A discussion with Jocelyne Cesari, HDS T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding, on her recent publication, We God's People: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the World of Nations.
David F. Holland (HDS) and Ousmane Kane (HDS) will serve as respondents. This event will be hosted by Francis X. Clooney, S.J. (HDS).
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Author discussion, We God's People, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in the World of Nations. April 21st 2022.
FRANCIS CLOONEY: Good evening, everyone. I welcome you to the Center for the Study of World Religions for our book discussion tonight. Director of the Center, Charles Stang, is unable to be present tonight. So myself, Francis Clooney, former director of the Center, have the privilege and the honor of hosting tonight's event.
I could add as a historical note that for the past 10 plus years now, one of the favored events of the Center has been to have book events, where faculty at the university and the divinity school get a chance to talk about their new books, how they came to write the book, what's in the book, and then to hear from chosen discussants to who will tease out elements of the book. So it's always a welcome occasion for us to be able to gather together and talk about each other's work. In our still continuing COVID age of course, we're doing this as a Zoom webinar. But I'm very happy to say that over 100 people have registered for this event today. And so I think there is real enthusiasm around what we are about to undertake tonight. So welcome to everyone.
And I will begin by just pointing out first of all, that the session is indeed about the book by Professor Jocelyn Cesari, We God's People, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in the World of Nations, published by Cambridge University Press in this very year, 2022. Our format tonight will have the author, Professor Cesari. speak first about the book, how she came to write it, and then we will have three respondents. And now, I will introduce everyone who is going to be participating on the screen here.
So Professor Jocelyn Cesari. Holds the chair of religion and politics at the University of Birmingham in the UK. At Georgetown University, she is a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. Since 2018, she has been the TJ Dermot Dunphy visiting professor of religion, violence, and peace building at Harvard Divinity School.
Our respondents will be, first of all, Professor David Frank Holland who is the John A Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at the Divinity School and director of Graduate Studies and Religion at the university for the study of religion. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including sacred borders, continuing revelation in canonical restraint in early America, published by Oxford University Press. His recent projects include a comparative biography of Mary Baker Eddy and Ellen White and the study of the legacy of Perry Miller.
Our second respondent discussant will be Professor Usman Umar Khan who holds the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal chair on contemporary Islamic religion and society at Harvard Divinity School with a joint appointment in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the university. His recent books include Muslim Modernity and Post-colonial Nigeria, Beyond Timbuktu and intellectual History of the Muslim West Africa. And most recently, 2021, Islamic Scholarship in Africa, New Directions and Global Contexts.
And because the book has a section on Hinduism which is one of my specialties, I will also add my own comments. I am the Pakman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at HDS. And my most recent book is a study of a Tamil epic text in the Christian tradition called Timbavany, and the title of the book is St Joseph in South India.
So our procedure tonight will be to turn over to Professor Cesari. Holland, Khan, and myself. And the chat is not working for those of you listening in as members of our audience, but there is a Q&A function. And at any time during the discussion, you can post your questions, comments there. And after we have all spoken and Professor Cesari. Has responded briefly to our comments, I'll take up the rest of the remaining time by taking up some of the comments from the Q&A, not the chat but the Q&A. And we will finish at 6:30. So I think we have a lot to do and a wonderful opportunity tonight. So without further ado, I turn things over to Professor Cesari.
JOCELYN CESARI: Thank you very much. First, I would like to thank the Center for the Study of religion for offering this opportunity to discuss this brand new book and also a special thank you to you, colleagues and friends, Francis, David, and Usman to also agree to exchange with me on this particular publication.
Just a little background. The book project grew out of my previous work and ongoing work on the politicization of Islam. And what I have been studying in this particular context is a decisive role of the nation state in politicizing Islam. And more than politicizing, it actually engendering a new forms of Islamic identities and even behaviors as citizen of the new nation as the modern political community. And so this has been an ongoing debate because usually, political Islam is looked at through the lens of Islamic parties and I wanted to look in fact at the foundational moment of the secularization that happened across all Muslim majority countries at the end of the Ottoman Empire.
So having observed this for a long time, I wanted to see if the same process could be identified for other religious tradition and other national communities. So I turn to India to look at the role of Hinduism in the nation and the national political project, I also looked at Russia and orthodoxy and China. And as you know, all these countries are very much in the news because of the ongoing events not only in Ukraine by the rise of Islamophobia in India, right now, there are communal riots or aggressions going on in some parts of the country.
And also my two case studies about Islam Syria and Turkey, and again, they are pretty much also in the news, especially since the collapse of ideas and the attempt to build new civil society. And I will say a few words about that. So having said that, I would like to share a few slides with you to give you the premises on which the book is built.
So the first two assertions are about religion and nation. So religion mostly in the Western scholarship is look as a personal feature. And we tend to forget or to neglect that religion is actually the foundational community. And here, I am going back to the basics amid your time, labor. And if we are familiar with monotheism, it's quite obvious that the monotheism are the examples of revelation-based community. The message doesn't come for individuals or even additions of individual, it's about building a community. And that's what Durkheim said, that the first social institution giving cohesion to a group is religion.
And we have in the three or more decades more focused on the personal aspects of religion. And I wanted to go back to this element and show also that until the modern time, there is no division between religion and politics. What is relevant is sacred versus profane. And the sacred include all institutions, symbols, ritual, proscription that make the group exist. And indeed, there are political elements, it's not just prayers or personal religiosity.
And what I show in the book is that actually the centrality of religion as the core institution of community building and political community has been displaced in modern times by the rise of the nation. And here, again, I'm not looking at nationalism as ideologies because that's most of the time what is done. We oppose liberal civic ethnic form of nationalism, but we tend to take for granted that the nation is the political community. And it is not obvious.
And history shows that actually that it will take a long time across centuries to make people and religious group accept this idea of the nation as the modern political community because it's based on two principles that do not exist in any other communities combined, which is the equality of membership and the sovereignty of people. And right there, these two principles are actually at odds with most of the construction and existence of religious community. There is no equality of membership, and the sovereignty is not in the people.
So what make the nation challenging is that the people can say, we want to exist as an independent autonomous group that manage our own fate. And this will take time of course, the goal here is not to go through that. But these are the two major principles that build the argument of the book.
So there is a genealogy of the secular, which is also a genealogy of the religious versus political, and it appears at the end of the war religion. Here I am relying on the superb work of Charles Taylor that show that until the end of the war religion, secular means only a century. It's after the collapse of the Catholic Church as a major canopy encompassing also the political leadership, even if they are kings, they have an allegiance and are subordinated to the power of the Catholic Church.
And I opened the book with a quotation from a student at La Sorbonne in 1571. He says, "This was to say Jesus is a lieutenant-- sorry, the Pope is the Lieutenant of Jesus on Earth." Which would be very challenging for today modern Christians to accept as such. So that this trajectory of differentiation between what is secular and what is religious that also goes with what is religious and what is political.
And this foundational moment is really when the King say that his leadership takes over the leadership of the religious community in protecting the security of his subjects. And then it will become citizens. And it's also the moment that the King ensure that there will be acknowledgment of different religious communities, and it's his duty to protect them. So you see the equality of membership doesn't happen overnight with all rights to people given instantaneously.
This whole process of secularization that we have seen in the West has been a continuous separation, differentiation between these worldly and the other world and the continuous push for relegation of religion to personal faith and belief with no direct implication on society and politics. And it is ongoing. So that's why I don't use the term secularism, because secularism is actually the ideology that goes with a certain history of this continuous differentiation in the West.
I don't use post-secularity either because it tends to consider that there was a moment that was secular and then we are post-secular, while what I am showing in the book that the tension between here and over there of what is the responsibility of the religious community on here, the site of contestation is not so much the transcendent of the other world. The site of contestation is really the responsibility of the religious community on tasks, economy control, education, that used to be under the purview of the religious community.
And so this process happened in the West with different timing and different outcomes. And with the building of the international order-- and it's interesting that 1648 marks both the building of the Westphalian system, where the state becomes the only legitimate political actor on the international scene, the only one that can wage war. And until now, despite all the transformation of this system, it's still very much present. The state has sovereignty. Look at the incapacity of the current international organization to stop Putin.
So that's the situation here that will oblige all religious communities to revisit their societal project. That's what I call the displacement of the religious community on the political and societal axis. It means that religious communities, even if they do not want to capture the state, have for a long time and continue to have claims on regulating not social activities because this actually is possible even in secular realm, but to propose a project for the whole community, which is the political community.
And that's where the secular state puts a limit saying, this is not in the domain of religion. You take care of the faith and the soul of people. And that has been the trajectory of Christianity in Europe, and then to a certain extent but not as much actually in the West. And even though we can see that there are always tension and that the neat divide between secular religious, political religious is not given.
So what happened there is I apply this approach of competition, the lions clash between the political community identified through institution leaders, rules, ideology, but also religious communities, institution, authority, doctrine, symbols, and try to find out patterns when the redefinition of the religious community is a go hand-in-hand with the national community as the modern political community. What it means here is that the nation has the legitimacy to define first and foremost, the collective identity of people.
And you can read in the different nationalization of churches and religious tradition this adjustment of the communities to this particular context. It does not mean that everything becomes national, obviously, you have still the appeal of transnational community, Catholicism, Islam, and this is clearly happening also for other religious tradition. So what I wanted to show is once national communities are built and they will be built, it starts in the 19th century, you have all this movement of national independence, it expand outside the West to the global South, to Asia.
And each time this building of the national community, because you do not exist internationally if you do not present yourself as the nation state, will have consequences not only on the civic societal aspects of the religious community, but also on its theology. And that's what I tried to show in the book and why this change in institutions has also consequences and how they also change the meaning of some concepts that otherwise are still used. You talk about ummah today or jihad today, it has a vastly different meaning that it had under the Muslim empire.
So the point is not to say this is what it was and that's now and it's good or bad. The point is to say that what can we understand in this transformation that helps us explain how and when these community religious, political, will enter in contact or ignore each other or compete. And that is what I call the pattern of politicization of religion. I will stop here because I'm tempted to give you a few example on the different countries. But I may leave that for later if possible. Thank you very much.
FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you for a wonderful start for our conversation. Professor Holland, over to you.
DAVID FRANK HOLLAND: Thank you Professor Clooney and thank you Professor Cesari. I've had the great privilege of talking with Jocelyn about some of these ideas for some time now and participating in the wonderful courses that she offers at HDS where some of these ideas have been developed and shared and exchanged with students. And it's wonderful to read the book and see it come to fruition and to see the fulfillment of a lot of careful inquiry and exquisite writing as you captured these ideas. I'm grateful to have the chance to be able to talk about it for a moment tonight.
As someone who spent his formative academic years in history departments and historical communities of discourse, I can attest to a point that you make, Jocelyn, in the book. You know that social scientific approaches to the study of religion and religious communities connections to nationalism have been criticized for the relative lack of historical perspective. And what historians usually mean when they level a critique like that is that the social scientific categories of analysis too frequently seem to be locked into a kind of definitional stasis that does not account for change over time or complexity of process.
Even when room is made for periodization and the identification of particular epochs, those are often bounded to neatly. Their dividing lines maybe overly impermeable or stable. And in this book, Cesari certainly avoids that temptation, the social scientific temptation to overly impermeable boundaries of categorization. She demonstrates her resistance to that temptation in relation to the two categories around which the book coalesces namely the religious and the political.
Cesari writes, "There is no such thing as two separate political and religious actors but instead, continuous interactions between actors, ideas, and institutions to define what is religious and what is political." She continues, "The concept of post-secularity does not capture this never-ending process." You just heard Jocelyn speak about that in her opening comments.
So rather than think about stable transhistorical transcultural categories of comprehension, she thinks in terms of process. Process is a function of historical change, and process focuses us on contingency, complexity, and evolution. So the categories of the religious and the political whose definitional boundaries have long been contested are in fact, engaged in this sequence of encounters that goes on and on and on. And I think that's a particularly useful way to think about what she's capturing here.
The concept of processional definition prevents Cesari from imposing a historical structures on her interlocutors and allows for motion contingency, all of which is music to a historian's ears and one of the things that I appreciated most about the approach of the book. At the same time, the book provides quantitative analysis and comparative frameworks that push beyond what a mono disciplinary historical text would likely do with this material. The result is a book that defies easy categorization but generates, I think, tremendous insight at the convergence of multiple methodological streams.
Her argument as I understand it in a nutshell is that the politicization of religion in the ways that we observe it today was only made possible by virtue of a conceptual differentiation of religion and nation state that resulted in Reformation era Europe in order to avoid the devastating confessional wars of the period. In succession, church and state are differentiated. The latter is granted authority over the transcendent. I'm sorry, the former is granted authority over the transcendent, and the latter is granted authority over the eminent.
And to this eminent frame, to use Charles Taylor's phrase, is transfer to kind of regulative authority over the transcendent. Because these two realms are now conceptually separable with the imminent nation state given the material upper hand over the transcendent religious community, the religious community has to change to demonstrate its validity by proving that it is not an obstacle to and may in fact be an advantage to the cause of the nation state.
Because the religious predates the rise of the nation state, it is part of the pre-existing habitats. And here, Cesari invokes helpfully the concept of habitants from Bordeaux, although she also criticizes it in a helpful way. But because it's part of that pre-existing habitats, it's an especially potent thing for the state to control and to appropriate. A religion that is thus conceptually separable from but practically intertwined with the state has the potential to deeply intensify both nationalist conflicts and conflicts between the state and religion when that prescribed relationship is violated in some way according to the standards established by the nation state.
She captures this in quantitative analysis, but also in a careful reading of what people actually say about their own views of the relationship between the religious and the political. For instance, in her chapter on the transcendent state in China, Cesari quotes a Communist Party official whose articulation of the problem of religion within China vividly captures the point that the book seeks to make. "Religion," the official declared, "is absolutely not just a matter of individual belief, it also consists of social entities, such as social organization, social facilities, and mass social activities and can have a profound effect on the consciousness of the broad masses of believers."
Here's the kind of Durkheimian conception of religion as the sacrilege of the social order. "For this reason, the government needs to harness and direct the pre-existing power of religion to the state's own ends or severely constrain it when it could not do so." Ergo, the pressure felt by the Chinese Christian leader, Bishop Dean Guangjun, who argued that the church that churches needed to reform their own theology. This is one of Jocelyn's most interesting interventions. The churches in some cases, in this case, in the case of Bishop Dean, consciously changing their theological commitments to make them more serviceable to the objectives of this socialist state.
Even at its most basic level, declarations like Bishop Dean's show how religion can reapply the idea that the nation state is the natural site of political power and vision setting for the nation. Bishop Dean's statement also demonstrates that in keeping with Cesari's argument, the rise of the nation state actually changes the substantive elements of religious worldviews. And where it doesn't, it seeks to suppress and supplant as in the Chinese campaign against the Uyghurs or in one of the more striking passages of the book, Jocelyn's description of the creation of Russian secular holiness in which literary figures such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol become guardians of the Russian soul.
Now, this explanatory sequence that she proposes has the capacity, that is there is a risk, I think, embedded in this sequence to be reductively universalizing. If not handled well, it crowds out local particularity and replicates the current scholarly tendency to somewhat simplistically attribute all conflict to the legacies of Western colonialism in ways that denies the agent of diversity of those who throw their loves and their lives into the religion nationalist campaigns.
Joseline definitely sidesteps that well-worn path and pioneers a different one by suggesting that because religious habituation predates the rise of the modern nation state on the Western model, each locale will have its own distinctive version of the sequence that can play out in even idiosyncratic ways. The precipitating element of that differentiation may be a colonial export, and I think it probably is, but that colonial export merely catalyzes a set of forces that neither begin nor end in that Western influence.
Thus Cesari helps us see the impact of colonialism without reducing and thus obscuring local concerns to universalizeable trans-historical structures, a mode of analysis that tends to reify the notion of an agent of the West and a reactive rest. This ability to construct an explanatory framework that helps us simultaneously think globally and locally is one of the signal achievements of the book.
The negotiation between the universal and the particular is representative of a number of other ways in which Cesari's book breaks down the unhelpful binaries that have too often ossified in scholarly discourse between the quantitative and qualitative as I've already noted, between the local and the international, between religion as an independent variable and religion is a dependent variable, even between East and West.
In one of the book's most impressive accomplishments, she demonstrates the substantive importance of religion without making religion solely a set of beliefs. It is also not solely an institutional presence or solely a social function. Partly, she does this by really amplifying throughout the book religion as a sense of belonging, which I think is a particularly helpful contribution. She talks about the three Bs of religion, belief, belonging, and behavior. And that middle term is one that I think too often gets overlooked in the literature but which is amplified in this analysis.
And in a sense that emphasis on the second B, the religious belonging, helps show how the others elements, the institutional, the social, and the theological can converge in a conversation with nationalism. So the book answered submitting questions for me even within my own field of expertise, which I wasn't particularly expecting. My own field of expertise is the early United States.
Although Jocelyn doesn't address it specifically, her modeling helps me see that the rise of the nation state helps explain early Christianity's preoccupation with textualist biblicism. That is when the state pushes religion to focus on the transcendent as its realm of authority often, the result is a commitment to the traditions of sacred textuality, and I see that happening in early America. But it also brought that reference of transcendence into the imminent discussions of American politics precisely because religion was harnessed by the state for the sake of generating this sense of belonging on which the new nation depended. So even in a case study that's not part of the book itself, I see applicability and illumination from what she provides.
While the book answered many questions, it raised others. I'll conclude here with just two for the sake of our discussion. One of which is the complaint against books that seek to provide a kind of transcultural or international explanatory models is that they suffer from the threat of the well-chosen example. And I would love to hear Professor Cesari speak a little bit about her process of identifying the examples that she did choose. The temptation or the suggestion is often that these examples can be carefully selected for the purposes of upholding the model rather than rigorously testing. And so the process by which they're chosen I think can be helpful in either dispelling that or helping us complicate that instinctual suspicion.
And then second, I would note that one of the prominent discourses in religious studies today has to do with the ways in which setting religion in relation to political and social concerns like nationalism has a tendency to reduce the devotional energy or content of religion as it is experienced by people around the world. So I would just cite for instance, a passage-- I'll do this quickly in conclusion. A passage from Bob Orci who has been on the kind of forefront of this argument, a former faculty member here.
And he writes about Marian apparitions in a Catholic tradition. And he notes the dangers of too frequently setting the experience of a Marian encounter, appearance of the Virgin Mary, in relation to nationalist energies. He writes, "While Marian shrines have served as pivots of nationalist sentiment, the same shrines become international centers where nationalist sentiments are eclipsed at least momentarily in the shared experience and expression of common need before the Virgin. The shrines create alternative publics of men and women in need and distress."
That's one brief example of a point that Orci makes elsewhere, which is a kind of fear that the extent to which we place these things always in relation to political and social concerns like nationalism is the result of a Durkheimian preoccupation that may in fact prevent us from really understanding the energy that often drives religious action, religious resistance, religious behavior.
So my second and final question would simply be the degree to which, Jocelyn, you think that your book makes room for the kind of what Orci calls abundant history, the notion that religious experience functions independent of and often without reference to concerns about nation and national identity or whether it pushes back against that space that Orci and others are trying to create. So I'll leave it there. It was simply an expression of gratitude for a marvelous book, a great intervention, and a very stimulating argument.
JOCELYN CESARI: Thank you.
FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you Professor Holland. So without further ado, I turn things over to Professor Kahn.
USMAN UMAR KHAN: First of all, I would like to congratulate Jocelyn for this new publication and thank the CSWR for hosting this event and inviting me to participate alongside my distinguished colleagues. Jocelyn is no doubt one of the most prominent scholars of contemporary Islam. I have been following her scholarship since the late 1980s when she came to speak in our graduate seminar at [INAUDIBLE] Paris, and at the time, she was working on Muslims in France.
And in the last three decades or so, her scholarship has made major intervention in the debates about Islamic politics, Islam in the West, and as this book shows religion in the modern world. Her two most recent monographs entitled respectively, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy and What is Political Islam changed our understanding of political Islam. Prior to a decisive intervention, three generations of literature located the origins of political Islam in oppositional societal groups that challenged the so-called secular elites or states. Cesari in contrast argued persuasively that Islam has been instrumental in the project of state and nation building in many Muslim countries, even those that so-called secular leaders ruled.
By bringing the institution building process of post-colonial states into the discussion of political Islam, Jocelyn offered an insightful critique of the literature that redefined Muslim states as secular. We God's People takes her scholarship a step further to address the ways in which the internationalization of the Westphalian system affected religious traditions worldwide. This is a well-documented book of great analytical sophistication, and writing such a book requires familiarity with analytical tools of political science and religious studies but also a sound historical knowledge of the religious and political history of India, China, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and its successor states. Very few scholars in the field of Islamic studies could write such a book. And I learned a great deal reading this book.
I will focus my comments on chapter 2 entitled, State, Islam, Nation and Patriotism, Never Ending Tensions. This chapter is more than 100 pages and stands as the book of its own. Jocelyn explains how some important concepts such as ummah, Sharia, majority, minority, have changed since the imperial encounters with Europe. This unpacking of critical concepts serves well the main argument of the book that the division of the nation states outside the West went hand-in-hand with the adoption of the secular religious divide.
Let me start with ummah. Ummah is one such term that we now understand as the world community of Muslims. But Jocelyn shows that ummah meant different things before the encounter with the West. It has many meanings including the followers of a prophet, a divine plan for salvation, a small group with a large community of believers. At the time of the Muslim empire, she explains ummah represented the sum of the territories under Islamic law, including non-Muslims.
Now, many people would not think of non-Muslims as part of the Islamic ummah while historically, non-Muslims made major contributions to all aspects of Islamic civilizations. And Jocelyn explained that some Christians even participated in Islamic conquest of territories. I will add that Muslim theologian and former like Somali dinner, Afghani, counted among his disciples Christians and Jews to whom he preached in the late 19th century, the danger of European imperialism. And many such Christians and Jews certainly felt the sense of belonging to an Islamic ummah.
In Justin's analysis, the notion of ummah underwent significant changes alongside the transformation of the social structure of Islamic society from the 18th century onward. It became the referent of a religious and cultural identity that was distinct from the territorial lines, power of the sultan, with the goal to generate a strong sense of unity across the Muslim population. It is in this context that it came to define exclusively the community of believers everywhere. Brilliant.
I agree that the rise of European imperial hegemony from the 18th century was no doubt instrumental in transforming the understanding of ummah. The loss of Ottoman territories followed by the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the creations of mandates given to France and Britain, then the conquest of North Africa and other Muslim lands, and later the creation of the state of Israel after the Second World War, all that contributed to changing the meaning of ummah.
In the new context, some Islamists perceive Christians and Jews not as people of the book al-khattab who are part of the Islamic ummah but as a fifth column as partners in an international conspiracy aimed at undermining Islam. And I wonder whether Jocelyn, you would be willing to discuss the changing perception of Christians and Jews not as people of the book but as infidels.
A Second important term, in fact, is that of minority. Today, the term minority is taken for granted as having existed forever, especially in the rhetoric of some human rights organizations. Jocelyn in explain that at the time of the Muslim empire, there was no numerical distinction between majority and minority. In fact, being a minority was not determined on a numerical basis but in relation to Islamic power. During Mughal rule in India, for example, they were small numbers of Muslims, but they ruled the majority of the Hindu population. Additionally, there was no concept of minority groups who did not belong to the ruling elite.
With the rise of national identification, Jocelyn explains, came the tyranny of number, Muslim groups that were not in leading political positions became minority. Along the same lines, it's not worthy that the Ottoman Empire at its zenith comprised all Arab lands except Morocco and Arabs, however, for most of Ottoman rule did not question Turkey's domination. Arab political nationalism challenging Turkish domination can be traced to the 20th century and was to some extent, I would argue a response to the pan Turkey, some advocated by the Young Turks.
Another important intervention in this book is a discussion of how Sharia was transformed with the encounter with the West, and Jocelyn didn't discuss this under the subtitle, a community-based Islam or what someone-- Wael Hallaq would call Sharia governance. That is Sharia before the encounter with the West. Jocelyn shows that before the nation said religious authorities provided rulings for local communities, which included Muslims and other religious groups. And from this perspective, Islamic legislation was first and foremost aimed at the people, for the people, and with no immediate consideration for the central political power.
And this argument is very similar to Wael Hallaq in his impossible state, which you don't cite in your bibliography. Anyway, Muslim community, Hallaq argued, was self-governance for most of Islamic history. Pre-colonial states where they existed did not seek to broadcast their power to the periphery. States established a presence only in areas where they could accept taxes. Muslim scholars enjoyed considerable autonomy, they were funded by Islamic endowments, okaf, which guaranteed their autonomy.
And Hallaq argued that juries and judges felt responsibility towards the common man and woman, and on their own, they frequently initiated action on behalf of the oppressed without any formal petition being made by these social groups or their individual members. They represented for the masses the ideal of piety, rectitude, and fine education. Their very profession as guardians of religion experts in religious law and exemplars of virtue made them not only the most genuine representative of the masses but also the idealized hairs of the prophet as one influential and paradigmatic prophetic report said that the ulama are the heirs of the prophet and ulama [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
More important, Hallaq showed that adjudicating disputes was only one of the many duties that the Sharia courts and judges had to undertake. The kadhi and the mufti were members of the community they served. They emerged from the midst of the ordinary social ranks, they oversaw the building of mosques, streets, public fountains, and bridges. They inspected newly constructed and dilapidated buildings, the operation of hospitals, Kitchens, and charitable endowments which constituted between 40% and 50% of real property in all Muslim lands.
Anyway, all this change has just ensured dramatically in the process of nation building when the state observes Islamic institutions. And Jocelyn argues that the nationalization of religious institutions and the inscription of Islam into the national narrative are the two main features of nation building that have shaped the very nature of political Islam. Jocelyn's major argument both here and in her previous publication is that the Islamist politics is embedded with the political cultures of the post-colonial state while the state has appropriated Islam through means of institutionalization, nationalization, the Islamist groups have in turn been able to use the persistent power of Islam in society as a resource for political mobilization to the point of becoming the main political force.
Now, my question here is, do you think that Islamism changed enough that we could call some groups post-Islamists? As you know, Asef Bayard argued that many of the parties that seem to cause anxiety to the mainstream media, justice and development in Turkey and other in Tunisia, et cetera, are not Islamist movements but they are post-Islamist. Unlike an Islamist politics that stressed citizens obligation, post-Islamism is characterized by the fusion of religiosity and right, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty. It's an attempt according to Bayard, to transcend Islamism by becoming a pious society within a civil religious state.
Now, to end, my two questions, Jocelyn, could you discuss the changing perception of Christians and Jews not as people of the book but as infidel in the Muslim world? You are very critical of the idea of post-secularism, what do you have to say about post-Islamism? Thank you very much, and I very much enjoyed reading this book.
FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you, Professor Khan. I will now introduce myself as the third speaker. So I'm honored to be both chairing this session and also being able to be one of the commenters on it. And I would just repeat what my colleagues have already said. Professor Cesari Jocelyn that this is a wonderful book, it's so impressively documented and carried through consistently from beginning to end, with such expertise ranging from political theory, history, statistics, and so on that I'm very impressed just to be able to pick it up and make my way into it to read it. So I learned a lot by looking into this.
My task is to take up chapter 3, which is the chapter about India and Hinduism. And here too, I would commend you also for asking me to be a respondent because as you know and perhaps others know, I'm more a classicist than a modernist, I dwell in the pre-modern worlds of both India and the Christian West and only pop up in the modern world occasionally, so I thank you for asking me. And I'm not an expert on the political issues and so on, therefore, I'm giving you impressions from a certain perspective, and I like the openness that you're offering here.
And I learned a lot, as my colleagues have said, I learned a lot by the way you weave together so brilliantly the political and the religious in your chapters, recounting for us in the chapter on India chapter three, the interplay of British policy and South Asian groupings in response to the British. Well, in some senses, this is a well-known story, the ways in which the British both by merely being present and also by strategy kind or unkind, played around with religious identities of the larger and smaller communities in India. To see it spelled out so well with reference to so many texts, legal texts, historical texts, and so on is very helpful.
And in particular to see how Muslims and Hindus in India began to develop much more distinct, separate identities in the 19th century in particular and then into the 20th century in part again, due to the British but in part due to the tendencies and trajectories that are already had begun in the pre-British period. And I think that's an important point that Jocelyn, you're making, is that this can either-- neither all credit nor all blame can be thrown on the British because there were these distinctive elements of community formation before the British were in charge and had power.
And yet, I think it does really help us to see how for strategic reasons there was a separation and distinction such as there had not been before of the Muslim and the Hindu, and also kind of a homogenization so that there could be inter-religious relationships but within these groups, they're kind of intra-religious, as you put it. Intra-religious diversity is denied to some extent by simply counting up Hindu heads and Muslim heads and counting them in many ways against one another.
So this is all very interesting, and I think it does go far toward what I've had to try to explain to people inelegantly for the past 50 years or so, that the Indian understanding of secular and secularity is not the same as that of the West. And yet, you show that these are not unconnected realities and that they're connected to one another. And that if we start thinking about how the imminent and transcendent distinction that this worldly and the other worldly are in a sense imported into the Indian context, the South Asian context, ways of understanding what it meant for India both before and after independence to see itself as a secular society with all these religious entities near one another.
I think you really help us to this out, and I've learned a lot simply by reading this. So thank you for helping me, and I'll certainly be going back to it in my teaching again. But on the fact that you did ask me who are more of a classicist and a text person, then I turn to a few questions that I have and concerns that I have in the context of really friendly questions about a wonderful book. Particularly the section around pages 150 and so, on where you kind of talk about the Hindu identity that was in place before the coming of the Muslim community, before the coming of the British and so on like that.
That I think perhaps there's a real importance to realize that the same kinds of complexities, the same kinds of interplay of the religious and the political were going on in pre-modern India. And before, they were the large influence of outside communities coming in. I'm sure you agree with that, that I think it's a matter of emphasis perhaps.
But to understand that the history of India and the history of Hindu-India is not simply a product of what happened to India and what happened to Hindus when Muslims came and then Christians came in large numbers but rather India has always been crafting its own identity, South Asia has been crafting its own identity. And the Hindu communities have never been passive victims or recipients of what others have done to them, but they've always been in an interplay among themselves and among various historical, religious, political communities over the centuries.
And I think you know the literature on this, and I just point out a few of the books that have been helpful to me that I didn't see in your bibliography and pardon me if they are there. I'm thinking of books like Andrew Nicholson's book, Unifying Hinduism Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History, which contests the idea that Hinduism is simply a modern invention, the word Hinduism. But looking back into medieval sources and philosophical theological texts to think about Hinduism. So Nicholson's book is very helpful.
Our own student from here at Harvard, Shankar Nair, now at the University of Virginia recently has a brilliant book out, Translating Wisdom, Hindu Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia. That does away with the idea that you could simply imagine Hindu-India in the 13th, 14th century and then suddenly, there were Muslims there. But this was a rich intellectual religious philosophical set of interactions that were alongside and intertwined with political and military concerns as well.
Or another Harvard student, Michael Allen, has a wonderful dissertation from Harvard, The ocean of Inquiry dealing with the Czechs called the Bichard saga, 19th century Vedanta text in the invite to non-duelist tradition that talks about the fate and the reconstruction of Vedanta in Hindi and other local languages of North India in the 19th century. Deliberately authors changing the way they thought about Vedanta, changing the way they taught it really among themselves and not simply in relationship to what the British or others were saying to them.
And finally, the innumerable works of scholars like Patrick Oliver, Joel Brereton, Stephen Lindquist, Dibakar Acharya, all of whom were working on even very ancient texts such as the Upanishads and seeing how those texts were not innocent of political, religious connections, and how kings and Brahmins were always in relationship to one another and contesting the boundaries and power setups and so on, long before outsiders came into the country.
And I would just point out a couple of facts before I conclude here that I would nuance further. And I think you're so brave to be doing so much in one book, and I admire somebody like yourself who does this. But talking about two broad strokes of intra-religious diversity of the strands of polytheism and monotheism. And while I think there are elements that could justify thinking about Vedic polytheism and the Panasonic monism of a sort, pantheism, pantheism. I think that's too simple.
And I think it can be done better, maybe not by you because that's not your primary task, but to think about how complicated the ancient Vedic text and Upanishadic texts were, and how many issues were brought to the fore in those texts that already show that any kind of effort to simplify as some secondary sources today do to say, well, the Veda was polytheistic and the Upanishads were monastic just doesn't work. And I think it's not a very helpful frame to be using.
And likewise, thinking about the Upanishads themselves, these texts that range from 900 or 1,000 BCE to 300 BCE, how complicated they are. I've been teaching a course right now on the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the oldest and greatest of these texts. And all through it, you have these constant interventions where Brahmins and kings are contesting with one another. And there's a constant emphasis on the way we think about the world and the way we think about the self are too interdependent, interrelated realities.
And I think that Jocelyn in positioning in texts like that show that even in the most ancient times, there was no effort to sort of have a solitary single Uthman or Brahman that had nothing to do with the world around it. And I could point this out in Tamil, South India as well, literature over the past 2000 years ago, 1500 years ago, these changes.
And then even within the commentary traditions related to Vedanta and the Upanishads, chakras importance as the great teacher of advaita, non-dualism pushing the monistic strand of Hinduism has been contested for a very long time. And his intervention, which was very successful, whether or not as you suggest it has something to do with the coming of Islam to India, which I'm a little bit skeptical about.
Ramanujan is another great thinker from around the year 1000 who's become very prominent in contemporary debates in India being proposed by various swamis for being an inclusivist, together people of different traditions is that giant statue of Ramanujan now in Hyderabad 20, 16 feet. And the swami there saying that follow your own religion but respect all religions and arguing that this is a very old position where a kind of inclusivism that's closer to what Christians would mean by inclusivism. As a bargain, it's neither polytheism nor monism.
And I would say that when it comes down to the notion, I think talk at one point there about shifting over to a priority of text over against practice. And some people imagining maybe the less attentive modern indulgence, that somehow there is a separation here between textual knowledge on the one hand and the raw political realities of India on the other hand that I think that doesn't work because my sense is of the classical text, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, and something like that, for better or worse, they're extremely concerned about praxis, and they're concerned about how to reshape and re-imagine communities in India.
And to point this out, again, not to take away from what you've done but to say that in a sense the complexity that you're seeing brilliantly in the modern scene can be read back into the older traditions too, such that as I was saying, we don't think of ancient India as just waiting for outsiders to come in to stir it into life and stir it into identity, but there are identities that preceded and also robustly resisted both Muslim and British understandings of what India should be.
So I think what I would conclude by saying therefore is that what your book does is raise questions for somebody like me from outside my field, which is wonderful, raising questions from me about not slipping into kind of an isolationist view of reading the classics without any attention to context. And that it really invites us to open up a conversation between those who do indulge the Upanishadic studies, classical Hinduism and scholars such as yourself who think about how these are playing out today, so that we can see both what is new in the Indian context, new understandings of society and religion, and also be able at the same time to trace some of those roots all the way back as far as Indian literature goes.
So I will stop with those comments. Thanking you again and hoping that my comments were helpful for tonight. Thank you, Jocelyn.
JOCELYN CESARI: Thank you. Thank you all, wow. I would like to take just a couple of minutes for each of your questions. So I'm going to go in the order. David Wise's example, that's a very popular question because I wanted to take the cases of country that have been colonized and that's India, Syria, I wanted to look at big political entities like the Russians, the period, but also the Chinese empire and show that even if they are not been colonized as such, they were part of this diffusion of ideas. And each time I identify a moment of encounter that triggers a debate that never stops and it's still going on.
So the validity of the approach is not so much in this qualitative report because what I'm trying to say in the qualitative approach is that the nation is not only institutional state action, it is a deep transformation of our conscience, of the way we think, we emotionally behave. And this comes from studies from anthropologists that have looked at this influence of the nation as the frame, and they have shown that it changed the way you are sick, the way you feel happiness. You take the same person from the same tradition, they will not live, behave, emotionally express themselves according to the nation in which they are, and they are not aware of that.
So what I was interested in is to, as you mentioned, tried to put a light on the habiture far from having clarify all the dark corners of it. I wanted to show that this habiture has changed everything. And what has always puzzled me is that religion never gets into the debate, so if you change everything, even the way you are sick, I think it did also change the way people interact with the religion.
So my example was to show that there is a method, and so it was validated for me when I used the key word from all these genealogical conceptually story and insert them in huge database to show the assumption is if the terms come together, that I have significant historical importance in the way that people see themselves not only as citizens but also member of these religious communities. It means that there is a pattern there. And some of the patterns are validated.
I mean, what's happening in Ukraine, I'm sorry to say, but I talk about it in the book. What's happening now in Syria, I am talking about it in the book. Not that I have forecast, it's just the pattern of a present, and it is interesting maybe to use them in order to understand or better decipher what's going on around us. And so this part of the quantitative was really for my colleagues in social science as you mentioned, that are very resilient to qualitative approach, to historical approach, to religion.
And I wanted to tell them, you are depriving yourself to a huge wealth of knowledge that can help you understand sometimes they have results, they look at them like it doesn't compute with what we wanted to do. So that's this contextual approach that I wanted to bring. So it can go for any nation actually, that's why I understand your argument about Orci. But as Heraclitus said, we never lost twice in the same river. Even the people today who do Marian, they probably don't do it like the Catholic in medieval Catholic or Christian dome.
So that's the kind of change that is unconscious that I wanted to point out there. And so it's not so much as saying that the nation explained everything, it's when you contest it, when you go even beyond it, you are still influenced by it. That's what I show, Izas, it creates a caliphate that has nothing to do with the caliphate in its historical time because it thinks of a state. So you can claim authenticity as much as you want, you are still in the parameters that come from your education, that you have gotten with the milk of your mother so to speak. So that's what I wanted to show.
And so to pay attention to this new meanings on the terms that are exactly the same, ummah, jihad. And this brings me to you, Usman. Yes, you are right. The infidels-- actually, the moment that the Christians, Jews, and other minorities become infidels, [INAUDIBLE] becomes infidel is with the colonial intrusion. There is this Algerian nationalist leader, Abdelkader, and the French arrive and have a deliberate project of domination, and he said, but these are Christian. Usually, we don't wage jihad against the Christian, they are not enemies. And it starts.
So this kind of critical juncture that is interesting because you will do what we call fatwa shopping around saying, what do I do in a particular situation? And there is no clear answer. That's this moment where a certain order becomes disturbed by an event or past dependent event, and that is the moment where the infidels start to be associated with Christian in the sense that it is part of seeing the West as an enemy of Islam in a way that was not present before in the mentality of Muslim.
Post-Islamism, it's true that I don't use it much, again because I see Islamism was for me a second iteration of this new political Islamic culture created with the nation. So for me, post-Islamism is the third iteration. What is fascinating actually is lots of new Muslim thinkers taking the position that we should not as Muslims invest in the state as the only institution in which we can get power. And this is new. And this indeed can go nicely with some of the pre-modern understanding of some of the terms we discussed.
But I don't know if this is post-Islamism. I am always a little wary with the before and after in the sense that what I'm showing, it's always changing. We have to stop to do the analysis but the reality is very messy.
Frank, yes, I mean, I don't take the position that Hinduism is modern, and actually I'm not convinced that Hinduism is modern. What was fascinating to me-- I'm not an Hinduist so don't-- I speak under your control. What I wanted to show is this extreme diversity not only of practice, it's not so much the opposition between culture and practice, but even the fact that what people use the same terms. One of the governors, the British governor got completely puzzled. He said, what they call this particular entity, they don't do the same thing in this part of the country and the other part of the country. So this has gone more or less.
It doesn't mean that people do the same thing, it means that the nation has built an overarching frame to explain to people again, the people have agencies but the legitimacy, and this is striking to me, has moved away from the agency of local community that were, like Usman also discussed in the Muslim empire, they were also multi-religious, this local community. It was not just only Hindus, there were actually the same caste could cover different religious groups. So this is gone.
And that's why Hinduism emerged at the national level. How can you claim a Hindu nation? It's because there is this overarching framework that gives also legitimacy to the religious tradition. And reading the Supreme Court ruling in India is quite eye-opening. They tell you what is Hinduism. So it's not that it's modern, but of course, it is a new crystallization of things that were going on before.
But what interests me is how these transformations are not only within the tech or within the discussion among significant member of the different cluster or work, it is how it has been also pulled out in justifying we are in India and making religion, which is very modern. Gandhi was very modern. He defined the religious identity across all the different localities in a sort of verticality with the state. So you have this [FRENCH], as we say in French, of the secular state and the vast diversity that still exists but that result that has to be filtered into this new institution.
And it does also change some elite, probably not I would say, all population, also perceive themselves vis-a-vis their tradition. And you are right, I say this clearly, there is always religion and politics but they were not seen as religion and politics. All the discussion you mentioned were within the caste system, and so it was not religion, it was what people are. And that's this kind of entity, religion-political that has been broken by the modern political community. So I stop there because I can't go on and on.
FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you very much. So I think we have about 10 minutes or so left. We have two questions in the Q&A, we probably have time for one more. So if anyone listening would like to post another question. And I'll just go through them both. The first one, Jocelyn, is how has colonialism affected religious geopolitics as opposed to tribal geopolitics? And if that distinction between religious geopolitics and tribal politics, geopolitics makes any sense to you or does it fit in your categories at all?
JOCELYN CESARI: Tribal is not the term I use but clearly again, it's not only the direct colonial coercion or imperialism, it's also the power of ideas. So yes, colonialism, and we have said it several times has been part of that. But trade, commerce, I mean, the Jesuits coming to China, China was not colonized but the debate start there. Are we a religion? What is a religion? We didn't know this existed. So that's a kind of things that happen everywhere.
And again, so the question is everybody is now frustrated, convinced that to exist as the collective, have to be a nation. We take it for granted but building this sense of community, a self-determined independently of all these other cultural, religious elements that we were discussing is not an easy thing to do. And actually, you can read the difficulty of lots of this post-colonial nation state by the fact that they were more state before a nation.
Pakistan didn't exist, it was a political project, authoritative, and authoritarian of a westernized little elite. Turkey didn't exist, it was created by the deliberate action of Ataturk taking advantage of the international situation after World War one and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And defining a territory deliberately saying, this is Turkey, people will speak Turkish, they will be Muslim. I mean, again, this is unthinkable for the Ottoman Empire.
So that's the kind of drive of this idea of nation of self-determination of a group of people is attractive and the equality of membership too. Does it mean that it produces everywhere the same results? No. And that's what I try to show in the book, because you have to take into account. As you say Francis, what was already going on, it doesn't come like a set of ideas on a blank page. It does reshuffle the very subtle equilibrium that were already in place, you see. But by doing so, it also changes them. Again, we don't bath twice in the same river, because when it has been changed, it has been changed.
So I think I have really responded that.
FRANCIS CLOONEY: Yeah, I was at a discussion earlier today where somebody was talking about the Jesuit missionaries in China and said the question whether Confucianism is a religion is one the West has never answered and one that the Chinese never asked. So this is an ongoing reality. The second question that we have, again, we have time for one more in the Q&A if anyone wants to add one, is a longer one. And the author says, "I was so excited to read the book and Jewish and Christian circles in which I run. I find that addressing these two forms of religious nationalism are bringing Jews and Christians to confront the idolatry of religious nationalism."
And I suppose this would open up and is a longer comment but into two questions. One, how would you apply your understanding to the hot issues related to Israel-Palestine in terms of nationalism religious identity? And then this person also asked at the end, we see interfaith nationalists uniting globally, are interfaith anti-nationalists organizing to combat nationalist religious ideologies and stand against the violence of nationalism? So it's kind of a different kind of politics but beginning with the Jewish Christian. Would you bring that into the conversation?
JOCELYN CESARI: Yeah, actually I wrote about the Israeli nation state building and again, taking it as Zion, as a revelation-based community that is not founded on equality or sovereignty of people but that is a project, again, this revelation-based on God is a project for a particular group of people that accept the message. So the whole goal of Judaism is not about piety, it is about maintaining this community, making it work in one way or another.
So this idea is displaced by the diaspora, the destruction of the second temple and the dispersion of Jews in multiple contexts, and in Europe, the fact that they were very segregated and separated maintained the appeal to Zion as a messianistic project. But again, it is not a modern idea. It is we will go back to Zionism and apocalypse and end of time. And then the nation came. The nation will put the Jews out of the ghetto, there is a wonderful historical books out of the ghetto by Jakob Katz.
And that's the moment-- and this is a little provocative, that is not my title, it's a Professor of Jewish Studies at Princeton. That's where Judaism became religion in the sense that you see the Ashkenazi reformist movement, and they start thinking that religion is about the individual and not trying to maintain Zion as a messianistic project. And it opens the door to social mobility in multiple type of institution, and it's very popular.
Even what we call today Orthodox form or mystical form of Judaism come from this modernization of Judaism with emphasis on what's called auto praxis and doing things for the community here and not anymore with the appeal of this end of time. Even if it's there, it's not invested the same way. And then there is a Dreyfus affair. We tend to forget the Jews took a lot of advantage of all this equality of membership, we are now member of this community. And they didn't say this community have to be regulated by God's sovereignty, that was the disconnect right there.
But then the Dreyfus affair happened, and that's when Theodore Herzl said, OK, that's not possible to exist within this context, we want self-determination not as the sovereignty of God but sovereignty of us Jews independently of other nations. And that's the quadrature of this, you have a rectangle and the circle. So that's why-- what I showed in this other article is that the question of who belong to Israel today is key because it's an internal Jewish question. Do you have to be member of the messianistic practice or can you be a secular and belong to any kind of secular nation? That's the conflict going on.
And the second is because it's also contested by the Palestinians. They said that this is-- and in terms of secular terms, it is absolutely legitimate to say we also have the right to self-determination. So that's why-- how do you make these arguments consiliate? I don't have a response to that, but that explain the tension here between the two.
But I would say just to finish on that, the book is not about religious nationalism as such, it was really to show that even in very secular contexts where people do not claim that they have a national project, even the way that religion has been privatized or put of what people have accepted to be less involved in societal issues, and the evolution of Christian in Europe is a case in point and to a certain extent in America as well.
There was this interview of some evangelical where they were asked about the injustice of slavery and racism and they said but we don't think about that, we think about our personal salvation. That's losing the horizon of the religion as a community and as an interaction not only with your people of your own faith, but outside your faith. And that's something that has been, unfortunately, too much delegated to the nation or the state. The state provides you, you're a citizen, you pay your taxes.
And some people with a religious background contest that. Sometimes with intolerant outcome, sometimes with interesting also alternative of looking at social contract. And I'll stop here.
FRANCIS CLOONEY: Yeah. So I think unfortunately, we've come to the end of our time. I think we can-- I would just say on behalf of the Center, thank you to everyone in attendance, thank you to our speakers, our respondents, David and Usman. Thank you, Jocelyn, for such a wonderful book and opening up a conversation I think could overflow into a longer period. And I think we just have to stop with many questions buzzing in our minds and take up these issues another day because they're not going to go away, and I'm sure Jocelyn, you'll be writing another book soon. So we can convene to talk about that.
JOCELYN CESARI: I'm going to rest a little right now.
FRANCIS CLOONEY: Yeah, but thank you, everybody. And good night, and keep safe.
JOCELYN CESARI: Thank you both. Thank you David, Usman, Frank, thank you very much. Bye bye. And the audience, thank you.
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