The Azanian Sea

Representations of Indian Ocean slavery

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:16:00 +0000

So little work on African slavery in the Indian Ocean world is grounded with descendant communities. It would be great if more of this scholarship tried to trace descendants and their families (ala the work of Joseph Harris) instead of reproducing the logics of erasure in the colonial archives or simply fabulating that past from folklore and rumor, as does some recent literary work.

Moreover, reproducing and narrating in pornographic detail the degradation the enslaved experienced in elite households or in royal courts (as does a recently translated work by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin) to expose "silences" might be necessary for certain projects, but I am often left uncertain certain how much such work contributes to the collective empowerment of African descendants about their present in light of their past. The translators of the novel claim they are stepping outside the colonial gaze, seemingly without doing much study of how these representations of Oriental and Muslim monstrosity were key ideological justifications for European colonial intervention in East Africa.

Most recent scholarship on the subject seems more about the extension of projects of critical race coming from the west than it does about recovering lineages and attitudes of the formerly enslaved. Those two projects need not be contradictory, but in practice, because of the organizational dominance of the western critical race framework, such projects of recovery tend to turn into cul-de-sacs of western representation of the 'Orient'.

Framing myths of an event and the politics of history

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 17:07:00 +0000

Whenever you go deep into a controversial or divisive historico-political event (wars, revolutions, coups etc), the first hurdle to a deeper understanding that you must deal with as a historian is the "framing myths" or "just so stories" about the event that make up the "collective memory" of its occurrence. These come in all ideological shapes and sizes and are basically the sum of the average person's understanding of the event from within the society where it occurred. These framing myths are often heavily influenced by school social studies, stories passed down from parents, or homespun narratives of history created by ideological entrepreneurs. The framing myth is a simple, easily communicable narrative of how one ought to understand the event in moral terms, usually propping up the absolute moral rightness of the victors or victims. Ideological entrepreneurs may frame the event as redemptive or tragic, depending on how they perceive the needs of their audience.

In this respect, it is sometimes advantageous for the historian to be an outsider to the events, as they are less prone to have been socialized in the narrative of the victors or the victims. However it is also quite possible for the historian to be seduced by one narrative or the other in the course of their research, and to mistake what their interlocutors told them as the most authentic framing of the event. In reaction, historians may try to balance that with another set of interlocutors, producing a narrative which simply tries to present victor and victim framing myths as co-equal. This is better than adopting one view or the other but is still not an adequate response to the challenge of the contentious past.

Instead the role of the historian is to try to use narrative to delve into the assumptions of both framing myths, unpacking each in different ways. This increases the likelihood that the descendants of victims and victors can gain sympathetic perspective on why each side made the choices they did at the time, how different choices might have led to different outcomes, and how to qualify one's framing of an event with perspectives from the other side. In this case nuance and complexity are not paralyzing paths to inaction but a route to a more robust understanding of the event that could (potentially) transcend the victor/victim dichotomy in the next generation, allowing the descendants of each side to recognize their agentive role in what occurred. In doing so, it becomes less necessary to look backward to the pains of that event to obtain moral legitimacy for the present and more necessary to embrace a generative future that encompasses the descendants of both victors and victims.

Historical studies and truth to power

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:41:00 +0000

I dislike histories where the author assumes their personal moral commitments are on the plane of the universal and metaphysical, and then spreads those assumptions all over their historical topic, a style that used to be called "whig history". One aspect that grates me is the egoism--the subtle need to communicate to the reader how much better the author understands things in hindsight than did the people who lived through the events. But there are deeper problems.

For it is surely of much greater benefit to our present to understand the specific rationale of actions later understood to be evil or harmful, then it is to make clear to a reader that they are "beyond the pale" to you in the present. This is bad historical method and is not very useful beyond demonstrating that one holds the current "right" ideas on the subject.

Detaching from snap moral judgements doesn't mean evacuating your moral commitments altogether, it means presenting them in way that respects the sensitivities of multiple readers, including those that disagree with you. For example, a western feminist scholar might disapprove ethically of "polygamy" for example. But instead of condemning it directly or negatively psychologizing those who engaged in it, that scholar could demonstrate some of its negative unintended effects and their larger social implications, without demonizing the institution and everyone part of it, as a whole.

It used to be that critical reviews could hold the tendency to whiggish moralization partially in abeyance, but anymore I wonder. I just completed an otherwise excellent book infused with this sort of moralistic rhetoric. Why do some scholars choose to write this way?

I speculate, but I think it might because I and many progressive scholars embrace an ethos of our work as "speaking truth to power", which was a concept coined in 1942 by Bayard Rustin in a pamphlet on nonviolent resistance to describe the role of a religious group. Applying it to historical studies is an inherently "whiggish idea", for it assumes that truth is out there among the masses or in the archives, merely suppressed by a powerful minority, and can simply be picked up and made visible by the scholar who tells their audience which group was right and which group was wrong.

At the same time, this imagination of "truth" must contend with a social backdrop of the loss of societal-level meta-narratives, the dissolution of truth into multiple perspective-bound truths. In the context of postmodernism, perhaps the whig style helps to broadcast and define communal boundaries within a larger community of scholars, demonstrating who is in, and who is out of a particular moral community.

Beyond speculations as to motivations, I think there are excellent and interesting ways to do morally committed history, that are more effective than placing your hand on the scale of the winners or the scale of the losers and saying, "I'm with them".

Defining a hierarchy of knowledge-value: a necessity in EVERY discipline

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 23:09:00 +0000

If you don't have some sort of hierarchy of knowledge-value in your discipline (a way to collectively distinguish good work from bad work from within the work itself, based on a set of criteria set by knowledgeable experts), you will end up with: 1) a hierarchy of celebrity (the people who are the most popular and well-known), a hierarchy of enrollment (whoever puts the most butts in seats calls the shots), a hierarchy of seniority (in which the olds stagnate the discipline into irrelevance, a hierarchy of newness (worship of the avant-garde), or even a hierarchy of admin proximity (whoever sucks up to the administration best gets the most cookies) The point is you WILL have some kind of hierarchy, whether internally agreed upon or externally imposed. It is always worse for a discipline or profession to have a hierarchy of knowledge-value externally imposed; it typically means the corruption and imminent demise of that discipline.

If a group of scholars faces that fact soberly they can assert more control over how and when the hierarchy functions, mitigate the worst aspects of how it functions, and check blind spots in their assessment. A denial of the need to assert and define a collective sense of value to define a discipline is a reactionary view. If you don't at least try to define, you have ceded your intellectual autonomy to much larger forces, and some sort of hierarchy will de facto impose itself, usually a kind all that much worse for there being no agency of actual scholars in its making.

I think humanities and social science scholars are much more reluctant to engage in this kind of process, partly because they have internalized a sort of shibboleth that all hierarchies of value imply oppression, and partly, because they do not feel the consequences of not doing it directly in the same way as, say, an engineer, a doctor, a farmer, an architect, or an airline pilot, to name but a few fields where hierarchy of knowledge-value is very important to their function. In these fields, there is a very clear distinction between those who know and those who do not, and distinguishing between good work and bad work is often a matter of life and death. Landing a plane is not matter of interpretation.

The idea that a discipline can skirt this necessity is a rhetorical illusion created largely by people who have had no experience of the hard work of trying to do it, or who weirdly think that all humanities knowledge is a form of aesthetics, or that Foucauldian canard that all truth claims are a function of hegemonic power. Some academic work is bad, really bad (even that by famous academics), and richly deserves to be called so openly. It may not be bad because the person doing it is a bad person, it may not be bad for lack of good intention, but it is bad nonetheless. Calling it thus will not save the humanities, nor should it be freighted with that expectation. But when one is brilliantly contemptuous of low quality and poorly designed research that lacks focus and rigor, one is expressing a yearning for something better that may keep the fire burning in the humanities a while longer.

Coloniality, original sin, and progress

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 18:53:00 +0000

While rather abstract and far-reaching, coloniality as a concept has historical predecessors within both western and non-western thought. There is something about how different human civilizations in different eras in their encounter with "others" along their borders were chauvinistic, violent, disruptive, and disastrously wasteful of human capital and human potential. The will to power of a particular civilization is experienced at its borders as the imposition of unjust and arbitrary punishments.

To myself as a thinker in 2024 examining and reading the works of decolonial philosophers, and looking at the ethical motivations held in common by these thinkers, I think that the terms "coloniality" and "coloniality of being" -the idea that the legacies of Euro-colonialism remain embedded in our consciousness after the end of formal colonialism- were an attempt to puncture liberal western triumphalism by analyzing western history with a repurposed theological concept of "original sin". This brief essay seeks to examine some of the contradictions of that move and the ideas generated by it.

The decolonial philosopher Anibal Quijano coined the concept of coloniality to analyze the postcolonial legacy of western European colonial expansion. As an idea, it sits uneasily between conservative and religious ideas of tradition and the secular idea of progress and universal history, a reflection of the educational background of its most active proponents who were all steeped in western theological and philosophical thought. The decolonial philosophers contribution to the western discourse of universal history took the form of a critique that is also a synthesis of religious and secular ideas. The emergence of the term "coloniality," and its resonance in secular spaces like the academic humanities, show the resilience of the religious idea of original sin, its transformation by a philosophical school of thought into a secular vision of progress, and the contradictions generated thereby.

With coloniality, original sin ceases being universal and becomes the turning back of claims to universalism into a form of negative particularity historically anchored in the last half millenia of human history. Let me "steel man" the critique they make. Whether one agrees with the decolonial scholars or not, it seems vital not to mistake western civilizational hubris and claims of progress for having really transcended essential human nature, notwithstanding the virtues of the refinements in rationality made by western thinkers. Artists of all kind have well portrayed certain types and dilemmas illustrating the folly and hubris of western man in the grip of his illusion of self-mastery through rationality and progress. It is vitally necessary to also recognize the fallenness and baseness of human motivations in the global expansions of peoples at the western end of the Eurasian peninsula since 1492, instead of merely celebrating them as an instantiation of universal human progress. European colonialism might be thought as the expression and legacy of human fallenness, a desire supercharged into a possibility by a punctuated acceleration in different kinds of technological and material progress of that world region.

If coloniality really does pervade our very being down to its core, this yields a rather pessimistic vision of the possibility of progress, more akin to a conservative religious view of humanity's baseness/fallenness/'at a loss'-ness. One way the decolonial philosophers reassert a positive and progressive worldview, or some kind of redemption from the prison of coloniality, is through the promise of undoing coloniality through decolonial thought. If our essential natures as humans globally are overwhelmingly shaped by western contexts and ideas mostly of recent provenance (last 500 years), then these can be undone by contesting and challenging these ideas.

Many critiques have been launched against these ideas, particularly the misguided focus on Descartes as the epistemological key to western thought. Here I want to note that the whole theory is beset by unresolved questions resulting from the uneasy merging of conservative and progressive ideals. Simplified from the often high-flowing rhetoric of the theorists, this contradiction is evident in the progressive vision of decolonial theory: that human redemption lies in (contradictorily) undoing the epistemic legacy of the last 500 years. Two questions emerge: about the desirability and the possibility of such an undoing.

First to possibility: I do not think the particular version of coloniality in decolonial theory, nor its proposed philosophical remedies are in the last instance plausible, not least because they exaggerate the influence of philosophers in changing the masses. It is simply not possible to undo the epistemic legacy of such a long period of history, no matter how many thought reforms one engages in. Moreover there is something more permanent in our nature that is older than 500 years. If one abandons a sort of modernist/recency bias, it is evident that large parts of our nature (perhaps more?) have been shaped by not only human-created ideologies pre-1500, but also (still poorly understood) pre-linguistic patterns of behavior as a species in interaction with our early environments. These influences shaped the very structure of our brain and body. Many of our most essential contradictions of conscious existence as humans are grounded in these dynamics which it is not possibly to disavow at the level of concept or epistemology.

To desirability: We ought to preserve the essential pessimism and sense of tragedy inherent in coloniality's critical analysis, which contains a form of wisdom linked to the older idea of "original sin", regardless if we accept the underlying history or cosmology behind that older idea. I cannot help but note that our understanding of human behavior patterns in the above areas have been advanced due to the influence of science; it is not desirable to,undo the western contribution to what is now an epistemic legacy of every human society. Human civilization cannot really afford to part with the material and technical tools of western science and the insights they have garnered into the self and the species. To imagine one can do so is the naive and dangerous side of a romanticism, the "anti-progress" dogma opposed to the dogmas of universalism and progress. There is more than a little elitism in the idea. Knowledge of self for the philosopher requires one to maintain an aloofness from either extreme. We do not need a rather neologistic terminological invention, coloniality, to remain aloof from the baseness and status games of western academia. I think the ideas of "original sin" or "creaturely fallenness" or just some basic recognition of human fallibility, baseness, and selfishness are all more vital concepts for philosophy and social change, than coloniality.

Film Review: "Origin" by Ava Duvernay

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:45:00 +0000

I watched Ava Duvernay's "Origin" on a plane. My thoughts would no doubt be better having read the source material book for the movie, but here is my take.

This is a movie in search of a central theme. Its ambition is to tell three intertwined stories, two of them historical and one contemporary. However the two historical stories are very undertold; the main focus is author Isabel Wilkerson's journey to write the bestselling book Caste. It is definitely an unconventional choice to tell a story about the making of the book; I love that Duvernay chose to tell Wilkerson's story. But the short shrift to the other stories is unfortunate since it means that earlier attempts to theorize caste in a US South context are not substantially addressed; though Allison and Elizabeth Davis are portrayed, their intellectual contributions to theorizing caste are not incorporated into the theoretical framework of the film.

The movie is beautifully shot by Duvernay, the lead actor playing Wilkerson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor brings emotional depth to her role as a writer dealing with the loss of her closest loved ones and embarking on a global exploration of oppression. In spite of the meandering of the narrative, the movie tells an effective story that holds viewers' attention throughout. As a meditation on loss, it is moving in its way. As a film about race and caste, it is deeply flawed in its historical presentation, its comparative framework, and the relentless didacticism of its mistaken conclusions.

The film's main issue seems to be the source material's main issue: it asserts that US Jim Crow racism, the Nazi Holocaust, and caste in India are "all connected" because they are all "caste." However, these connections are not really properly theorized, nor are the significance of these connections to practical action raised except in some general love for each other we all ought to have. nstead, caste is a poetic metaphor for the writer to affirm a radical Enlightenment view of human equality. In place of materialist theorization we are told that caste is omnipresent but invisible, which raises the question of how Wilkerson knows what is and is not caste.

There are attempts to theorize race and caste, but they are very muddled. Caste is defined in an amorphous way, as the phenomenon of placing one group above another in a hierarchy. This doesn't do adequate justice to the distinction within 'caste' between occupational castes (which do not necessarily imply hierarchy) and the spiritual hierarchy of the 'varna' system in India, from which the whole notion of untouchability flows.

Moreover, race seems quite adequate to understanding social hierarchy and social ranking in the US, but Wilkerson's character continually disagrees with her interlocutors who assert this. At one point, a character responds to Wilkerson's presentation of her comparative research, "It's all racism." To which Wilkerson's character responds, "No, it is caste...Why is the same thing happening in India, they're all brown? How is is racist if they're all the same race?" The movie attempts to drive this point home by arguing that in Germany both oppressor and oppressed were of the same race, therefore racism can't explain it.

This is a very contradictory even silly thing to assert if one has read the scholarship on the Holocaust or social dynamics in India. The reality is that both race and caste are categories of practice that have been wrenched into serving as categories of academic analysis, and are thus equally problematic for doing global comparisons.

Wilkerson's assertion on the centrality of caste seems arbitrary. The movie then misses the opportunity to tell viewers why 'caste' is a more explanatory comparative term; we are expected to trust Wilkerson, without being given compelling reasons to adopt the new term. There is an attempt to do this--a discussion of various comparative pillars--on which more shortly.

The film asserts that "the Nazi blueprint for the extermination of millions of people was directly patterned after America's segregation and enslavement of black people", that "America taught the Nazis", and that although the outcomes were different, the function of caste in America and Germany is the same. There is some evidence that Nazis studied US racial dynamics and laws, but the assertion that they needed a pattern to borrow from the US to exterminate the Jews is an exaggeration in the service of the film's American exceptionalism (of the negative kind).

Wilkerson's character then goes to India, where she meets real life Dalit intellectual Suraj Yengde, playing himself. This part bore out the US-centrism of the movie, since Yengde's prominence as an intellectual is almost wholly related to his proximity to US higher education institutions. There is some exploration of the life of the Dalit intellectual and activisit B.R. Ambedkar which is very interesting and welcome. However, the movie misses an obvious contradiction of caste-as-universal-framework in discussing Ambedkar's education: he went to school with upper-caste children in a way that would have never occurred in the Jim Crow South.

Duvernay has Wilkerson's character explore several pillars of comparison, but these pillars reveal the dissimilarity of Jim Crow segregation, Nazi Germany, and caste in India. The first pillar, asserts Wilkerson's character, is control over marriage and mating in the form of endogamy. To me this is a bizarre way to begin. Notwithstanding prohibitions on intermarriage, none of these systems originate primarily to control marriage and mating strategies. Moreover endogamy as an informal institution is fairly widespread in all human communities; not all endogamy is casteist. Finally, while endogamy might apply to Jim Crow segregation, it certainly does not apply to US slavery, which can only be characterized as an institution for protecting endogamy if one ignores the history of the sexual dalliances of the master class with their slaves.

The second pillar is terror, but again one is hard-pressed to understand why race isn't just as applicable a term here, given the centrality of violence to racial hierarchy. The third pillar is purity and pollution. However, this is contradictory because endogamy as a strategy is often based in purity and pollution, making pillar one essentially a sub-pillar of pillar three.

Wilkerson's character asserts that the connective tissue making all three situations (US, Germany, India) caste is 'deference', which again seems to ignore the central role deference plays in racial and class schema.

Indeed, the movie has almost nothing to say about class, which was a central theme in the work of earlier African American scholars who used caste as a category of analysis, like the aforementioned Davis and Oliver C. Cox. Wilkerson is presented regularly hobnobbing with elites who praise her intellect and encourage her to continue writing.

In conclusion, though the aesthetics and emotional tone of the movie are impressive, its substance is not. The concept of caste is rendered definitionally incoherent by its use to connect the three cases. We don't really learn anything about the actual history of US, Germany, and India. Complexity is sacrificed to the simplicity of a single explanatory variable to create an emotionally satisfying framework. And Wilkerson is presented as creating a comparative theory of caste whole-cloth, with short shrift given to previous scholars who tested (and often rejected!) the comparison Wilkerson builds her book around.

Would a return to "indigenous religions" be a progressive move within US society?

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 17:57:00 +0000

There are a number of people in the US who, discontented with their childhood religious indoctrination as well as the seeming soulless and anti-human character of our technocratic society, imagine if we only could remove Christianity conditioning of our consciousness, we could get back to some primordial pro-human reality in which indigenous spiritual tradition would provide a basis for new human flourishing, removing things like shame, guilt, and other “foreign” ideas.

Notably, a methodology for this recovery is rarely proposed or specified, so it typically takes a very idiosyncratic form and is often draped in a naive nostalgia, uninformed by history.

A scientific way to study the viability of such assertions would be to look at a contemporary society where rejection of Christianity and Islam in favor of some other religion are actually in ascendancy today and study the practical significance of such views.

India is an ideal case study: the current government’s legitimacy rests on an assertive Hinduism, which is contrasted with foreign ideologies of Christianity and Islam. Elements within government and civil society assert that these foreign ideologies have had Indians in a mental chokehold for millennia and that only a return to a primordial idea of religious coexistence under Hinduism can revitalise society. Essentially the government is advocating a return to what Christians and Muslims would understand as neo-paganism, only this time with modern characteristics.

I really wish more critics of Christianity in the west, especially those in the wellness industry, would pay much closer attention to the practical consequences of the realization of the idea they cherish in Indian society. If they did, I think they would see there that an assertive and victorious non-monotheism has produced as dangerous a fundamentalist reaction as any monotheistic faith, complete with lynching, widespread religious persecution of minorities, and a thorough-going purity culture as virulent as anything produced in Christianity and Islam. One cannot really avoid the conclusion that the assertion and attempted implementation of Hinduism as the indigenous tradition of India has resulted in many of the worst dynamics present in Christian fundamentalism, and even the resurgence of several anti-human dynamics that Christianity as a belief system had attempted to eliminate or reform.

Unfortunately global dynamics militate against westerners developing a more critical understanding. The dynamic of muscular Hinduism in Indian society is obscured by the rebranding of Hinduism in the US as a tolerant New Age belief system, flattering the sensibilities of the many post-Christians and other lost souls who migrate to the wellness industry in search of meaning. Our New Age wellness advisors have fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. But they are not the only ones misled. Put in terms familiar to decolonial scholars, modern Hinduism exemplifies the "coloniality of power", but absent any of the ideological geneaologies decolonial scholars impute to coloniality's origins. A similar geneaology of power's coloniality could be revealed in many to most non-western religions, suggesting in turn that decolonial scholars have fundamentally misread the historical situation, and that coloniality is not a historically specific situation but a perennial human dynamic inherent to our attempts to build social groups and create collective meaning. It might also be said to be an artifact of the development of consciousness in our species, inherent in our evolutionary descent from our nearest non-human ancestors. This is something our decolonial scholars could profitably examine, if they were able to break from the romantic mental shackles imposed by the idea of 1492 and Descartes "cogito ergo sum" as epistemological ruptures producing the ideology of coloniality.

My personal belief is that most such projects of ideological “return”, not only Hinduism, are doomed to produce these types of dystopian outcomes. I believe the way is not to return to a past that only exists as an imaginary construct, but to look boldly forward and define the customs and values worth preserving from our various traditions and try to live by them. Tolerance will play a huge role here. However I will die on the hill that there is nothing inherently tolerant or utopian about pre-monotheistic traditions; their appeal to ex-Christians in the west says more about the psycho-dynamics of romanticism in our secular US society than it does about the practical consequences of reanimating the ethics of those belief systems. I think the decolonial turn is the academic version of these psycho-dynamics. We need a much more sophisticated approach.

Review of Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 04:00:00 +0000

Azad Essa has written a book critical for understanding recent right wing developments in India and Israel. Essa's book draws on, and is enriched by, reporting on the ground from multiple contexts, going back over the last decade. Hostile Homelands reviews nearly nine decades of history that begins with both countries under British rule and ends with the ascendance of right wing, religiously conservative, and xenophobic political parties to governance in both countries. Along the way Essa provides necessary historical context on the evolution of India-Israel relations: the way Indian leadership resolved its statements on Palestine with increasing interest in diplomatic rapprochement with Israel, how New Delhi used the war on terror as justification for labeling all internal dissenters to its militarizing policy in Kashmir as terrorists, how the election of Modi emboldened the Indian right wing, and how Modi's administration has extended its influence into diaspora. Essa explores the evolution of Hindutva, and its tangle of organizations as well as their diaspora arms, thus linking the issue of Israeli and India relations to their increasing influence on U.S. 'soft power'.

The book's ambition is to weave together a comparative narrative of accelerating relations with a particular emphasis on military and weapon sales between the two nations, alongside chapters exploring Hindutva and Zionism as ideologies of exclusionary ethnic nationalism. The stakes of the ambition to compare state relations and ideology shines through very clearly in a chapter on Kashmir, which compares its struggle not only to Palestine, but also to the Chinese state crackdown in Xinjiang on the Uighur population, as well as Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. The war on terror had the negative effect of causing the misrepresentation of nationalist demands made by Muslims as a form of Islamic extremism.

At a moment when Biden is under heavy pressure from younger Democratic leaning voters to change U.S. policy towards Israel, particularly the disproportionate amount of military aid given towards its war in Gaza, Essa shows the historical background of Israeli and Indian militarization. These questions are particularly acute in both democracies, reflecting the fragility of the democratic idea of consensus in an international order still ruled by the de facto law of power and force.

Both India and the US will hold elections this year, and if Israel held elections, it is likely Netanyahu's government would fall, a not inconsiderable factor in the conduct of the war. The possibility of a second Trump term looms, as both India and Israel have been increasingly emboldened to conduct war near and far--Israel through an illegal bombing campaign, and India through targeted assassination of an Indian citizen in Canada. India has become the most populous nation in the world (In this way, Israel is very dissimilar to India), recently sent an expedition to the moon, and recently recorded fantastic levels of economic growth. It has nuclear weapons (as does Israel). Its government increasingly understands itself as a global superpower.

Another fascinating dimensions of the book is the way it portrays the 'roads not taken' in international statehood. On the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, India opposed the partition of the region between Arab and Jewish national interests and advocated a federal solution. Assuming for a moment that this road had been taken in the 1940s, would the resulting state still be anxiously dominated by a right wing Jewish voting bloc? Could there have been an alliance between progressive parties in both camps that could have aided the integration of newcomers without leading to violent displacement?

I will leave it to those more familiar with Indian politics than I to comment on the practical questions raised by the book on that topic. For me, the book raised the crucial issue of what a federal solution means currently to the issue in Palestine and Israel. This is an urgent issue for global stability, security, and peace, as well as being relevant first to the Palestinians (who have never had a state inclusive of them in their modern history) as well as to the existential identity of the Israeli state.

Why read Zanzibar Was A Country?

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 18:49:00 +0000

Why should you as an English language reader from the United States (as a large portion of my friend circle is) choose to read a long(-ish) non-fiction book about two small islands off the coast of East Africa?

In truth, this book was written primarily for Zanzibaris, wherever they may find themselves. In particular, it is for a diasporic Zanzibari community--East African-born Swahili-speakers in Oman, with whom I did oral histories during a Fulbright fellowship in 2012-2013.

Second, the book is written for East African Muslims more generally. My hope is it might assist them in thinking about their historic relations with Indian Ocean states, religious and cultural pluralism, and comparative approaches to integration and dialogue within the civic arenas of those countries.

Third, historians may be interested in the book as a new historical synthesis of modern Zanzibar history, written emphasizing the interdependence of material and ideological factors and focusing specifically on the transnational, diasporic, and extraterritorial dimensions of Zanzibar nationality.

So what about the average reader then? Well, in essence, my approach has been to weave real life stories of escape, covert travel, border crossings, detainment, and dilemmas of separation, into the narrative. These stories are extremely compelling in their own right, though I have had to anonymize a number of them. I treat the subjective dimensions of experience of my interviewees as evidence for several interwoven theses about historical change in the littoral societies of the western Indian Ocean:

1. There was a notable economic divergence between East Africa and the Gulf between 1950 and 1970 which drastically shifted patterns of migration between the two regions.

2. The migrations out of Zanzibar after the 1964 revolution are connected to this divergence and reflect its growing practical effects: the movement of littoral communities, especially those of Arab descent, to the Gulf.

3. Zanzibar nationalism has had an extraterritorial dimension in the modern era, which is also connected to the deeper history of Oman in East Africa.

https://www.ucpress.edu/.../978052.../zanzibar-was-a-country

Zanzibar Was a Country (UC Press, 2024)

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 07:04:00 +0000

My book comes out with University of California Press April 9, 2024.

"Zanzibar Was a Country explores the transregional impact of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 through the historical memory of its exiles. Thousands of former citizens of Zanzibar and their offspring live in Oman and are a significant contemporary example of an Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in diaspora. These “Zanzibaris” (as they are often known in Oman) speak Swahili, sustain community originally formed in Africa, and continue to remember Zanzibar’s history as an independent country. Drawing on their life histories, their historiography of Zanzibar, and the archival traces of their migrations, Nathaniel Mathews demonstrates how these exiles were important to nation‑building and economic development in Oman."

On modern tactics of popular protest since the 1960s

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 16:42:00 +0000

Andre 3000 had it right, "The game changes everyday so obsolete is the fist and marches. Speeches only reaches those who already know about it..."

Popular protest tactics in the US are still stuck in a 1960s hangover and suffering from a deficit of Alinsky-style strategic tactical thinking. Despite the diminishing returns of street actions in terms of real political gains, there is resistance to investigating the effectiveness of actions like blocking traffic, chanting slogans, pulling down statues, carrying signs, etc and instead pivoting to "well, at least we're doing something!" In part this is symptomatic of a broader multi-generational shift in the US, a wholesale erosion of civic institutions and the growth of hyper-individualism. There are fewer and fewer places where new tactics and strategies of civil disobedience might be born out of everyday community reflection. Instead protest has become something primarily confessional in nature, something one does to make oneself feel less complicit in injustice as an individual.

The question is what to do in this dismal interregnum and my answer would be to take the long view and try to preserve and renew existing bulwarks of community while building new spaces for people of different generations and backgrounds to come together in real life.

short note on the 'coloniality of power' thesis

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 14:52:00 +0000

The scholar Anibal Quijano defined "coloniality of power" as a new way of organizing reality produced by European colonial expansion from the late 1400s.

I understand the impulse behind it, it is a potent metaphor, and it does offer a few useful insights, but I differ from the decolonial theorists in that I do not consider 'coloniality of power' to have much coherence as a concept, much less to be the sin qua non of 'modernity'. The way it is phrased and used, it is as if violent coercion was invented in 1492, as if before that time, humans were acting and being in ways that eschewed civilizing projects, violent conquest, and permanent antagonism. You have to ignore large swaths of earlier history in order to sustain this idealistic view. Moreover it would seem to also commit one to the view that this mode of power has not fundamentally changed since that time, and that we are still living in it. I find that view a-historical.

In the end, I find the idea of coloniality of power extremely Eurocentric, as if somehow Europe invented a new way to be powerful in the colonial Americas that was distinct from the absolute mess humans had been making of that endeavor since the dawn of complex societies.

the diminishing returns of liberal anti-racism

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 03:47:00 +0000

The concept of anti-racism has a much more limited utility than might be suggested by the place it holds today in US liberal discourse. These days it has become something of a moral status game for elites and a lucrative capital accumulation lane for some. I have become increasingly convinced of the inefficacy of many-to-most current approaches.

One of the major contradictions of anti-racism pedagogy is that on the one hand it is posited that x individual is racist by virtue of their membership in a “dominant” group that “actively benefits” from racism, and on the other hand, the trainings often make asks of that same person to bear the burden of “actively dismantling” the system. If we step back we can see that not only is the term “dismantle” being used in a vague metaphorical manner, but there is a huge contradiction therein: people who actually are oppressors do not dismantle things they actively benefit from. Asking an individual to dismantle that which the group benefits from is thus an impossible (not to mention impossibly vague) “ask”, unless specific policies and laws are actually at stake. Not only that but no “dominated” group ever got free trying to convince the “sympathetic” oppressors to voluntarily dismantle oppression by changing themselves or altering the language they use. The civil rights movement was primarily about enforcing laws in a rights-based society, not moral suasion. Frederick Douglass had it right: Power concedes nothing without a demand.

Anti-racism is effective in a limited set of circumstances: when it can hold a mirror to an individual to show how the “active benefit” they imagine they receive from racism is really an illusion, how it has damaged them spiritually, and how it is in their own self interest to change. Beyond that it is not really worth it (for trainers or participants) to engage in long secular struggle sessions with people to get them to admit their “hidden” racism, or to “perfect” the language they use to discuss these things. Most of that energy ought to be placed into 1) enforcing and protecting the civil rights laws made since the 1950s (which have been and are being eroded by right wing power within the judicial system) and 2) building real economic and political power within groups whose primary obstacle to success remains lack of power.

Miscellaneous thoughts on history, objectivity, activism, and useable pasts

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 16:44:00 +0000

I thought I'd offer a few thoughts about history and the historical profession from the vantage point of my own (limited) experience. Maybe it will be beneficial in clarifying what is at stake in the current US debates about "presentism" in history.

Coming from a grassroots activist before I entered a History Ph.D. program, I have been steeped in leftist and activist versions of history as "useable past". The relevant political question was always, "what is to be done?"

Gradually as I went through graduate school, I became interested in holding that question in abeyance, so as to ask another question: "what happened/what is happening?" Doing so meant 'unlearning' or complicating some common activist shibboleths.

I came to appreciate the notion of objectivity as incredibly relevant, urgent and necessary to this work. I came to the gradual conviction that characterizations of objectivity as an outdated idea in service to the status quo, err mightily and consequentially. In fact, I concluded the opposite: that embrace of objectivity's irrelevance leads to the gradual hollowing out of an ability to say much of anything of substance. I came to this conviction through a period of soul-searching and encounter with post-modernism, which at the time I was in graduate school, was being treated by many graduate students in diverse disciplines as a kind of academic activism, the path to liberation from the tyranny of reason.

In short, I have become more and more convinced of the value of objectivity, problematic as it may be, for appreciating the strangeness of the past. We are still in the infancy of a comprehensive understanding the evolution and development of ourselves as a human species and civilization; enormous realms of human activity in the past, stretching over hundreds of thousands of years, continue to remain opaque to us in the present. History's relevance goes well beyond present political concerns.

Now what I've observed of the discipline is that a significant number of my senior colleagues came through opposite routes, privileging methodological mastery and academic professionalism all along. For them, I gather, politicizing history and questioning objectivity can feel like a fresh and necessary break from what may have become a stale 'academic' pursuit. The idea that the study of history can and ought to reflect presentist concerns, is liberating for them. While I respect the efforts of colleagues to combat the hide-bound conservatism of the academy, and remain fully committed to the idea of reading history to inform one's activism, I am starting to embrace the reality that my unique past experiences have led me to very different conclusions about the relationship between the academy and activism.

For one, from what I can see, a good deal of those I've observed pushing this direction, are taking their cues from a professional class of media-anointed activists and personalities, rather than the 'grassroots' as such. In my opinion, well-meaning efforts to push the historical discipline to embrace as axiomatic a form of "usable past" activism, has and will continue to contribute to undermining the broader societal relevance of historical thought, rather than contributing to its revival. There are more than a few people I've met over the years under the impression that by criticizing more conservative interpreters in the discipline they are combatting actual Nazis. This lack of perspective is a direct consequence of the lack of contact they have with the grassroots they claim to be producing a usable past for.

Useable pasts are necessary (and unavoidable in politics), but in my opinion historians ought to beware of making their production central to the discipline. In doing so, they undermine the very thing that makes the discipline unique. For me, at this juncture, a historical study conducted with methodological rigor and a commitment to objectivity, is something thousands of times more valuable, enduring, and interesting to read, than a study written to resonate with contemporary orthodoxies, often by those who fatuously claim to have transcended or outgrown the notion of objectivity.

And this brings me to my last notion. A certain dynamic ideological tension is necessary and good for the discipline and for the academy at large. I prefer to inhabit a university where the ideological landscape actually reflects the full and splendid ideological anarchy of the grassroots, not an ideologically purified sanctum. I have no truck for scholars who are serial abusers and do actual material harm. But the problem with mid-career historians embracing activism to go with the times, is that most of that energy is (naturally) turned inward, on others in the discipline who express IDEAS or OPINIONS deemed problematic or even harmful. These sort of efforts alienate me, as I find them highly myopic and often cloyingly self-righteous. In short, while I remain on the left, I find the push towards liberal ideological conformity within the discipline (reflected in the belief that bad ideas are equivalent to harm) incredibly dull and reflective of the alienation of historians from the grassroots. Some of my most interesting presentations have been to an audience of people who sharpened my thinking through vigorous disagreement. This sort of low-level 'conflict' sharpens faculties, increases acuity, and improves my thinking. In my experience, academic aversion to this sort of conflict is also reflective of kind of an alienation from the necessary life experience of encountering frank unvarnished disagreement. I'm grateful for my time as a grassroots activist because of what it taught me about the importance of this kind of contained conflict for a healthy civic life. It is my conviction that such disagreement is normal and necessary to human flourishing, and that it helps, not hurts, the 'left' and the project of studying the past from a 'left' perspective. Demands that historians apologize for the expression of ideas, and the apology for "offensive" ideas, are both symptoms of a more general malaise of bourgeois alienation from the grassroots.

secular forms of Christian perfectionism within academia

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Fri, 13 May 2022 21:14:00 +0000

I can vividly remember in the cult I was raised in, moments where we were made to listen to Christian apologetics--'proving' the inerrancy of the gospel, 'proving' how evolution wasn't real, or how Christian courtship was the only way to have a happy marriage. The function of these sessions, no matter how much it was asserted that this was so, was not to genuinely explore evidence to arrive at an unbiased conclusion, nor to encourage a genuine diversity of thought, but to find the pathway through to the predetermined 'correct' idea. In this way, otherwise outlandish and illogical ideas were able to appear to well-intentioned and perfectly intelligent rational people as having a strong patina of plausibility. When the factor of subtle communal pressure was added to this, it meant that anyone who wanted to remain in community would not challenge the orthodoxy. This meant that what was really at stake epistemologically and methodologically was obscured by gnosticism, in which God's will on earth was presumed instantiated by the group's leaders. To ask uncomfortable questions about groupthink was the same as questioning God's will.

There are massive differences between a small cult and the secular academy, but some of the more extreme progressive academic discourse resembles nothing so much as the gnostic theology of a cult. Like a cult, the goal is not independent thought but to find the way to the 'correct' idea, stated in the 'correct' language, that broadcasts that you belong to the 'right' people. There is not an independent method to arrive at truth, because truth is (like it was in the cult) purely a function of where you stand in relation to who is in power.

Now there is nothing wrong with forming a group around certain ideas; every group's foundations are to some extent a matter of social conformity rather than independent moral reasoning. But this tendency in academia concerns me because of the gap between what these groups imagine the stakes of their ideas are, and the actual state of the university within US society today. They remind me of warriors who have lost the map of the terrain of battle, and have become deluded that their real and ultimate enemies are within their academic disciplines. As neo-liberalism and austerity carve our vocation as humanities scholars into bits, and as the right ramps up the culture wars against the university, some of them imagine that it would be a good thing for certain departments or disciplines to be destroyed in the name of progress towards a 'revolution' deemed to be held back only by a cabal of 'status quo' scholars who lack sufficient faith in this alleged progress.

The end result of this secular form of Christian perfectionism seems nearly the same on the left as the conservative Christian cult I grew up in: a proportionally tiny group who imagine that the walls of the academy are the world itself, and that they are at the center of the site of a tremendous battle purifying the evils on the way to remaking the world. Like the cult I grew up in, this type of thinking appeals to the alienated and disaffected among the intellectuals because it is full of hubris that is made to appear morally justified. But this tendency is limiting. Such groups are inherently weak, easily divided by ideological infighting over small issues and thus easily picked off and overwhelmed by ideological opponents who really understand power. Not understanding power except in theoretical terms, this academic 'super-left' (to borrow Ali Mazrui's phrase) remain on the margins of it, and this place itself comes to seem like a form of exceptional virtue, as well as a form of evidence that there is a conspiracy against the truth they possess.

The cave at Hira and the importance of place to mystical experience

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 14:56:00 +0000

I've long been fascinated by the earliest "revelation" received by Muhammad, which he interpreted as being from the angel Gabriel. I believe Muhammad's experience in the cave with the Angel Gabriel was real. While I accept that Muhammad is the only valid source for what happened to himself, I am also convinced that the orthodox interpretation of the experience is only one of a range of possible interpretations one could have given to it. For instance, if Buddha Gautama was in that cave, I do not think he would have spoken of the Angel Gabriel, for the Angel Gabriel would have been culturally alien to his worldview. 

When I step back from Muhammad's interpretation and think about the sacred space of Hira, the impression I'm left with is the fundamental importance of that cave as a 'gate' to another reality, where there is always the potential for humans to have an experience of, an experience that lies beyond the sensory world of common sense experience. All revelation and mystical experience in human history, if it is not the specious invention of a complete charlatan (a possibility!), is made possible by the intersection between these spaces and the personalities of certain sensitive individuals. 

In studying the life of Muhammad, I've come to understand that it is only natural for one who has such an experience to interpret it through the lens of their own linguistic and cultural frame of reference.  And I also hold out that it is always possible for the one experiencing this to misinterpret its meaning, since even the greatest of humanity are potentially unreliable guides to an experience that by design overwhelms one's senses and sense of normalcy. These interpretations in language are almost always a partial understanding of phenomena that remain fundamentally mysterious. But I am convinced there are other places on this earth very similar to Hira cave. This is actually one reason I can think of why the recovery of indigenous epistemologies is very important work, not only politically, but spiritually.

Lamya al-Mugheiry and the global worlds of the Swahili

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 16:04:00 +0000

One of the fascinating minutiae of the global Swahili-speaking Omani diaspora is the late great Lamya al-Mugheiry. Born in Mombasa, Kenya and raised in Oman, Cairo and the UK, according to Wikipedia, she ran away from home at age 16 to pursue a musical career in New York city. A brilliant vocalist with a five octave range able to hit the 'whistle register', she sang vocals on Duran Duran's "Come Undone" during their Unplugged tour, worked with Soul II Soul, and released a highly underrated solo album, "Lamya". She passed away suddenly of a heart attack in Oman in her mid-forties [thanks to Sa'ad for the correction]. Someone ought to write her posthumous musical biography. Because otherwise I'm gonna do it, once this first book is done.

Between CRT & me

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 14:10:00 +0000

If I may, I'd like to share some brief reflections on the endurance of racism in US society, and the absolute need to teach critical histories of that racism, from the perspective of a white male American, born in the midwest, who now teaches history in an Africana Studies department. Perhaps these limited reflections will offer some insight into parents who wish to understand the meaning of the calls to "ban" the teaching of critical race theory.

I was raised in an evangelical Christian cult. Through the good graces of some earthly mentors, I was delivered from the stultifying anti-intellectual foolishness of that group, through an opportunity to work for Habitat for Humanity in Farrell-Sherard, MS, two small towns near the levee in Coahoma County, MS. What I learned about American racism there, forever changed the course of my life. The images I saw and experiences I had in Mississippi brought me to the ineluctable conclusion that racism was an inextricable part of US history and an enduring pattern in US society, and that I had to find a way to address the conditions that helped spawn it, to play my small part in a human drama of struggle against the immoral forces of racial domination and supremacy that pre-dated me by centuries. 

I thought these grandiose thoughts with all the moral passion of the eighteen-years-young man I was. I made up my mind to apprentice myself to and learn from, as many elders from the black freedom movement as I could find. At the time, New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church gave me a new reference orientation on Christianity. I learned about grassroots organizing from my supervisor Dorothy Jenkin's many lessons, while meeting many elders from the Mississippi wing of the movement (such as my Delta Service Corps supervisor, Euvester Simpson). Among and through these elders, I met committed whites of an earlier generation who thought as I did.

But in spite of these noble "accomplices" like Bob Zellner, Heather Booth and others, it was hard to ignore one significant and depressing dynamic that dwarfed their important work: most of the earlier generations of US whites were laughably, criminally ignorant of black history and black 'forms of life' in a way unlike the knowledge blacks had of whites. A great many American whites, I observed as a young man, seemed to have difficulty openly and honestly communicating with blacks without layers of guilt, condescension, or contempt. They often mistook pity for blacks as compassion. Some were only capable of treating black people as individuals if blacks conformed to their rigid expectations.

These observations, born from my sociological scrutiny of the awkward habits of interracial socializing in the US, fired a passion in me, to try to develop forms of speaking and communicating across these gaps, and to help more of my US 'tribe' become conscious of how the ideologies of anti-black racism, in addition to their other human costs, have socially damaged some white Americans to a shocking degree.

This brings me to critical race theory. When I see US politicians today ranting and raving against CRT, I cannot help but think about where they grew up, who they grew up with. Many were socialized into all white communities and never developed the necessary tools to deal with the cultural pluralism of their own society. Many powerful leaders in US history have chosen to remain behind this 'veil', a studied posture of innocence about racism which often conceals a basic attitude of domination. Many of their much less powerful white constituents have become proud of this ignorance, wielding it as form of identity politics and taking refuge in anxious patriotism to shield themselves from dealing with the corrosive effects of US racism on their own psyche. When I think of the relevance of CRT, I think of efforts over the past two centuries to change this dynamic in the US. As I sit here over 20 years later, I think of Derrick Bell's words, "If I could get that message [what racism has done to US whites] across, you could carry me away."

We can debate the effectiveness of anti-racism initiatives, observe that it has been co-opted by liberals, and criticize those who use it as an entrepreneurial venture. Racial reductionism and 'racecraft' (belief in race as a hidden ontology) are indeed as rife as ever on both sides of the US divide. But critical race theory didn't 'cause' that divide, nor does critical race theory artificially keep open a wound that otherwise would have healed, as many of its critics imply. Rather the critics, along with a great many white Americans, would simply prefer to believe the wound doesn't exist anymore, or that it can be closed with well-intentioned gestures of friendship. A more thorough recipe for spiritual rot would be hard to find than this particular brand of "know-nothing-ism."

Webinar Presentation: Slavery and Anti-Black Racism in the Modern Indian Ocean

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 21:32:00 +0000

A short and very basic introduction to how slavery and racism interrelate in the making of the modern world, particularly the societies of the Indian Ocean. This webinar was originally given to a virtual audience of students at Christ University in Bangalore.

Arab-Islamic Slavery: A Problematic Term for A Complex Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 22:49:00 +0000

Here's a link to a short essay I wrote for Research Africa on the conceptual and historical problems with the term 'Arab-Islamic slavery'.

Teleologies of abolitionism in modern popular understandings of the history of Islam and Christianity

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 17:46:00 +0000

There are a lot of misleading teleologies in the modern appropriation of abolitionism by contemporary Muslim and Christian faith communities. In the eagerness to uncover an 'abolitionist' impulse in their religious past, one frequently observes scholarly and popular efforts to 'prove' that some Muslims or Christians abolished slavery before it became a global norm. There have also been many efforts to portray the founders of these religions themselves as abolitionists. This is complicated by the long history of warfare on the frontiers of Christian and Muslim states, which produced many slaves.

While I appreciate efforts to uncover these 'lost' histories, I also think it is helpful to define what 'abolitionism' is and what it is not, in the interest of greater clarity about the past. Most Christian and Muslim faith communities have historically had strong prohibitions on enslaving co-religionists. This attitude had long coexisted with a tolerance of enslavement as punishment for being captured in a battle or a war. Prohibiting the capture and sale of co-religionists is not functionally equivalent to an abolitionist viewpoint, although it may have helped in certain ways and at certain times, to stimulate abolitionism's more universalist vision. The prohibition against selling or enslaving co-religionists did not extend to those outside of the 'civilization' created by these universalist faiths, or to the idea of slavery, ownership by another, as being inherently immoral.

If prohibiting capture and sale of co-religionists was functionally equivalent to abolition, In fact the impulse to extend the name 'abolitionist' to anyone who tried to curtail or regulate the slave traffic of co-religionists, leads to logical and historical absurdities. Are we to regard Bathilde, wife of Clovis II, as an early abolitionist because she outlawed the traffic in Christian slaves in the Merovingian state? Is the Ethiopian emperor Gälawdéwos an abolitionist, for propagating an edict against the illegal slave trade in Christians in 1548? Were the slaveowning founders of the United States 'abolitionists' for banning the slave trade from Africa? I have similar doubts about labeling West African Muslim leaders from the 17th and 18th centuries who similarly tried to curtail the TRADE in CO-RELIGIONISTS, as abolitionists. I would distinguish between people who wanted to end the slave trade or who were outraged by its excesses, from the militant position of abolitionism. Perhaps this makes me a bit out of step with recent scholarly trends, which have tended to take a 'lumping' approach to the phenomenon of abolition, rather than the 'splitting' approach I favor.

I have argued in the Journal of Global Slavery that abolitionism is a modern discourse with origins in the brutal regime of trans-Atlantic slavery and can only with great difficulty and inconsistency be mapped onto the further past of most faith communities. There is a nonviolent wing exemplified by Quakers, the Great Awakening, and the anti-slavery efforts of people like Olaudah Equiano and Otto Cugboana, as well as an armed resistance wing exemplified by Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Sam Sharpe, the Haitian revolutionaries and the Bahian Muslim rebels. Abolitionism was not the natural working out of the 'inner logic' of the Abrahamic faiths, but a modern response to the contradictions in those discourses which had allowed slavery and the slave trade to continue to flourish. I think it is valuable to make these distinctions so we can gain a more sophisticated historical sense that, just as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged as a response to, and was influenced by the Holocaust, the modern human rights revolution of abolitionism was a response to the brutalities of forced migration of Africans across the modern Atlantic, and was first and foremost a diasporic phenomenon of the Americas. My JGS article.

Muslims, gender protection under the law, and Bostock v. Georgia

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 14:50:00 +0000

From the RFI brief in Bostock v. Georgia: "The purpose of the brief is to set forth orthodox Sunni Islam's position that sex is biologically determined upon conception, and that to interpret "sex" to mean gender identity would have applications that impinge on Muslims' religious rights." Some things that have been bugging me about this whole debate are 1) the meaning of 'biologically determined' to an 'orthodox Sunni Muslim' who does not believe in biological evolution, 2) the legal meaning of 'sin' under US civil rights law, and 3) the idea of a specific protection for 'religion', when there is no objective determination of what a religion is and religions frequently deems other religions as inherently sinful or misguided. Biology is a human science that today holds that all life on earth came into being through natural selection, aka without a creator. So when orthodox Sunni Muslims reference 'biological science' as an authority to interpret the meaning of sex and gender in the laws, it would seem that in order to avoid the charge of cherry picking, they would have to also believe in the authority of biological science to interpret the origins of human beings through evolution. If they don't, then this claim that gender protections impinge on a Muslim's right to believe in biology is nothing more than a private religious matter that religious claimants are seeking to impose on the public square with thinly veiled 'public reason' sentiments. By the logic of 'sin' presented in the brief, the fact that Muslims have to accomodate Catholics atheists, polytheists and other 'loathsome' beliefs in American life is given surprisingly short shrift. Surely the authors know of robust historical and contemporary debate among Muslims about whether or not it is even PERMISSIBLE to live outside of the sovereignty of a Muslim ruler. According to a number of orthodox Sunni Muslim authorities from the past and present, it is sinful to live in a non-Muslim state and Muslims have an obligation to emigrate. THAT contradiction in Muslim American life was once much greater than the sex/gender issue, and acknowledging that would seem to undermine their case that the 'sex/gender' issue is some kind of Muslim 'rubicon'. Finally, notice, that the Muslim Bar Association filed a separate amicus brief in this case, opposing the RFI brief. This represents to me the thorniest part of the case: how are secular courts supposed to offer accommodation for a 'religious' point of view, when it means adjudicating internal disagreements over non-creedal issues like this? It is an impossible task. In fact, 'religious' protection as a category is on even shakier conceptual grounds than sex/gender protection. There are two basic biological sexes (and a handful of intersex and gender identity expressions). With religions, no 'religious' group can totally agree with any other religious group as to what a 'religion' is and is not. In fact, many religions have beliefs that logically entail that another group's religious beliefs are 'sinful'; thus a protection of one religion's rights can entail 'sin' for another group. I'm not a lawyer. My main point is that I think this issue is blown waaay out of proportion by the average person's ignorance about intersex issues and the relationship between sex and gender. In that confusion, reactionary organizations like the RFI can position themselves as 'standing up' for Muslim rights by opposing protections for others. Recall how this case started: "Gerald Bostock, a gay man, began working for Clayton County, Georgia, as a child welfare services coordinator in 2003. During his ten-year career with Clayton County, Bostock received positive performance evaluations and numerous accolades. In 2013, Bostock began participating in a gay recreational softball league. Shortly thereafter, Bostock received criticism for his participation in the league and for his sexual orientation and identity generally. During a meeting in which Bostock’s supervisor was present, at least one individual openly made disparaging remarks about Bostock’s sexual orientation and his participation in the gay softball league. Around the same time, Clayton County informed Bostock that it would be conducting an internal audit of the program funds he managed. Shortly afterwards, Clayton County terminated Bostock allegedly for “conduct unbecoming of its employees.” (https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/17-1618) My own opinion, from reading about the case, is that in addition to the inconsistencies I listed above regarding justifications for specific religious exemptions from the 14th Amendment, Muslims in America who are filing briefs like this are actually arguing for the right of Bostock's employer to fire him, simply for being gay in public. In doing so, they are demonstrating a callous shortsightedness (probably also motivated by fear of losing control over their institutions), which will come back to haunt them.

Islam, Christianity and LGBT in the United States: What do we owe to each other?

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 17:08:00 +0000

This is a response to Mobeen Vaid's reflection from Feb. 19, 2020. The author of this piece is an excellent, incisive writer. I enjoy reading him, in spite of my substantive disagreements, because he makes me think. This piece is not the best example of his abilities. In fact, I think the piece shows that the author has some blind spots, some unexamined bigotry on the LGBT issue, as do many of your Muslim faves on this issue. To see why, and to see what I believe to be the shortcomings of his approach, it may help to imagine the post below being written by a Christian about Muslims. To understand the validity of this comparison, we need to erase the Eurocentric distinction of distinct "religious" and "non-religious" communities in modern society. This doesn't mean denying that certain groups think of themselves as religious groups, rather it means seeing that IT MATTERS how, and with what language, groups relate to each other in a plural society. Under US law, religious groups don't have a privileged right to an authentic identity that exceeds that of any other group. In the US, there isn't a meaningful legal distinction between the protection for religious identity, and the protection for sexual identity, although today a number of conservative Christian legal theorists are highly invested in making the distinction. However, both are legally protected by the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. A thought experiment I often perform when thinking through the subtleties of this issue, is to imagine if a Christian wrote about Islam, the way Vaid writes about LGBT. I can see a Christian 'apologizing' for centering their point of view unequivocally with the following, betraying their profound anxiety about losing followers: "There are increasingly Christians who are attracted to the abominable heresy that is Islam, who are still trying to live a life of fidelity to Jesus Christ, in spite of the increasing public tolerance for Islam's perversion of the gospel." or, an edited version of a sentiment expressed in Vaid's article, from a Christocentric perspective : "Today, Christian activists and politicians are free to support masjids being built in majority Christian neighborhoods, the legalization of polygamy, the practice of the sharia, restrictions on Christian religious freedom, and basically any other pro-Muslim program without receiving even mild push back or concern from anyone other than a few nominal corners online." We can recognize the 'right' of someone to express these opinions, about Muslims as well as gays and lesbians, even if we find them distasteful. But if it is important to critique the above sentiment as partial and based on low-information and a degree of hysteria, then it is equally important to challenge the sentiments expressed in the linked piece by Vaid. With study, we should be able to recognize that the Christian perspective I articulated above is Islamophobic, even if it is a valid generalization from the perspective of an authentically, orthodox Christianity. Similarly, LGBT-phobic Muslims are expressing a clearly recognizable form of bigotry, even if it is a valid generalization deeply rooted in Muslim religious orthodoxy. There are a number of shortcomings and contradictions in modern social progressivism, which Vaid is an eloquent critic. But these contradictions pale in comparison to the contradictions that would arise if orthodox Muslim and Christian views of human sexuality were implemented on a universal basis in US society today, or even ONLY within their respective communities. With its shortcomings, 'liberal progressivism' still provides a valuable safety valve for victims to escape from some of the more damaging views of sex and gender relations emanating from within religious communities.

Studying racism in pre-modern Muslim contexts

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Tue, 05 May 2020 18:45:00 +0000

Some thought provoking methodological reflections on my timeline recently, mostly critiques of Cemel Aydin's book, The Idea of the Muslim World. I was particularly taken with this argument: "Perhaps the better argument is that such ideas [the Muslim world] represent a rebirth of classical ideas, and are not simply some construct of colonial modernity, even if colonial modernity created the conditions in which they gained new salience."

For historians, who ideally are trained to see things in terms of dynamics and evolution, rather than origins, this idea makes intuitive sense. However, I've seen a lot of reluctance among Islamic studies scholars to apply this methodology to forms of social prejudice and governing distinctions with roots in the premodern Muslim past, that also clearly affect modern social life among Muslims. Indeed, in popular Muslim circles the exact opposite is usually claimed. A popular take from a few years ago attributed most all recent critical revisionist scholarship on the issue to 'Orientalism' and anti-Muslim Afrocentrism. I do not think such a position can be sustained. Put simply, my contention is that racism(s) in the Muslim tradition (like in the Christian or Jewish traditions) have an independent pre-modern history that was not erased by colonial modernity and thus continues to impact the present.

In a comment left below the article linked above, one cogent commentator, Sarah, asked: "Is what religiously matters to Muslims whether it was “American” racism, or whether there was discrimination at all? Are we discussing personal-level xenophobia, cultural ideas, the history of religious legal institutions, or the possibilities of religious primary sources?" In short, a lot of today's simplistic constructions of Muslim history around race are reflections of genuine contemporary hope and faith in Islam as an alternative to the systemically embedded racism of a morally exhausted post-civil rights US society. From this perspective it is understandable why scholars might be reluctant to talk about how modern forms of Muslim racism have much deeper roots than colonial modernity, fearing they will lend support to the rantings of racist western bigots. But in doing so, scholars leave themselves no way of meaningfully analyzing forms of racism originating from people thoroughly steeped in the Islamic tradition, well before the west became the west. When these are analyzed, it is rare to see commentary that goes beyond modern notions of generic anti-racism, in which race is merely a sinful aberration.

But the roots of racism within this 'special world-system' of Islam are complex, not merely the manifestation of human sin, or the universal tendency to favor one's tribal in-group. Remember that forms of racial difference have always co-existed ideologically with socially leveling ideas, sometimes within the same religious or political group. Belief systems with the ambition to universally reorder all humanity into a new community, can give birth to their own unique forms of systemic exclusion. While not unilinearly linked to color or complexion, Muslim forms of racism took shape in the historical patterns of acculturation, accumulation and dominion that accompanied the worldly success of Muslim empire. Scholars might profitably analyze the whole cluster of ideas in the Islamic tradition relating blood, culture, color and lineage, as ideas about race. We might then see more clearly how race, as an assemblage of ideas about physical and cultural traits, informed the creation of multiple cross-cutting social hierarchies of value in Muslim societies.

TL:DR , saying 'race and racial difference is a modern colonial construct' is about as conceptually useful as saying 'the Muslim world is a modern colonial construct'. That is not to deny that a particularly pernicious form of racial difference, birthed in the European colonial encounter, had a world-historical impact and continues to operate globally. Race was an indispensable tool of governance in the colonial Atlantic world. But the Americas are not the origin of the construction of racial difference, any more than they are the origins of capitalism. In each case one needs to carefully unpack the historical meanings encompassed within the modern discursive signs.

Zombie Faith and Our Global Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Nathaniel Mathews) — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 14:53:00 +0000

You hear a lot in religious studies about the 'return' of religion, how people, contrary to secular modernist predictions, didn't abandon faith, but returned to it, revived it. Of course, I agree, but many types of faith were revived, in many different religions. I've been studying some of these expressions, and I think we need to talk about one type of faith that has made a 'comeback' today in global religious communities of all kinds.

I put 'comeback' in scare quotes, because, in spite of its hyper-emphasis on fidelity to tradition, this isn't the same faith of the believer of old, in which a person's conviction made them into a better person with other people of all kinds, and gave them hope that the world in which they were oppressed was not the only world. This was faith as vital life force, faith as the 'substance of things hoped for'. This new faith is more like Gage, from Pet Semetary, a sort of undead changeling. It is zombie faith.

This new zombie faith is methodologically nationalist in orientation, characterized by ressentiment, filled with huffy irritation, envy and a sense of victimhood. Zombie faith is always petulantly demanding that one cannot claim they are a person of said faith unless x x and x characteristics are met. It is anxious about its own dissolution, and about what is perceives as its declining relevance. It muses violently at those who reject it. It snarls at information and critical evidence as 'harmful' to faith. It demarcates a strong line between a faithful self and a non-faithful other, and then sees knowledge emanating from the non-faithful as threatening. It identifies itself as the only and supreme epistemological foundation. It identifies itself completely with what public morality should be. Zombie believers sometimes debate about permissibility and the boundaries of faith in ways that personally have always terrified me, as if they were the admissions committee to the pearly gates themselves.

Zombie faith is extremely self-conscious about some of the more obviously bizarre 'unseen' things it is required to believe to maintain its faith, and will defend them as essential to faith. Yet this self-consciousness stems from the knowledge that it insists on the belief in unseen things foundationally, while rejecting out of hand naturalistic conclusions that have been the subject of decades of detailed study and evidence compilation. Like nationalism, this denial of the 'other' is not rational, but rooted in fear and anxiety. In its more reflective moments, zombie faith is uneasy about the many low information suppositions that make up its intellectual apparatus, while regarding things which methodological naturalism has high information answers for (biological evolution, for instance), as conspiracies to take one away from belief.

Zombie faith will try to make that information liability into a strength, by turning to post-modernist individualism, specifically the idea that no one has a right to challenge my fundamental conception of what I believe or what I use to arrive at that belief. ("You don't know me!") Another strategy used to cover the information deficit is to insist that people of zombie faith have a unique insight, a sixth sense, that others just don't have the ability to get, because they're blinded by scientism or arrogance. Zombie faith may also give itself the imprimatur of intellectual respectability by turning heavily to scholastic theology, preferring to have intellectual conversations with the dead, who they can exalt as an obviously superior type to the 'atheist' philosopher of today. In this way they can avoid having to confront the epistemic revolutions of the modern age. Zombie faith will tell itself that the reason people are critical of its faith is that they have insufficient grounding in these sources they use.

Today's zombie faith has absorbed some of the worst qualities of nationalism, and yet, like nationalism, it still offers an invaluable succor to the average person on the street. In the absence of the old faith, the people turn to zombie faith, as a sugar lover would turn to stevia, because it appears to offers a 'sweetness', a certitude and ethical orientation that ordinary modern life, with its runaway global political corruption, its hierarchies of extreme wealth and poverty, and its degradation and destruction of the earth, is unable to.

None of this should be read as an attack on the ethical dispositions of compassion and care which faith (yes, even zombie faith) can provide. Nor should it be read as a vindication of today's scientific consensus. The challenge for critical decolonial thinkers on the ground today, when engaging with religion, is to engage the psychological need many people have for this zombie style of faith, to cultivate a sense of wonder and mystery that draws on the old faiths, and to use the high-information contexts of empirical observation that come to us from detailed naturalistic study of the world to fuel the urgently needed and revolutionary changes required to address the current climate crisis, among other urgent issues in global civil society.