Dan Mathewson, a scholar of religion, has published an incisive analysis on disparities between the media coverage of Dr. George Tiller’s murderer and that of the man who killed an army recuiter in Arkansas. Whereas in the case of the latter, the media has paid a lot of attention to his religious background as a convert to Islam, in the case of the former, the fact of the man’s zealous attachment to Christianity has been basically set aside as unimportant. Junaid Afeef makes the same point in his piece at altmuslim, and further asks: why has Dr. Tiller’s murderer not been charged with terrorism, even though his act seems to meet the legal definition.

Both Mathewson and Afeef argue that both men were quite obviously ‘religiously motivated’, and so the differential media treatment is unjustified. Clearly, it seems that the media perceives Islam and Christianity differently when it comes to the question of whether or not religion can be a ’cause’ or motivating factor in a murder (Hence, Mathewson’s apt title: “Muslims Murder, Christians Don’t”). But even attributing causality to religion is not straightforward business. If a religion is said to have made someone do something, why aren’t other followers of the same religion led to the same act? It also matters how we understand religion itself: for e.g. whether or not religion is something that exists independently like an object, outside of its practitioners.

Interestingly, not only is our particular perception of Islam being shaped by the events we associate with it, but apparently we now can’t even conceive a terrorist act without an Islamic vocabulary. In other words, not only Islam –> Terrorism, but also Terrorism –> Islam. And so, for e.g., the Canadian columnist Zerbisias describes the murder of Dr. Tiller thus: “Terrorism, plain and simple. The American Taliban” (Thanks to GaL for the link; click to read why she takes serious issue with this characterization).

Of course, this is all just part of the process by which we ‘make sense’ of things and attribute meaning to events. I recall someone saying, during the debates in the aftermath of the tragic Aasiya Zubair murder, that when a white man beats up and kills his wife, the ’cause’ is likely found in his being psychologically disturbed, but when a Black or immigrant man does the same, it’s enough to know that he is Black or immigrant.

As I was following the ridiculousness that is the film called Fitna, I thought to myself that a perfect response to Widlers’s naive cut-and-paste strategy would be to turn it around and make a similar film about the Bible and instances of violence perpetrated by some Christians. The purpose, of course, would not be to argue that the Bible promotes violence, but to reveal the fallacy of Wilders’s shallow cause-and-effect analysis. Even as I wished I had the time and ability to make such a film, I decided that there were certainly many others out there who’d think similarly.

And so I was pleased to discover Schism (click to watch!), through an article on Slate about Saudi blogger Raed al-Saeed who made this film in response to Fitna. Raed is mature enough to not merely retort against Wilders, but to undermine his project itself by applying the same strategy to different content matter. How is it possible, I wonder, that a young Saudi blogger is more sensible than a Dutch parliamentarian? So much for enlightened Europe! (Turns out, by the way, that there was another video response to Fitna, a short film called Almouftinoun.)

Of course, I don’t think the question of religion and violence and causal relationships between the two, if any, are settled. I have actually been planning a series of posts to address this, as I’ve come across a number of interesting readings on the topic. There’s a lot to think about here!

Having to choose between the ivory tower and the real world, I realized, is an extremely difficult decision—not least when many of the factors affecting this choice are beyond one’s control. While I continue to bother my mind with all that boggles it, I thought I would share with the world the following reflections that I had to write down sometime ago in response to a question:

At the conclusion of a conference on Islamic hermeneutics at Yale last year, Farid Esack posed a rather blunt question to the speakers of a discussion panel that he was moderating: he asked, what do any of their presentations, their sophisticated treatments of issues in law, theology, and scriptural interpretation, have anything to do with the suffering of human beings out there in society? How do their works relate to the millions of AIDS victims in Africa, or the countless millions of poor and starving people across the world? Esack, of course, was not making an accusation. He was rather, in a characteristic manner of provocation, inviting his audience to re-think the un-thought. For an aspiring scholar of religious history, these questions are indeed deeply unsettling.

But that moment of uncertainty can help lead us to understand the challenges of religious studies. The essential challenge confronting the scholar of religion is whether he is able to define or identify his or her own location: is it primarily the academy, or is it the church, or is it out there in the town square? Even more complex is the fact that none of these spaces are entirely independent of the others. Indeed, scholarship does not take place in a vacuum, and regardless of the academic’s working assumption of objectivity and distance, the discourse of scholarship affects, as much as it is affected by, the world at large. Also relevant is the question of the relationship between the person of the scholar and the object of her scholarship. If the scholar is interested in religion as faith, then what of her own beliefs? If she is interested in the practitioners of a religion, where does she stand in relation to that community? And if she is interested in the texts of a religion, how do her own writings affect the discourse surrounding the key texts?

Such questions, of course, are not unique to scholars of religion but apply to academics in most disciplines of study. But the challenge in religious studies is particularly acute, not least because religion is so remarkably pervasive. So much so, in fact, that the same religion can be responsible for the ideology that sustains an order as well as for the opposition that seeks to undo that status quo. Religion is that which can cause people to ostracize victims of a disease in the name of God’s curse at the same time as it can help those same victims cope with unimaginable pain and misery. The same religious text can inspire some people to acts of violence and terror, while promoting others to utterly reject such tendencies to hatred. The problem of the religious scholar is therefore not just “being-in-the-world,” but being in a world in which he or she is perhaps not even sure what religion is.

But the pervasive presence of religion in society is precisely what makes it so rewarding as a subject of scholarship. Indeed, religious study is not just a rewarding pursuit, it is almost a requirement. As Mohammed Arkoun asks so appropriately: “how can one justify scientifically the setting aside, the methodological suspension, or the explicit elimination from consideration of the religious element in societies where, contrary to what Durkheim said at the beginning of the century, God is present at every level of social existence and every level of discourse expressing it?” (Rethinking Islam, p. 103). Religious study is therefore a responsibility, as much as scholars must also remain wary of the challenge already discussed above: they are not necessarily outside of the “social existence” they seek to understand.

The issue of scholarly responsibility and associated challenges points us back to the questions raised by Farid Esack, which we can now understand as questions about the ethics of scholarship. Theological scholarship is not independent of concerns for social justice, for theology is almost always invested in the real world—either for or against justice. The responsibility of the scholar is therefore to investigate these complex and often unclear relationships. Such an exercise is ultimately rewarding, one hopes, in its ability to contribute to justice in the world.

The waz mahfil is ubiquitous in the Bengali Muslim milieu. Understood quite literally as “propagatory meeting,” it is a mass assembly (usually open-air) of religious followers who gather to hear a preacher speak on various matters. As such, these mahfils occupy the pinnacle of popular piety across Bangladesh. Indeed, the ability to attract and engage large crowds with very skillful oration becomes a mark of reputation for some clerics. I was reminded of this remarkable cultural practice when reading an article by Syed Jamil Ahmed, who takes a close look at the performative aspect of the waz mahfil, and offers a very elaborate description that I’m compelled to quote here verbatim:

In one of my field trips to northern Bangladesh, I chanced upon a wāz mahfil—a gathering of lay devotees, often held in the evening (sometimes running through the entire night), where an Islamic scholar elucidates one or more religious issues deemed important. The scholar is usually seated on a raised platform at one end of a large open air space, canopied on top and lit with fluorescent tube lights. The scholar’s voice is crystal clear (clearer, in fact, than most of the performers in the mainstream urban theatre of Dhaka) and his vocal modulation is characterized by a chant-like pattern, which he adapts to fit any ordinary prose sentence. Alternating this near-chanting with ordinary prose, the scholar constantly encourages two-way communication by asking questions and seeking responses from the audience. Therefore, when led by a skillful speaker, a wāz mahfil may mesmerize the participants, arousing the deepest devotional fervor. [Syed Jamil Ahmed, “Hegemony, Resistance and Subaltern Silence: Lessons from Indigenous Performances of Bangladesh,” The Drama Review, 50 (2006): p. 73]

Syed Jamil Ahmed, whose name I only recently discovered, is a leading Bangladeshi critic, scholar and director. His main interest is in the “70-plus genres of indigenous theatre that still exist in the rural areas” of Bangladesh—a subject that I realize I know barely anything about.

Ahmed is extremely cynical of the hegemonic discourse of religious orthodoxy, but in the article mentioned above, he reveals nuance and complexity in the nature of waz mahfil as performance. He shows how “the wāz mahfil became a site with shifting ground, at times offering ideological resistance against U.S. imperialism and at other times exerting hegemonic social control over the subaltern classes.” Armed with a comparative outlook, Ahmed then moves on to an intriguing analysis of two genres of folk performance from the villages of Bangladesh. For true and further enlightenment in these remarkable matters, one would have to acquire and read the books by Syed Jamil Ahmed, who says he has “witnessed the most fascinating and poignant interplay of hegemony, resistance, and the culture of silence in the indigenous theatre of Bangladesh.” I hope to be able to do that someday.