assafir Newspaper)

BYHICHAM SAFIEDDINE
05.18.2024
JACOBIN

With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive short intellectual shrift. When they register on the radar of ideological debates at all, such debates summarily present their work as proof of Marxism’s universalism rather than a means of transforming Marxism itself.

This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Amel, who was assassinated on this day, May 18, in 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pen name Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party’s national leadership by the time he was killed.

Amel’s legacy did experience a revival during the Arab uprisings that broke out a decade ago. His work garnered further attention after a volume of his selected writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in his philosophy of Marxism and its implications for how we understand colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.

A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of his philosophy’s assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in comparison and contrast to European Marxism as well as heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.

We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to major themes of post-WWII national liberation, including the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine.

Marxism, Colonialism, and Methodology

Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of some supposedly authentic precapitalist thought. He equally rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw the historical materialist baby out with its Euro-centric bathwater. Instead, Amel labored in a dialectical fashion to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and employed for its socialist liberation, which he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.

Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first in brief and later in detail, across a series of essays and book-length treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings were engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that emerged during his age and remain relevant to ours.Mahdi Amel called for a ‘methodological revolution’ in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism.

While Amel’s texts may be dense and at times repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx’s discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx’s own historical context in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of colonized countries, he was incapable of taking full stock of colonialism and incorporating it into his theory of capitalism.

The historical reality of colonized peoples is the inverse of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was incidental to, or mediated via, colonialism. Colonization, in the words of Amel, “cut the thread of continuity” in their history and “sent through it violent tremors.”

He believed these tremors reached all the way to the strata of the relations of production, as the material basis for precapitalist production was destroyed while the material basis for industrialization was denied. To put it another way, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not merely concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.


For Amel, it follows from this point that the colonial relation, which is all-encompassing rather than purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction in colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis for the colonized country’s social structure.” Consequently, colonialism does not end with the end of military occupation or by gaining political independence, but with the total severance of this relation in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.

Amel’s inquiry along these lines yielded the concept of the colonial mode of production (CMOP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism furnished Amel with a sound theoretical basis to develop his model. In each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant commentary and identified first principles.

For instance, Amel relied on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and on Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thereby distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts like class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but tried to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.

Colonialism and Class Struggle

Amel’s theorization led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a CMOP is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.The instability of rule in colonized countries is a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

Small-scale manufacturers in this context are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity in economic activity is not due to some “excess energy” of this social class, but rather stems from the limitations upon concentrating production.

These constrained economic relations of production had political implications. Tied in its own class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoise is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing a liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of rule in colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of the two social factions, urban merchants tied to foreign trade and landowners who direct their agricultural production toward colonial trade. This fusion negates the existence of either a national bourgeoisie, usually associated with industrialists, or a feudal class, usually associated with a colonial alliance.

Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s toiling masses — prominently peasants — is never complete at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the CMOP.

When peasants migrate to urban centers seeking employment relief, they rarely, according to Amel, experience a radical transformation in terms of class existence and consciousness. Although embedded in a new class position that involves small-scale consumer industry, they preserve their previous class connections and retain much of their past class consciousness, transitioning between the two positions with ease.

Amel described the pattern in Lebanon:


The worker returns to his village at every opportunity, for holidays, vacations, and funerals. In this way, his village becomes his centre of gravity and exerts a pull over him stronger than that of the city. Ultimately, he longs for the land he left and demands to be buried there, home to his ancestors.

Amel warned that the lack of class differentiation does not mean that class struggle is absent in the colonial setting, as nationalist forces would have it. Nor does it mean the national question is insignificant, as some anti-imperialist or internationalist Marxists would have it. Given the indirect relation of exploitation under a CMOP that is governed by the colonial relation, class struggle is directed against a structure of dependency and domination, not another social class. This means that socialist revolution in colonized societies is synonymous with national liberation:


The struggle for national liberation is the sole historical form that distinguishes class struggle in the colonial formation. Whoever misses this essential point in the movement of our modern history and attempts to substitute class struggle with “nationalist struggle” or reduces the national struggle to a purely economic struggle loses the ability to understand our historical reality and thus also to control its transformation.

Amel prevented his philosophy from lapsing into determinism or economism by placing his structural analysis in a historical perspective as he theorized class struggle.

He emphasized the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class becoming and resistance. He argued that before World War II, sectoral and economic forms of struggle by different factions of the toiling masses independent of each other precluded their very formation as a class. The period after 1945 saw these struggles converging in a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.

At that moment, the colonial relation became mutually constitutive of colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to sever this relation in order to transcend, and thereby destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region.

The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel’s intellectual labor focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, namely Islam, in politics.

In contrast with other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel’s thought did not lapse into orientalist tropes. He countered the ideology of defeat that ascribed the Arab loss in the 1967 war with Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lambasted the Arab bourgeoisie for portraying their own political failings as universal failings of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.

For Amel, turath, or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of the interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem that persisted in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind to be found in secular or communist polemics that saw Islam as being inherently reactionary.
Islam and Revolutionary Thought

By the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thought. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.

Amel developed critiques of different manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilist, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who saw the primary contradiction in Islam — or any other religion — as being that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who defer to power and those who defy it.

The traditional classification of precapitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Conventional scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified in the figure of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), while ascribing conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief over reason, exemplified in the figure of al-Ghazali. Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and rested on the assumption that reason was a monolith.The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force.

He pointed out that one could find a single scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking scientific reasoning as well as Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never fully antithetical to each other. As a result, subversive thought, as expressed in illuminationist Sufi Islam, took the form of rejecting reason in toto.

For Amel, the primary contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (juridical). Spiritual Islam, however, was not atemporal in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical becoming, was temporal and by extension political. Sufism, or certain strands of it, negates the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.

The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was Islam’s material rather than otherworldly existence that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even if, in Amel’s estimation, it had mostly served the interests of the ruling classes.

He identified notable exceptions to this rule in precapitalist Islamic societies that included the revolt against the third “Rightly Guided” Caliph, ‘Uthman Ibn Affan, in the period following the death of Muhammed, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Modern examples that Amel cited of Islam forming part of a revolutionary struggle in the age of national liberation included the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.
Revolution, Liberation, and the Palestinian Cause

Amel’s treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel shed light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, which included the role of noneconomic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the overwhelming majority of European settlers, whether they were artisans, farmers, bourgeois, or workers, opposed the revolution for national liberation.

The politicized working class was no exception. The working-class Algiers district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red neighbourhood” for serving as a popular base of the Algerian Communist Party. Yet it became “a haven of European racism” and “centre of fascist European terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.

The same anti-colonial logic applies to theorizing class struggle in Palestine. So-called labor Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be characterized as socialist. By contrast, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

The failure of Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow’s directive led the leadership of these parties to support the 1948 partition of Palestine. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic depiction of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jew, and a mercantile and landed bourgeoise, both Arab and Jew. It caused the communist movement to suffer a loss of popular support in Arab societies.Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalizing force that had an impact on class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who minimized the significance of successful armed resistance against Israeli occupation in the name of focusing on strengthening the central Lebanese state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.

Israel’s own attitude toward Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains determined in the last instance by the decision of those movements to adopt or reject national liberation strategies, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the significance of armed resistance to Israel and its allies derives from the objective centrality of the colonial relation in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.

Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in swaying this struggle toward a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point toward the end of sectarianism or its reproduction:

Either they go against the reactionary sectarian form of their ideological consciousness, i.e. in the direction of radically changing the sectarian political system of rule by the dominant bourgeoisie, or they align with this same reactionary sectarian consciousness — (but against the class interests of their toiling factions) — and lean towards sectarian reform of this system. In the latter case, the system would catch its breath in a movement that would renew its crisis, and subsequently the conditions for civil war.

There is no sectarian crisis in Palestine similar to that of Lebanon. But the leading armed resistance forces today in Palestine and across the region are Islamist in their ideology. Analyzing this resistance without centering the colonial relation, as Amel showed elsewhere, is a methodological error that mischaracterizes its revolutionary role as the latest stage in the war of national liberation.

The twentieth-century global conjuncture of national liberation may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. The colonial social reality of Palestinians, however, remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by all means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of early Arab communists, and, in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.

CONTRIBUTOR
Hicham Safieddine is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (2019) and the editor of Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel (2021).

Turkey’s main opposition party protests new education curriculum as political, reactionary

ByTurkish Minute
May 3, 2024


A group of lawmakers from Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) have protested a new education curriculum released by the Ministry of Education, arguing that it seems more like a political text reflecting reactionary views than an educational program.

CHP MPs on Friday marched from the parliament to education ministry headquarters in Ankara in protest of the “Century of Turkey Education Model” for primary and secondary education announced by the ministry last week.

The new curriculum underwent a reduction of about 35 percent in content, resulting in the limitation of the evolution theory to secondary biology and the complete removal of integrals from mathematics.

This marks the fourth overhaul of the curriculum in the last 22 years under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. Standardized exams and educational systems have undergone numerous changes during this period, with the education minister replaced nine times.

The protesters, including the party’s deputy group chairman Murat Emir and vice chair Suat Özçağdaş, issued a press statement in front of the ministry building.

Emir said they reject the new curriculum because it is designed to undermine secularism and erase the revolutions of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, to serve the AKP’s “ideological obsessions.”

“Our children need scientific, secular and modern education,” Emir said, adding that the primary goal of every education minister during AKP rule has been to distance education from its national character and tie it to religious and reactionary ideologies.

Özçağdaş also emphasized that the new curriculum resembles more “a political text reflecting a series of ideological obsessions” rather than a program prepared within the framework of educational sciences.

Meanwhile, the Artı Gerçek news website reported on Thursday that Alevi civil society organizations also criticized the AKP for the new curriculum, arguing that it aims to detach education in Turkey from its secular and scientific foundations and align it with the party’s own ideology.

Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Association President Cuma Erçe told Artı Gerçek that Alevism is not an interpretation of any religion or any other belief, but a belief that is unique to itself.

“The faith they describe [in the religious education textbooks] has nothing to do with the essence of our faith,” he added.

While religious education remained compulsory from fourth to the twelfth grade and class hours increased in the new curriculum, Alevism will only be studied under the title “Sufi interpretations in Islamic thought” in twelfth-grade classes.

Erçe further said that the association does not accept the new curriculum because it is “far from science and reason” and appears as “a party’s propaganda tool.”

Hacı Bektaş Veli Anatolian Cultural Foundation President Ercan Geçmez also underlined that they don’t want Alevism to be taught in religion classes; on the contrary, they want religion classes to no longer be compulsory.

Turkey is a majority Sunni country, with some in the conservative and religious population viewing Alevis as apostates; therefore, people adhering to the Alevi faith generally avoid revealing their beliefs in public out of fear of facing discrimination or social alienation.

Alevis follow a heterodox Islamic tradition that separates them from Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Some view it as a cultural identity as much as a religious faith.

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Music 'haven of freedom' Tangiers hosts global jazz festival

Tangiers (Morocco) (AFP) – The Moroccan city of Tangiers, which has a long history as a haven of inspiration for American jazz musicians, will host UNESCO's International Jazz Day for the first time on Tuesday.


Issued on: 28/04/2024 - 

Abdellah El Gourd, a legend of gnawa, in the Moroccan city of Tangiers which will host 2024's International Jazz Day © FADEL SENNA / AFP

Over the last century, jazz greats such as Randy Weston, Idrees Sulieman and Max Roach all crossed the Atlantic to play and record music in the North African port city, perched on the edge of the Strait of Gibraltar.

"The city has had a fascinating power of attraction on a wave of intellectuals and musicians," Philippe Lorin, the founder of an annual Tangiers jazz festival, told AFP.

"It's not for nothing that a writer once said there was always a cruise liner in New York preparing to sail for Tangiers."

This year's Jazz Day will be held over four days starting on Saturday, during which talks and open-air performances will be held in Tangiers.

The festivities will culminate in an "All-Star Global Concert" on Tuesday led by jazz icon Herbie Hancock, also featuring bassists Marcus Miller and Richard Bona, as well as guitarist Romero Lubambo.

The city's cosmopolitan artistic reputation stems from its location between Africa and Europe as well as its history, having been administered by several colonial powers from 1923 to 1956, the year Morocco gained independence.

This melting pot of influences prompted visits from international writers and poets, notably from the Beat Generation movement, as well as African American musicians seeking to find "their African roots", Moroccan historian Farid Bahri told AFP.

Lorin said that Tangiers "was a haven of freedom -- just like jazz music".
'He gave a lot to the city'

A pivotal moment in the city's musical history came in 1959, when Tangiers jazz promoter Jacques Muyal -- then just a teenager -- recorded a session with trumpeter Idrees Sulieman, pianist Oscar Dennard, bassist Jamil Nasser and drummer Buster Smith at the Radio Tanger International studio.

The recording gained renown in jazz circles decades before its distribution as "The 4 American Jazzmen In Tangier" album in 2017.

US jazz pianist Randy Weston, pictured in 2007, lived in Tangiers for five years, helping sculpt the sound of the city © GEORGES GOBET / AFP/File

Bahri, the author of "Tangiers, a world history of Morocco", said "the presence of American musicians in Tangiers was also linked to a very active American diplomacy".

Famous US pianist Randy Weston settled in Tangiers for five years after visiting 14 African countries in 1967 during a tour organised by the US State Department.

The Brooklynite virtuoso would play a key role in building the musical reputation of the city, to which he dedicated his 1973 album "Tanjah".

"Randy was an exceptional, kind and respectful man," said Abdellah El Gourd, a 77-year-old Moroccan legend of gnawa music, a centuries-old style played with a three-stringed lute and steel castanets, rooted in West African rituals and Sufi traditions.

"He gave a lot to the city and its musicians," added the friend and collaborator of Weston, who died in 2018.

'Our language was music'

Together, El Gourd and Weston blurred the lines of their respective genres, creating the beginnings of jazz-gnawa fusion, which remains a key part of Tangiers' musical legacy.

"The language barrier was never a problem because our communication was through (musical) scales," El Gourd recalled in a rehearsal room lined with old photos and memorabilia from the years he toured with Weston and jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp.

"Our language was music," said of his collaboration with US jazz great Randy Weston in Tangiers © FADEL SENNA / AFP

"Our language was music."

The two men's collaborative work would years later yield the acclaimed 1992 album "The Splendid Master Gnawa Musicians of Morocco".

Two years after settling in the city, Weston opened the African Rhythms jazz club, above the iconic Cinema Mauritania in downtown Tangiers.

"We used to rehearse there," El Gourd recalled. "Randy would invite his musician friends. It was a beautiful time."

With El Gourd's help, Weston launched Tangiers' first-ever jazz festival in 1972, featuring big names such as drummer Max Roach, flautist Hubert Laws, double-bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

"It was quite a unique experience, because it was the first time we played in front of such a large audience," said El Gourd, who was then used to small crowds for gnawa performances.

Weston and El Gourd's festival was only held once.

But three decades later it inspired Lorin to create the Tanjazz festival, which is held in the port city every September.

© 2024 AFP

2024 Elections: What’s at stake for India’s minorities?

Could a third term under Narendra Modi see the formalising of second-class status for minorities and the destruction of the country’s ancient composite culture?

Sajjad Hassan 

Published April 29, 2024 

PRISM/DAWN

If the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi succeeds in winning a third five-year term in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections, many fear that India’s religious minorities, especially Muslims, will see their second-class status formalised in law and practice.

But for Hindu supremacy to be fully realised, which is the stated aim of Hindu nationalists, they will have to expunge India of any Muslim influence, of which there is much, historically. When Indians cast their vote in the coming weeks, they would do well to be aware of the weight of their electoral choices. And the international community would do well not to drop the ball on India.
Second-class citizens

In a recent article, political scientists, Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs asked the rhetorical question: “Is India under Narendra Modi … beginning to resemble the American South under Jim Crow?” referring to state and local laws introduced in the southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th century that enforced racial segregation.

They explain that Jim Crow laws were aimed at blunting the Reconstruction Amendments that abolished slavery and gave equal rights to Blacks. They were designed to make Blacks second-class citizens. Similarly, in India, Hindu nationalists seek to diminish the constitutionally guaranteed equal citizenship of Muslims and turn them into marginalised, less than fully equal citizens.

Jim Crow laws lasted for almost a century, ending only in the 1960s. Varshney and Staggs claim that since Hindu nationalism is in its early phase, it could still be forestalled before it is institutionalised via political and legislative processes. They suggest that the ongoing national elections present an opportunity for Indians to do that.

However, the comparison between Jim Crow and Hindu nationalism diverges in their ultimate objectives. While Jim Crow merely targeted the equal citizenship of Blacks, Hindu nationalism has a more totalitarian goal.
What does Hindutva want?

To fully grasp the end-goals of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva, it is necessary to read its foundational texts. There are none more seminal than We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who led the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) from 1940 to 1973. The RSS is considered the heart and soul of the vast network of Hindu nationalist organisations, of which the BJP is the political wing. Narendra Modi, a life-time member and former official of the RSS, credited it for grooming him to political leadership.

In his text, Golwalkar writes of his wariness of “hostile elements” within the country that “act as menace to national security”, singling out Muslims as the number one threat, followed by Christians. His solution to “the danger of a cancer developing into its body politic” was offering the “foreign element” two options: “either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow it to do so, and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race”.

MS Golwalkar. Credit: Golwalkarguruji.org — image via Scroll.in



Another of the movement’s foundational texts is Essentials of Hindutva (1923) by Vinayak Damodar Savakar, who is considered by many to be the foremost Hindutva thinker. In Essentials, he provided Hindu nationalism with an ideology, which in a nutshell claims that India was special, as it offered something nobody else could — Hindu thought. This unique Hindu supremacy, Savarkar believed, was under threat because of the presence of non-Hindus. He called on Hindus, fragmented as they were, to unite and reclaim their supremacy. Violence against Muslims, Savarkar said, was the means to achieve that goal.

Golwalkar drew on Savarkar’s thoughts. He also admired the race theories of fascist Germany and Italy and recommended that Hindustan, the land of Hindus, should profit from their lessons. In We or Our Nationhood Defined, he wrote: “To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of its semitic races — the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.”

Golwalkar saw the world in apocalyptic terms. His objective was clear: “To rule over the world was the heavenly task ordained to Hindu race.” He called upon Hindus to “rally to the Hindu standard, the bhagwa dhwaj [and] set our teeth in grim determination to wipe out the opposing forces”.

Some Hindutva leaders today have explicitly articulated this vision. For instance, in March 2020, a Hindu priest named Yati Narsinghanand, who is the president of Akhil Bharatiya Sant Parishad (All India Priests Council) and someone close to the BJP, was reported to have told his followers, “Humanity can only be saved if Islam is finished off. Hindus: Read the Gita along with Mahabharat, and learn how to die fighting.”

This call was made around the time BJP leader Kapil Mishra was leading processions in Delhi calling for violence against the mainly Muslim participants in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, chanting the mantra: “Desh ke ghaddaron ko, goli maro saalon ko [Shoot the traitors of the country].”

In 2023, another BJP leader, an MLA from Telangana, T Raja Singh, at a rally in Mumbai, urged his audience to take to arms. “I would like to request all my Hindu brothers that the coming time is the time of struggle, it is the time of war,” he said. “Every Hindu is obliged to unite. Hindu should not become one who rings temple bells, but rather he should become a Hindu who kills landyas”, a derogatory reference to Muslims.

At a public meeting of Hindu priests in December 2021, in the holy town of Haridwar, a star speaker, Annapurna Maa, the general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, was heard exhorting her audience: “If you want to eliminate their population, then be ready to kill them and be ready to go to jail. If only a 100 of us become soldiers and each of us kills 20 lakhs of them, we will be victorious…”

Modi is circumspect in his speeches now, but was not always so. As chief minister of Gujarat, soon after the pogrom there in 2002 during his term that left at least 2,000 dead, mostly Muslim, he was often reported in his public speeches to evoke visions of a religious struggle of good over evil.

“This is the holy place of shakti [godly power], the power for extermination of asuras [demons],” he said in one speech. “We have resolved to destroy and stamp out all forces of evil…”
The montage that is India

Beyond the goal of cleansing the Hindu land of the “cancer” to save the nation, there is another equally compelling reason for the Hindutva project to be more than just about marginalising Muslims. That has to do with the fact that India today is, in the words of historians Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot, “an intricate montage assembled from assorted material”, of which the Islamic is a critical element. The desire on the part of Hindutva leaders to fully realise Hindu supremacy will also require extirpating Muslim life and Muslim imprint from today’s India.

Historians view the era between 1200 AD and 1750 AD (Medieval India in history textbooks) as the foundation for the highly diverse human landscape of modern South Asia, with its pluralistic culture that draws on both Indic and Islamic traditions. In their magisterial work, India Before Europe (2006), Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot show how the Central Asian ethnic heritage, Persian cultural orientation and Islamic religious affiliation of North India’s ruling elite class in the period after 1200 AD led to the dissemination of many innovative elements through the subcontinent.

While acknowledging that the encounter between Indic and Islamic peoples and cultures led to short-term conflicts, Asher and Talbot note the vast degree to which cultural practices inspired by Perso-Islamic traditions became integral to the subcontinent as a whole in the long run. South Asia’s art and architecture, its political rituals, its administrative and military technologies and even its popular religions were deeply inflected by the new forms.

This composite culture, the authors note, forms the basis of India that exists today, in its foods, dressing and music, languages that people speak, the built architecture, and its popular religions, among others.

The ruins of the Krishna temple in Hampi, Karnataka, in 1868. 

Credit: Lyon, Edmund David (1825-1891)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — taken from Scroll.in

In the south of the peninsula, the ‘Hindu’ Vijaynagara empire (1350-1550) drew significantly from Islamicate influence in military technology, secular architecture, courtly dress, as well as local languages. The successor ‘Muslim’ sultanates of the Bahmani state in the Deccan too, followed in this tradition, most importantly in their patronage to local languages, so much so that Golconda rulers, around today’s Hyderabad, occupied an important place in the historical memory of Telengana language — with one of the sultans, Ibrahim Quli Qutub Shah (1550-1580) often called Ibharama Chakravati by Telgu poets.

Bijapur’s Ibrahim Adil Shah II (1580-1627), called Jagat Guru, authored a collection of songs in dakani, Kitab-e-Nauras (book of nine rasas), that opens with an invocation to Saraswati, Hindu goddess of learning, followed by praise of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and then the Chisti saint Gisu Daraz. These were no exceptions.

In Bengal, the Hussain Shahi (1493-1538) rulers adopted local customs, such as purification by the water of Ganga at coronation ceremonies, and the Sufi poet, Saiyid Sultan (d 1648) published a genealogy of prophets of Islam, called Nabi Vamsha that included the Hindu god, Krishna.

In Gujarat, amid the flourishing literary tradition that the Ahmad Shah rulers patronised was the Sanskrit work Raja-Vinoda (pleasure of the kings), written in honour of the ruler, Mahmud Begada (1460s), presenting the sultan as an ideal Indic king, whose court was graced by the presence of the Hindu deity Saraswati, the goddess of learning. In Malwa, in central India, capital Mandu had fine libraries that included among their collection the track Nimat-nama (c. 1500), an illustrated recipe book for making dishes suitable for all seasons, including vegetarian as well as meat-based, with illustrations drawing on both Persian and Indic tradition, including the Bhagwata Purana.

However, it was the Mughals, especially Akbar (1556-1605), who helped create a state that was more Indian in character. The aesthetic that developed under Akbar’s guidance was composed of a fusion of Timurid and Indic models, and which went on to set a standard for subsequent Mughal arts and culture, including food, architecture and courtly dress and culture, Asher and Talbot argue.

Besides, in the realm of built architecture, of which there is ample evidence, literary production was an important site of Indic and Islamic collaboration. Examples are the translation of Ramayana and Mahabharata in Persian (Razm-nama) and Abul Fazl’s including in his Ain-i-Akbari, extensive sections on “the learning of India” — including philosophical schools, music, life cycle rituals, and modes of image worship. The scale of the borrowing led Audrey Truschke, a prominent historian of Sanskrit at the Mughal court, to conclude that these were efforts on the part of Abul Fazl to convince Akbar’s supporters of the virtues of infusing Sanskrit knowledge into Indo-Persian thought.

The tendencies towards synthesis had significant consequences. Man Singh, the highest ranking noble in Akbar’s court, only after his sons, built temples throughout the domain, including the Govinda Deva temples in Vrindavan, the largest in North India, in a recognisably Mughal style, and helped to spread Akbar’s belief in multiculturalism, just as Abdul Rahim Khaan-e-Khanan did by commissioning an illustrated Ramayana.

Among the most consequential contributions of the Mughal court to Indian letters, Allison Busch shows, was its engagement with Brajbhasha. A local (Hindavi) dialect of the region around Agra and Delhi, Mughal heartlands, Brajbhasha had existed until then, mostly as bhakti devotional poetry. Under Mughal patronage, it developed a sophisticated courtly style, inspired by Sanskrit poetics, and became the principal poetic language of north India. In creating the outcome, that could be described as classical Hindi, were Akbar’s nobles composing works in the language, including Todar Mal, Birbal and the Rajput nobles, as also Faizi and Abdul Rahim Khana Khanan — showing how courtly literature in Brajbhasha was nurtured within the multicultural context of elite Mughal society.

There were other enduring contributions too, of this age and milieu, outside the courtly realm. A major influence in the early part of this period was Sufis, and their dispersal, throughout much of the subcontinent. By the 14th century, the practice of Sama, devotional musical congregations, and Urs, annual pilgrimage to the shrines of Sufi saints, had become established Sufi traditions. Sufi shrines drew both Muslims and Hindus, and were themselves influenced by local traditions, including the Shattari Sufis of Bengal drawing on Nath yogis, and Rishi Sufis of Kashmir who led celibate lives and practised vegetarianism.

Sufism also contributed to reform in Hindu tradition, starting in the 14th century with the rise of sants, who like Sufis, were mystics, believed in a formless God, and extolled devotion to God as a primary religious practice. Kabir, the most influential, attacked rituals and customs of traditional religions, and excoriated the caste system. Guru Nanak (born in 1469), the founder of the Sikh tradition, also came from the same context.

Notably, Sufism also influenced Hindu bhakti tradition, as the historian of Indian religion John S Hawley points out. This is evident in the commonalities that the latter began to show in its focus on love for God, as did Sufis, the use of poetry and music in worship, and an ethics of compassion for others. Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas (1575), crafted in about the same age and the middle Gangetic Awadhi milieu of Sufi poets, Malik Mohammad Jayasi (Padmavat, 1540) and Mir Siyyid Manjhan (Madhumalati, 1545), exemplified this shift. Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu, became the preeminent object of devotion, in place of Siva.

It is these constructions of a cosmopolitan Indian paradigm, resulting in innovations that spoke to both traditions that Hindu nationalists must disentangle and destroy to be able to achieve their vision of a Hindu supremacist India. This will undoubtedly leave much violence in its trail.
‘Authentic fantasies’ of suffering

These historical accounts of co-living and co-production contradict Hindutva claims that have much purchase today, in popular as well as scholarly circles about the thousand years of conflict between Muslim “outsiders” and “local” Hindus; of forced conversions and the wanton destruction of temples. Hindu nationalists have developed a wide repertoire of suffering and victimhood of Hindus at the hands of Muslims. Evidence to support their thesis is slim.

Richard Eaton, one of the foremost historians of medieval India, shows how the claim that Islam spread in South Asia by the sword is incongruent with the geography of Muslim conversions in South Asia. There is an inverse relationship between the degree of Muslim political penetration and the degree of conversion to Islam, he notes. Most conversions happened in the north west and north east — Punjab and Bengal, farthest away from centres of Muslim power.

As to temple destruction, Eaton found, over a span of more than five centuries from 1192 to 1729, there were “some 80 instances of temple desecration”, well short of the 60,000 claimed by Hindu nationalists. Typically, the desecrated temples would have been associated with the authority of an enemy kingdom. The instances of desecrations followed a long-established pattern in India, of temples having been natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority, well before the coming of Muslim Turks, including their destruction. Among the most recent examples was the destruction in the 10th c of the Pratihara temple of Kalapriya near Jamuna, by the Rashtrakuta king Indra III.

But as the Bosnian historian, Edin Hajdarpasic, shows from his study of Balkan nationalism in the 19th century, enthusiastic depictions of suffering convey the essence of a political threat more vividly than simple facts or documentary narratives — a phenomenon he calls “authentic fantasy”. Hindu nationalists, themselves inspired by European nationalist movements at the turn of the 19th century, relied much on the construction of suffering and victimhood of Hindus, however divorced from facts.

Decolonial historiography shows how they drew on the Orientalist bias of British colonial historians, who saw the period of the previous 600 years, as a history of Muslim arrival and their dominance over Hindus, marked by Muslim fanaticism, and temple destruction, forced conversion, and Hindu oppression. In contrast to the dark Muslim medieval age, colonial historians like James Mill posited the ancient Hindu age as golden, and modern British, as liberal.
Call to violence

Hindu nationalists in power today are seeking to inflict retribution for their perceived sufferings by rewriting history. In some cases, this has taken physical forms — such as in the destruction in 1992 of the 15th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, a criminal act that was legitimised by the Supreme Court of India in 2019. Claims for several other historical mosques to be converted into temples have been set in motions across the country.

Elsewhere, place names have been changed to erase any hint of their Muslim heritage. Allahabad is now Prayagraj, Mughalsarai station is Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction, Aurangabad is Sambhajinagar and Gulbarga is Kalaburagi. Not satisfied with occasional erasures, the BJP government has thought fit to change high school history and politics textbooks by significantly altering and in some cases, fully scrapping the sections on Mughal history.


C

redit: Yasminsheikh, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons — taken from Scroll.in



The act of political forgetting targets minorities to deprive them of history, of the right to narrate, of the capacity for recognition. History tells us it is also a precursor to violence. As eminent historians Aditya and Mridula Mukherjee noted recently, “…genocide of a community is often preceded by the community being demonised, their names changed, their history being erased”, claiming “these processes have begun in India and open calls for genocide of Muslims are being given in various parts of the country with amazing impunity”.

More than Jim Crow South, the history of the Balkans in the late 19th century and post-Yugoslavia 20th century provides a better guide to understanding the future of minorities in India today. Hajdarpasic’s account of Balkan history alerts us to the real consequences of the claims of victimhood. Nationalists there used stories of suffering not only to inspire collective sacrifice but also to encourage mass violence against entire communities perceived as threats. He demonstrates how certain stories of victimisation in the region long outlived their original inspirations. Decades after overthrowing Turkish rule, Serbian nationalists could revive narratives about Turk-like enemies even in the late 20th century with catastrophic consequences.

Tanika Sarkar, eminent historian of modern India, demonstrates similar impulse in early modern Hindu nationalist thought. Emblematic of this repertoire was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 1818 novel, Anandmath, whose main character, the Hindu sanyasi (ascetic) rebel, Satyanand, is engaged in a messianic battle “for exterminate(ing) all Muslims on this land, as they are enemies of God”, a recompense for “inflicting misfortune on Hindus”. The novel is set in the context of the 1770 famines in Bengal, as the East India Company was inserting itself at the expense of the Nawabs of Bengal, and that resulted in a third of the population starving to death, both Hindus and Muslims. Historians inform Muslim fakirs (ascetics) rose up, along with sanyasis, against the depredations.

Sarkar calls for Anandmath, “the first explicit message in our literary history for ethnic cleansing”, one foretelling Hindu nationalist thoughts to emerge later in 20th century. Its protagonists deemed “elimination of Muslim rule and Muslim presence from the land” an act of worship of Bharat Maata (motherland), a deity that first emerged in the novel. In 1920, Savarkar and Golwalkar adopted Vande Mataram — hymn to Bharat Maata, contained in Anandmath — as aHindu nationalist anthem. Vande Mataram was also the rallying cry of Hindu communalists in anti-Muslim violence to follow during Partition.

Vande Mataram continues to inspire Hindu nationalist thoughts and action to this day. So when the terror-accused BJP MP Pragya Thakur recently instructed her audience to “keep your weapons sharpened”, to “in this world created by god … finish all oppressors, wrong-doers, sinners…”, she was deploying Anandmath’s template of the holy war — calling for violence against the entire Muslim population.

It is in such violent contestations borne out of ‘authentic fantasies’ of past sufferings that Hindu nationalists of today — following that of Savarkar and other Hindutva ideologues — seek to create Hindu supremacy, by waging permanent war against India’s 200 or so million Muslims and other ‘foreign elements’. Already, United Nations experts are alerting us to the fact that “India risks becoming one of the world’s main generators of instability, atrocities and violence, because of the massive scale and gravity of the violations and abuses targeting mainly religious and other minorities, such as Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others.”

Mass atrocity experts are warning: “If nothing is done to address these risks, India may continue to experience a rise in the number of violent (and fatal) attacks against religious minorities, an escalation in the scale of the violence, and an increased level of state involvement in atrocities.”

The burden on Indian voters to use the ballot to forestall the institutionalisation of Hindu nationalism, before it reaches a point of no return, is therefore, even heavier.

This piece is a longer version of the article, titled “Is the 2024 Lok Sabha election India’s last chance before the point of no return?” by Sajjad Hassan published on Scroll.in. It has been reproduced here with permission.

Header image: A protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act — photo taken from Prashant Waydande/Reuters

Between colonialism and extremism, Pakistan continues to exist in the shadows

Pakistan seems to be split into a minority of two extremes — the liberals and the conservative — whose voices are the loudest. In the meantime, no one knows what the vast majority of Pakistan wants, because no one is listening.

Sabahat Quadri 

Published April 17, 2024 

I have a long-time acquaintance who moved to Pakistan from Malaysia when he was almost an adult. For the sake of his privacy, let’s call him Junaid. He is a globe-trotting critic — the kind of acquaintance you can’t shake off, no matter how hard you try. He swapped the palm-fringed shores of Malaysia for the bustling streets of Pakistan, bringing along more than just his luggage; he brought his opinions too, and boy, does he love to share them.

Having also lived a few years in Saudi Arabia, he’s now busy comparing us to a country that could buy and sell us as a side project, and still telling us how terrible this country is. From bashing Pakistan to praising the latest country he’s set foot in, Junaid’s commentary is as consistent as the sunrise.

Fast forward to our latest encounter right after the elections — Junaid, unable to cast his own vote because he couldn’t get himself a CNIC from Nadra for unknown reasons — found joy in ridiculing those who did. He laughed about how ‘stupid’ PTI supporters were for thinking that voting was going to change the country.

Now, this is an obnoxious man, so I take his comments with a pinch of salt. But he’s not alone in his disdain. A journalist in Islamabad, alongside a Twitter columnist, joined the chorus, labelling PTI supporters as everything from ‘uninformed’ and ‘ignorant’ to ‘over-zealous ideologues’ and ‘fanatics’.

But Pakistan isn’t just a battleground for political debates. It’s a free-for-all where everyone is itching to tell you how to live, how to pray, and even how to think. There’s a Junaid in every corner, ready to school you on the “correct” way to practice Islam or why your political views are outdated, leaving no room for alternative voices — not in politics, not in religion, and not even in culture.

Pakistan seems to be split into a minority of two extremes — the liberals and the religious — whose voices are the loudest. In the meantime, no one knows what the vast majority of Pakistan wants, because no one is listening. Most of us are stuck in the middle, drowned out by the roar of extremism on both ends, silently wondering: “What about us?”
Unaffected by global events

In the global spotlight, there’s a dialogue we’re missing out on. While Israel ramps up its genocidal assault on Palestine (because let’s not forget the escalating violence by the Israelis in the West Bank, despite our focus on Gaza), a new cognisance about colonialism has taken hold.

In their efforts to bring their cause to light, Palestinian voices in the diaspora are leading the charge, exposing colonialism for the ugly truth that it is. Through decades of patient campaigning and organising, Palestinian civil society has raised an awareness across the Global South of the devastation colonialism wrought, its lasting scars and its modern-day manifestations.

In Pakistan, we have also recognised this, but we seem unable to emerge from that looming shadow. Our leaders are both deeply embedded in the neo-colonial capitalist structures and snake pits of the Global North — more concerned with their own pockets than their country. Their collective visions of Pakistan’s future are borrowed from the Middle East or the West, while our intellectual class remains fixated on India. Our leaders completely abrogate any responsibility while the majority of Pakistanis are left to fend for themselves, trapped in poverty, illiteracy, and injustice.

Small sections of civil society are helping to alleviate some of these issues, but unless they can scale up at a phenomenal rate, there is little chance that they’ll do more than apply band-aids to the seething wounds inflicted upon us. Meanwhile, if there is some semblance of organisation within society, some spark of engagement and participatory citizenship — however you may dislike how they participate — we are quick to shut it down with contempt, derision, and indifference.

This is the same contempt a feudal feels for his serfs. The same contempt I’ve seen middle-class women hold for their domestic staff. The same contempt a school owner in a Katchi Abadi in Karachi has for his students (“Why give them parathas when all they’re used to are rotis?”). This isn’t just a lack of empathy; it’s a legacy of colonialism ingrained in our society. It’s the language of the British Raj internalised, absorbed, and well-padded with expensive foreign educations in neo-colonial USA or through Saudi Arabia’s deliberate attempt to spread Salafism.
Divide et Impera

Just as we continue to battle the quest for ‘fair skin’ — our deep-seated gora complex — and the drive to bury our native languages in favour of English, we should recognise that we’ve inherited this attitude of contempt from our oppressors.

After the 1857 War of Independence (which is still referred to in the UK as the Mutiny), Lord Elphinstone wrote:

“I have long considered the subject, and I am convinced that the exact converse of this policy of assimilation is our only safe military policy in India. Divide et impera (divide and rule) was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours. The safety of the great iron steamers, which are adding so much to our military power, and which are probably destined to add still more to our commercial superiority, is greatly increased by building them in compartments. I would ensure the safety of our Indian Empire by constructing our native army on the same principle; for this purpose I would avail myself of those divisions of language and race we find ready to hand.”

Similarly, Brigadier John Coke, an officer in the North West Frontier (before it became a province of Pakistan), said:

“Our endeavour should be to uphold in full force the (fortunate for us) separation which exists between the different religions and races, and not to endeavour to amalgamate them. Divide et impera should be the principle of Indian Government.” [sic]

Years earlier, Lord Macaulay had already started the process of breaking down the subcontinent’s existing education system. Having received an extensive grant for investing in education for the ‘natives’, he was hesitant to invest in existing materials which were all in either Persian, Urdu (which he called Arabic), or Sanskrit.

He lobbied strongly to replace all oriental literature with English books, because he “never found one among them (orientalists) who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.”

Lord Macaulay relished the idea of educating the Indian into “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

The British wanted us divided. They also considered us unable to progress on our own without their superior intellect and help. The US feels no differently. Nor does Saudi Arabia. Both countries have continued to colonise us and divide us.

Where once we longed to be British, we now long to be American or Arab (the rich Arabs, that is. No one here yearns to be a Yemeni). We educate our children in US universities. We internalise their language and their ideologies. These children return to their home countries to bring enlightenment to us. They bring back with them not solutions to the daily struggles of a family of 10 who can’t save for their futures, but principles of capitalism, secularism, liberalism, and rationalism that only serve to crush any last vestiges of identity the population is still clinging on to.

Meanwhile, those coming from the Middle East bring with them the outward trappings of Salafism and a complete disdain for Sufism, our music, our poetry, our rituals and customs, disregarding them all as either ‘innovations’ in Islam or superstitions learned from Hindus.

And this is possibly the logic (and I can find no other logic for it) behind the division of Pakistan into two non-contiguous land masses.

A small example of this attitude is the hugely popular Coke Studio. Leaving aside the irony of a programme sponsored by a global corporation that abets apartheid in Palestine and represents the worst aspects of capitalism, the programme itself is instrumental in reminding our middle classes of the great Sufi legacy we can and should remember, revere, and tap into.

However, as one former colleague of mine put it, it’s too ‘populist’ for him. Suggesting music from Coke Studio at my previous place of work (with a select few, all of whom were educated abroad and belong to the upper crust of society) will return a turned up nose and much mocking. Salafists, on the other hand, simply dismiss music as ‘unIslamic’, and have the same reaction to the popularity of the programme.

In all cases, these segments of society view each other and the vast majority of their fellow citizens (who don’t agree with them) with complete and utter contempt.
Break open the compartments

Britain’s iron steamers left a long time ago. Whatever veneer of civilisation the Global North had has been well and truly stripped since this latest war on Gaza, along with it any notion that Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, could be the spiritual leader of the Ummah.

The United States’ own domestic affairs are in a deep divide. Evidence of the corruption of their leadership, judiciary, media, and political system is visible for the whole world to see. Its social poles keep moving further and further apart. If we must learn from empire, perhaps this is what we should be looking at: what not to do with our own societies.

It’s time we stopped scoffing at each other’s views.

It’s time we stopped dismissing the other for their desi accents or local brand of shoes.

It’s time we turned inwards in contemplation; remember that we are all, from all parts of the country, human beings whose diversity gives us strength rather than dividing us.

It’s time we moved beyond the circles of school and family that keep widening the rift between the silent majority and the vocal few.

Start by actually speaking to the people (which is something that none of the reigning political parties do either) and finding out what they really want, rather than assuming you know what is best for them. Start by listening with the respect we learned from our elders, not the crude superiority of the white man towards the brown native.



The author is a graphic designer, web designer, and writer, currently managing the secondary educational product at Knowledge Platform, where she writes engaging educational content for K-12 English language and development courses on pedagogy.

Good news: Democracy won in Senegal. Here’s why it matters.

When so much of the world is backsliding on democratic norms, Senegal’s election reveals a trend toward democracy in Africa.

By Ellen Ioanes 

 Apr 4, 2024

Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Senegal’s youngest president, was sworn in on April 2, 2024.

Ellen Ioanes covers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflicts.

2024 is the biggest global election year in history and the future of democracy is on every ballot. But amid an international backsliding in democratic norms, including in countries with a longer history of democracy like India, Senegal’s election last week was a major win for democracy. It’s also an indication that a new political class is coming of age in Africa, exemplified by Senegal’s new 44-year-old president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye.

The West African nation managed to pull off a free and fair election on March 24 despite significant obstacles, including efforts by former President Macky Sall to delay the elections and imprison or disqualify opposition candidates. Add those challenges to the fact that many neighboring countries in West Africa — most prominently Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, but other nations across the region too — have been repeatedly undermined by military coups since 2020.

Sall had been in power since 2012, serving two terms. He declined to seek a third term following years of speculation that he would do so despite a constitutional two-term limit. But he attempted to extend his term, announcing in February that elections (originally to be held that month) would be pushed off until the end of the year in defiance of the electoral schedule.

Sall’s allies in the National Assembly approved the measure, but only after security forces removed opposition politicians, who vociferously protested the delay. Senegalese society came out in droves to protest Sall’s attempted self-coup, and the Constitutional Council ruled in late February that Sall’s attempt to stay in power could not stand.

That itself was a win for democracy. Still, opposition candidates, including Faye, though legally able to run, remained imprisoned until just days before the election — while others were barred from running at all. The future of Senegal’s democracy seemed uncertain at best.

Cut to Tuesday, when Sall stepped down and handed power to Faye, a former tax examiner who won on a campaign of combating corruption, as well as greater sovereignty and economic opportunity for the Senegalese. And it was young voters who carried Faye to victory.

“What it tells us is that young people in the continent are becoming very assertive,” Joseph Sany, the vice president of the US Institute of Peace’s Africa Center, told Vox. “Very active in the party politics, right? Because they are the first victims when democracy does not deliver.”

The strength of Senegal’s democracy depends on several factors that go beyond any single politician, including relatively robust, independent democratic institutions like the courts and, perhaps surprisingly, the military. Those elements set it apart from other African nations presently under military rule.

“This election showed the resilience of the democracy in Senegal that resisted the shock of an unexpected postponement,” Adele Ravidà, Senegal country director at the lnternational Foundation for Electoral Systems, told Vox via email. “... after a couple of years of unprecedented episodes of violence [the Senegalese people] turned the page smoothly, allowing a peaceful transfer of power.”

And though Faye’s aims won’t be easy to achieve, his win can tell us not only about how Senegal managed to establish its young democracy, but also about the positive trend of democratic entrenchment and international cooperation in African nations, and the power of young Africans.
Senegal’s election is deeply important given challenges to democracy in Africa

In Senegal, Sall had been trying to erode democratic norms for months prior to his decision to postpone elections back in February, leading some observers to worry that Senegal’s democracy was in serious danger.

Sall “had taken the country through this whole odyssey whether he was going to go for a third term or not, which was very stressful,” Joseph Siegle, research director at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said in a February interview with Vox. “It led to protest and death; there were some 50 people who died in the protests, there were more restrictions on free press and just a growing sense that he was testing and weakening the democratic institutions.”

There have been a series of coups in the Sahel — an African region roughly stretching from Senegal in the west to Sudan in the east — starting with Mali in August 2020. On the surface, it could look like these countries were dominoes falling, or that the coup phenomenon was somehow “contagious.” (A coup can be defined as a sudden and violent change in power by extralegal means.)

But coups remain a fairly rare phenomenon around the world, as the political scientists Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne demonstrate through their research. In a recent Voice of America piece, Powell and Thyne’s research showed that from 1950 through October 2023, there were 492 coup attempts globally, 245 of which were successful.

Poverty, polarization, corruption, weak institutions, a lack of safety and security, and high inequality are important factors that drive nondemocratic transitions of power, but they don’t, on their own, necessarily trigger coups.

Perhaps the biggest predictor of whether a coup will happen in any given country is precedent: Has there been a coup attempt before? Any sort of precedent, whether or not the attempt was successful, shows that it’s at least possible to try, and that other indicators for coup conditions are present.

“If you’ve had a coup attempt in the last three years, controlling for a bunch of different factors, there are various studies that point to your probability of having a coup in the current year to be something between 25 and 40 percent, which is really, really high when you think about how rare these events are otherwise,” Powell told Vox in an interview last September.

To think that coups are somehow contagious would both discount the complexity of why the phenomenon occurs, and ignore opposite trends of democratic entrenchment in Africa, particularly in Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, Sany said.
What makes Senegal different?

Since it gained independence from France in 1960, Senegal has never had a coup — military or civilian. Increasingly strong and competitive democracy has been the norm for Senegal, and the country’s civil society went out in great force over the past three years of Sall’s term to enforce those norms.

“I think that it is really the victory of the democratic institutions — the government, but also civil society organization,” Sany said. “They were mobilized, from the unions, teacher unions, workers, NGOs. The civil society in Senegal is one of the most experienced, well-organized democratic institutions on the continent.” Senegalese civil society also pushed back against former President Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to cling to power back in 2012, and the Senegalese people voted him out.

Though governmental institutions like the courts and the National Assembly do not have equal power to the presidency in Senegal, it’s important to note the Constitutional Council’s independence back in February when it ruled that Sall could not push back elections. (The council oversees some parts of the electoral process and adjudicates electoral and election policy disputes between the president and members of the National Assembly, among other duties.)

That decision clearly had the support of civil society, Sany said, but also international actors including the US, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and France, all of whom were united in reinforcing this decision — and pressuring Sall to reverse course.

Such pressure is much easier to apply to civilian politicians than military leaders, which leads to another critical characteristic of Senegal’s democracy: Its military is highly professionalized and has not been politicized in the way that the militaries of other nations like Mali and Sudan have, experts told Vox.

“In most of those countries, the military was designed for regime preservation, not for the preservation of the republic,” Sany said. Members of the Senegalese military are “extremely well-educated — the level of education is very high compared to other militaries in the region and then they have been exposed to national peacekeeping missions,” allowing the military to work with and learn from other professional forces. In a situation like that, the military is less likely to start a coup because they don’t see it as their job to have power.


Senegal also doesn’t face the same risk as other nations from Islamist insurgencies like ISIS-West Africa Province — possibly due to the proliferation of Sufi Islam and the nation’s identity as politically secular — though there is always a possibility that regional insurgencies could spill over its borders. In countries where terror attacks are common, it becomes easier for military personnel to convince civilians that the way to security is to have the military in charge — although increased violence in the region despite the presence of military governments disputes that.

Faye will still have his work cut out for him accomplishing the goals he campaigned on, including economic prosperity, transparency, food security, increased sovereignty, and the strengthening of democratic institutions. This will be important, especially for Senegal’s young people, who are at the forefront of another major trend.

Young Africans will play an increasingly key role in the coming decades, both on the continent and on the global stage; Africa’s youth population (people aged 15 to 24) will make up approximately 35 percent of the world’s youth population by 2050, and Africa’s population is expected to grow from 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion during that time. In Senegal, people aged 10 to 24 make up 32 percent of the population, according to the UN.

“These young people have connected to the rest of the world,” Sany said. “They see what’s happening. They are interested. They are smart. They are more educated.” And they have high expectations not only for their economic future but also for their civil rights and autonomy.

The reality of government is always different from the promise of campaigning, but Faye’s election is part of a promising trend of democratic entrenchment in Africa, exemplified by successful transitions of power in Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone over the past year. To be sure, those elections were not without challenges, but on the whole, they provide an important counterweight to democratic backsliding.

Senegalese people, especially the younger generation, have high expectations for what democracy can and should deliver for them. It’s up to Faye and his government to follow through.

REVIEW

Bedeviled: Jinn Doppelgangers in Islam & Akbarian Sufism

Book Author(s): Dunja Rasic
Published Date: March 2024
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Hardback:220 pages
ISBN-13:9781438496894

by Usman Butt

February 19, 2024 

Doppelgangers are the stuff of fantasy, folklore and tradition and are an integral part of popular culture; one only has to think of Jake Gyllenhaal’s 2014 film, Enemy, where a depressed history teacher discovers he has an exact look-alike who works as an extra in films, to see how doppelgangers capture our imaginations today. The main definition of doppelganger seems to be a biologically unrelated exact look-alike of a person, or the double of a living person. Outside of the West, there is also a tradition of doppelgangers and, in the Islamicate, they are associated with jinns. Dunja Rasic’s Bedeviled: Jinn Doppelgangers in Islam & Akbarian Sufism explores the world of doppelganger jinn in medieval Islam and the writings of thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, traveller, scholar and poet, Ibn Arabi. Devotees of Ibn Arabi, who follow the Akbari Sufi order, not only continue to pore over his works for wisdom, they also preserve and pass down some of our understanding of doppelganger jinns. Who the jinn are and what their significance is has long been debated but, broadly, they are understood to be beings who are neither human nor angels, who exist between worlds and can influence humans.

REVIEW: The City in Arabic Literature

Doppelganger jinn, known as qarin (pl. qurana) or qarina, were the subject of lively debate in the medieval period. In Islamic tradition, “a qarin was generally understood to be a jinni companion and a doppelganger of human beings. Each qarin was thought to be conceived at the same time as its human. When a child is born, a qarin enters its heart.” Qurana are usually evil or mischievous beings who whisper to humans to tempt them to either follow whims and passions, or to do bad things. While we find jinns discussed in the Quran and a collection of prophetic narrations known as hadiths, the concept of jinns predates Islam and has strong ties to pre-Islamic Arabian folklore traditions. In different regions, local oral traditions make their way into Islamic debates about jinn, including qarin. In Palestinian oral tradition, the idea of evil doppelgangers may have given rise to tales of a female demoness, Qarina, who was a succubus, seductress and murderer of pregnant women and children. The belief in Qarina was likely inspired by tales of Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who, like Qarina, became a succubus, seduced men and harmed children. Qarina could appear as a beautiful woman and, in the Iraqi tradition, we encounter stories of men marrying her. But does this disqualify her from being classed as a jinn? As Rasic observers, “the main difference between a qarin and Qarina is reflected in the fact that Qarina’s cruelty is not reserved for a single person. Jinn are disgusted with menstrual blood which seems to attract Qarina.” What these discussions highlight is a concern with identifying boundaries and categorising jinn by medieval thinkers.

For Ibn Arabi, he saw qarin as “a devil within the blood and hearts of humans”. For the Sufi mystic, both jinn and qarin were not only supernatural entities, they were also ways of probing theological issues and problems in society. Through writing about them, Ibn Arabi not only tried to make sense of evil, but also, “to show how humans, jinn and, even the Devil himself, might be saved from it.” Indeed spiritual self work was key for all humans, “Sufi works often made no distinction between the act of taming a qarin and the purification of the lower soul.” Given how closely tied qarin were to humans, advice on how to deal with them often meant advice on how to deal with the individual self. A righteous human being who resists temptation offered by qarin could actually convert the qarin to Islam, as they will follow the piety and good actions of the person they are tied to.

Bedeviled offers a niche and exciting exploration of Jinn doppelgangers in Islamic thought; it lays out both clearly and concisely debates Ibn Arabi and others were having about the qarin and gives the read an excellent introduction into the world of jinn studies. In both medieval and contemporary societies in the Middle East, jinns are an active part of how people interpret the world around them and, while there is a lot of complexity and nuance in how people interact with these ideas, to imagine a world in which jinns are not part of the cultural landscape in the Islamicate would be hard to fathom. Both medieval and contemporary debates about jinn are not merely about exchanging scary stories, as we have become accustomed to doing with ghost stories, but are about grappling with moral issues, boundaries, religious obligations and the edge of human knowledge. While reading Bedeviled, I got a sense of a whole range of issues confronting society in the time of Ibn Arabi and the book provides an important window into it. Rasic’s book will surely not only be of interest to those who are interested in jinns, but also to those who are interested in the concept of doppelgangers and how different cultures think about them.

REVIEW: Sufis in Medieval Baghdad

 

Islam and Jesus as Jewish Messiah

by Eric Walberg / February 7th, 2024

If anything proves the validity of Occam’s Razor,ⁱ it’s contemplating the astounding attempts over two millennia to square Christianity’s circle, or rather triangle. Trinitarianism: one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons (hypostases) sharing one essence/ substance/ nature. The ‘what’ is one, the ‘who’ is three.

The Old Testament has been interpreted as referring to the Trinity in many places. One of these is the prophecy about the Messiah in Isaiah 9. The Messiah is called ‘Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’ Some Christians see this verse as meaning the Messiah will represent the Trinity on Earth. This is because Counselor is a title for the Holy Spirit (John 14:26), the Trinity is God the Father, Jesus, Son, the Prince of Peace, the Counselor Spirit.

But this trinitarianism is very different from the Hindu Brahma (creator), Vishnu (sustainer), Shiva (destroyer), or the Roman Diana.

It was only formulated in the 3rd century by Tertullian, based on the New Testament (NT) writings from the late 1st century early 2nd century. They contain several Trinitarian formulas, including Matthew 28:19, most clearly in 1 John 5:7. But modern Biblical scholarship largely agrees that 1 John 5:7, found in Latin and Greek texts after the 4th century and found in later translations such as the King James translation, cannot be found in the oldest Greek and Latin texts. Verse 7 is known as the Johannine Comma, which most scholars agree to be a later addition by a later copyist. This verse reads: Because there are three in Heaven that testify – he Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit – and these three are one. This verse is absent from the Ethiopic, Aramaic, Syriac, Slavic, Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic translations of the Greek New Testament. Ditto Matthew 28. The debates later moved from the deity of Jesus Christ to the equality/ inferiority of the Holy Spirit with the Father and Son. Need I say more?

A perusal of Wikipedia page Nontrinitarianism (i.e., non orthodox Trinitarianism) identifies close to a hundred variations on the theme, trying to convince that 3 really is 1. My favorites:

*Arianism, popular until the Council of Nicaea, argued that the pre-existent Son of God was directly created by the Father, before all ages, and that he was subordinate to God the Father. Arius’ position was that the Son was brought forth as the very first of God’s creations, and that the Father later created all things through the Son.

*The Adoptionist theory was perhaps the most popular in the 2nd-3rd centuries, which holds that Jesus was adopted as the Son of God at his baptism, his resurrection, or his ascension, but this theory died out when it was declared a heresy in the 4th century when the 4th century Nicene Crede was agreed in Constantinople, the capital of Christianity.

*Ebionites (1st-4th centuries) observed Jewish law, denied the literal virgin birth and regarded Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and the greatest prophet of God. Period.

*Socinianism taught that Jesus was the sinless Messiah and redeemer, and the only perfect human son of God, but that he had no pre-human existence. They interpret verses such as John 1:1 to refer to God’s plan existing in God’s mind before Christ’s birth, and that it was God’s plan that ‘became flesh’, as the perfect man Jesus.

*Unitarianism holds that Jesus was inspired by God in his moral teachings and that he is the savior of humankind, but he is not equal to God himself.

*Many Gnostic traditions held that the Christ is a heavenly Aeon but not one with the Father. Docetists asserted that Christ was born without any participation of matter and that all the acts and sufferings of his life, including the Crucifixion, were mere appearances.

Christian heterodoxy flowered throughout the Middle Ages despite Pauline police. The democratic egalitarian spirit-filled Jesus movement slowly atrophied into the repressive, bureaucratic Catholic Church, culminating in the 6th century Gelasuis Decree, a list of distrusted and rejected works not encouraged for church use, which banned 60 books including 9 gospels, 4 sets of apostolic acts and 3 revelations, as well as 35 heretics.

Underlying this debate through the centuries were real questions:

*Is Jesus God?

*Was it Jesus who was crucified?

*If so, then did he physically resurrect as apostles claimed?

The above nontrinitarians are all closer to Islam than the official Pauline creed. Most claim Jesus as ‘son of God’ in some sense, but with God supreme, using Jesus as intermediary. Ebionites Jewish Messianism is probably closest to Islam, where Jesus is the ‘greatest prophet’ only. And the Unitarians, a 17th century offshoot of the 16th century, the Radical Reformation, and which gave birth to Anabaptist groups like the Hutterites, Amish and Mennonites. The Ebionites and Unitarians are ‘Christianity without Paul’ or ‘Islam without Muhammad’, though the Unitarians’ actual beliefs are so lax that it’s fine to reject pretty well everything (virgin birth, miracles, resurrection), making it more a liberal humanism.

Interestingly, later Protestant heretics, the Anabaptist Hutterites and Amish, were rediscovered during Covid, as they refused vaccines, relying on (medieval) herd immunity. While infections were high, death rates from the virus are lower because their older people live with family and extended family and not in old people’s homes, and usually maintain a healthier lifestyle. Lev Tolstoy was a big fan of the Anabaptist Mennonites and gave the income from his final novel Resurrection to them so they could emigrate to North America, freed from serving in the Russian imperial army.

In The Gospel in Brief: The life of Jesus (1881), Tolstoy asks:

What is it to me if Christ was resurrected? The questions important to me are:

*What should I do?

*How should I live?

Man is the son of an infinite source not by the flesh but by the spirit. Therefore man should serve this source in spirit … True life is outside of time, exists only in the present.

Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church for his heretical thoughts. The New Testament is stinking filth with buried jewels. But he sees himself as a true believer: the Jesus message transcends all answers from other cultures. My study is like reassembling a broken statue. The teachings of a great man must express clearly that which others only expressed unclearly. Socrates is clear. Christianity is not. The dogma — trinity, pentecost, seven sacraments for salvation, the communion ritual. They are not in Jesus’ teachings. Why did people turn Jesus into God? Tolstoy’s answer: The teachings were so transformative, they mistook the messenger of it as a God. Don’t look for inner peace from my study, he warns, but truth.

Tolstoy knew and respected Muslims. They recognize Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, who made clear meaning of Moses and Jesus’ revelations. The Muslim looks at teachings of Jews and Christians for what agrees with his mind and heart.

Islam’s roots in Christian heterodoxy

There were many Christian and Jewish stories circulating during Muhammad’s lifetime, and hadiths relate how the Prophet spoke with Christians and Jews. Muslim apologists argue that any overlaps between the Quran and such sources hark back to the original Truth behind them and that that Truth is what the Quran reveals. Fair enough, but it is still interesting to see how close to the Truth various popular narrations or actual Christian or Jewish texts came, as precursors of the Quran.

Pauline ‘pagan Christianity’ became a strict orthodoxy by the 2nd century, but alternative versions of Jesus’ message were strong until the 9th century, surviving in the eastern sects with a colorful array of gospels and apocalypses. Ironically it was the Reformation and the printing press that proved lethal for Christian heterodoxy. Colorful was ou,t and it was much easier to control what was read when everything was now printed (and approved).

The apocryphal works were prompted by the need of alternative narratives to fill in blanks or mull over theological problems not adequately explained. Things Jesus should have said or done if he had the time. ‘What would Jesus do?’ The theological need produced the required texts.

Philip Jenkins, in The many faces of Christ: The thousand-year story of the survival and influence of the lost gospels (2015), shows how the James/Jacob version of Jesus’ Messianism through the years was trying to keep the central monotheistic legacy in tact. That kind of ‘Christianity’ would not have made Jews the outcasts of Europe (and the monsters of today in Israel) as happened.

Rejecting Paul’s innovations offends Christians, as Tolstoy warned, but it is necessary to overcome the bigotry that came with dubious dogma and unending communal strife.

That said, we can marvel at the blossoming of monotheism in the Middle Ages, and thank the heterodox Christian cultural milieu of the time for some of the most striking images in the Quran.

In the 2nd century pseudo Infancy gospel of Thomas,ⁱⁱ boy Jesus fashions a bird from clay and then blowing on it, bringing it to life as it flies away. Surah 5:110 Thou makest out of clay, as it were, the figure of a bird, by My leave, and thou breathest into it and it becometh a bird by My leave.

Muslim apologists argue that, yes, the original Bible contained the apocryphal story of Jesus making and animating clay birds, and that the Quran was actually correcting a wrongful exclusion of this apocryphal from the canon. Fine. Oscar Wilde thumbed his nose at such nitpicking: talent borrows, genius steals. If ‘the Church’ had had its way, this delightful and profound story, an enduring symbol of belief, would only have appeared in the Quran. Given the plethora of gospels in circulation in the 7th century, especially in outposts like Arabia, who knows what other ‘caves of treasures’ have survived only because of the Quran?

left: Jesus raises the clay birds of his playmates to life. right: The Cave of Treasures recounts the lineage of Man from Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Jesus, popular in eastern Christiandom in the 6-7th centuries. Like many other priceless treasures, it survives only thanks to an Arabic translation.

Jenkins brings the time of the Middle Ages from the 2nd century to the Reformation to life. The medieval period is fascinating, strikingly similar to today’s mostly visual society, with bible epics and a secular heavenly kingdom courtesy of Cecile B de Mille and Walt Disney. Austere Islam arose at the height of this imaginative time, which ended with the extreme austerity of the Reformation and the rise of scientism leaving Islam as a fascinating time capsule for reimagining Christian civilization at its peak, minus Paul’s dogma.

From the birth of Islam in the 7th century, it has existed in dialogue with Christianity. For much of Muslim history, Christians composed a large proportion of the population of the Muslim world, Egypt, Syria, Iraq. Muslims were living in Europe by the 8th century, in Spain, later Sicily, the Balkans. Christian subjects under Muslim rule were free to practice their faith and read old texts that were suppressed in Catholic or Orthodox lands. What an era! Medieval society was full of religion, with successive waves of conversion zeal.

Similarly, after the sudden burst of zeal and the expansion of Islam across the known world, Islam too spread peacefully. The key difference being Christianity as the religion of empire, and Islam as the conqueror of empire, born free in the desert.

As Christian civilization slowly came to pagan Europe, next door Islamic civilization was already flourishing. Lots of learning, translating, debate. As late as 649 a Nestorian bishop wrote: “These Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay, rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and saints, and they make gifts to our churches and monasteries.” At the same time Islam was influenced by diverse Christian traditions. And as religious rivals, Muslims would have welcomed any dissidents from the Pauline mainstream. The apocryphal/ Islamic Jesus was proclaimed in Quranic recitations across much of Europe, in mosques of Toledo and Palermo Seville and Sofia, Athens and Budapest, Belgrade and Bucharest.ⁱⁱⁱ (Too bad about the Crusades)

Muslim gospel

Sayings of Jesus recorded by early Muslim commentators resemble Q source’s collection of aphorisms. Some sound like Manichean Dualist:

*The world is Satan’s farm and its peoples are its plowmen.

*The world is a bridge. Cross this bridge but do not build upon it.

*Do not examine the sins of people as though you were lords, but examine them as though you were servants. critique Kharijite movement.

*Just as kings have left wisdom to you [scholars], you should leave the world to them. largely supportive of government because any government is better than none at all.^iv

*Jesus addressing a self-proclaimed worshipper: What is your brother doing? Caring for me. Your brother is more devoted to God than you.

*Blessed is he who sees with his heart but whose heart is not in what he sees.

*Console me, for my heart is soft and I hold myself in low esteem. emphasizing Jesus’ human weakness.

*Be in middle, but walk to the side.

*Be at ease with people and ill at ease with yourself.

*Those among you who sorrow most in misfortune and the most attached to this world. Jesus as fierce ascetic. also

*A pig passed by Jesus. ‘Pass in peace.’ How can you say this to a pig? Jesus: ‘I hate to accustom my tongue to evil.‘^v

It’s eerie how the Jesus hidden away by Pauline orthodoxy managed to resurface in Islam 7 centuries after Jesus died. A Jesus ‘resurrected’ in an environment where he becomes a Muslim prophet. Belonging to a common age-old fund of wisdom found in the rich traditions of near eastern cultures. Also with roots in Hellenistic civilization.

Their attribution to Jesus reveals a lot about both an unknown Jesus and how Islam sees Him. When Islam arrived, the Church had not yet enforced its dogmas in the near east, i.e. there were mutually hostile Christian communities. The Church only cemented its dogmas in the 10th century, by which time many ‘heretics’ often found in Islam a better fit.

Some likely founded Sufi orders. Jesus is one of the major spiritual heroes of Sufism. Basra was an important base for the Church of the East and the earliest center of Islamic Sufism. Syria’s Alawites follow several Gnostic ideas, including the transmigration of souls, to the point that many orthodox Muslims do not consider it Islamic. True Gnostics, both Alawites and Druze are famous for the extreme secrecy of their faith. Islam offered a message appealing to the old Dualists who were hostile to priests, institutional churches.

It’s a shorter step from Christian to Muslim than from Jewish. Apocryphal texts were alive and well among Eastern congregations long after their formal exclusion from the NT canon in the 4-5th centuries. Quranic images of Jesus and the Christians echoed a living—not imaginary—Christianity, reflecting some of the lost Jesus as Christianity became the religion of empire, caught up in intrigues with secular power.

When Muslims occupied the eastern Christian territories they were intensely exposed to the writings of ancient centers of Christian heterodoxy as Syria Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Islamic world became a treasury of writings otherwise lost or suppressed in Latin Europe. Muslim scholars preserved priceless documents from the earliest church, texts that were lost to Christendom.

A Muslim Gospel of Prophet Jesus would be anti-Pauline for sure, but not anti-Christian like the Toledot yeshu (life of Jesus), the nasty Jewish version. Written in the 9th century prior to the 14th century it would have been available in any large town in Europe where Jewish communities existed. After the 14th century Black Death, the Jewish center of gravity shifted to eastern Europe. Based on a deceptive Jesus, Christianity was depicted as at best a parody religion, a pallid imitation of authentic Judaism.^vi Luther was appalled by it; it poisoned his attitude to Jews and Judaism, which in his early years had been relatively tolerant. By 1540s he was urging that Jews be expropriate and their faith utterly forbidden. In Germany his anti-Jewish fury had a long and hideous afterlife.

In fact, there is such a ‘gospel’, the 14th century Gospel of Barnabas, which more or less follows the canonical NT, with the addition of the prophecy of Muhammad. Jesus: and the mesenger of God when he shall come, of what lineage? Disciples: of David. Jesus: you deceive yourselves. The promise was made in Ishmael, not in Isaac.^vii It is Judas that is mistaken for Jesus and crucified. Evil men, pretending to be diisciples, preached that Jesus died and rose not again. Others preached that he really died, but rose again. Others preach that Jesus is the Son of God, among whom is Paul deceived.

The Gospel of Barnabas, probably written by a convert monk, has been rediscovered periodically, lauded as an explosive demolition of Christian orthodoxy. Deist skeptic John Toland found a copy in Amsterdam and wrote Nazanernus, or Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity (1718). He saw it as an account of primitive Christianity without the Trinity and the canceling of Jewish law. Jewish Christianity. The original plan of Christianity. Toland was popular in enlightenment circles. When a scholarly English translation was published in 1907, it created a sensation in Islamic lands, especially India.

But the real thing would simply be Jesus’ actual sayings which Muslims have incorporated into their faith. The Muslim Jesus. Such a work has been immanent all along, scattered in hadiths, works of ethics and popular devotion, Sufism, wisdom anthologies, histories of prophets and saints, from the 2nd/ 8th^viii century to the 12th/ 18th century. Muslims in the first century of Islam were generally quite receptive to the religious lore of Judaism, Christianity and other religions of the new Muslim empire. The first such ‘gospel’ was only complied in 1896 a collection of 77 sayings. This was supplemented and published as 225 sayings (in Latin) in 1919. A new version The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and stories in Islamic Literature, with 303 sayings, was published by Tarif Khalidi in 2001.

In The Muslim Jesus, Khalidi offering a Jesus quite different from that of Christian Europe. The Jesus of Muslim tradition is a fierce ascetic, not the figure of the canonical gospels. A 9th century commentator Ahmad ibn Hanbal reported a saying of this Jesus: I toppled the world upon its face and sat upon its back. I have no child that might die, no house that might fall into ruin. The Muslim Jesus is Sufi, his parables and aphorisms like Zen koans. Jesus points to the birds of the sky and speaks of how God cares for them. He urges his followers to lay up treasures for themselves in heaven, to fast and pray in secret, unlike the hypocrites. Repay cruelty with kindness. He who has not been born twice shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven.

The only direct quotes from either the OT or NT in the Quran are ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘rich man and the camel passing through the eye of a needle.’ Muhammad knew many Jews and Christians and honored Jewish and Christian scriptures, but it is wrong to suppose that anyone had any direct role in inspiring revelation. There was no ‘Arabic Bible’ at that point.

The language of the Quran is a kind of eternal present. Past, present, future laid out in a continuum. The structure is a typology of Quranic prophets, the model of prophecy recognizable by the manner in which a particular prophet sets about his mission of warning, rejection, vindication as retribution. A Christian or Jew today would be okay with the manner in which Moses, Joseph, David are presented. Not Jesus. The Quran was free to use, indeed, to preserve any nugget of Truth in the apocryphal infancy stories and miracles, gospels, as well as Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic literature.

More emphasis is on the miraculous birth than Jesus’ Passion. Jesus is almost always ‘son of Mary’. There is no Sermon on the Mount, parables, teachings on law and spirit, no Passion. There are faithful disciples, humble and pious, God’s unity. The Quranic style is argument and counter-argument in the face of sneers from unbelievers and quarrelsome religious communities.

Jesus’ image is shaped by the Quran’s own corrective message, pruning, rearranging of an earlier revelation regarded as notorious for its divisive and contentious sects. It is a trustee of an inheritance, not a relative of the testator.^ix i.e., Muhammad inherited the Christian (and Jewish) books, canonical and noncanonical, but it is a new, distinct religion, not beholden to quarrelsome, misguided relatives. Islam claims to be the true version of the underlying treasure (the true monotheistic path), not some wayward child of Christianity.

Examples of Quran and popular Christian imagery of the time:

*When Muhammad received his first revelation, he feared that he may have been visited by an evil spirit. He ran home to his wife, Khadijah, saying, ‘cover me, for I fear I may be possessed by an evil spirit.’ Khadijah did not believe Muhammad was possessed by an evil spirit, and she took him to her cousin, Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a Christian, who was well versed in the scriptures. It was this Christian who first suggested to Muhammad that he may have been visited by the angel Gabriel, and therefore, may be a Prophet.^x It is believed that Waraqah ibn Nawfal belonged to a group of Ebionite Christians, who maintained the Jewish laws of circumcision, avoidance of pork, and emphasized God’s Oneness.

*Early biographies suggest Muhammad had a sympathy for Mary. When his forces destroyed hundreds of idols in Mecca, he reverently preserved an image of the Virgin and Child.^xi

*Popular reading then would have been Christian or Jewish stories like The Cave of Treasures (590s) when Muhammad was a young adult. He travelled as a merchant husband of a respected merchant widow Khadija and such works were the HBO/ PBS of the day.

*The Trinity is rejected out of hand as a later invention and is never deconstructed except as denying God’s indivisibility. There is even a hint that the Trinity was Father, Son and Mary, not spirit. The Father-Son-Spirit triune does not appear in the Quran. One of the most dramatic moments in the Quran is God taking Jesus to task 5:116: And [beware the Day] when Allah will say, “O Jesus, Son of Mary, did you say to the people, ‘Take me and my mother as deities besides Allah ?’ ” He will say, “Exalted are You! It was not for me to say that to which I have no right. If I had said it, You would have known it.

It may be an allusion to heretical Arab Christian Collyridians, mentioned in the 4th century and possibly having survived into Muhammad’s time, so the Quran could be addressing their understanding of the Trinity. As to the purpose of verse 5:116, the most plausible explanation is clearly that it was a polemic against real or imagined Christian belief in the Trinity. Consider 4:171. Do not say “Three”. Stop it. That is good for you. Allah is the only One God. He is far too pure to have a son. Neither ayat directly addresses the ‘real’ Trinity, but it looks like Muhammad was criticizing not only the Trinity but the deification of Mary which had been proceeding apace after Paul (who hardly mentions Mary at all).

*In the Roman Catholic tradition Mariology is seen as Christology developed to its full potential (Paul would have been horrified). Veneration for Mary is based on the reference in the Gospel of Luke to Mary as ‘the selected handmaid of the Lord’. Particularly significant is Mary’s presence at the Cross, when she received from her dying Son the charge to be mother to the beloved disciple. The theological development of devotion to Mary begins with Justin Martyr (100–165) who articulated Mary’s role in salvation history as the Second Eve. While Jesus and Mary are central to the Quran, they are very different, Jesus is more ascetic and Mary a model of piety and courage, and the honored vehicle for Jesus’ appearance. Neither are part of a ‘salvation history’ of Jesus dying for our sins, and Mary as intercessor in this. There is no ‘original sin’ in Islam. Jesus came to add to the Jewish Covenant, with a universal message of love and compassion. 4:171: The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was no more than a messenger of Allah and the fulfilment of His Word through Mary and a spirit created by a command˺ from Him.

*Paul described the crucifixion as being to the Jews an obstacle that they cannot get over, to the pagans madness. 1Cor1:23. Did the Quran follow a Docetic form of Christianity? But the Jesus of the Quran is very much flesh and blood while in Docetism he is a mere shadow. In denying the crucifixion, the Quran is denying that the Jews killed him, and elevates him to God as part of his vindication as a prophet, reconciling him to the general typology of Quranic prophecy. It is the ascension rather than the crucifixion which marks the high point of his life in the Quran. There is no Passion, stations of the Cross in Islamic commentary. It is closer to the Docetists.^xii or the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter^xiii

 *In the Cave of Treasures, probably the most popular religious work of the Middle Ages, which begins with the creation of the world and ends with the Pentecost, the devil‘s excuse for not bowing to Adam is that he was created from fire, while Adam was created from dirt. It is this tradition that is reflected in the Qurʾān: ‘I am better than he is. You created me from fire. You created him from clay.’ (Q 7.12; cf. 15.33; 17.61; 38.76). Cave of Treasures: When the leader of the lesser order saw the greatness given to Adam, he became jealous of him and did not want to prostrate before him with the angels. He said to his hosts, ‘Do not worship him and do not praise him with the angels. It is proper that you should worship me, for I am fire and spirit, not that I worship something made from dirt. The Life of Adam and Eve (Jewish apocrypha 200BC–100AD) would have been popular and is much like Quran 18:50 Kahf: We said unto the angels: fall prostrate before Adam and they prostrated, except for Iblis. He was of the jinn and departed from the command of his Lord.

 *Seven sleepers of Ephesus Quran 18:9. Clearly inspired by disciples being persecuted in the 3rd c, during the persecutions by the Roman Emperor Decius, around 250) and who hid in a cave, as related by Syriac Father Jacob of Serugh (c. 450–521). The cave was opened during the reign of Theodosius II (408–450)—in AD 447 when heated discussions were taking place between various schools of Christianity about the resurrection of the body in the day of judgment and life after death. Some Jewish circles and the Christians of Najran believed in only three brothers; the East Syriac, five, others seven, which explains the curious ayat 18:22: My Lord is most knowing of their number. None knows them except a few. So do not argue about them except with an obvious argument and do not inquire about them among [the speculators] from anyone. The pilgrim account De situ terrae sanctae, written between 518 and 531, records the existence of a church dedicated to the sleepers in Ephesus, also part of the Quran rendition. How long they slept is also debated but the Quran settles on 309 (lunar) years or 300 solar years.^xiv

The Seven Sleepers were included in the Golden Legend compilation, another popular book of the later Middle Ages, which fixed a precise date for their resurrection, 478, in the reign of Theodosius. The legend was rediscovered by Donne, and The Golden Legend may have been the source for retellings of the Seven Sleepers in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in a poem by Goethe, Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle, H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes.

 *The cosmography of the times, such as that of Syriac authors like Ephrem, explains the Quran ‘Go down!’ to Adam and Eve. Ephrem refers to paradise as being at a great height, beyond the world-encircling ocean, and was the source of the great rivers on Earth, as reflected also in the common Quranic phrase ‘gardens from beneath which the rivers flow’. Allah’s command to ‘Go down!’ in the Quranic verses reflects the cosmological vistas of Syriac Christian sources in which paradise is on top of a cosmic mountain, above the Earth, and thus has God cry out ‘Go down’.

*Re Muhammad as ‘illiterate‘, in The Quran and Bible: Text and Commentary (2018), Gabriel Said Reynolds points to Quran 3:20 as evidence that the word refers to those who do not know the word of God (similarly 3:75 and 62:2). Thus, Muhammad is described as an ummi prophet in 7:157-158 because he came from a people to whom God had not yet sent down revelation, not because he was illiterate. 29:47-48 denies that Muhammad wrote the Quran himself, yet this does not imply that he could not read. As a respected international merchant, it only makes sense that Muhammad had at least ‘business Arabic’.

Lost gospels

The ‘lost’ Gospel of Hebrews is considered by some as more important (or identical to) the lost biblical Q source. Origen quoted it in the 3rd c: Rays issued from Christ’s eyes, whereby they were terrified and put to flight. And Jerome in the 4th century cites a surviving fragment emphasizing the importance of James, the brother of Jesus and head of the Jewish–Christian movement in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death, thereby testifying to the Jewish character of the community of the Gospel. The theology of the Gospel is strongly influenced by Jewish–Christian wisdom teaching. The Holy Spirit is represented as a manifestation of Divine Wisdom who is called Mother.

The Gospel of the Ebionites is one of several Jewish Christian gospels, along with the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Nazarenes; all survive only as fragments in quotations of the early Church Fathers. Fragments of the Ebionites were embedded in a polemic by 4th century Bishop Epiphanius to point out inconsistencies in the beliefs and practices of a Jewish Christian sect known as the Ebionites. The Christology of the Ebionites was known to Irenaeus: Jesus is understood in this gospel as having come to abolish the sacrifices rather than substituting for them; thus it is unlikely that it contained the same institution of the Eucharist as practiced by Nicene orthodox Christianity. Jerome remarks that the Nazarenes and Ebionites both used the Gospel of the Hebrews.

There is also the gospel text known to Origen as the Gospel of the Twelve. Jesus as the Messiah but not divine. The twelve insisted on the necessity of following Jewish law and rites and they used only the Jewish–Christian gospel. Jesus’ message was not to proclaim the end of the Torah, but to make the Jews see that they can remain Jews by renouncing the sacrifices and admitting the messianic character of Jesus. In the cross-cultural process of constructing the Roman identity, the Judeo-Christians wanted to participate by Judaizing the Empire, for which they yielded a little in their Jewish beliefs, making them more lax.

And the Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, but it has disappointed researchers. Like all the gospels, it is a pseudo and 80% of the sayings are some variation on the canonical gospels. Khalidi doesn’t even mention it.

Last but not least, and never completely lost, the Gospel of Nicodemus or Acts of Pilot. Jesus in a nutshell: convicted of sedition and killed by the Romans with approval of Caiaphus (so the Romans could blame it on ‘the Jews’). The story was soon turned on its head, making the Jewish mob the killer and Pilot an honorary saint with his own gospell, a 4th century celebration of Christianity’s new role as Church of Empire. Eastern Churches such as the Coptic and Ethiopian churches even made Pontius Pilate and his wife saints. We can add Marx to the brew here: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. So good effort, St Pontius.

Reza Aslan is a prominent contemporary Muslim writer, a convert to evangelical Christianity from Shia Islam as a young American immigrant, who ‘reverted’ to Islam. Aslan: It’s not [that] I think Islam is correct and Christianity is incorrect. It’s that all religions are nothing more than a language made up of symbols and metaphors to help an individual explain faith. A man-made institution. It’s a set of symbols and metaphors that provides a language for which to express what is inexpressible, and that is faith. It’s symbols and metaphors that I prefer, but it’s not more right or more wrong than any other symbols and metaphors. It’s a language; that’s all it is.

Aslan’s postmodern take on religion would grate on most Muslims’ ears. But religion is a language, even ‘pure language’, the Word. And as a perennialist, there is always a middle way. That’s what real diplomacy is all about. And that’s what Islam is about. The Jews had veered into tribal insularity and ritual gone mad, the Christians had landed in a solipsistic world of Paul’s creation, distorting Jesus’ message. The two monotheisms were bitter enemies as a result of Paul’s rejection of Judaism and hounding of Jews, with forced conversion always lurking as a ‘final solution’.

It was wrong push the Jewish Christians aside. They are special Christians. The good Jews. We must always look for the good Jews and work with them! Islam is the classic ‘middle way’. That’s what we must find now. This is 70AD. We are living a cosmic typology of empires. The Romans (Zionists) are destroying/ expelling the natives of Jerusalem, getting ready to flatten the sacred mosque al-Aqsa to build their Temple to Jupiter.

ENDNOTES

Part I: Pauline Christianity vs Jesus as Jewish Messiah

i If there are competing explanations, the simplest is usually the best.

ii Wikipedia calls this Childhood of the Saviour (second century AD; commonly, and erroneously, referred to as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas)

iii Jenkins, The many faces of Christ, 193.

iv Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus, 2001.

v Khalidi, 17.

vi Jenkins, op.cit., 214.

vii Jenkins, 191-192.

viii i.e., Anno hejirae/ anno domini

ix Khalidi, 17.

x Internet Sacred Text Archive, http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/gbar/.

xi Ibid., 199.

xii Since the 1950s, evidence has been uncovered by archeologists of thousands of early Christian sects which were systematically wiped out by ‘the Church’ with the 4th century Nicene Creed, and continued ever since as soon as any heresies were noticed (or dreamed up by would-be Inquisitors).

xiii Jesus a laughing savior, a substitute on the cross being crucified.

xiv Their purported cave was identified in Afşin is near the antique Roman city of Arabissus, to which the East Roman Emperor Justinian paid a visit. The site was a Hittite temple, used as a Roman temple and later as a church in Roman and Byzantine times. The Emperor brought marble niches from western Anatolia as gifts for it, which are preserved inside the Eshab-ı Kehf Kulliye mosque to this day. The Seljuks continued to use the place of worship as a church and a mosque. It was turned into a mosque over time, with the conversion of the local population to Islam.

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.