Postsecular Feminisms: Religion and Gender in Transnational Context 9781350038066, 9781350038097, 9781350038073

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Postsecular Feminisms

Also available from Bloomsbury The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality, and Gender, edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Carly Daniel-Hughes Postsecular Cities, edited by Justin Beaumont Religion, Migration and Globalization, David Garbin Shameful Bodies, Michelle Mary Lelwica

Postsecular Feminisms Religion and Gender in Transnational Context Edited by Nandini Deo

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Nandini Deo and Contributors 2018 Nandini Deo has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. LLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Deo, Nandini, 1979- editor. Title: Postsecular feminisms : religion and gender in transnational context / edited by Nandini Deo. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2018001792| ISBN 9781350038066 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350038073 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Secularism. | Feminism. | Feminism--Religious aspects. Classifi cation: LCC BL2747.8 .P6765 2018 | DDC 305.42--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001792 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3806-6 PB: 978-1-3501-4788-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3807-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-3808-0 Series: Bloomsbury Ethics, 1234567X, volume 6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Contributor Biographies Acknowledgments 1

Postsecular Feminisms: Religion and Gender in Transnational Context Nandini Deo

vi viii

1

Part 1 Provincializing Western Secularisms 2 3 4

Postsecular Feminisms in Historical Perspective William J. Bulman Re-enchanting Feminism: Challenging Religious and Secular Patriarchies Alka Arora Rethinking Secularism and Democracy Neera Chandhoke

17 32 52

Part 2 Feminists Navigate the Religious 5 6 7 8

A New Variety of Anti-secularism? Khurram Hussain Beyond the Binaries of Islamic and the Secular: Muslim Women’s Voices in Contemporary India R. Santhosh Dalit Feminism as Postsecular Feminism Timothy J. Loftus (Not So) Well-Behaved Women: Piety and Practice among TwentyFirst-Century Mainstream Mormon Feminists Christine L. Cusack

75 87 108 123

Part 3 Postsecular Feminism and Materialism 9

The Intersection of Feminism, Religion, and Development in the Discourses of “Gender Workers” in Ghana Nana Akua Anyidoho 10 Why I Am Not a Postsecular Feminist: Pakistan, Polio, and the Postsecular Afiya Shehrbano Zia Notes Bibliography Index

143 155 175 189 217

Contributor Biographies Nana Akua Anyidoho is a researcher at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana. Dr. Anyidoho’s research focuses on the work aspirations, prospects, and experiences of women and young people; policy discourses on women’s empowerment; and civil society advocacy for women’s rights. Her publications can be found at www.researchgate.org. Alka Arora is a core faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, California. Her teaching and research interests are centered on feminist spiritual activism, integral feminist pedagogy, and vegan ecofeminism.  William J. Bulman is Class of 1961 Associate Professor of History and Global Studies at Lehigh University. He writes about the intellectual, religious, and political history of Britain and its empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648-1715 (2015) and a coeditor (with Robert G. Ingram) of God in the Enlightenment (2016). Neera Chandhoke was formerly Professor of Political Science, Delhi University. Her research areas overlap between Indian politics and political theory. Her major publications include Democracy and Revolutionary Politics (2015); Contested Secessions (2012); The Conceits of Civil Society (2003); Beyond Secularism (1999); and State and Civil Society (1995). Her current research project is India Anxieties of Coexistence. Christine L. Cusack is a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her most recent publications include contributions to the edited volumes Whose Religion? Issues in Religion and Education (2015) and Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity (2017). Her principal areas of research include religious diversity, non-religion, and worldview literacy in Canadian public education. Her other research interests include gender and religion, new religious movements, and Mormonism. Nandini Deo is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. Her research interests include social movements, religion, gender, South Asian

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politics, and civil society. She wrote Mobilizing Gender and Religion in India (2016) and coauthored (with Duncan McDuie Ra) The Politics of Collective Advocacy in India (2011). Khurram Hussain is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University. His work focuses on the modern confluences of religion and politics with special attention to treatments of Islam in the contemporary West. He is currently working on two book projects: The Muslim Question and Islam as Critique. Timothy J. Loftus is a graduate student in the Religion Department at Temple University, Philadelphia. He is a scholar of Buddhist studies and is writing a dissertation about the Western reception of B.  R. Ambedkar’s religious and philosophical work. R. Santhosh teaches sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India. His research interests are in the field of religion and modernity, especially related to religious identity and mobilization, religious cyberspace, gender and religion, and Islam in South Asia. Afiya Shehrbano Zia is the author of Faith and Feminism in Pakistan: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy? (2018) and Sex Crime in the Islamic Context (1994). She has contributed chapters to several edited volumes, including Contesting Feminisms: Gender and Islam in Asia (2015) and Voicing Demands (2014). She teaches at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Habib University, Karachi, and is an active member of the Women’s Action Forum, Pakistan. 

Acknowledgments This book was made possible through the work of a number of people who have not written a contribution for this volume. We want to thank Dean Donald Hall of the College of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University for funding and supporting the conference that brought many of us together. Mohamed Al-Asser and Debra Nyby made some of the international connections that globalized the conversation. The conference committee was chaired by Jackie Krasas who worked tirelessly to make this dialogue possible. Suzanne Edwards, Monica Miller, Vera Fennell, James Peterson, Bruce Whitehouse, and the staff in the office of Interdisciplinary Programs were critical to realizing this project. Sonja Thomas, Zara Khan, and Srimati Basu were not able to write with us but provided intellectual fodder and moral support along the way. Our editors at Bloomsbury, Lalle Pursglove and Lucy Carroll, have been patient and supportive as they kept us on task.

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Postsecular Feminisms: Religion and Gender in Transnational Context Nandini Deo

Introduction This book was born of struggle. The struggle is one in which we try to reconcile our ideas about feminism and our ideas about religion. Some think the two are fundamentally incompatible. Others argue that their relationship is deeply contextual. And some suggest that feminism in fact is a form of spirituality in itself. Each of the contributors here has considered each of these possibilities and has found themselves more or less comfortable with each. In this Introduction, I show how the concept of postsecular feminism is used and how it connects to wider literatures on feminism, secularism, and colonialism. This book features multiple perspectives, some of which find postsecular feminism to be a productive approach and others which see it as dangerously misguided. The variety of views is a reflection of how conflicted feminists remain over religion and also of the stakes involved in these debates.

Postsecular feminism: Stakes and context Should women wearing burkinis be allowed on French beaches? Should Muslim women in India be protected from instant divorce that is justified using Islamic law? Should a doctor in Michigan be prosecuted for practicing female circumcision/mutilation on young Bohra Muslims? These are dilemmas that have been in the news headlines in recent months. In each case a religious minority’s practices are deemed a threat to gender equality and secular norms of the rest of the society.

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Postsecular feminism offers a way of thinking about these controversies that avoids the trap of embracing either patriarchal religious authority or majoritarian aggression. It requires that we reject the binary framing and instead examine the context within which these claims and counterclaims arise. The context refers to the immediate political environment, the stated wishes of all actors, and the historical and/or global antecedents informing the situation. That is, postsecular feminism points out the power of ideologies whether they claim to be religious or secular. Postsecular feminism destabilizes assumptions about the subject of feminism and the role of choice and agency and invites us to broaden our empathetic imaginations. Postsecular feminism has echoes of an earlier debate around multiculturalism and feminism in which some argued that respect for group identities was necessary in diverse democracies.1 Others argued that multiculturalism reified groups and caused specific harm to disadvantaged individuals within those groups, especially women by subordinating their rights to those of the community.2 The tension between the liberal individual subject and the encultured member of a group caused a great deal of ink to be spilled. A significant difference between that earlier generation of scholarship and this one is that today much of the argument for postsecular feminism results from centering women’s agency. That is, rather than an etic, or outsider, perspective, scholars are offering emic understandings of agency that are used to reflect upon and contest assumptions about unitary subjects that await liberation. Postsecular feminism has grown out of the surge of interest in religion that followed the violence of 9/11. Everyone agreed that religion mattered in understanding that attack and the resultant War on Terror, but few social scientists could explain how it mattered. Political scientists especially had been quite remiss in studying religion in politics before 2001. Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in attention to religion in politics, particularly the role of religion in conflict.3 The majority of academic studies of this topic eventually argue that to understand religious conflict, we must focus on politics not religion. That is, conflict is the result of battles over material and symbolic resources by strategic actors rather than an outgrowth of primordial or irrational loyalties as suggested by the new atheists. Postsecular feminism is a way of going beyond this conclusion to ask not only what causes religious conflict but also how the sides in conflict are constituted, and how their interests, or preferences, are formed. Thinking through a concrete example is useful before returning to an overview of secularism and feminism.

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Triple talaq Indian secularism seeks to be equidistant from all religious traditions.4 The problem of religion in India was not that it needed to be privatized or eliminated, but rather that its multiple versions needed to be treated fairly. To achieve this, the state established a common criminal legal code but preserved religious personal codes to govern family law.5 One of the areas covered in this family code relates to varying grounds and procedures for divorce. In the case of India’s Muslims divorce can take place through triple talaq, which refers to the proclamation of a desire to divorce stated three times in front of certain witnesses. Some have interpreted it to cover a form of instant divorce where a man simply says “talaq” three times in succession to his wife (at times over the phone or text message), resulting in a life-altering split. This form of divorce has once again become a source of controversy in India after a 2016 case came before the Supreme Court. In Shayara Bano’s public interest litigation (PIL), she alleges that her fifteenyear-old marriage to an abusive husband was dissolved by him sending her a letter in which he wrote “talaq” three times. Her PIL to the Supreme Court asks that triple talaq be declared unconstitutional as it violates the equal rights of Muslim women. It follows on a 2015 invitation by the Court to revisit the issue of ending the personal law code system in favor of a universal civil code for all Indians.6 All of this is taking place in an environment that has become increasing hostile to Muslims in India since 2014; the Hindu nationalist party (the BJP) has taken office in many states and at the national level, providing cover to its adherents to carry out anti-Muslim vigilantism.7 Legal activist Flavia Agnes argues that Muslim women’s rights are already protected through a whole series of court cases and that this particular case is significant only in that it creates a platform for Hindu nationalist posturing as a way to intimidate Indian Muslims.8 The All India Muslim Personal Law Board released a statement in which it argued that triple talaq is permissible under Muslim law, that it is an ugly practice that should be eliminated through social boycott and better wording of nuptial contracts, and that determining its legality is beyond the scope of the secular Supreme Court.9 A number of feminists have spoken out in support of the Supreme Court’s intervention, but some have also argued against it.10 Progressive voices who generally support women’s rights have pointed out that the campaign against triple talaq is also a media campaign that reinforces certain problematic ideas. These include that Muslim communities “do gender wrong”11 and that

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Muslim women need Hindu men to rescue them from Muslim men.12 It is argued that in light of the Hindu chauvinist ideology of the ruling party in India, inviting a parliament with almost no representation of Muslims would lead to a Hindu chamber making decisions about Muslim families.13 This is hardly secularism, but rather a form of majoritarian bullying. Indian secularism would require the maintenance of religious authority in making and remaking family law. On August 22, 2017, the Indian Supreme Court released a 3-2 decision banning triple talaq. The lawyer who had argued the case, Mukul Rohatgi, rejoiced, saying that the ruling was an important step on the path to a Uniform Civil Code.14 Note that by placing the judgment within this larger goal he is essentially admitting that the state was not actually concerned about harms arising from triple talaq as such. Instead, the practice was seen as one more “special privilege” granted to Muslim men.15 That framing is echoed by the language of the Hindu right in contrast with the general argument of most Muslim feminists in India who argue for gender equality within the framework of distinct personal laws.16 The prime minister, who was accused of aiding an anti-Muslim pogrom in the early 2000s, tweeted, “Judgment of the Hon’ble SC on Triple Talaq is historic. It grants equality to Muslim women and is a powerful measure for women empowerment [ ].” In response to attempts by the BJP to use the ruling in subsequent elections as a sign of the government’s solidarity with Muslim women, a Muslim women’s collective issued a statement rejecting such a characterization while still supporting the court ruling. They state, The enormous media debate, after the judgement, underplayed the efforts of women’s movement and turned it into a game of political rivalry between BJP and Congress. In fact, BJP’s constant reference to the violent and gender discriminatory practice of triple talaq seems to feed into the imagination that the Muslim community is conservative and violent which also creates fractures within the community and legitimises the targeted violence of the men of the community in beef cases or in fabricated terror cases. We strongly condemn the appropriation of the struggle of women’s groups and want to reiterate that triple talaq could be declared unconstitutional owing to the sustained work of women’s groups in the community and also, because of the legal intervention made by grass-roots women’s groups in the apex court supporting Shayara Bano’s petition who challenged the validity of unilateral triple talaq in the court.17

A postsecular feminist approach to this dilemma would take a position similar to that of Flavia Agnes. She has pointed out that within Indian criminal law there are already a number of provisions that can protect Muslim women from

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abuses that are associated with triple talaq. She couches her argument for using these rather than a specific legislative reform leading to a universal civil code on the grounds that women who appeal to the secular authority of the state over their religious community risk ostracism and that they play into the hands of Hindu chauvinists. The danger posed by majoritarianism is greater than the harm experienced by women abandoned through triple talaq.18 Another feminist activist reminds us that when the state dabbles in such projects to “help” women from a particular community, the patriarchal leaders of that community circle the wagons and reassert their authority.19 Instead of women’s rights being advanced, the boundaries of religious communities are highlighted and policed through the sacrifice of women’s interests. All of this attention to the plight of Muslim women is a convenient way to avoid talking about the patriarchal structures that constrain all Indian women. “If destitute Indian women, Muslim or otherwise, are to be lifted up, then pointing fingers at fast divorces is but a distraction, a looking away from the fact that Indian society does not permit a woman to exist without a man.”20 Reforming triple talaq is a way to strengthen patriarchy within all religious communities in India. This is postsecular feminism as a normative guide to action which is based on an understanding of secularism as a political and therefore contested power strategy. One asks the following questions: ● ● ●

Who benefits from this secular settlement? Who is hurt by it? What is the history of religious community making in this context? How would this shift in the status quo affect the balance of power within this polity? Who benefits and who loses?

Secular settlements are not treated as sacred. Feminist subjects are not treated as given or assumed to have universal interests. I will elaborate on why these questions and assumptions are important below. Postsecular feminism can also refer to a theoretical lens in which feminist scholars take cognizance of the ways in which secularist assumptions have shaped theory and practice in the past. Doing so leads to the normative positions above, but also is about a re-examination of intellectual history with another dimension of intersectionality made explicit. The distinction between theoretical lens and normative guide is often not very clear. How we describe a problem is already imbued with theoretical assumptions and those descriptions shape our prescriptive analyses. Postsecular feminism is always both a way of seeing the world and a way of acting upon it.

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Feminisms There are many feminisms. The most dominant narrative of feminism is as an ideology and practice of centering women’s experiences in service of the goal of gender equity. This is what is often referred to as “white feminism” or “Western feminism.”21 It is dominant because feminists in the global North, who occupied positions of class and racial privilege, were the ones who were able to discuss, write, and publicize their views earliest and loudest. This meant that early feminism often developed in close alignment with liberal imperialism.22 This liberalism (best exemplified by John Stuart Mill) advocated for the protection of individual rights, trust in science, and a belief in the teleological progress of history while defending the empire.23 Thus, feminism demanded the extension of individual rights to women, saw science as its ally against religious natural-law doctrines, and thought societies were more advanced based on their adoption of women’s rights, all the while colluding in racial and imperial domination.24 As Bulman points out in this book, secular liberal feminism was always also competing with religious varieties of feminism. However, those are less well known and have therefore had less influence on the mainstream of contemporary feminist thought. After liberal feminism, the second variety of feminism that became influential was socialist feminism. Growing from Engels’s brilliant insights about the interconnection between private property and the control over women’s bodies Marxist feminists issued important challenges to liberal or “equality” feminism. They argued that the reproductive labor of women needed to be recognized and that women’s emancipation was joined with class liberation.25 But like their liberal sisters, socialist feminists sought individual women’s equality with men in the absence of significant racial critique. Difference feminists, unlike equality feminists (liberal and socialist), emphasize the ways in which women and men were different because of their biology and/or their life experiences. Difference feminism has been criticized for being essentialist and homogenizing the experiences of diverse women. More recently it has been seen as a form of trans-exclusionary feminism.26 However, many of the versions of feminism espoused by women of color in the global North and South have fallen into this camp. Womanism is a formulation popularized by Alice Walker as an alternative to white feminism in which quotidian life is the source of theory rather than theory driving practice.27 Others have argued that feminism is based on a false rivalry

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between men and women and that the experience of the formerly colonized is of shared oppression. Therefore, these women’s activists reject the term “feminism” to describe their own advocacy on behalf of women.28 Despite the disavowal of the term “feminist” by many of these activists, the work they do and the theorizing they do is what an outsider would recognize as feminist—it places the interests and understandings of women at the center. This is a feminism that is intersectional and as Nana Anyidoho points out in this book, this is a feminism that has always assumed religion is a part of women’s lives. Does feminism have a problem with religion, or just patriarchal religion? Alka Arora in her chapter sketches the history of secular materialism and how it has falsely claimed feminism for itself. But as she argues, there is no a priori relationship between religion or spirituality and feminism. The two may be at odds but they can also be helpmates. Other texts show that there is a multiplicity of views within religious traditions, some of which are ultraconservative and problematic from a gender justice perspective, but others in which religious actors can advance gender justice.29 Christine Cusack in this book describes the attempts by Mormon feminists to reclaim their faith in a way that honors their religious and female selves. Despite these varieties, the most dominant version of popular feminism remains one in which gender equality is based on giving women access to the opportunities and resources available to men. One aspect of this is to secularize women so that they can be free of the ideological restrictions placed on them by patriarchal religion. As Joan Scott argues, “The private/public demarcation so crucial to the secular/religious divide rests on a vision of sexual difference that legitimizes the political and social inequality of women and men.”30 That is, gender inequality and secularism actually go together. How have gender equality and freedom from religion become so closely linked? To understand this, one must read liberal feminism as a close cousin of liberal modernization theories, which are themselves the children of Enlightenment views of progress.

Secularism One aspect of modernization theory31 is the widely held notion that with economic development and education, people would lose their religion.32 This theory is based on a set of assumptions about religion—its function, its characteristics, its practice, and its dangers—that one by one turn out to be false.

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The notion of religion as blinding the individual to scientific reality is based on a faith in positivist science as well as a rather constricted view of religion as a set of (false) beliefs about the material world. Actually, religion is not just beliefs33 and science is not just facts.34 Sociological and political anxieties about religion were based on a reaction against Europe’s Wars of Religion and their aftermath. The theological origins of the “secular” and the peculiar relationship between the church and the secular world are established in the history of religion.35 According to José Casanova, “‘the secular’ emerges first as a particular Western Christian theological category, while its modern antonym, ‘the religious,’ is a product of Western secular modernity.”36 It is only once the church articulated a secular realm that the secular world could look to a religious realm. As Charles Taylor has clearly shown, the historical process of modern secularization begins as a process of internal secular reform within Latin Christendom, as an attempt to “spiritualize” the temporal and to bring the religious life of perfection out of the monasteries into the saeculum, thus literally, as an attempt to make the religious “secular.”37 In the twentieth century, the term “secular” has been adopted to refer to many things. Casanova identifies three primary uses of secularization. Secularization can mean the institutional differentiation of religious and secular spheres. It refers to a theory of the decline of religious belief and practice and/or a theory of privatization of religion as precondition of modern democratic politics. Each of these uses has both a descriptive and normative element to it.38 On the one hand secularization refers to a sociological process that may or may not occur. On the other hand it also refers to a sociological process that should or should not occur. The blurring of the line between the descriptive and prescriptive is the result of the ways in which power circulates via discourse.39 In Western Europe the differentiation of the religious and secular lead to the privatization of religion as a means of adapting to the political organization of society within nation-states with public spheres that were forced to accept a limited pluralism at the end of a bloody series of religious wars. This privatization was then followed by the decline in religiosity. This linear process was historically contingent but because of European colonialism and its concomitant production of social scientific knowledge, it became the “normal” progression that all societies are expected to follow.40 Today it is clear that religion is not in decline, in terms of how pious adherents are, nor is it disappearing from the public sphere. Habermas notes that “the European development, whose Occidental rationalism was once supposed to

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serve as a model for the rest of the world, is actually the exception rather than the norm—treading a deviant path.”41 He argues that the opposition of secularism and religion even within Europe is a false division and that religion remains an important source of guidance for many perfectly rational, reasonable people. So, in the rest of the world the project to privatize religion irrespective of local context and history is one based on a contested European norm. The important point is to note that the privatization of religion can occur without a decline in religiosity and neither needs to occur even if differentiation is taking place. The normative pairing of differentiation with privatization is of greatest importance. After all, if to be secular means to be privately pious, then a clear border between the religious and temporal implies a clear border between the private and the public.42 How is this border established? Through the delineation of private religion and public politics. While that sounds like a simple enough matter, it turns out to be far from obvious what is religious and what is political. The boundary between the two varies from state to state. The particular histories and cultural contexts of a society, the relative balance of power between religious authorities and state administrators, colonial legacies, contemporary geopolitical alignments, and so on shape how the border is constructed in each country. In fact, the secularist division of religion and politics is a thoroughly political process. As a process it is ongoing, contested, and open to revision. At any given moment in time we can see a particular secularist settlement. There is nothing natural or inevitable about these settlements.43 Each one is of course built on the ones that came before, but each iteration is new.44 That is, at a given moment a particular version wins out over other possibilities. At another time, with another configuration of power, another border is equally plausible.

Postsecularism The recognition of the flaws within secular theory and the fact of its political contestation have resulted in the birth of a new postsecular perspective.45 To be postsecular does not mean adopting some objective perspective above the rival claims of the religious and profane. It does not mean suggesting that religion does not matter. It does mean recognizing that secularism has been an ideological project that has sought to create realities that did not previously exist. To be postsecular is to disavow that normative project and to make policy with a consciousness of the

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historical legacy of that project. Smith and Whistler suggest the term “imperial secularity” to refer to this project and its colonial ramifications. “The secular in the hands of Western powers becomes an imperialist weapon, for the secular is always already interpreted as a particularly Western and post-Christian secular, rather than anything approaching a generic secular that can be located equally in all religious traditions.” The work of colonialism is not Christian; rather it is about the forced inclusion of the colonized into a secular modernity.46 Habermas has argued that the term “postsecular” should only apply to some states. “A ‘post-secular’ society must at some point have been in a ‘secular’ state. The controversial term can therefore only be applied to the affluent societies of Europe or countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where people’s religious ties have steadily or rather quite dramatically lapsed in the postwar period.”47 However, this is too limiting. A postsecular society is any society in which the state had advanced the secular project and now is willing to rethink it. In this book, it is used as a way of thinking about affluent and poor societies. While historical processes shape the way in which secularism, religion, and feminism are understood in different contexts, to suggest that these terms are not relevant to either the global North or the South is to reify differences in ways that are not helpful. The critiques leveled in recent years against secularism by a wide range of scholars have made postsecular approaches necessary. The use of secularist language to engage in Islamophobia in the West, sectarianism in the Middle East, and ethnic persecution in Southeast Asia in recent years has made the development of postsecular discourses an urgent matter. Talal Asad has suggested that all teleological narratives echo the Christian narrative that all heathens/savages will eventually come to see the ultimate truth that is Western modernity. So, even secular ideology is actually an echo of Christianity in which eventually all traditional and religious societies will come to be modern by being secular.48 Similarly, Laura Levitt has shown that the secular/religious binary is false as the two categories bleed into one another.49 The first step was to historicize secular settlements and show their contested nature in order to denaturalize existing divisions of the secular and the religious.50 “To give up on the idea of secularization is to raise the specter of abandoning the concepts of freedom, universalism, modernization, and progress.”51 A number of theorists pointed out that secularism has been compatible with terrible ethical choices and that perhaps religion has an important role to play in the public sphere.52 They have gone on to show that secularism and its associated virtues

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continue to play an imperialist role in the world today.53 Now, scholars are pushing this conversation further by considering alternatives to secularism and public religion.54 The second step is to relate these critical perspectives on the secular with feminist theory. Cady and Fessenden question the equivalence between secularization and gender equality, showing that the two are not the same.55 For example, historical feminist commitments to secularism in nineteenth-century United States served to reinforce white racism.56 Current controversies over secularism and gender in European Islam frequently serve to shore up gender unequal regimes of the larger society.57 And feminism seems to be both at odds with and compatible with different strands of the same religious tapestry.58 That is, feminism may itself be a spiritual discourse that is not at all compatible with secularism as state project.59

Future of postsecular feminism At least since Saba Mahmoud’s book The Politics of Piety, feminists have been pushed to seriously question the idea of women’s liberation as the purpose of feminism. She asks if there are forms of agency by women that don’t require them to be “free” of their faith or community or family ties. That is, as feminists can we support women whose aim is not to become unencumbered individuals creating their own good life? Instead can we embrace the struggle of women to lead good, meaningful lives within frameworks that are about effacing selves in service of a greater good? Postsecular feminism emphatically says “yes”! But, as Neera Chandhoke and Afiya Zia argue in this book, does this mean that postsecular feminism is a discourse that ends up destroying secularism and bolstering the power of conservative religious patriarchs? In that case, postsecular feminism would be just postsecular and not feminist at all. It has been argued that postsecularism is actually just anti-secularism.60 This is the concern articulated in the journal Feminist Dissent.61 Rather, as Hussain and Loftus show in their chapters, there are postsecular feminisms that through their attention to power in context strengthen internal feminist critiques of religion while defending communities against external critics who are engaged in imperial secularism. Postsecular feminism is particularly useful in thinking about how a historically disadvantaged group’s practices are viewed by dominant groups.

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That is, it offers guidance in how to support women who belong to minority communities that are often demonized on the basis of their religious practices. It means supporting women’s articulation of their understanding of a good life and supporting their ability to lead such a life, even when that good life is not one that liberates them. However, postsecular feminism runs into difficulty when adopted as a discourse that deflects critical perspectives on majoritarian or dominant religious practices. Postsecular feminism takes the position that dominant groups are subject to critique and interrogation by everyone while subordinated groups’ gender practices should not be available as weapons to disadvantage the community as a whole. This attention to power and context is what makes postsecular feminism useful. This also allows it to straddle the boundaries between cultural relativism and liberal universalism. The limitation of this approach is that it struggles with the many transnational discourses that cannot be neatly categorized as dominant and subordinate. This dilemma is sharpest in the case of postsecular foreign aid and how that runs into problems. Further work on this dimension is critically important.

Outline of the book This book features scholars who are in creative tension with each other. Some of the authors embrace postsecular feminism, others are skeptical, and some reject it outright as a useful approach to thinking and acting ethically. This diversity of voices is a strength of the book as it allows a full consideration of the implications and consequences of a postsecular feminist approach to action. The arguments put forth in this Introduction represent my views alone, but they have been informed by the discussions among the authors at a conference that first brought many of us together and then by the process of reading iterations of their chapters. The book is organized into three parts. The first part is an attempt to examine the relationships between the secular, religion, feminism, spirituality, and democracy as a frame for the subsequent discussions. The second part examines the way in which secularism and religious discourses are being used and challenged by feminists. How do people who are embedded within particular faith communities conceptualize the relationship between their feminist activism and secularism? The third part reveals the consequences of particular

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feminist and secularist configurations for development practices on the ground. Some of these authors push us to question the secular feminist fear of organized religion while others point to the dangers of postsecular feminists inadvertently propping up patriarchal religious authorities. The second chapter offers a historical perspective on the relationship between secularism, liberalism, and feminism. Bulman questions the dominant narrative that Europe moved from its religious dark ages into a secular Enlightenment in a smooth progression. He shows that there were multiple Enlightenments, including deeply religious ones. As Europeans first debated modernity and its challenges, both liberal/secular and religious discourses emerged that focused on the roles and rights of women. It was a political project to construct the progressive narrative and one that is historically inaccurate. The perception of feminism and secularism in conflict was not true and is not accurate. Arora then goes on to show that the feminist suspicion of religion is actually based in the fallacy of treating organized religion as the totality of religious experience. She argues that feminism can and does reclaim spirituality from patriarchal religion as a way of escaping secular materialist assumptions. Secular materialism is dangerous for feminist religion and is the problem, rather than patriarchal religion or state secularism itself. The last chapter in this part is a spirited defense of secularism as a state practice. Chandhoke argues that democracy and secularism are necessarily connected in the context of pluralist societies. She suggests that we need to learn to accept the uncertainty and indeterminacy of how secular states will manage the boundary between religious and secular. It will have to be based on context and the principle of protecting individual rights. She suggests that hardline secularism and postsecular approaches alike are fantasies of consistency that underestimate democratic politics. The second part of the book, “Feminists Navigate the Religious,” features contextually specific examinations of how feminism and secularism are articulated. Hussain argues that the populist movement led by Imran Khan in Pakistan appropriates certain ideas that resist secularism as a state doctrine that necessarily destroys the Muslim self. The idea of the Muslim is a creation of colonial encounters and the resistance to secularism by the erstwhile playboy cosmopolitan is deconstructed. Moving to India, Santhosh traces the ways in which Muslim women in the Southern state of Kerala are creatively engaging with tradition and modernity. He shows how a rejection of secular language by gender-conscious Muslim women is not a simple case of religious subjects

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rejecting secular modernity. Rather, the secular and religious are in constant contact and dialogue. They shape one another in ways that can be put into historical context and reflect the mutual constitution of the secular and the religious. The binary does not withstand scrutiny. Loftus questions the way in which Buddhists studies has come to define what counts as authentic Buddhism by reference to the academy’s neglect of Ambedkar as a religious thinker. This great social reformer is relatively unknown outside of India, and within the academic study of Buddhism is regarded as an ethicist but not a spiritual thinker. He argues that a similar silencing of Dalit feminism occurs in which secular Indian feminisms fail to account for the history of caste discrimination, which is a history of religious discrimination. To treat gender or caste as secular matter is a problem as articulated by Dalit feminists. Finally, Cusack shows how Mormon feminists face a dilemma similar to Muslim and Dalit feminists in that they are religious women within a minority group. They must contend with the mainstream’s suspicions about their religious group and the patriarchy they encounter within. She describes the attempts by Mormon feminists to advance gendered goals within their tradition in the face of skepticism and hostility. They are “doing religion” and “doing feminism” simultaneously. The third part of the book features two essays that relate religion, feminism, and economic development. The developmental state in postcolonial Africa and Asia placed the economic uplift of the masses at the center of state legitimacy. Even in the face of setbacks to this goal, women who are development workers persevere. Anyidoho suggests that they do so by combining their Christian commitments with their understandings of feminism. As she says, Ghana is not postsecular because it never was secular in the first place. Zia writes witheringly of the postsecular turn in feminism and development discourse. She sees it as a dangerous and misguided theoretical turn that undermines the struggle of Pakistani women workers while empowering patriarchal and violent forces. While this introductory chapter has made a case for the utility of postsecular feminisms, Zia’s chapter ends the book with a stark warning against postsecular feminisms. I invite you, the reader, to make your own judgment.

Part One

Provincializing Western Secularisms

2

Postsecular Feminisms in Historical Perspective1 William J. Bulman

At least since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the world has witnessed a striking resurgence of religion in public life. While it has often assumed a primarily national ambit—one thinks, for instance, of Protestant and Jewish fundamentalism in the United States and Israel, Hindu nationalism in India, and struggles over laïcité in France—even seemingly national examples have transnational components, from the Rushdie controversy in Britain to the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Other instances, such as the popularity of liberation theology in Latin America and the global spread of Islamic terrorism, are fundamentally transnational with national impacts, the Brazilian Popular Church and the September 11 attacks among them. In every case, though, these developments have forced democracies in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas to grapple with the place of religion within and without them. Amid the waves of controversy that have accompanied this development, liberals have been compelled to reconsider and defend the religious and moral dimensions of their political creed, both among themselves and in dialogue with adversaries to their right and left. Many secularist liberals persist in their efforts to eradicate religion from the public square and other prized institutional contexts. Others have tried, in a multitude of ways, to imagine liberal or at least democratic polities that more clearly produce moral goods and can accommodate at least some forms of religious speech on central matters of public concern. Critics of liberalism and liberal democracies have, in turn, declared them morally bankrupt, socially entropic, and hypocritically persecutory. They have pursued the implications of these critiques in ways that are about as diverse as the liberal responses to their contentions. But in general, they have either made broad proposals for reestablishing a moral core and religious inclusion in democratic

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politics or encouraged their followers to pursue the full implications of their alienation from liberal communities and polities, however those implications might be understood.2 It will come as no surprise that as the world has grappled with this resurgence of public religion, both secularism and its descriptive counterpart, the theory of secularization, have fallen on very hard times. Their current predicament is closely related to their historical trajectories. But as we will see, these trajectories are not quite what they seem. Secularization and secularism have never triumphed, and the Enlightenment that produced them was never a wholly secularist movement. Both secularism and secularization are and always have been deeply contested notions. Both are premised upon conceptions of religion and the secular that emerged in a European Christian context and were later imposed upon colonial societies throughout the world. The basic theological origins of religion and the secular, as well as the peculiar relationship between the Christian church and the secular world, are now fairly well understood. In Reformation Europe “religion” was largely synonymous with “true religion,” or in other words, with orthodox Christian doctrine and worship; the term religio was usually paired with vera or Christiana. All other forms of what we now call religion or religiosity, along with what we would now refer to as the secular realm, were lumped together as the “profane” and opposed to religion and the sacred, not simply set apart from them. A largely parallel, stricter understanding of “religion” in the Christian tradition associated it with the spaces set apart for monks and other “religious,” who had renounced the saeculum, or the temporal realm.3 Beginning in the later sixteenth century, in a complex process often referred to as confessionalization, Protestantism and post-Tridentine forms of Catholicism brought religion into the saeculum and destabilized understandings of both. In one dimension of this process, states were transformed into divine instruments of true religion, and laymen and voluntary associations assumed a more central role in Christian life. The century of religious warfare that resulted from the Reformation further destabilized the meaning of the religious and the secular, and further confounded any distinction between the religious and the political. This reshuffling was only compounded by the onset of Europeans’ encounters with the globe’s religious diversity in the course of their early commercial, colonial, and missionary ventures. By the end of the seventeenth century, the nascent social science of the early Enlightenment had emerged amid this increasing confusion. This science of humanity was largely the result of an exhaustive historical analysis of religion gone wrong conducted by scholars trained in the tradition of

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Renaissance humanism. They invented modern distinctions between the secular and the religious and between the sacred and the profane in response to constant internecine bloodshed and disorienting cultural encounters.4 More relativistic understandings of the religious and the secular emerged as part of projects for making religious war a thing of the past in Europe and perfecting the technologies of European religious, commercial, and imperial expansion abroad. Religion was taken to be a category that encompassed a huge diversity of Christian and non-Christian arrangements for human transactions with the divine. Its social and political import was increasingly discussed in generalized and universalized terms across time, space, and cultural difference. Enlightenment secularisms were one offshoot of this style of analysis. Once the deleterious effects of religion gone wrong were understood in universalized terms, European writers could devise universally applicable arrangements for social and political life that nullified these effects. Rigidly secularist theories emerged in this context as particular solutions to the problem of civil peace. They competed with less thoroughly secularist programs, and usually lost out to them. England’s most famous philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, for example, proposed the banning of all public theological speech. He thereby founded a tradition of thought that would lead, for instance, to French laïcité. But his proposals were almost universally despised for a century after he wrote Leviathan (1651). In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hobbes and other secularists were seeking to insulate European states from the sort of zealotry that could threaten their sovereignty and to protect religious minorities from violent persecution. Since the beginning of the Reformation, Christians had used their commitment to the independence and superiority of divine law relative to human law to justify revolt against secular rulers, as Puritans had done in Hobbes’s homeland in the 1640s. At the same time, the ideal of the godly magistrate was taken to justify both the persecution of heterodox minorities and wars against heterodox rulers. Despite their origins, however, these secularist visions themselves eventually became justifications for violence, initially in the form of European imperialism, and in particular, Orientalism. In the nineteenth century, European colonialism and social scientific knowledge production fell deeper into a mutually constitutive relationship. In the process, many Western experts eventually deemed secularization to be the normal progression that all societies were expected to follow.5 In the twentieth century, the term “secular” assumed a wide swathe of referents, and theories of secularization proliferated in a host of disciplines.

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Hardly any of the traditional usages of either term, however, sit well with the historical record, either within or without the West. It is certainly the case that the most straightforward measure of secularization—decline in religious belief and practice to the point where it becomes atypical or even nonexistent—applies only to a small segment of the world at a very late date: in particular, areas of post-1945 Western Europe and the communist bloc (the latter development, of course, was in any case largely state imposed). And when understood as an adjunct to broader theories of modernization, secularization theory is at its most glaringly deficient when we turn to the cases of the United States and Japan. There is a stronger case to be made for secularization in the West and beyond, of course, if we take it to denote the institutional differentiation of religious and secular (i.e., political and economic) spheres accompanied by a privatization of religious expression. In Western Europe the differentiation of the religious and secular, which occurred as part of the political organization of society within nation-states, supposedly forced religion into the private sphere. That privatization was then supposedly followed by a decline in religiosity. Yet as José Casanova argued over two decades ago, the privatization thesis rests upon the juridical conception of institutional differentiation (the “separation of church and state”) that prevails in liberal political and social theory. Only with a more sophisticated understanding of institutions is it possible to see that the beginnings of juridical differentiation between religion and politics in Western Europe were in fact concurrent with the emergence of an undifferentiated social or institutional sphere—civil society—in which public and indeed politicized religion immediately flourished. This dynamic has continued to the present day, and public religion may now be more present in civil society than ever before. Indeed, in the West, the role of public religion in modern polities is arguably weakest in places such as England, where institutional differentiation did not occur (England has always retained an ecclesiastical establishment), and strongest in the United States, where a strict disestablishment eventually prevailed. The prominent role of religion in civil society in most of the world today also defies any liberal theory of secularization that focuses on the privatization of religion as a precondition of modern democratic politics.6 In general, the important point is that the privatization of religion can occur without a decline in religiosity and neither needs to occur when juridico-institutional differentiation is taking place, because of the crucial role of civil society in modernity. The proposition that we (or parts of the world) are in fact living in a secular age can only be true if we adopt a fundamentally different understanding of secularity.

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The trouble with traditional understandings of the secular, however, did not begin with its Eurocentrism, its complicity with modern colonialism, or the glaring violations of its theoretical and normative dictates in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Traditional theories of secularization and traditional understandings of secularism fundamentally distort the history of even the early modern Western world, to which they are supposedly best suited by virtue of their origins.7 The project to privatize religion irrespective of local context and history has not been contested solely by the societies that have been unwillingly subjected to it. It has in fact been contested in the West since its very emergence. Secularization theory and secularism were not the products of a consensus among Europeans about how to reorganize their own societies after the Wars of Religion. They were elements of a series of partisan agendas. Only by appreciating this fully is it possible to uncover the ultimate origins of the weaknesses of secularization theory as a description of historical developments and the weaknesses of secularism as a normative perspective that can be universalized. An awareness of the contested emergence of secularization theory and secularism also helps point the way to more useful understandings of secularity. The most widely recognized point of departure for the secularist liberal tradition of institutions and ideals has always been late-seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Europe, where the Wars of Religion came to a close, and Renaissance and Reformation gave way to Enlightenment. However unpopular it has become in many academic circles, the “Enlightenment project” still serves as a cornerstone of both secular liberal self-understanding and anti-liberal and anti-secularist critique.8 While many participants in debates about religion in liberal polities now prefer to scoff or quibble at the Enlightenment’s pretensions to positive social transformation, few of them doubt that the Enlightenment was (at least ostensibly) a campaign for liberation, secularization, and philosophical rationalization. This summary judgment applies to the educated public, to seasoned politicians, and to scholars of religion, society, politics, philosophy, and theology. They continue to represent the Enlightenment, and in particular its earliest stages, as the cusp of modernity—a radical departure on every front, for better or worse. Eighty years after the publication of Paul Hazard’s La Crise de la conscience européenne, the classic account of the undeniable intellectual turbulence of the nascent Enlightenment, academic and public discourse resounds with echoes of the book’s opening sentence: “Never,” Hazard wrote, “was there a greater contrast, never a more sudden transition than this!” It

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remains conventional wisdom that after the mid-seventeenth century, Europeans suddenly discarded their intellectual and institutional heritage. “The quest,” as Hazard put it later on in his book, “had to be started all over again; the human caravan must needs set forth once more, this time along a new road, and heading for a different goal.”9 Yet unbeknownst to most philosophers, theologians, political theorists, sociologists, and other students of religion and politics, the nature of the Enlightenment itself—not to mention the secularism and liberalism often traced back to it—has never been more in doubt. Just as critics of secular liberalism have disputed the supposedly inherent and ever-increasing secularity and liberality of modern life, historians of the Enlightenment have uncovered extensive evidence of religious Enlightenment.10 To be sure, because Enlightenment is so central to liberal identity, when historians and other scholars living in liberal democracies have described the Enlightenment and the modernity it fostered, they have traditionally thought in terms of an essentially emancipatory phenomenon. This perspective continues, on balance, to prevail today. The Enlightenment, according to this view, was a philosophical critique of the religious and political bulwarks of Old Regime Europe and a rationalist espousal of individual political and religious freedoms. These freedoms were to be rooted in natural law and rights and ensured by religious toleration, representative and contractual government, and relatively unrestrained speech, inquiry, and association in civil society. Once this hoary vision of liberal modernity is invoked as a motivational or propositional summary of the Enlightenment, a rich historical tableau comes together effortlessly. In every version of this story, the heroes of the mature Enlightenment are the irreligious and the libertarian, and their intellectual currency is philosophy, the sacred discipline of the liberal canon. This Enlightenment turned its back on the past in every way. Europe’s religious wars, its fruitless persecution of dissent, and the confessional stalemate it reached at Westphalia in 1648 had proven the bankruptcy of the old order. To recognize this was to be Enlightened. It was to completely repudiate the intellectual and institutional inheritance of Renaissance and Reformation Europe, a world of public piety, literary humanism, scholastic theology, religious coercion, pastoral power, and divine-right monarchy. This world was to be suddenly replaced by a new metaphysics, the philosophical and scientific disciplines built upon it, the extremely limited versions of divine agency implied by it, and the classic liberalism that naturally accompanied it. The early Enlightenment was therefore intrinsically radical and blazed a trail for the philosophes, even if it was also

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appropriated later by the establishment and by tyrants, racists, misogynists, imperialists, and totalitarians. The fate of God in this interpretation of the Enlightenment is determined by the liberal conception of modernity and the widely discredited narratives of secularization mentioned earlier. In those stories, the Enlightened pushed God to the margins of learning, society, and politics, they eradicated the Christian God entirely, and they relegated religious belief to human minds and to the realm of privacy. This Enlightenment is the only general interpretation that has attracted widespread acceptance since the publication of Peter Gay’s two-volume masterpiece on the topic in the late 1960s.11 Behind this traditional understanding of Enlightenment can usually be found a specific contemporary agenda, in which the moral failures of society are to be explained not by the triumph of the Enlightenment project, but by a perennial resistance to that project’s most radical form, a resistance that was coeval with the project itself, and one in which the truly reactionary and the moderately Enlightened have always joined hands.12 Whatever the prominence of this interpretation, a great deal of recent historical scholarship suggests that we ought to discard every assumption underlying it. Perhaps the most troubling fact is that none of the supposedly characteristic intellectual activities of the secular, emancipatory Enlightenment consistently led to secularist or emancipatory arguments. One can easily find proud priests and the counselors, aides, and abettors of absolute monarchs making use of the same intellectual tools, not to mention the philosophes, who were after all more aligned with monarchs and their regimes of censorship than arrayed against them.13 This suggests, at the very least, that proponents of the traditional interpretation have mistaken an essentially political movement for an intellectual one. But the problems go deeper still. It is by no means clear that most of those who famously argued and fought for limited forms of religious and political emancipation in this period as a response to religious bloodshed were primarily motivated by a repugnance to oppression and a principled commitment to liberty, or even pretended to be. It is also unclear that the campaigns against priestcraft, persecution, and tyranny launched in this period drew their intellectual firepower from a rejection of the great disciplines and traditions of the Renaissance or an eschewal of the polemical inheritance, theological problems, and pious energies of the Reformation. Indeed the secularization component to the usual interpretation does not fare much better than the liberalization component. The rise of anti-Christianity, atheism, deism, and other impersonal

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or remote conceptions of the deity in this period are probably better understood as complex transformations in the nature of theological, metaphysical, and cosmological discourse than as a simple matter of subtraction or the advance of irreligion. And in the eighteenth century, as in later periods, the increasing importance of civil society in political life in no way led to the neutralization of public religion. Yet somehow, without a foot to stand on, this interpretation has retained its hegemony in historical scholarship. In fact, adversity may ironically account for much of its sustained relevance and prominence: perhaps it can only remain significant with enemies on its heels. After all, the secular liberal Enlightenment has been sustained by a political dialectic since its infancy. It was invented during its supposed apotheosis, the French Revolution, when revolutionaries, after their struggle to destroy the power of the Catholic Church, aristocracy, and royalty in French society, selected a literary canon with which they legitimated their actions. These actions included the 1790 radical reform of the church, the so-called Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which after it was condemned by the papacy turned even clergy who had been sympathetic to the Revolution against it and made counterrevolutionary sentiment a Christian duty. This in turn provoked the Revolution’s “dechristianization” phase, which ran from the Terror in 1793 to the end of the century. While it is often supposed that the Enlightenment produced the Revolution, it is more accurate to say that the Revolution concocted the Enlightenment. The revolutionary pantheon used retrospectively to justify these actions included what are now household Enlightenment names—above all Voltaire and Rousseau, but also Mably, Raynal, and others. The revolutionaries also depicted philosophy as an inherently critical, subversive, anticlerical force, when in general, it was nothing of the sort. The priests and other conservative writers among the Revolution’s enemies, following earlier critics of the philosophes themselves, actually complied with the revolutionaries in this effort. They joined them in identifying the intellectual trends of the past century with the Revolution, and specifically, with its radical secularism and anticlericalism. They did so, of course, only to label those trends and the Revolution itself as dangerously antiChristian and ultimately destructive, immoral, and tyrannical. At this point, the revolutionaries could not admit that Christianity had done anything to bring about the Revolution (although it certainly had), and conservatives could not be brought to allow any association between their faith and the revolt that had turned against their church.14

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Since then, it might be argued, much of the discourse about the Enlightenment has remained fundamentally unchanged. The currently dominant secular orders—either on the Lockean model or that of French laïcité, which was born during the Revolution—are and have always been heavily contested, partisan projects of civil peace, even in domestic, Western contexts. Today the secular, liberal, philosophical Enlightenment seems to be too useful to too many people to lose much credence. This is in part why it continues to be endorsed by most nonspecialist academics and by liberals and their conservative critics in contemporary culture wars across the globe.15 These groups, like their predecessors, concur on what the Enlightenment was, while their judgments of it are polar opposites. All agree that the West’s primary response to the horrors of the age of religious war was a movement toward liberal secularization guided by a metaphysically novel philosophy. This, at bottom, is what allows Christian traditionalists, evangelicals, and communitarians to assume that there is no place for religious voices in liberal polities today and to condemn those liberal polities on this basis. It is also what allows secular liberals of varying sorts, on the right and the left, to argue much the same thing, with the opposite normative stance attached: that it is the essence of liberal and secular modernity that religious voices be excluded from public discourse, and that any such inclusion, from radical Islam to Christian fundamentalism, is an inherent threat to liberalism and to liberal democracy. But what if it were possible to capture a different and more accurate understanding of our Enlightenment inheritance with regard to religion? In recent years, historians have indeed made a persuasive case for the existence of Christian Enlightenments in every area of eighteenth-century Europe. These Enlightenments often had clerical, orthodox, and ecclesiastical dimensions, and close ties to Jewish Enlightenment as well.16 On most accounts religious Enlightenment began in England after the Glorious Revolution, when moderate, tolerant Whig divines quickly and creatively assimilated Lockeanism, Newtonianism, and natural theology into both pious heterodoxy and Anglican orthodoxy.17 A similar set of moves were quickly made, often with considerable Anglican influence, in French- and German-speaking areas of Protestant continental Europe, and even in Catholic France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Austria.18 These facts have spurred a fundamental reconsideration of the overall ideological and political character of the mature Enlightenment. A revised assessment of the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment is a necessity not only for improved historical understanding but also for an

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improved discussion of the role of religion in liberal societies and polities. Religious traditionalists of all sorts have always recognized that many people of faith eventually responded to the Enlightenment by desperately seeking to accommodate themselves to the conditions, demands, expectations, and intellectual foundations of emerging secular, liberal societies. This is precisely the sort of liberal piety and theology that they continue to condemn both within and without their own confessional communities, in a manner that many find increasingly compelling. In precisely the same way, secular liberals use the commonplace understanding of the early Enlightenment as an abrupt departure from the past to bemoan the way in which since the eighteenth century, the promise of radical Enlightenment was dulled, blunted, and corrupted by the Enlightenment’s rapprochements with theism, liturgy, and Christianity. Even those who would argue that the Enlightenment was bound to produce these supposed deformities do so with an acceptance of the antitraditionalist rhetoric of the movement itself, since the errors they believe the Enlightenment produced are still taken to be recognizably modern mistakes. Yet if it turned out that the Enlightenment was not radically liberalizing or secularist in its infancy, all these rhetorical platforms would fall apart. The rich tradition of Enlightenment thought could then be used, in conjunction with entirely non-liberal and non-secularist traditions, to foster innovative thinking about the relationship between religion and liberation, instead of serving as a source of false dilemmas and superfluous conflicts. In fact, the turn to Enlightenment in the late seventeenth century was not spurred by attempts to eradicate or privatize religion, but rather by the emergence of what I call elite secularity.19 This process was aided by the continuing fragmentation of European Christianity. And while it is ignored by many students of secularization and the secular, the early modern phase of globalization—and, in particular, Europe’s exposure to the global dimensions of religious diversity in the early modern world—was also a crucial factor in this development. Both fragmentation and expansion were, of course, largely the result of the activism of European churches, states, and empires. This secularity was the emergence of a state of acute awareness among elites that their own religious commitments (or lack thereof) constituted a choice among many available forms of belief (and unbelief), all of which could be held by sane (if erring and partly unreasonable) people, because they were the products of complex historical forces. Elite secularity was in no way an inherent threat to Christianity, but it did lead Christians to understand their own Christian identity

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differently and to refashion Christianity and its defense under these conditions. It also allowed their enemies to attack their Christianity with the very resources they were increasingly using to sustain it. This environment of secularity shaped a series of positive initiatives for the protection of social order that are clearly distinguishable from their Renaissance and Reformation predecessors. But in no way were these initiatives all liberalizing or secularizing in any traditional sense. Under conditions of secularity it simply became increasingly clear to many elites that any successful proposal for taking Europe beyond religious war, insurrection, and tyranny would be one that could be defended in multiple registers and according to moral, religious, epistemological, and ontological principles that contemporaries of differing forms of belief and unbelief could presumably be expected to accept. As a result, both the central projects and the pivotal conflicts of Enlightened Europe were distinctive. Elites came to struggle over competing proposals for ensuring civil stability. Standoffs between belief and unbelief, and among believers, began consistently to feature immanent critique on all sides.20 The Enlightenment, it can be argued, was this new project of order, stability, peace, and well-being— the primary response of Europe’s elite to the onset of a secular age. Secularity profoundly influenced the way in which elites posed, answered, and tackled in practice the characteristic Enlightenment questions of civil peace and human flourishing that had been posed by Europe’s Wars of Religion. Enlightened solutions to the riddle of public religion tended to be defended with recourse to both immanent critique and purportedly minimal, shared epistemological and ontological assumptions. Alternative solutions tended to be refuted in the same manner. In this way elite secularity supplied a second guiding question for the Enlightenment: How could plans for moving forward be espoused and evaluated in a manner that people of widely varying types and degrees of belief and unbelief could possibly be expected to accept?21 The need to answer the question of civil peace under conditions of elite secularity accounts for the familiar turn in Enlightenment argumentation away from the theological, the demonological, the providential, and the revealed and toward the useful, the natural, the rational, the civil, the moral, the peaceful, the cosmopolitan, and the human. But because the original question of the Enlightenment was primarily one of stability, security, prosperity, and truth, the answers to it could be intolerant, absolutist, and imperialist just as easily as they could be liberal, egalitarian, or individualist.22 And because this question encouraged only the bracketing and not the rejection of advanced theological commitments, it by no

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means precluded pious individuals or religious institutions from participation. In fact, more conservative, authoritarian, and pious forms of Enlightenment were present from the very beginning. A fundamental source of rancor and confusion in interdisciplinary debate and educated discussion about public religion in the contemporary world can therefore be removed by turning to a more accurate and less ideologically partial understanding of our Enlightenment inheritance. The Enlightenment should be seen as containing the seeds of not only the Kantian, secularist, and contractarian forms of liberalism around which most academic debate still centers today, but also the seeds of a competition among a variety of ways of legitimizing a variety of responses to the problem of pluralism, from deeply pragmatic forms of proto-liberalism to liberal monarchisms and even modern confessional states legitimated by civil religions. Many of these forms of legitimation arguably have far deeper roots and resonances in modern society today than formal political theory, and they can be productively understood as changing traditions that can be articulated in more or less sophisticated forms. What all of this suggests is that historians need to be involved not only in the study of the Enlightenment but in wider discussions that essentially entail a debate over the contemporary nature and relevance of the Enlightenment project. Otherwise, what will continue to stand in for an accurate and productive understanding of the Enlightenment in the wider world of academic and public debate is a series of genealogies or traditional histories of ideas largely produced by philosophers and other theorists, accounts that invariably feature both a deeply metaphysical portrait of the Enlightenment and an ideological slant. Accounts like these are not simply implausible; they cannot best serve the needs of either scholarship or civil society.23 Feminism is certainly in some ways heir to the proto-liberal secularism of the Enlightenment.24 One might cite Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, for instance, as a prominent example.25 But a less partial view of the Enlightenment that registers its ambivalent relationship to secularism points to a less partial history of early feminism. In a postsecular genealogy of feminism, the ideas of a figure like De Gouges might be paired, for instance, with those of the high church Anglican, Tory feminist Mary Astell (1666–1731), who was long referred to as the first English feminist.26 When we look to the example of Astell, we see that it was not the supposed proto-liberalism of the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) that opened a space for feminism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After all, as many

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feminist theorists have shown, liberalism and the various forms of contractarian political theory that preceded it have been by no means necessarily positive forces for women’s liberation. The social contract is commonly built upon a sexual contract. Liberalism valorizes a public freedom that arises from a social contract but also tends to presuppose patriarchal right. In this way, in the name of freedom it regularly excludes women both from the social contract and from public life, and thereby reinforces their subordination in the private realm.27 Astell, by exposing the Whig political theory of her day as misogynistic, was one of the first to reach such an insight. The recent return by feminist scholars to labeling Astell and similar figures “feminist” has in large part been driven by a critique of a deeply liberal historiography of feminism.28 It was not Whig proto-liberalism but the social dislocation and moral uncertainty provoked by the Glorious Revolution that created an opening for figures like Astell, and in particular, for a profoundly religious feminism. In other words, it was women who were best positioned to fulfill a quintessentially Enlightened role in these circumstances, in accordance with the understanding of Enlightenment outlined above. Astell described women as practitioners of a purified, primitive Christianity that qualified them as the proper guardians of English morality. They had been left alone in this role, she argued, because men had so manifestly failed in their attempts to play it. Their moral regression was epitomized in the revolutionary Whig culture of masculinity and wit. According to Sarah Apetrei, Astell thus “gendered as male the decadent and godless liberal establishment at the turn of the eighteenth century,” merging her Toryism with her feminism and exposing the liberal myth that the two are antithetical. “It was their pious response to a moral, political and spiritual crisis,” Apetrei has argued, “which gave feminist writers between 1680 and 1710 a new and weighty sense of the righteousness of their cause.” In this context, at least, “rather than acting as a foil to, or even as an inadvertent platform for, new ideas about women, religion was potentially seminal to the whole intellectual and psychological process of conceiving a feminist critique.” Astell depicted heaven as Christ’s spiritual kingdom, but insisted that it was accessible in prayer, thus paradoxically rendering Christ’s kingdom as an earthly site for a better existence for women under domination. She urged wives to continue to obey their husbands not because the laws requiring this reflected a natural order, but because they were currently the positive law of the land, and as such could be altered, as she hoped they might be during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14). In the meantime, it was necessary for women to escape their likely

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predicament in marriage either through celibacy or through spiritual life within marriage; in either case, women became, as Astell put it, “absolute monarchs in [their] own bosoms.” She bolstered this position by reversing the usual gendered understanding of human psychology in her day, insisting that men were consumed by brutish passions and women by reason. “Right reason,” in her view, was participation in God’s nature. It was the locus of spiritual communion with Christ and his spiritual kingdom, which also happened to be the site of freedom for women in postrevolutionary society. In Astell’s formulation, there was no space for the right operation of reason distinct from spiritual communion. In other words, only in spiritual retirement from the world could one access right reason. Despite Astell’s adherence to the patriarchal order, her acceptance of gendered psychology, and her subordination of reason to divine lordship—not to mention her Toryism and high Anglicanism—none of her central arguments can be described as antifeminist, as a liberal or secularist perspective would seem to dictate. The fundamental reason for this, as Apetrei argues, is that Astell located reason in “the basic intellectual processes involved in human agency,” and to the extent that she gendered those processes, she identified the masculine form as relatively corrupt. Astell’s position here also fit seamlessly within a broader set of feminist claims that highlighted Astell’s ambiguous relationship to the religious and political orthodoxies of her day. For instance, she argued that because sexual equality was a question of nature, it was to be adjudicated by natural reason, not with reference to Scripture, as even John Locke and other Whig writers, not to mention their Tory enemies, had done. Astell thus attempted to separate theology and philosophy in service to her own arguments, in a typically Enlightened move. At the same time, she used humanist biblical criticism to refute misogynistic readings of Scripture. And ultimately it was Astell’s perspectives on human freedom and rationality that led her to challenge the exclusion of women from public life, because it justified her choice to put pen to paper, publish her writings, and engage with men in heated polemics.29 Dozens of other examples like this one can be drawn from the history of the non-liberal, Christian Enlightenment. They should lead us to reconsider whether postsecular feminisms are best conceived and understood solely as reactions against the Western feminist tradition, as both its proponents and detractors tend to assume. Instead we might think of postsecular feminisms as in part the successors of a foundational, contested species of feminism that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, a feminism that was coeval with liberalism and secularism but preceded their hegemony.

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Once we understand that the Enlightenment tradition was a diverse set of contested but fundamentally similar programs for human thriving and fulfillment within pluralistic societies, we can longer treat it as an intellectual paradigm that is inherently tainted (or graced) by its supposedly liberal, secularist, and irreligious character. At that point, the current configuration of culture wars in the West and the East, and between East and West, simply evaporates. Confrontations or dialogues between religious and secular perspectives can no longer be conducted or understood as struggles for and against the perpetuation and perfection of the Enlightenment project, as they nearly always are. Instead the Enlightenment becomes a resource for all parties in such debates, and a source of common ground among those parties. It also becomes a resource that is more easily combined with traditions that did not originate in the West. The erasure of differences that can lead to violence and the construction of common ground were, after all, the most fundamental practical goals behind the Enlightenment. It was meant to enable people with fundamentally different metaphysical commitments to come together in projects of human betterment. Much the same can be said of many projects pursued within the Enlightenment, including early feminism. Once we see that Western feminism was neither born secularist nor liberal, but was in fact rather diverse in its attitudes toward the role of religion and community in women’s liberation, there is very little reason to suppose that there is an inevitable conflict between secularist and non-secularist feminist projects that is rooted in their intellectual origins. The Enlightenment roots of so much feminist discourse cease to figure as sources of deadlocks, dichotomies, and divisions. Instead they become resources for novel formulations that result from a more accurate understanding of the Western tradition and its open-ended relationship to non-Western traditions. These Enlightenment roots also point to a model of discursive exchange, one designed to forge common ground in an environment of diverse epistemologies, ontologies, and identities.

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Re-enchanting Feminism: Challenging Religious and Secular Patriarchies Alka Arora

Introduction My life has been shaped by both a passion for feminism and a deep spiritual curiosity. Given that the major world religions, even in their moderate forms, have sanctioned women’s subordination, these two parts of my life have not always been easy to reconcile. Seeking to learn if and how spirituality and feminist politics might coexist, I focused my graduate studies on understanding how other women integrated these two dimensions of their lives. From a series of open-ended research interviews that I conducted with women in the Seattle area in 2008,1 one story in particular continues to captivate me, nearly ten years later. Sondra, a working-class bisexual African American woman in her thirties, recounted the following narrative about a near-death experience (NDE) she had had at the age of twenty: After I came back to consciousness, I was healing my body—I was like “God loves me!” And that was one thing no one could take away from me any more. I could never, never think that there was something out there that didn’t love me. The God that I had learned despised me because I was so imperfect actually didn’t. And that changed a whole lot, you know, because I’m like, wait a minute now, I can no longer be controlled by your viewpoint because I had more information that was given to me directly—by direct experience—to let me know that I’m okay the way that I am. And then I said, wait a minute, God loves me, do you know what I mean? No matter what anyone says, I wasn’t going to church, [I was] having sex with my boyfriend outside of marriage, all of this stuff that would send me to hell, none of that happened, and this beautiful loving energy was there for me and that was my first experience of unconditional love and what it feels like.

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Rather than affirming the patriarchal values of her inherited faith, Sondra’s remarkable experience offered her an entirely different framework. She credited this experience with enabling her to leave a Christian church she found oppressive and setting her on a lifelong path of healing and service. Her statement that she could “no longer be controlled” by the church’s perspective indicates that she came to develop an oppositional consciousness, one based not in religious ideology but in direct spiritual experience. What sort of epistemological frameworks do we need to make sense of experiences such as Sondra’s? While her specific experience is relatively rare, many women have experiences that can be characterized as spiritual, mystical, or non-ordinary. An even larger percentage of women have a belief in “something more,” beyond our senses. Certainly, many women relate to religion or spirituality in a way that reinforces internalized sexism. Feminists have been rightly critical of religion on these grounds. Yet, for other women, spiritual beliefs (and more often, spiritual experiences) serve as a counter-hegemonic force, enabling them to resist patriarchal conditioning while strengthening their sense of agency, meaning, and connection. My assertion in this chapter is that feminist thought has played insufficient attention to these latter types of experiences, and has done so because of a misplaced faith in secularism. My critique here is not of the secularism that prevents the formal influence of religion on state decisions, nor is it of the secularism that, in theory, treats all religions equitably.2 I wholly support these two aspects of secularism; without them, we have no counterpoint to the rising waves of religious fundamentalisms in today’s world. My concern, rather, is about secular materialism, the view that only the material world is real. Strict adherents of this paradigm deny the possibility of spiritual realms or states of being. Feminist secular materialism, then, can end up invalidating many women’s lived experiences when such experiences do not conform to materialist expectations. Further, as I aim to demonstrate in this chapter, it does so out of a paradigm that is imbricated with sexist and colonialist ideology. Secular materialism is often referred to as scientific materialism; because they denote similar ideas, I use them interchangeably in this chapter. The former term emphasizes how materialism is contrasted to religious worldviews. The latter, meanwhile, calls attention to the role of Western science in developing and forwarding the materialist paradigm.3 When I refer to secular feminism in this chapter, I am speaking specifically about feminism that uncritically accepts the materialist presuppositions that underlie both modern Western science and Western secularism.

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This “anti-spiritual” secular feminism is not representative of grassroots feminist movements across the globe; rather, it is largely the purview of feminists in the West and those elsewhere who have been heavily influenced by the dominance of Western epistemologies. It is a minority position that wields enormous power. As a result, the spiritual dimensions of feminists’ activism and theorizing have been downplayed if not dismissed in many feminist spaces, particularly in academia. As transnational scholar Jacqui Alexander argues, there is a tacit understanding that no self-respecting postmodernist would want to align herself (at least in public) with a category such as the spiritual, which appears so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition. Many, I suspect, have been forced into a spiritual closet. Ultimately, then, I argue that a transnational feminism needs these pedagogies of the Sacred . . . because it remains the case that majority of the people in the world—that is, the majority of women in the world—cannot make sense of themselves without it.4

In this chapter, I argue for a postsecular feminism that challenges the hegemony of secular materialism and its attendant “closeting” of spiritual feminisms. In order to do this, I contend that we first challenge the supposed neutrality of the materialist worldview, and instead locate it as an historically and culturally specific way of knowing that has exerted dominance over other ways of knowing. Second, we must pay heed to how this worldview has served colonial and capitalist interests, reframed rather than eradicated sexual and racial hierarchies, and intensified the domination of the natural world. To be sure, similar critiques can be leveled against most of our major world religions. Despite my pointed critiques of secular materialism, in most cases I still find it preferable to religious hegemony. Yet I resist the idea that our only options are “the two poles of Right-wing fundamentalism and secular rationality.”5 Rather, I believe that the third task of an effective postsecular feminism, after historicizing and questioning the materialist worldview, is to open our field of vision to see that there are—and have always been—alternate paradigms. Indigenous, animist, and pagan peoples perceive the world in ways distinct from the “two poles” mentioned above. So do members of Goddess spirituality traditions. Even within the dominant faith traditions, there are feminists and other progressives who focus on liberatory and anti-patriarchal teachings to resist fundamentalisms. Others find counter-hegemonic teachings in heretical traditions such as Gnosticism or in smaller, lesser-known traditions that have supported women’s leadership. From ancient heresies to modern “New Age” developments, there have always been ways that people have made meaning outside of the hegemony of science and religion.

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I do not claim that these alternate paradigms are uniformly aligned with feminist aims. Rather, my argument here is that, like the “two-party” political system in the United States, the “parties” of secular materialism and conservative religion tend to obscure our ability to imagine alternatives. Once we look beyond this narrow system, however, we can find both historical and contemporary examples of how spirituality has been a source of both profound healing and meaning for individuals and a source of collective resistance to oppression. Thus, I argue that the final, and most important, project of postsecular feminism must be to recognize, recover, and amplify religious and spiritual narratives that are anti-patriarchal and liberatory. Such narratives may be individual, as in the case of Sondra and other women who have had transformative spiritual experiences. They may be collective, such as those of the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers6 or of the first eleven women ordained in the Episcopalian Church.7 In either case, such narratives can open our imaginations to other ways of being, knowing, and acting in the world, ways that are in touch with the sacred dimensions of existence while also being fully committed to social change in the material world. To date, the discourse of secular materialism has not been able to quell the growth of religious fundamentalisms around the world. I believe that one reason for this failure is that the worldview of materialism is simply too limited to be able to combat the fears and insecurities that fundamentalisms feed upon. It also fails to meet the human needs for meaning, purpose, connection, and transcendence. What we need, then, is better religion, not anti-religion. Just as “bad” science (i.e., biased and error-ridden science) must be countered with more rigorous science, so too must “bad” religion be challenged by spiritual discourse that liberates and empowers. By paying greater attention to women’s spiritual lives and interests, postsecular feminists can become better equipped to draw on liberatory spiritual discourse in our resistance to fundamentalism.

Personal standpoint I enter this conversation on feminism, spirituality, and secularism as a firstgeneration Indian American woman who was raised Hindu. Having spent all my life in the United States, my knowledge of the secularism debates in South Asia is based only on secondhand sources. The feminist discourse in which I have been embedded is very much US based, but my ideas about religion and spirituality have been shaped by both my ancestral lineage and Western paradigms.

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While there were many aspects of the Hindu tradition that I embraced while growing up, there were two things that lead me to question my faith: one, the undeniable male dominance in our culture and, two, my Westernized suspicion that perhaps both the complex cosmology and the somewhat inscrutable (to a Western mind) ritual practices of my religion were simply “backward” superstition. I never got over the first concern. Instead, I came to see that Hinduism is not a monolithic tradition, despite what today’s Hindu fundamentalists would have us believe, but rather a set of practices and beliefs, with multiple variations, that were developed from the interplay of people’s encounters with the divine, their lived experiences, and their politics. I’ve found that I can find both sublime wisdom and incredible tyranny within this tradition—and that I have the agency to choose what aspects of this tradition to keep or leave behind. The second concern I had—that modern, scientifically minded people “knew better” than the naive religious—has, fortunately, been resolved. I am grateful to a graduate school mentor who helped me realize that the tools of critical thinking should be applied to all knowledge claims—including those of science. By historicizing the materialist worldview and seeing how it had political biases as deeply entrenched as the biases of religion, I gradually came to let go of its hold on my psyche. Meanwhile, my own spiritual experiences led me to develop trust that there is a deeper reality that what we can see or measure. My experience of academic feminism, however, was that it paid very little attention to women’s spiritual lives. With the notable exception of my mentor mentioned above, conversations about spirituality were very rare in my graduate Women’s Studies program. The theorists we studied were, for the most part, firmly steeped in a materialist paradigm. Debates between socialist and post-structuralist perspectives were commonplace, but both elided serious examination of spirituality. When we did read feminist scholars (such as Gloria Anzaldua) whose work addressed matters of spirit, the focus remained on their cultural or political arguments; their spiritual claims were largely ignored. I eventually found my way to teaching at a small graduate institution where women’s spirituality was studied seriously.8 I became exposed to a wide array of transdisciplinary scholarship that examines the interrelationships of women’s oppression, the domination of the feminine in religion, and women’s spiritual liberation. I have been as deeply transformed by this work as have my students, and it is this work that propels me to insist that feminist scholarship and activism resist the materialist erasure of our spirits.

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The sacred web of being Most of the world’s peoples have understood human existence as embedded within a multidimensional reality that includes nature, nonhuman animals, and a multitude of invisible beings and energies. While this basic cosmological orientation is shared, in varying ways, by the world’s patriarchal religious traditions, these traditions did not invent this worldview. Rather, humanity’s sense of the numinous preceded the historical development of patriarchal religions. According to Chippewa scholar Melissa K. Nelson, “No matter where you go on the planet, Indigenous and traditional cultures regularly refer to the ‘Original Instructions’ or ‘First Teachings’ given to them by their Creator(s)/Earth-Maker/ Life-Giver/Great Spirit/Great Mystery/Spirit Guides.”9 These teachings center on how to live in harmony and balance with both natural and supernatural elements of the universe. Without proper respect to these relationships, violence and destruction ensue—as they did when Europeans came to the Americas. In their resistance to the ongoing violence of colonization, many Indigenous feminists10 make two important claims: first, that it was the colonizer’s worldview and religion that brought patriarchy to their people and, second, that their resistance to colonial religion is grounded in traditional Indigenous cosmologies of sacred interconnectedness.11 Thus, it is patriarchal and colonial religion that is the problem, not the religious or spiritual impulse itself. In a similar vein, women’s spirituality scholars have argued that Goddesscentered societies predated the historical androcentric religions and affirmed life, dignity, and the interrelationship of all beings.12 Women, and especially mothers, held considerable power in these pre-patriarchal societies but they did not dominate men. Today, practitioners of what is called “women’s spirituality,” “feminist spirituality,” or “Goddess spirituality” seek to reclaim these earlier forms of religious practice as a liberatory alternative to patriarchal religions. Carol Christ, for instance, has argued that “Goddess symbolism undergirds and legitimates the concerns of the women’s movement, much as God symbolism in Christianity undergirded the interests of men in patriarchy.”13 These practitioners’ claims of a peaceful, egalitarian past—a “feminist utopia”—have been the source of much debate among feminists, religious studies scholars, and archaeologists.14 While I find the evidence garnered by women’s spirituality scholars compelling, I cannot claim to capture or resolve the complexities of this debate in this chapter, nor does my argument hinge upon it.

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Instead, I follow the lead of Rita Gross, who argues that “it is extremely unlikely that patriarchy prevailed in the earliest human societies.”15 We also know that such societies were certainly not secular materialists. Thus, the claim that moving beyond patriarchy requires the relinquishment of the spiritual sensibility seems ungrounded. If the human religious impulse predated patriarchy, how did it end up so fused with male dominance and hierarchy? Historian Gerda Lerner provides a clue in her groundbreaking work The Creation of Patriarchy. Lerner contends that patriarchy evolved in stages, beginning with men’s exploitation of women’s sexuality and reproductive abilities, continuing with the development of classbased social divisions, and culminating with the “dethroning” of the Goddess.16 In earlier stages of Western patriarchy, powerful goddesses continued to be worshipped even as women became socially and politically subordinate. Eventually, however, male monotheism took over and women’s connection to divine power was severed.17 Ultimately, according to Lerner, the “symbolic devaluing of women in relation to the divine becomes one of the founding metaphors of Western civilization.”18 While it does not specifically address Hindu patriarchy, I believe that Lerner’s model can also help us make sense of Hinduism’s paradoxical relationship to the feminine: while goddesses are worshipped by both women and men, women remain socially and spiritually subordinate. Lerner argues that “the spiritual and metaphysical power of goddesses remained active and strong” in ancient Mesopotamian societies even as human women were oppressed.19 What was true in ancient Mesopotamia remains true in Hindu societies today. Some feminist scholars of Hinduism have noted that Hindu patriarchy did not develop by eradicating goddesses but by domesticating them.20 Autonomous and sometimes-wrathful goddesses like Kali and Durga are worshipped by all genders but are not considered role models for girls or women. Rather, women are conditioned to model themselves on the self-sacrificing, husband-worshipping consort goddesses, epitomized by Sita. Susan Wadley notes that “the benevolent goddesses in the Hindu pantheon are precisely those who transferred control of their sexuality (Power/Nature) to their husbands.”21 Human women are similarly expected to cede control of their bodies and life force to men. In effect, each of the patriarchal religions molded the human spiritual impulse in ways that reinforce male dominance and other forms of social hierarchy; they did not manufacture the impulse itself. Rather than inventing the concept of the divine to sanction oppression, as some secular materialists

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believe, I contend that patriarchal religions narrowed the concept such that some beings are considered closer to God, Heaven, or Enlightenment than others. It is this welding of the religious sensibility with patriarchal values of dominance, exclusion, and hierarchy that has led to the myriad horrors of misogyny, holy wars, homophobia, and so forth. This “secular colonization of the divine,” as Leela Fernandes has termed it,22 has had far-reaching effects but, fortunately, has never been absolute. Religious feminists who speak from within specific traditions have done important work to demonstrate how their traditions contain both oppressive and empowering messages. Some argue that an egalitarian core to their tradition underlies layers of androcentric accretions. Within Buddhism, for example, Rita Gross has argued that though both historical and contemporary practices of Buddhism have been patriarchal, its “essential core teachings” are egalitarian.23 Other feminist theologians eschew the search for a “core” to religious tradition, recognizing that religious texts and practices are often “multivocal” in their treatment of women and gender roles.24 Ruether, for instance, rejects biblical “inerrancy” and points out that the Bible contains multiple and competing narratives about women. She argues that feminist Christians must challenge its androcentric narratives and highlight those that are woman affirming.25 In effect, religious feminists such as Ruether seek to actively construct religious teachings and practices in light of feminist values and women’s experiences, drawing upon specific traditions and textual sources as support. While traditionalists might argue that such feminists are taking too many liberties with religious traditions, feminists would counter that religious traditions have always been constructed by those who wrote, interpreted, and disseminated religious texts. Just as elite men shaped religious traditions to align with their own interests, so can feminist women reinterpret and reconstruct such traditions to support feminist aims. Women’s spiritual experiences play a key role in many such reconstructions. For instance, Judith Plaskow scrutinizes the androcentrism in Judaism’s structuring myth of Moses’s address to the Jewish community. She asserts that Jewish women have the agency to resist such androcentrism: On the one hand, women can choose to accept our absence from Sinai, in which case we allow the male text to define us and our relationship to the tradition. On the other hand, we can stand on the ground of our experience, on the certainty of our membership in our own people. To do this, however, is to be forced to remember and recreate its history.26

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Plaskow’s call here is for women to claim their rightful place in religious history rather than walk away from religion altogether. She and other religious feminists critique the sexism and misogyny of the world’s dominant religions while recognizing that such religions still contain teachings and practices that they find personally meaningful, resonant, and empowering. Speaking from outside today’s dominant traditions, many Indigenous feminists challenge the view that all religions have a patriarchal history; they cite the more egalitarian concepts of their own traditions, particularly as they existed prior to European colonization. For example, in an anthology titled After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World Religions, Apache feminist Ines Talamantez asserts that “in contrast to the view of many authors in this volume, many of whom deem their own inherited traditions patriarchal, I believe the Apache not to be.”27 While patriarchal values have certainly infused many Indigenous societies over time, Indigenous activists by and large such attribute such values to colonization and colonial religion, not to the religious impulse itself. As Morris Berman notes in The Re-enchantment of the World, people held a spiritual consciousness throughout 99 percent of human history.28 This consciousness has not always been fused with oppressive values. While patriarchal authorities and institutions have dominated the religious landscape for most of recorded history, counter-hegemonic spiritual voices have always struggled either in secret or on the margins of mainstream traditions. The notion that there is something beyond the material world was not simply conjured up by tyrants to pacify and control those with less power. Rather, the human spiritual impulse has taken myriad forms throughout time and space: in some forms, it has supported the agency of women and other subordinate groups (who have not always been subordinated) and in other forms, it has buttressed social oppressions. How then did feminists come to believe that the worldview of the 1 percent, comprised largely of elite white males, would save us?

Fundamentalist materialism The story that is told in the West about secular or scientific materialism is that it is the natural outcome of humanity’s social and intellectual evolution, that it can provide a rational corrective to the prejudices of religion, and that it must

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eventually prevail over the myriad spiritual belief systems extant across the globe. Many feminists have adopted this story as well, believing materialism to be the necessary—and only—antidote to the sexism, racism, and homophobia sanctioned by religious texts and practices. What is missing from this story, however, is an historical understanding of how scientific materialism, too, is linked to oppression and domination. Below, I posit a number of shortcomings inherent in the materialist paradigm. First, the secular materialist worldview is deeply linked to colonialism and its ongoing “epistemic violence” against non-Western ways of knowing. Second, this worldview has perpetuated sexist ideologies, giving such ideologies scientific rather than religious legitimacy. Third, it has served capitalist interests and abetted the devastation of the earth and nonhuman animals. Fourth, the hegemony of the materialist worldview has led to the silencing, ridicule, and pathologization of spiritual experiences. Fifth, with deep roots in Judeo-Christian thinking, secular materialism is not truly secular. Finally, I argue that materialism retains its power by masquerading as a “neutral,” unmarked worldview against which all other worldviews must be judged. To the extent that it silences other ways of knowing while itself not being open to question, it serves as a sort of “fundamentalism.” Thus, I adopt Robert Wilson’s term “fundamentalist materialism” to highlight the dogmatism that often accompanies materialist philosophy, as well as its parallels to religious fundamentalism.29 The fundamentalist materialist position has roots in the Western European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers made two claims that would radically alter the way many Europeans—and eventually many people around the world—perceived reality and shaped social institutions. The first was that the world operates according to universal, predictable laws that do not require divine intervention. During the period of the Enlightenment, scientific formulas replaced religious doctrines as explanations for the mysteries of existence. The resulting philosophy of materialism held that everything could be explained through an investigation of matter. The second, related, claim was that religion and politics should occupy separate spheres. If scientific materialism could explain the natural world, it followed that materialism could help political leaders understand and rule the social world as well. To be sure, Enlightenment philosophers were not atheists, by and large. Rather, they held that God (understood in Christian terms) had originally set the universe in motion, but having done so, had discreetly exited the scene. Thus, for scientific and political purposes, it was almost irrelevant

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whether one had faith in a deity or not. Religious faith, in this view, should be a matter of individual conscience, not social policy. In many ways, this separation of church and state was a revolutionary move. Materialist philosophers challenged the hegemony of clerical authorities. They sought to free themselves from the grips of a religious and political structure that persecuted scientists whose theories contradicted religious dogma. By and large, Western history has described the Enlightenment as a time when religious tyranny was replaced by individual freedom and scientific reason began to prevail. However, this narrative of the Enlightenment, like all narratives, is partial (in both senses of the word). First, it fails to account for the colonial dimensions of the Western Enlightenment project. While Western scientists challenged the religious persecution of elite white men who disagreed with the church, they did not question the church’s denigration of non-Western religious traditions, nor its role in justifying colonial conquests. Indeed, much of the scientific knowledge that was developed at this time drew from information gathered during colonial expeditions. Moreover, the Enlightenment narrative depicts the specific European conceptualization of reason as the pinnacle of human philosophy. Dussel, a liberation theologian from Argentina, describes this Western metanarrative as one where humanity is on a path from “primitivism to secularism.”30 He writes: Beginning with a mythical, irrational, infantile time of primitive cultures, history in this view continues to reach superior levels of humanization, from the Orient (from China, Hindustan, and Persia) to the “Classic Age” par excellence of the West (through the Greeks and Romans), passing from antiquity through the “Dark Ages” of medieval Christiandom. Through this world history of religions final and universal maturity is reached in Latin-Germanic Modern Europe, where self-conscious rationality is discovered and expressed in reasoned Enlightenment, knower of its own content.31

Dussel links this metanarrative to colonialism, as the West takes over the land and bodies of other peoples while denying their forms of knowledge as well as their humanity. The Enlightenment vision, he argues, is “Eurocentric, colonialistic, and reductive of other types of rationality which nonetheless have not been exhausted, despite such definitive judgments hurled against them by modern secularism.”32 Enlightenment thought did not eliminate the binary of Christian/heathen that the church had used, in collusion with colonial forces, to subjugate Indigenous peoples around the globe. Rather, it developed a new

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binary that proved to be just as powerful as that developed by the Christians: rational/irrational. Second, the charge of irrationality that has been levied against non-Western belief systems has also been applied to women, of all backgrounds. While Christianity cast women as more sinful than men, science asserted that women were inherently less rational. Years of feminist activism have helped to sway mainstream scientific opinion in this regard, yet the specter of being considered “irrational” forever looms over women. Intuitive or spiritual ways of knowing have been degraded and feminized. As a result, even feminist women seek to distance themselves from, and often disparage, women who express perspectives rooted in nonmaterialist frameworks. A third facet of modern scientific materialism that we must consider is how its “disenchantment” of the world was linked to capitalist interests. According to Berman, the European worldview prior to the Scientific Revolution was “enchanted”: “rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt at home in this environment.”33 Scientists who held on to this belief in “participating consciousness” were at odds with those who espoused a purely mechanic philosophy. Notably, the former worldview was associated with political radicals and was “economically inconvenient” to proponents of laissez faire capitalism.34 Thus, the Cartesian worldview’s eventual “triumph over the metaphysics of participating consciousness was not a scientific but a political process; participating consciousness was rejected, not refuted.”35 Ecofeminist philosopher Carolyn Merchant also examines the linkages between the Cartesian worldview and capitalism in The Death of Nature, which traces how the emergence of a “mechanistic” worldview during the Scientific Revolution removed ethical sanctions against ruthlessly exploiting nature. Prior to this time, Earth and the whole of the natural world were described in motherly, feminine terms. Though maternal nature could be alternately “nurturing” and “wild,” it was seen as alive and therefore deserving of ethical consideration. Merchant writes: One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold or mutilate her body, although commercial mining would soon require that. As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destructive acts against it.36

For proponents of the mechanistic worldview, however, such ethical concerns were meaningless. Many scientists of this era even encouraged the domination of nature. Merchant cites Francis Bacon, who wrote that “the new man of

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science must not think that the ‘inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden.’ Nature must be ‘bound into service’ and made a ‘slave,’ put ‘in constraint’ and ‘molded’ by the mechanical arts.”37 This attitude toward nature was convenient for growing mining industries and other capitalist endeavors. The materialist worldview also intensified our domination of nonhuman animals. To be sure, human use (and even abuse) of animals existed prior to the disenchantment of the world. However, religious traditions have traditionally held that animals deserve moral consideration. Eastern and Indigenous traditions have viewed animals as similar to humans in possessing inherent sanctity and worth. The Abrahamic traditions gave animals a lesser status, considering them to be bereft of the souls that only humans were believed to possess. Yet even these religions traditionally imposed sanctions on how humans could treat animals.38 As the capitalist drive to maximize profits became bolstered by the materialist belief that animals were no different from machines, these sanctions were eroded.39 The idea that animals were fundamentally no different from things and hence could be vivisected or produced in factories was thus one of the devastating effects of the materialist paradigm.40 Another harmful effect of this paradigm has been its pathologization of anyone who admits to non-ordinary experiences. As the materialist worldviews became ascendant in Western culture, those who challenged it have been considered mentally unstable. Stanislav Grof, a leading thinker in the field of transpersonal psychology, writes, “People who have direct experiences of spiritual realities are in our culture seen as mentally ill. Mainstream psychiatrists make no distinction between mystical experiences and psychotic experiences and see both categories as manifestations of psychosis.”41 Grof also notes that mystics around the world have been pathologized in the psychiatric literature: St. John of the Cross has been called a “hereditary degenerate,” St. Teresa of Avila dismissed as a heretical psychotic, and Muhammad’s mystical experiences have been attributed to epilepsy. . . . Many other religious and spiritual personages, such as the Buddha, Jesus, Ramakrishna, and Sri Ramana Maharshi, have been seen as suffering from psychoses, because of their visionary experiences and “delusions.” Similarly, some traditionally trained anthropologists have argued whether shamans should be diagnosed as schizophrenics, ambulant psychotics, epileptics, or hysterics.42

Christianity often cast those exhibiting unusual behaviors as witches or as heretical, evil, or possessed. Western science, unfortunately, has simply replaced these designations with psychiatric labels and has a history of treating those so

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labeled nearly as harshly as the church treated witches. It has only been because of the activism on the part of the “mentally ill” and their families that changes have been made to the mental health system. While the fields of psychology and psychiatry have certainly helped individuals in some circumstances, they have also contributed to the secular materialist certainty that anyone who believes otherwise must be “crazy.” Further, secular materialism purports to be wholly distinct from religion, when in fact it inherits certain key beliefs from Judeo-Christian cosmology, such as beliefs in linear time and historical progress. Our retributive justice system can be traced to Judeo-Christian notions of punishment, in contrast to restorative justice systems based on notions of interdependence.43 Moreover, anyone who participates in the institution of marriage, whatever their individual spiritual beliefs, enters a contract that is fundamentally rooted in religious traditions. Finally, what is perhaps most problematic about the secular materialist worldview is that, like whiteness or maleness, it too often remains unmarked. Just as whiteness has functioned in the West as the unmarked race against which all others are compared, and males have been the generic “humans,” so has the secular worldview seen as the neutral, unmarked position from which spiritual or religious claims must be assessed. However, as Rosi Braidotti notes, “all beliefs are acts of faith, regardless of their propositional content—even, or especially, when they invoke the superiority of reason, science and technology.”44 Materialism takes on a fundamentalist flavor when its adherents brook no possibility that its claims are contestable. As I have demonstrated above, the secular materialist worldview is not politically neutral nor is it objective. Rather, it emerged out of a particular set of historical conditions in the West and has supported colonial and capitalist interests. Secular materialism did not eliminate religious oppressions; it simply shifted the discourse. Heathens became primitives, evolutionary biology replaced God’s design as the reason for women’s subordination, and ordinary people who believe in the supernatural are considered naive at best and seriously mentally ill at worst. By highlighting the harms done in the name of science and materialism, I do not mean to diminish the ways in which people have drawn upon such discourses to create progressive change. Feminists and others have challenged sexist and racist science with better science, for instance, by demonstrating the flaws in research designs that “proved” the inferior intelligence of women or people of color. The paradigm of scientific materialism includes within it the

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means for challenging and refuting claims, by utilizing more rigorous research. Science’s openness to having specific scientific hypotheses challenged and refuted is a wonderful thing; however, it has not yet brooked any questioning of its bedrock assumptions that matter is inert, that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of matter, and that spiritual realms and beings are simply figments of credulous people’s imaginations. Returning for a moment to Sondra, whose story began this chapter, what would scientific materialism have to say about her NDE? “Even if I were to have a near-death experience myself,” one scientist has purportedly stated, “I would conclude that I was hallucinating, rather than believe that my mind can exist independently of my brain.”45 According to Grossman, a NDE researcher, this is what an academic colleague told him when asked what he would do if he were to experience an NDE himself. Grossman argues that for this colleague, as well as for the majority scientific community, “materialism is the fundamental paradigm in terms of which everything else is explained, but which itself is not open to doubt.” It is this “fundamentalist” aspect of secular materialism that has been harmful in its attempt to replace the voices, histories, and experiences of the world’s majority with its own reductionist vision.

Spiritual closets and secret histories Clinging to the promise of secular materialism as the only corrective to fundamentalist religion, feminists, like many others on the left, have attempted to challenge one form of absolutism with another. When feminists uncritically accept the assumptions of fundamentalist materialism—for instance, that only that which can be measured is real, and that consciousness is but an artifact of matter—they fail to recognize these assumptions as historically situated narratives rather than absolute truths. They also become complicit in the silencing and shaming of people who express worldviews and share experiences that run counter to this materialist narrative. One of the effects that this has had is marginalizing the spiritual aspects of women’s lives, particularly in academia. “My peers and colleagues mostly thought of religion as a kind of joke,” writes bell hooks of her experience as a university student, “They ridiculed and mocked the idea that any smart person could sustain belief in God.”46 Jocelyn Moody, meanwhile, comments that academics too often “read a false dichotomy between spiritual and rational,

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between religious and political in religious matters, and they disparage these matters as unsophisticated, untenable, or specious.”47 And, as quoted earlier, Jacqui Alexander notes that the dominance of the fundamentalist materialist worldview has had the effect of “forcing feminists into a spiritual closet.” Moreover, the hegemony of secular materialism has nearly invisibilized what I call the “secret spiritual history”48 of feminism. Numerous spiritual women have helped to advance feminist thought and activism. However, the spiritual lives of our feminist foremothers are rarely discussed in feminist discourse. Fortunately, a few notable scholars have taken on the challenge of uncovering and documenting this secret history. Gerda Lerner, for instance, locates the emergence of “feminist consciousness” in women mystics. According to Lerner, female mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–c. 1413) derived an authority to speak from their mystical experiences and visions. Other women found authority through smaller Christian groups, such as the Cathars and Beguines, that supported women’s equality with men. Although the female mystics may not have conformed to contemporary notions of feminism— and many even accepted the doctrine of women’s intrinsic weakness—they nevertheless broke new ground for women by claiming the right to speak and to teach. While tradition and religion “inculcated in women a deep sense of mental inferiority,”49 mystical revelation provided “an alternative mode of thought to patriarchal thinking.”50 For Lerner, the efforts of religious women to assert spiritual authority prefigured women’s struggles for political authority. Moving to a different historical era, Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits charts the co-emergence of Spiritualism and feminism among mid-nineteenth century American women. As a new religious movement that stressed each individual’s connection to the divine and supernatural realms, “Spiritualism formed a major—if not the major—vehicle for the spread of women’s rights ideas in mid-century America.”51 For the modern secularist, Spiritualism’s focus on channeling and séances might seem quite bizarre and unrelated to political activism. However, the Spiritualist belief that women’s relationship to the divine need not be mediated or sanctioned by male-dominated churches gave women a deep sense of personal agency. Moreover, trance states freed female mediums’ psyches from societal constraints.52 Jocelyn Moody’s study of the autobiographies of six African American “holy women” of the nineteenth century offers another perspective on the connection between spiritual expression and political authority. Although the women

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she examines drew from a more traditional theology than their Spiritualist counterparts, they were part of the black tradition of reinterpreting Christianity as a liberatory force. In their narratives, black holy women speak to being called by the divine to “prick the nation’s conscience.”53 Arguing against slave owners’ conceit in disregarding God’s design, these women exercised both spiritual and political authority. Through their religious work, black holy women found avenues in which they could command respect and exercise agency. Quaker women, too, played an important role in first-wave feminism, and comprised the majority of delegates at the historic Seneca Falls Convention.54 Unlike more dominant forms of Christianity that relied upon religious authorities, Quaker philosophy stressed an individual’s connection to their own inner voice and conscience. Leaders of the Convention were thus guided by spiritual inspiration that came from within. Helen LaKelly Hunt highlights part of the declaration made by these women: The time has come for woman to move in that sphere which Providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied with the circumscribed limits with which corrupt custom and a perverse application of the Scripture have encircled her.55

She points out that these feminists differentiated between their personal religious experience and felt sense of equality, on the one hand, and an oppressive institutionalized church on the other. Likewise, Leigh Schmidt argues, “to spiritualize (and de-institutionalize) religion, to embrace the liberal notion that religion was chiefly a matter of the individual in solitude, was for many firstwave feminists and their allies an important move.”56 Hunt also points out that mystical experience was the transformative event that turned an enslaved woman named “Belle” into Sojourner Truth, a preacher and abolitionist who has become a feminist historical icon. During this mystical experience, Belle realized that God was everywhere in everything. “There was no place where God was not,” she proclaimed . . . . This realization strengthened Belle’s inner voice. What began as a whispered prayer to God became a crystallized understanding that she and her children deserved to be free . . . . She asked God for a new name, and He gave her “Sojourner Truth.”57

Years later, another “bell”—bell hooks—had similar experiences. In fact, hooks explains that it was early experiences of religious ecstasy within the black church that politicized her: “It was those mystical experiences that enabled me to

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recognize that the Beloved offers us a realm of being and spiritual experience that transcends the law, that is beyond the authority of man.”58 Although hooks later left the church due to its sexism, her engagement with spirituality only deepened over time.59 Numerous other feminists of color have written about the links between their spirituality and their politics.60 A number of African American feminists have argued that their activism is guided by liberatory readings of Christianity, Indigenous African religions, or a blending of the two.61 Many Chicana and Asian feminists have also written about the complex ways in which they have negotiated spiritual terrain, resisting patriarchal indoctrination while holding on to spiritual wisdom from either their natal or adopted traditions. Yet, even when such feminists are as highly regarded as hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, and Alice Walker, we find that much of the feminist commentary “secularizes” their work, downplaying if not erasing the importance that spirituality played in each of their lives. For instance, Anzaldua’s concept of mestiza consciousness is frequently discussed in texts that address feminisms of color, while her focus on spiritual initiation, transformation, and activism is generally elided. When viewed through a Eurocentric and materialist lens, the spirituality of feminists of color is considered a mere cultural artifact rather than the fount of meaning and agency. The largely Euro-American women’s spirituality movement which emerged during the second wave of US feminism has also remained on the margins of feminist thought, despite its many contributions to both women’s liberation and ecological activism. In its early years, women’s spirituality was often marginalized, and even ridiculed, by materialist feminists. For instance, in a published debate about secular versus materialist feminism, Susan Binford (representing the materialist perspective) wrote: What the study of the past can teach us is that as long as women do not have a fair share of the economic pie, as long we do not control our own reproductive capacity, our access to power is severely limited. It is time to struggle with real issues of power and not to fritter away our energies rebuilding myths and doing our own version of the Ghost Dance.62

Binford’s comment demonstrated not only an anti-spiritual bent but also antiIndigenous racism; as I argued earlier, these two prejudices have historically been linked. Far from being an isolated critique, Binford’s statement echoes much of the hostility that spiritual feminists have faced from their secular peers.63 Contrary to what critics such as Binford assume, many feminists throughout history have had spiritual experiences that bolstered their ability to resist

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patriarchal norms. Of note, it has generally been women’s personal experiences of the divine, rather than their adherence to religious doctrine, that has supported such political agency. However, the biases of secular materialist feminism have obscured the spiritual history of our feminist antecedents. I therefore contend that it is time for the emergence of a postsecular feminism that can resist these materialist biases and amplify the spiritually radical voices of women.

Conclusion Feminist scholars of religion routinely employ Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” when examining religious texts, paying attention to how political motives underlie “surface level” meanings.64 For instance, feminist theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza argues that “a hermeneutics of suspicion scrutinizes both the presuppositions and interests of interpreters and that of biblical commentators as well as the androcentric strategies of the biblical text itself.”65 Feminist scholars and practitioners from non-Christian traditions have used similar strategies for questioning their faiths’ sacred texts and practices. Amina Wadud applies this method of “suspicion” to Islam,66 for instance, and Rita Gross does the same for Buddhism.67 My assertion in this chapter is that a postsecular feminism must extend this hermeneutics of suspicion to the secular materialist paradigm as well. This paradigm is not simply a neutral stance against which other ideologies can be assessed, as its proponents generally make it out to be. Rather, secular materialism is a culturally and historically specific worldview that arose in concert with European projects of capitalist expansion and conquest of peoples and of nature. Certainly, secular materialism did not engender sexist and racist hierarchies— those have been rife in religion—but nor did it liberate us from them. To be sure, my call to question the neutrality of the Western scientific paradigm is not new. Feminist epistemologists have long since argued that such objectivity has been a mask for white male subjectivity. They have shown how androcentric and Eurocentric perspectives have shaped both the questions that scholars ask and the answers that they find. The work of feminist epistemologists has informed what feminists see as valid claims about our social and political worlds, and even our biology. However, for the most part, the epistemological critique of scientific objectivity has not uprooted the feminist reliance on a materialist worldview.

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Thus, my claim here is that a postsecular feminism must take the critique of scientific objectivity one step further by questioning the materialist worldview that underlies most of our politics. This questioning need not lead us toward an uncritical acceptance of religion as the only alternative. Rather, what I have endeavored to show in this chapter is that we must pay greater attention to perspectives that are beyond the bounds of patriarchal religion and patriarchal materialism. I believe that Fiorenza’s Christian feminist hermeneutics can be instructive here. She calls for a “hermeneutics of memory and reconstitution, of imagination, and of transformation” that moves her tradition from critiquing oppression to crafting liberatory alternatives.68 Postsecular feminists can adapt this model beyond the Christian faith to remember and recover women’s spiritual narratives across a range of traditions. We can also seek out the spiritual voices of women who speak from outside of any codified religious tradition. By amplifying the counter-hegemonic spiritual voices of both historical and contemporary women, we can begin to uncouple the association between spirituality and conservatism. A postsecular feminism therefore requires us to suspend the automatic distrust of women’s accounts that are considered “irrational” within a materialist metaphysics. In other words, we begin to listen to women such as Sondra, whose story began this chapter. Such listening creates space for women to come “out of the spiritual closet” and join together to challenge both religious and secular patriarchies.

4

Rethinking Secularism and Democracy Neera Chandhoke

The dilemma The troubled relationship between religion and political secularism—in the specific sense of a democratic norm—can hardly be resolved by dispensing with the latter, particularly in the context of a multireligious society. Nevertheless, we have to recognize that the troubled relationship between the two needs rethinking, simply because it poses a serious dilemma for democratic theorists. Dilemmas, wrote the philosopher Bimal Matilal, are like paradoxes, and genuine paradoxes are seldom solved. “They are generally speaking, resolved or dissolved. Those philosophers and logicians, who have tried over the centuries to solve the well-known logical and semantical paradoxes, have more often than not created new problems elsewhere in the conceptual apparatus, which exposes the nonexistence of a universally accepted solution. Can moral dilemmas be put into the same category as unsolvable paradoxes?” Theologians, ethicists, and “strongminded moral philosophers,” he goes on to argue, have often been reluctant to admit the reality of moral dilemmas. If there can be genuine unresolvable moral dilemmas in a moral system, then it would be good as courting defeat in any attempt to formulate rational moral theories (1989: 1). But we are, the philosopher seems to suggest, fated to inhabit a world of irresolvable dilemmas. Matilal illustrates his argument with a story found in the great Indian epic the Mahabharata.1 The Mahabharata, he suggests, is shot through with the meta-concept of dharma, which can be interpreted as righteous conduct that makes for a normative order. There is however no definitive meaning assigned to dharma, and the concept is ambiguous and elusive. Not surprisingly, we discover dilemmas within the structure of dharma ethics. These are not culturally specific, as Matilal hastens to add; they are universal, and can be effectively used to

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illustrate arguments in moral philosophy (1989: 6). Moral dilemmas arise when the agent is committed to two or more moral obligations, but circumstances are such that an obligation to do x cannot be fulfilled without violating an obligation to do y. Dilemmas present irreconcilable options, and the actual choice among them either becomes irrational, or is based upon grounds other than moral. This is contrary to the system of Kantian ethics. For Kant, objective practical rules should form a harmonious whole and a system characterized by consistency, much like a system of true beliefs. The system presumes that two mutually opposing rules cannot be necessary at the same time. Therefore, if it is a duty to act according to one of them, it is not only a duty but contrary to duty to act according to the other. Moral conflicts cannot be genuine; there can only be conflict between genuine duty and a ground of duty. In Kantian ethics, truth telling gets the highest priority, as is promise keeping. This is equally true in the Indian systems of ethics that extols truth telling as satya-rakhsa (protection of the truth). No cultural relativism can be found here. But when two equally strong obligations, that of truth telling and that of saving lives, conflict (1989: 8–9), keeping of a promise cannot be an unconditional obligation. In such situations, we have to make a choice between different sorts of options that might minimize harm. The implication is that we bear moral responsibility for the choices we make. For instance, suggests Matilal, Kausika could have told the bandits that though he knew which way the travelers had gone he would not share this information, or simply kept quiet. But he interpreted his commitment to tell the truth unthinkingly and unimaginatively, and innocent lives were lost. We learn from Matilal that the dilemmas we find ourselves in might well prove intractable, but there is no reason why we cannot negotiate them with some degree of resourcefulness and ingenuity. It is precisely these qualities that we need to bring onto the task of reflecting on the relationship between religion and secularism. This chapter might not be able to throw new light onto the problem. What I hope it can do is to highlight some aspects of the dilemma, even as it accepts that dilemmas are by their very nature resistant to resolutions. We may not succeed, but try we must, because there is an important question that is at stake.

The question How can people who speak different languages, worship different gods, and subscribe to different conceptions of the good live together in a degree of

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civility, with dignity, and with mutual respect? The question has bothered political thinkers for long. We have still not found an answer. And it is not easy to find one. The proposition that a society is plural insofar as its members hold distinctive conceptions of the good and/or speak different languages is an empirical proposition. There is absolutely nothing in this statement that allows us to transit to the normative proposition that each of these conceptions of the good is of worth and deserves respect, or indeed that plurality is of value. The proposition that plurality is a value requires another and a detailed argument. However, a brief synopsis of a larger argument may be in order here. We can think of at least three reasons why civil coexistence of different communities is of value. The first reason is instrumental. Consider that citizens who might have broken no law, or harmed anyone, can be, and have been in divided societies like those in India, subjected to great indignity, brutality, and loss of life simply because their constitutive community has been stigmatized, typed as the enemy, or as the “other” with whom there can be no truck or transaction. Every fundamental right guaranteed by international covenants and national constitutions proves incapable of protecting citizens from harm, if the group of which they are a member is targeted. Unless a society learns to respect different ways of life, individual members will always be vulnerable to hate speech and hateful acts that maim and take away innocent lives. The right of a group to respect, and its right to dignity, is arguably an essential precondition for individual rights. Two, individuals are social beings, and they realize sociability through membership of different associations, from bird watching clubs, to film fan associations, to social audit groups that keep a watch on acts of omission and commission of the government. However, the community we are born into commands our allegiance, in sometimes inexplicable ways. Some people identify strongly with the community of their birth, others identify weakly, and still others move on. But most of the time we identify with our community because it is from here that we learn the first alphabet of a language. The language enables us to make sense of ourselves, of the world, and of our relationships with others. Communities are of value for their members, and should be valued for that reason. Three, pluralism is itself of value. A monocultural society, or a society that allows only one system of belief to flourish, is bound to be soulless and bare. Stripped of the excitement of learning new languages, of the possibility of acquaintance with new people and their worldviews, and of the opportunity to

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familiarize ourselves with different cuisines, literature, music, art, sculpture, and modes of conceiving the world, monochromatic societies are dull, predictable, and tedious. Life in a plural society promises adventures and novel ways of understanding ourselves and our worlds. The valuation of diversity is a good because awareness of difference expands our horizons, deepens sensibilities, cultivates empathy, and enhances solidarity. Living in plural society allows us to embark periodically on new journeys that promise discovery. For these reasons and more, the gap between the two propositions on pluralism, one empirical and the other normative, needs to be theoretically bridged. What normative concept, other than secularism, can bridge the chasm? Today, however, secularism seems to have practically vanished from the political scene. Whatever remains of the concept is subjected to contemptuous remarks, some ribaldry, and rank dismissal. The near disappearance of secularism from political imaginations, vocabularies, and visions of how a plural and complex society can be held together is regrettable. We are in danger of misplacing something that is of great political significance. The marginalization of secularism from the political debate also happens to be short sighted, for the binary opposite of the concept is majoritarianism at best and theocracy at worst. Both forms of government insistently subvert the basic precepts of democratic life, that of freedom, equality, rights, and justice. Unless we are prepared to give up on democracy, there is a need to reiterate and reinscribe the value of secularism. At the same time, we need to recognize that the concept is in crisis because it has been subjected to overuse and invested with far too many expectations. Anuradha Needam and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan suggest that secularism is called upon to perform various functions in a postcolonial society such as cultural nationalism, minority/community rights, liberal individual rights, identity politics, and the politics of gender (2007: 12). Priya Kumar likewise suggests that secularism in India has been called upon to resolve thorny social and political issues, the problems of multireligious and multicultural coexistence, the place of minorities within the nation-state, and communalism (2008: 15). But secularism is not robust like democracy, or justice; it is a thin and limited concept. In India, the fragile concept of secularism has had to shoulder the onerous task of nation building and national integration, take on the politically explosive construction of a Uniform Civil Code, bear responsibility for the subversion and rearrangement of hierarchical and exclusionary relationships within religious communities, and even stand in for democracy. Secularism has

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been subjected to an overload. Unable to bear the weight of too many political projects and ambitions, it shows signs of imploding. Yet moments of crisis need not lead to unmitigated gloom or abandonment of the concept. Reversals in the biography of concepts and practices associated with them provide an opportunity to reexamine, rethink, and clarify what the concept means, what it stands for, and what the political context of the concept is. Such moments can prove productive because they propel reconsideration of the foundational presumptions of secularism. Reexamination of, reflection on, and the reworking of secularism might rescue this beleaguered concept from not only angry and abusive opponents but also ardent supporters and fervent advocates. As part of this rethinking we will be called upon to cut away theoretical flab, and dispense with extravagant expectations and hopes that overburden the concept of secularism. The argument in this chapter tries to put secularism in its place. For this we need to recognize that political secularism or simply secularism is not a standalone concept. In modern Europe, it rose to prominence on the shoulders of a social process, the secularization of society in the wake of the Enlightenment. Now that the secularization of society has been analyzed or rather dismissed as one of the vanities of modernity, and after religion has made a spectacular comeback into the public domain, political secularism has been abandoned. It needs a new theoretical home. What other conceptual home can modern societies provide except democracy? This chapter argues that secularism is a companion concept of democracy, both an indispensable precondition for democracy and an outcome of democratic principles. For these reasons the concept should be relocated in democratic theory. Two preliminary points may be in order. One, the term “secular,” whether it refers to the sociological process of secularization or political secularism, is not synonymous with “atheism.” Nor does it stand in opposition to religion. Atheists are nonbelievers. People who sport a secular attitude can be religious, but also hold that their conversations with God are a personal matter, that religion should not be used to discriminate between people, or be mixed up with politics. When the term “secularism” was coined by the British freethinker George Jacob Holyoake in 1851, he took pains to clarify that his approach was not defined in opposition to, or as a negation of, religion, but as an alternative way of understanding and dealing with worldly things (1854). The phrasing of a nonreligious approach to politics as secularism, rather than atheism, enabled the freethinkers to enter into alliances with working-class movements for social, and in particular educational reform in a rapidly industrializing society.

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Two, though the terms “secularization,” “secular,” and “secularism” are used interchangeably, they refer to different sorts of phenomena. Secularization involves the privatization of religion. The term “secular” can be used descriptively to capture an idea or a process that does not involve religious imaginaries. Political secularism, or simply secularism, is a normative concept, and is an attribute of a democratic state. The democratic state does not distinguish between people and groups merely because they are born into “this” or “that” religious community. The belief that no one should be privileged or disprivileged, discriminated against or favored for reasons that are outside their control, is part of the generic right to equality and freedom. Given wide acceptance of the term “postsecularism,” this is perhaps not the best of times to recover the import of secularism, but it is also not the worst of times. Across the globe today, we live in frighteningly blinkered worlds. Timetested projects of living together have simply broken down. We see this in country after country, including my own. We seem unable to manage cultural plurality within our own societies. We have to rethink this project of living together, reach out to other sites of theory production, and see whether we can together reflect on problems that stalk the project of equality or even its weaker forms such as nondiscrimination, freedom, and justice. If conventional notions of secularism as a way of holding people together have broken down, as postsecularists suggest, it may be time to rethink the project in the light of other historical experiences, that of India for instance. We may need to go “beyond secularism,” not to abandon it but to recast the concept in a new mold and strengthen it. Global political theory has to expand beyond Eurocentrism to engage with other philosophies and histories, and to mediate its own admittedly Eurocentric preoccupations. Conversely, we who live and work in the global south need to sift out what is valuable in Enlightenment philosophies of equality, freedom, and justice. We need to listen to each other. The right to equal political voice can perhaps be then realized. Epistemic inequality might then be mitigated somewhat.

Secularization and secularism: The European experience Two philosophical moments in the history of secularism in Europe illustrate the turning of the secular wheel. In 1689, the quintessential liberal John Locke made out a case for toleration of other religions, and for the separation of the church and the state. Notably, many enduring and authoritative arguments for toleration in seventeenth-century Europe arose in the middle of religious

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strife, the adoption of one religion as the state religion, suppression of minority religious groups, and forcible conversions. Conflict over religion engulfed most of the continent in rampant civil war and posed a direct threat to social cohesion and political stability. Locke, through his celebrated argument on toleration, struggled hard to emancipate the state from corrosive wars over religion as well as to restore civility to the body politic. The essay, which suggested that all beliefs and practices which do not threaten public order should be tolerated, was written in the second half of the seventeenth century to accomplish precisely this task. Locke’s celebrated Letter Concerning Toleration written in 1667 and his Epistola de Tolerentia, written in 1689 (1997: 134–59), revealed his concern and his involvement in English politics during the latter part of his career. Fearing that the political society of his day possessed scant resources to survive the onslaught of religious wars, and even fewer resources to enable people to live in peace, Locke identified religious strife as the major cause of turmoil. The origins of discontent, he suggested, could be traced to the merger of the state and the church, official disregard of other religions, and persecution of minorities. This had to be countered, and for this Locke theorized why people had to be tolerant of other religions. Locke’s theory of toleration is grounded in two principles. Some opinions do not have any influence on the actions of others, and are therefore not subjected to the jurisdiction of the magistrate. Two, there is a vital difference, Locke suggests, between knowledge that flows from the comprehensions of propositions that relate to the experiential and the concrete, and knowledge based upon faith. The former genre of knowledge is verifiable; the latter is not since it emanates from revelation. Each human being has to validate his or her faith. For this reason, no one other than the person concerned can ever understand why people believe the way they do. “The other thing that hath just claim to an unlimited toleration is the place, time, and manner of worshipping my God. Because this is a thing wholly between God and me, and of an eternal concernment, above the reach and extent of polities and government, which are but for my well-being in this world” (1997: 137). If persons have determined their own faith because they have tested it against their own understanding and reason, they must allow others to so decide their own faith. There is no Archimedean point from which we can referee another’s faith and find it wanting, because faith is purely subjective, and subject to only internal reasoning of the believer. Locke’s argument on toleration reflected the great debates of the day on the relationship between religion, science, and reason. In the seventeenth and

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eighteenth centuries, scholars, policy makers, and advisors to princes agreed that the task of intellectuals and political pragmatists was to liberate humankind from the shackles of blind faith and unquestioning obedience to Christian dogmas. Wars over religion had fragmented society, retarded economic growth, and fostered intolerance. The age of unreason had to be replaced by the age of reason and science, ignorance had to give way to the Enlightenment, and allegiance to sectarian norms had to be substituted by universalism. It is not as if people became atheists or agnostics, they could believe or not believe, believe faintly or believe intensely in God. The choice was theirs alone. From a reigning ideology codified in, and enforced by the Roman Catholic Church, Christianity was demoted to another domain of belief and free exercise of choice. Religion lost its public role, and was replaced by the sovereign state. From thereon it has been the modern state that has established and maintained the legal framework within which societies, economies, and cultures conduct multiple transactions. One of these rules has been for long that the state will practice neutrality toward all religious groups, favor no group even if it is in the majority, and disfavor no group because it is in a minority. Aligned to this is the individual right to freedom of religion and conscience. The norm of secularism adopted by modern states might have originated in Europe by appropriation of church property and rights of the clergy. But secularism as a political norm has been in history legitimized by acceptance of the democratic rights of freedom and equality, of which the right to freedom of conscience is an integral part. This right was strengthened in the twentieth century by the right to equality. Notably, the principle of secularism, which guarantees nondiscrimination on religious grounds and which sanctions the right to practice one’s own religion, is qualitatively different from the principle of toleration deployed by premodern states. Premodern states deployed tolerance to regulate coexistence of different religions, maintain peace and stability, and collect taxes from subjects of a different religious persuasion. Modern states adopted secularism as a constitutive principle of gradually democratizing societies. The wheel turned in the closing years of the twentieth century. Western political philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, and postmodern thinkers announced the onset of a postsecular age for two main reasons. First, secularization, it is held, had led to spiritual impoverishment; people have lost access to ethical resources that can help them negotiate thorny problems. Second, religion reentered the public sphere as a powerful and evocative form

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of politics. Religious groups and armed movements placed demands upon governments, attempted to shape civil societies, and engaged in state breaking and state making. For postmodernists and postsecularists, the rejection of secularism is part of a generic rejection of Enlightenment rationality and of the baggage it carries in its wake (Abeysekara 2008; Smith 2010) The return of religion to public life provides sufficient proof of the incapacities and infirmities of secular reason. Secularism, for them, has become redundant. Jurgen Habermas, on the other hand, seems to suggest that instead of abandoning “the secular,” we have to “go beyond” the concept to accommodate religious practices and affiliations in the public sphere. In an October 2001 acceptance speech titled “Faith and Knowledge” on the occasion of the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Habermas argued that “the risks of disruptive secularisation elsewhere may be addressed only when we are clear on what secularisation means in our own post-secular societies” (2001). Secularization, he went on to clarify, has a juridical meaning: the appropriation of church property by the secular state. This meaning has since been extended to the emergence of social and cultural modernism in general. Both interpretations make the same mistake insofar as they consider secularization as a kind of zero-sum arrangement between the productive powers of science and technology and the tenacious power of the church and religion. This image, according to him, no longer fits a postsecular society that posits the continued existence of religious communities within a continually secularizing society. Habermas has, since 2001, turned his attention to the role of religion in the public sphere and on the need for inclusion of religious voices in this sphere. In an essay published in 2006, he emphasized that secular-minded people must adjust to the fact that religion must be accommodated and granted reciprocal rights. Religious traditions have a special power to articulate moral intuitions with regard to vulnerable forms of communal life. This potential, he argued, makes religious speech a serious candidate for communicating possible truth contents, which can then be translated into generally accessible language. “However, the institutional thresholds between the ‘wild life’ of the political public sphere and the formal proceedings within political bodies are also a filter that from the Babel of voices in the informal flows of public communication allows only secular contributions to pass through” (2006: 10). In Parliament, rules must empower the house leader to expunge religious statements or justifications. In sum, the truth content of religious contributions can participate

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into institutionalized practices of decision making, only if necessary translations have already occurred in the public sphere. Considering that one of the tasks he sets before himself is to work out rules of coexistence between religion and nonreligious or secular politics, Habermas could have considered India. The country has had a long experience of negotiating a problem that Western philosophers have recognized as serious only at the turn of the twenty-first century. How does a democratic public sphere and a democratic state negotiate and manage the inclusion of religious voices in the public sphere? A plural society such as India’s had little choice but to recognize both the salience of religious identities and the need to protect minority rights to religion as far back as 1928 in the Motilal Nehru Constitutional Draft (1995: 1–43). More significantly, the Indian experience chronicles the dilemma of reconciling religion and nonreligious politics. The two simply do not lend themselves to reasonable accommodation. Their relationship is troublesome, unpredictable, contingent, and chancy. It is difficult, if not impossible, to resolve different vocabularies, imaginaries, symbols, and modes of domination. In India, the conflict between religion and secular politics has sometimes been sorted out and sometimes left unresolved. Sometimes one side has won, and other times the other side has waged a successful battle. On some occasions, the outcome of conflict has been predetermined; on others it has been purely contingent. The moment Western political philosophers pay attention to the Indian experience, the act of recognition might well dent their belief that political predicaments can be neatly resolved. It is time that we realize that the politics of simultaneity between disparate phenomenon and belief systems is erratic, and does not lend itself to tidy explanations. To live in a democratic society where religion shapes not only people’s lives but also politics, society, and in some cases economics, is to live in a world that offers new dilemmas that are essentially irresolvable, even as older ones continue to bedevil politics. India provides an example of this paradox. The origins of the paradox are to be found in the history of colonialism.

Religion and the public sphere in India The coexistence of secularism and politicized religion and religion as a form of politics differentiates the biography of Indian secularism from the European case. At the turn of the nineteenth century, India became a site for a rather

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historic encounter between two different sorts of civilizations: Hinduism marked by heterodox traditions, localized power structures, deities, rituals, and system of belief and Christianity dedicated to deism, fired by the ethos of the Enlightenment-reason and universality, and by Protestantism. Ironically, Europeans, themselves the product of a political modernity that privileged reason and science over faith and adherence to norms bequeathed by ancestry, triggered the turn to religion, in the biography of secularism. Different colonial agents began to propel reflections on, consideration of, and debates on Hinduism; Indologists or Orientalists as they came to be known, colonial administrators, and Christian missionaries. Indologists were fascinated by Hinduism and Sanskrit, the medium of literature and sacred texts; Christian missionaries planned to study the religion they wanted to replace with Christianity; and colonial officials had no choice but to study the religion and the social practices of a society that they intended to govern. All of them possessed different projects that they wished to pursue. But as S. N. Mukherjee suggests in his work on the indologist Sir William Jones, there was an underlying unity to the different projects of understanding India. Men, he suggested, came to the country for a variety of reasons, to make money, for adventure, and for a step up the social ladder in England. But a majority of them possessed a definite missionary zeal to shape the future of the country. However, the subsequent transformation of India was produced by a complex of factors, “the ideas, which set politicians in motion to reform the administrative system, left a definite mark upon Indian society” (1968: 2). The most momentous mark left by colonialism on India, a mark that has not only proved inerasable, but become the anchor of the political project of the Hindu right, was that of the translation and interpretation of classical texts of religion and philosophy through the prism of Western-centric thought and understanding. Under the onslaught of criticism by Christian missionaries, influential Western philosophers, and colonial officialdom, Indian intellectuals, leaders, and social reformers launched an enquiry into religious practices, and tried to refashion Hinduism according to ancient texts as well as in the light of received wisdom of Western liberal theory. In India, modernity arrives through processes of intense reflection on and critique of existing religious practices, and not through the devaluation of religion. From the early nineteenth century onward, Indians were surrounded by, swept up in, and swamped by discussions, invention of new interpretations, new modes of measuring and critiquing received wisdom, and anxious responses by orthodoxy.

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In the attempt to reform Hinduism by returning to the original sacred texts, and the counter-reaction by conservative elements, we see the making of a public sphere as the site for competitive politics of affirmation, contestation, mediation, and transformation. Initially, investigations into the question of “who are we” and “where have we come from” revolved around Hinduism. This preoccupation did not fade away with the passage of time, nor was it replaced completely by nonreligious considerations. On the contrary, awareness of religious identities became the anchor of nationalist imaginaries. The connection was clearly articulated in the case of right-wing Hindu organizations. But even in the moderate wings of nationalism, particularly in the political agenda of the Indian National Congress, religion did not stray too far away from the central plank of social reform and political freedom. As the public sphere consolidated itself as an essential site for the construction of the social reform, and the national/anticolonial project, religion became more not less relevant to multiple political discourses. At the end of the nineteenth century, Hinduism and Islam were foregrounded by intellectuals, leaders, and political organizations for many reasons, to regenerate and reform Indian society, to serve as an anchor for the national project or rather projects, as a dominant language that enabled leaders to forge a constituency among the people, as a repertoire of symbols to restore confidence in the greatness of a civilization, and to mobilize opinion against the colonial power. Colonial policies gave an added flip to politicization through practices of group representation in government via separate electorates, politics of enumeration, and the politics of what has been called “divide and rule.” That the articulation of religion and nationalism generated the two-nation theory, and ultimately the Partition of India on religious grounds is well known. Competitive nationalism and competing notions of the nation found their culmination in the formation of Pakistan, as a homeland for Muslims of South Asia, and an India that remained committed to secularism, even though religious and political animosities and claims continued to hover over the political horizon. In sum, India’s public sphere, unlike the European public sphere, was not stripped of religious vocabularies and imaginations in times of political modernity. Controversies over and within religions shaped a public sphere as the space for the politics of contestations and affirmations over religion. Secularism emerged as a political norm in the context of intense politicization of religion, debates, controversies, and competitive religious nationalism.

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The norm of political secularism As mentioned earlier, in 1928, amid religious strife between the Hindus and the Muslims, leaders of the Indian National Congress drafted a constitution in association with other political groups. The constitutional draft offered to the Muslim community protections in the form of minority rights to culture, educational institutions, and script (1995). In 1931, the Karachi Resolution on Fundamental Rights, authored in the shadow of a communal riot, emphasized that a postindependence state would be neutral to all religions. In 1947, the leaders of the Congress failed to convince the leadership of the Muslim League that the Muslim community would possess equal citizenship rights, as well as constitutional protection to their own religion, in postindependence India. The Constituent Assembly met in the shadow of the Partition, amid widescale rioting, massacres, and looting of property. However, the makers of the Constitution stood firm when it came to secularism and minority rights. Dr. Ambedkar, the chairman of the Drafting Committee, stated resolutely that the “rights of minorities should be absolute rights. They should not be subject to any considerations as to what another party may like to do to minorities within its jurisdiction . . . . I think that the rights, which are indicated in clause 18 are rights, which every minority irrespective of any other consideration is entitled to claim” (C.A.D 1989: 507–08). The right of minorities to their own culture and the right to run their own religious institutions was granted vide article 29 but more importantly by article 30 of the fundamental rights chapter. In sum, whereas article 25 of part 3 of the Constitution grants the individual right to freedom of religion, articles 29 and 30 recognize groups as bearers of rights. The right of minorities to their own culture and the right to run their own religious institutions were granted vide article 29 but more importantly by article 30 of the fundamental rights chapter. In sum, whereas article 25 of part 3 of the Constitution grants the individual right to freedom of religion, articles 29 and 30 recognize groups as bearers of rights. Oddly enough, the concept of secularism was elaborated neither by the leaders of the freedom struggle nor by the members of the Constituent Assembly. In the Constituent Assembly, discussions on secularism were basically the by-product of the debate on minority rights, personal codes, and arguments that religion is the source of injustice and should be controlled. It was in 1948 that the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, spelled out the implications of secularism at a convocation address in Aligarh Muslim University. In the middle of a fluid

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state caused by the Partition, he said, all of us have to be clear about our basic allegiance to certain ideas. Do we, he asked, believe in a national state, which includes people of all religions and shades of opinion and is essentially a secular as a state, or do we believe in the religious theocratic conception of a state that considers other people as beyond the pale? The idea of a theocratic state was given up some time ago by the world and it has no place in the mind of a modern person. And yet the question has to be put in India, for some of us have tried to jump to a bygone age. Whatever confusion, he said, the present may contain, in the future, India will be a land, as in the past, of many faiths equally honored and respected, within a tolerant, creative nationalism not a narrow nationalism living in its own shell (1987: 26). In 1961, in a preface to a work on secularism, Dharam Nirpeksh Raj by Raghunath Singh, Prime Minister Nehru elaborated the concept of secularism thus. We, he said, call our state a secular state. There is no good Hindi word for “secular.” Some people think it means opposed to religion, this is not correct, pointed out Nehru. It means a state that honors all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities; that as a state it does not allow itself to be attached to one faith or religion, which then becomes the state religion. This, he said, is a modern conception. In India, we have a long history of toleration, but this is not all that secularism is about. “It is perhaps not very easy even to find a good word for ‘secular’. Some people think that it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. What it means is that it is a state which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities; that, as a state, it does not allow itself to be attached to one faith or religion, which then becomes the state religion” (1980: 330). For Nehru the concept of the secular state thus carried three meanings: (1) freedom of religion or irreligion for all, (2) the state will honor all faiths equally, and (3) that the state shall not be attached to one faith or religion which by that act becomes the state religion. Strictly speaking, we do not need secularism to ensure that all people have the freedom to religion or atheism. Nor do we need secularism to mandate that no religion will be discriminated against. Both these rights are protected by democracy. The doctrine of secularism specifically implies that the state shall not be aligned to any one religion, which by that attribute becomes the state religion. This is fundamental to the democratic right of nondiscrimination on morally arbitrary grounds such as birth into a religious community. Secularism is in other words an attribute of the liberal democratic state, with the democratic

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rights of equality and freedom construing the preconditions of equality of all religions. Conversely, secularism supports the specific right of religious communities to equality. This becomes clear the moment we begin to understand that substantive equality implies protection of vulnerable groups. Secularism in other words involves the notion of minority rights, a recognition that had been built into the Nehru Constitutional Draft in 1928. The term “secularism” was inserted into the Preamble of the Indian Constitution only in 1976. But the meaning of secularism as “honoring all faiths equally” has become an accepted way of conceptualizing the concept, which according to the 1973 judgment of the Supreme Court in Kesavananda Bharati vs. State of Kerala is part of the basic structure of the Constitution (Sen 2006: 6). Gary Jacobson, who has carried out a close reading of the various arguments offered by the Supreme Court during the Bommai case in 1994, has isolated the dominant theme in these arguments as “equal treatment of religions, often referred to in Indian tradition as sarva dharma sambhava . . . . In the same vein Justice Sawant emphasized that ‘the State is enjoined to accord equal treatment to all religions and religious sects and denominations’. It is a theme that was echoed by Justice Reddy, who literally underlines the point by declaring ‘secularism is . . . more than a passive attitude of religious tolerance. It is a positive concept of equal treatment of all religions’” (emphasis added; 2003: 146–47). The court has continued to reiterate the interpretation of secularism as equality. In short, the Indian version of secularism recognized the historical legacy of preindependent India: the salience of religious identities, the politicization of religion in the public sphere, the fragile line between religion as personal faith and religion as politics, and the plurality of religious identities and belief systems. Secularism as an attribute of democracy guaranteed the existence of a public sphere where religious identities not only lived cheek by jowl with each other, but with also secular or nonreligious value systems.

Coexistence of secularism and religion in India The coexistence of secularization and religion has been neither completely harmonious nor wholly discordant. In the first instance, social practices associated with religion have been subordinated to secular and democratic politics. The Supreme Court has distinguished between “essential” and “inessential” practices of a religion, to decide which practice warrants constitutional protection.

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In 1961, Justice P. B. Gajendragadkar declared that specific practices must be regarded by the said religion as an essential and an integral part. If these practices are inessential they will not be accorded constitutional protection. The Supreme Court, in other words, carried on the colonial project of defining religion, and the nationalist project of reforming religion. In another case, the Court ruled that “a claim made by a citizen that a purely secular matter amounts to a religious practice, or a similar case made on behalf of the denomination that a purely secular matter is an affair in matters of religion, may have to be rejected on the ground that it is based on irrational considerations” (Sen 2006: 19–21). The project of regulating religion was accompanied by the project of subordinating religion to democracy and justice. In the Constituent Assembly it was made clear by various members, particularly Dr. Ambedkar, that religion must be subjected to strict control. Religious conceptions in this country, he said, are so vast that they cover every aspect of life from birth to death. We should strive to limit the definition of religion so that it does not extend beyond beliefs and rituals of ceremonies (CAD 1948: 781). The Supreme Court has on various occasions subscribed to this view. The project of the postindependence Indian state to reform society by limiting the power of religion was phrased in a new political language: social welfare, fundamental rights, and democracy. The logic appears to be that the secular state cannot guarantee plurality of and equality between religions, unless religious communities subject themselves to dramatic restructuring. The state in India thereupon set about controlling religion in the interest of democracy, and democratizing religion in the interests of pluralism. In the second instance, the Supreme Court has delayed judgment on contentious issues, and thus warded off serious problems that might follow in the wake of controversial decisions. For instance, in December 1992, cadres of the Hindu right demolished a mosque built in 1528 by a general of Emperor Babar, on the ground that a Hindu temple had been razed to the ground to construct the mosque. Across the country communal riots between Hindus and Muslims followed the demolition of the mosque, and reportedly 2,000 people died in these riots. In 2010, the Allahabad High Court decided that the 2.77acre disputed site, where the sixteenth-century mosque had stood before its demolition, should be divided into equal parts between the contending parties. An appeal was filed in the Supreme Court against the verdict, along with another appeal that a temple should be constructed on the exact site on which the mosque had been built. The highest court of the land has still not given a judgment, on

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the plea that it needs at least a decade to peruse the records of the case written in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. It took the Allahabad High Court fifty years to deliver a verdict on the original case filed in 1950, that the respondent be allowed to perform prayers before the idol of the God that had been placed in the mosque in 1949. The Supreme Court is in no hurry to decide the case, because any decision is bound to have serious repercussions on communal harmony. In this case, clearly, the state has been unable to control religious demands or subordinate them to the dictates of justice. The problem remains unresolved, because no resolution is going to stave off murderous riots. Controversial themes are best placed off the political agenda, which seems to be the position of the Court. In a third instance, we see two anachronistic practices existing side by side in India. In August 2015, the Rajasthan High Court Bench in accordance with sections 306 and 309 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes abetment to suicide and attempted suicide, directed the state government to treat the Jain practice of Santhara as suicide. According to the practice of Santhara, persons belonging to the Jain community can choose to give up food and water, and await death in certain stipulated cases, when they believe, for example, that the objective of their lives has been fulfilled. The fast, which is undertaken voluntarily, is an integral part of the Jain belief that the body is a prison for the soul. A person has the right to choose death for the soul to be liberated from the confines of the corporeal body. On the other hand, the belief that suicide is a criminal act, because only God can take away life, is part of the Christian faith. The judges of the High Court concluded that Santhara is not essential to Jainism and banned it. The decision of the state judiciary was overturned by the Supreme Court following mobilization of the Jain community. The ban was accordingly lifted. Till attempted suicide was decriminalized in March 2017 in India, two practices continued to live side by side: the practice of treating suicide as criminal and that of voluntarily accepting death. The first is informed by the belief that suicide is an act against God. This belief can hardly accept any other notion of the self, one that sees death as freedom for instance. Practices that contradicted each other survived in the same domain of the politics of contestation and affirmation, but spoke past each other. These three cases illustrate the paradox of coexistence of religion and secular politics. In the first case, the state has subordinated largely Hindu rituals and practices to democratic norms. In the second instance, the state has pragmatically stayed away from contentious issues such as the Ayodhya case, and the issue of

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Christian and Muslim personal laws even though the latter violate gender justice. In the third case, two contradictory practices managed to coexist by ignoring each other. The two languages of religion and secular politics cannot easily be translated into each other, and in some cases religious identities continue to exert their force against secular and democratic values. Clearly, Western political philosophers seem to greatly underestimate the problem of reconciling religion and secular politics.

Our political dilemma In zeroing into this particular dilemma, of the difficulties of coexistence, I presume that the brief of political theory (or at least one sort of political theory) is to address, understand, and clarify political paradoxes that dog our collective lives. I doubt if these dilemmas can ever be resolved, we can only try to manage the shortfalls; we can only try to contain the undesirable aftereffects of living amid paradoxes. This is perhaps natural, for the world of politics we inhabit is shot through with discrepancies and irreconcilable dilemmas. Attempts to bring neatness into either explanation or prescription into understandings of contradictory practices can prove flawed, for politics does not lend itself to neat ordering of principles. At the best, political theory can help us to understand that we are fated to live amid contradictions. How can we best live amid these contradictions? This is the question. I suggest that we cannot dispense with secularism in a multireligious society. Even if civil rights guarantee freedom of religion and equality between religions, there has to be a clear provision that bars the state from aligning with one religion. Contemporary India is poised toward this very end, and the open rise of majoritarianism threatens minorities, and subjects members of minority groups to violence and intimidation over flimsy issues such as cow protection and consumption of beef. We have to go back to the days when secularism was considered indispensable for a multireligious society simply because the merger of two awesome forms of power poses a danger for not only minorities but also ordinary citizens. The moment we forget this aspect, we overlook the fact that the combination of formidable religious and overwhelming political power is cause for highly charged political anxiety. The overlap poses a distinct threat to freedom of conscience and expression, and provides opportunities for the religious group that is aligned to the state to legitimize its practices through

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the coercive power of the state. Disrespect to other religions follows because members of minority religions are not treated as equal participants in debates in the public sphere and in law. This seriously compromises the basic tenets of democracy: equal citizenship rights. It is difficult not to conclude that secularism is the only concept that can enforce a separation of power between religion and the state, provided we rethink the project in the light of the following two considerations. A secular state is not concerned with personal faith, ritual, or with theological questions of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or whether karma is a peculiar way of justifying present injustices and harm. It is concerned with deepening one aspect of democracy in a plural society, equality/ nondiscrimination between religious communities in the public sphere. It follows that secularism is not a stand-alone concept, but a companion concept of democracy. Whereas secularism holds that a government shall not harness its projects to a religious agenda, legitimize itself by reference to religious authority, proclaim a state religion, or discriminate against minority groups, democracy establishes that nondiscrimination and freedom of belief flow from the generic principle of equality and freedom. Discrimination and injustice within groups is tackled through appeals to individual rights and status. This is a necessary precondition for secularism that aims to regulate relationships between religious communities, insofar as a secular state will find it difficult if not impossible to defend a community marked by undemocratic practices as equal to communities that constantly strive toward democracy. The location of secularism in the theory and practice of democracy is important if we want to preempt the overstretching of secularism. This might be one way out of the dilemma we find ourselves in.

Conclusion In the specific context of India, secularism was intended to bridge the gap between the empirical proposition that India is a plural society and the normative one that plurality is of value. In order to ensure pluralism, the doctrine of secularism was buttressed by minority rights. The experience of India shows that the coexistence of religious and the nonreligious in the public discourse is not by any means neat. It cannot be, because there is, arguably, a fundamental discrepancy between religious and secular languages. Religion gives to believers “thick” or comprehensive conceptions of the good that help

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them to make sense of the world, order their lives, and relate to others. This is the basis of religious assertions in the public sphere. The concept of secularism is, in comparison, “thin” insofar as it establishes procedures that indicate what the place of religion in the public domain is, and what the relationship between different groups should be. I am not suggesting that secularism is not a good: merely that secularism does not tell people how to lead their lives or what to strive for. The principle of secularism contributes to the construction of a normative structure where people can pursue their faith or any other substantive conception of the good unburdened by discrimination, and where the state does not discriminate between different religious groups. The two languages pertain to different sorts of goods and are in many cases difficult to translate. But that is the nature of democratic political life: irresolvable dilemmas that can only be negotiated through the deployment of imagination and creativity in thinking and practice, exactly as Professor Matilal had suggested in his interpretation of a tale in the epic Mahabharata.

Part Two

Feminists Navigate the Religious

5

A New Variety of Anti-secularism? Khurram Hussain

The last decade or so has seen the emergence of a peculiar social movement in Pakistan. A retired celebrity cricketer and erstwhile playboy, Imran Khan, has turned up the heat on the establishment by staging a series of massive rallies calling for an end to corruption and claiming that his movement will bring about a “political tsunami” to rid the country of its looting elites.1 An Oxford graduate and a fixture on the London social scene during the 1980s and 1990s, Khan is now an avowed critic of the West as a viable model for Pakistan’s political and cultural development, and of American meddling in his country’s affairs.2 At the center of his political program is an almost obsessive focus on corruption as an existential malady that afflicts the body politic as a whole. The diseased relationship between Pakistan and its Western counterparts, and the fractures and fault lines that threaten Pakistan’s internal stability are both symptoms of this underlying disorder. In Khan’s reading, corruption ceases to be mere instances of individual greed or a lust for power that can be remedied on a caseby-case basis by the efficacious application of law. It is instead that primordial, metaphysical defect in Pakistan’s ideological basis for the proper provision of viable communal identity to its peoples. What makes Khan peculiar is the manner in which his rhetoric frames this issue of corruption as simultaneously a political and a religious problem. He self-consciously and explicitly represents his crusade against corruption as a religious imperative and imagines the postdeluge order as a genuinely Islamic one. While anti-Western sentiments are a staple of Third World politics, and especially in a country like Pakistan that has borne the brunt of the American “War on Terror,” Khan’s rhetoric is considerably more complicated than any simple regurgitation of old political tropes. And his use of religion in the language and symbols of his movement is thoroughly novel in a Pakistani political scene replete with Islamist parties and activist groups.

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Still, Khan resists any easy characterization as a religious revivalist in the standard sense. He is mobilizing urban, young, educated, and middle-class constituencies that have hitherto not figured in the political calculations of any party. The women of Pakistan are some of his most ardent supporters.3 He has also received considerable backing from progressive sectors of the Pakistani civil society.4 It is for this reason that “some commentators have suggested that his support is divided across irreconcilable demographic lines. On the one hand, he depends on the backing of young, urban, secular-liberal middle-class voters; on the other, on a more conservative, religiously minded sector of the population.”5 But Khan’s public elaborations of Islam have always been less as a source of this or that law and more an ideological glue to bind Pakistanis in a pre-political foundational unity of collective identity and communal solidarity that can shortcircuit the corrupt political processes by the use of religiously infused political action. And the basis of such political action is a conception of Muslims as “the middle nation,” synthesizing the extremes into a viable animated whole. Khan argues, for example, that one of the problems facing Pakistan is the polarization of two reactionary groups. On the one side is the Westernized group that looks upon Islam through Western eyes and has inadequate knowledge about the subject. It reacts strongly to anyone trying to impose Islam in society and wants only a selective part of the religion. On the other extreme is the group that reacts to this Westernized elite and in trying to become a defender of the faith, takes up such intolerant and self-righteous attitudes that are repugnant to the spirit of Islam.6

Trapped in the feedback loop of dueling incriminations and recriminations between the secularist elites and their Islamist counterparts, the spirit of Islam is unable to ensoul the body politic with the animating vigor of a salutary identity. Khan sees the liberation of this spirit from the discursive constraints of the eithers and ors of Islamic or secular states as the necessary prior condition for Pakistan’s future development as an Islamic welfare state. In his recent political biography, Pakistan: A Personal History (2011), Khan argues that the solution for Pakistan and the Muslim world is “genuine democracy, freedom of speech that allows open debate, an evolution of our culture, and above all rule of law.” But “what it does not need is pseudo-westernization with Muslim westernized elites aping superficial aspects of the Western society, in reaction to which we have seen the growth of fundamentalism, which in turn stunts the growth of our culture.”7 It is for this reason that Khan is explicitly against any thorough secularization of Pakistani society. Yet his anti-secularism never comes across

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as a call for a theocratic state nor as a simple instance of religious nationalism. Inasmuch as he offers up a critique of secularism, it is that secularism has already been the de facto ideology of the Pakistani state for quite some time and is in fact complicit in the many ills and corruptions of modern Pakistani society. Khan reads the perseverance of colonial state apparatus in postindependence Pakistan as a “secular” defect that has not allowed Pakistanis to properly formulate an Indigenous Islamic basis for their community’s political existence and has instead perpetuated the corrupt materialist logic of colonial extraction. The regulatory relationship, for example, between the bureaucracy and the military (often called the Establishment) on the one hand and the masses on the other continues to constitute an exploitative colonial architecture because the secular logic of the Pakistani state frustrates any alternative blueprint for an integrated common identity to be realized in practice. In an article for Muftah trying to make sense of Khan’s Islamism, Hamza Saif contends that “the state’s secularist projects, from Presidents Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan, to President Musharraf ’s Enlightened Moderation, have been coercive state-led initiatives to regulate and define religion in the public sphere.”8 In this reading, secularism ceases to be merely an ideological commitment to the separation of religion from politics. It is rather also a condition of political existence where the moral basis of the community serves no function in its constitution or evolution. It refers then to pre-political grounds of legitimacy for the status quo that lacks a proper acknowledgment of, and engagement with, what it means for Pakistan to be a homeland for the Muslims of India. Secularism is that insidious architecture of political logic that dismembers the body politic. It is evident in a diseased relationship between the elites and the masses, and in the inability on the part of both to give an ideologically fecund answer to the problem of collective identity. Corruption is the inevitable condition that afflicts public spheres and, lacking any common basis for a shared identity or destiny, devolves into a struggle for all against all, and each for themselves. Islam as the moral basis for a political community and for a shared identity is an antidote to such secularism. The banal corruptions of the political classes and the Establishment are merely symptoms of a more fundamental problem. The political and the material are ultimately epiphenomenal to the ideological. Pakistan is faltering because its ideological efficacy is undermined by disillusionment and confusion. Material and political corruption are the necessary corollary to the corruption of the ideology of Pakistan. And secularism is the conceptual mechanism by which such corruption is visited on the body politic. Still, Khan’s Islamism demands neither a return to a time of earlier purity nor a thoroughgoing Islamization of

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laws and society in the conventional sense. As much as he embodies it in his own personal evolution, what Khan imagines for Pakistan is a postsecular future fully engaged in modernity with confidence in its ideological efficacy. The literature on religion and politics has tended to focus on more conventionally right-wing religious parties, social movements that emphasize the so-called pelvic issues (sexuality, reproduction, and gender), or revolutionary groups that seek the violent overthrow of existing political institutions in favor of more religiously informed ones. Khan’s movement does not fit easily into any of these categories. Inasmuch as it is a political mobilization, it may on initial examination look like the aforementioned social movements. But the stated aims of this mobilization—to eradicate corruption—would appear oddly “unreligious” to the casual scholarly observer. Inasmuch as Imran Khan actually also heads a political party (Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf/PTI), his public rallies and protests could suggest straightforward electoral calculations. But PTI’s recent electoral success was built on bread-and-butter issues, and its membership and manifesto resist easy characterization as a right-wing religious party.9 Inasmuch as Khan uses apocalyptic language about the desired fate of the extant regime and political establishment, one could call him a revolutionary. But Khan has not shown the slightest proclivity to violence, and appears quite convinced that with the application of adequate political pressure the existing institutions will radically self-transform or die. All this suggests that we might need a new, postsecular frame for making adequate sense of the hybrid nature of the Imran Khan phenomena in Pakistan and to understand it on its own terms. A series of questions present themselves in this regard: What, broadly speaking, is the political theology of Imran Khan? What manner of Islam is this, and what kind of polity is being imagined as an alternative to the secular state in Pakistan? And finally, how does the postsecular as an analytic category better illuminate the intricacies of this movement and its program for the political transformation of Pakistan? A brief foray into the life and times of Khan would be a good place to begin our investigation into these questions. Khan spent the first twenty odd years of his public life in Pakistan becoming the single most illustrious sportsman in the nation’s history. In cricket-mad Pakistan, Khan is legendary for his exploits on the field and for his leadership and captaincy of the national team. He eventually became the first Pakistan captain to lead winning teams on tours of India and England, and managed to draw even with the mighty West Indies of the 1980s. Khan’s cricket career had a fairy-tale ending with the most improbable of victories in the 1992 World Cup in

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Australia. He then parlayed his success on the field to raise funds for a state-ofthe-art cancer hospital and research center in Pakistan (named after his mother who died of cancer in 1986), which provides free medical care to the poor. Khan acknowledges that during his playing career he had little interest, and no time, to think about politics or even about religion. His sole focus was cricket and continued to be so until his mother died. It was only then that he began to pay attention to the state of the country he called home and to (re)discover the Islam that was the mainstay of his mother’s spiritual life. The process of building a hospital for the poor also put in stark relief the corrupt infrastructure of Pakistan’s bureaucracy and the frivolous neglect of the political classes toward the welfare of the average Pakistani. Khan had been approached by politicians of this or that variety since at least since the mid-1980s to lend his name to their parties or even to stand for election on their ticket. Khan had always refused. In 1996, with his cricketing career over and his hospital operational, Khan finally turned his attention to politics. Khan’s Tehrik-e-Insaaf (Movement for Justice) has had a tumultuous existence, with little political success in the first few political cycles orchestrated by the regime of Pakistan’s erstwhile military ruler General Pervez Musharraf. But Khan has persisted with his message and has miraculously maintained his independence in a political context known for its horse trading and cynicism. In elections held in 2013, PTI finally emerged as a potent political force in the country, getting the second largest share of the vote and forming provincial government in the crisisstricken province of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (KPK). In the ensuing years, Khan has continued to stage massive rallies in the capital Islamabad and his native Lahore, keeping up the pressure on the incumbent prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family whom he accuses of looting and corruption on a biblical scale. With the recent release of the Panama Papers that revealed off-shore wealth that could not be accounted for as lawfully acquired, Nawaz Sharif was dismissed from Parliament by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Khan’s movement had its first major political scalp and PTI is in position to contest the 2018 national elections from a position of unprecedented strength. In a recent profile of Khan in The Spectator, Peter Osborne argues that “the world needs to take seriously the prospect that Pakistan’s sporting idol and former Test cricket captain may be its next prime minister.”10 After two decades in the political wilderness then, Khan now appears ready to vociferously articulate his vision for the country on the national stage with political mandate in hand. It is this vision that has caused much confusion inside and outside Pakistan. In point of fact, Khan may

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be the only politician in Pakistan who gets attacked from the right for being part of a Zionist conspiracy to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (on account of his Jewish ex-wife Jemima Goldsmith who is actually a run-of-the-mill English Protestant) while simultaneously being labeled “Taliban Khan” by some members of the secular left. Those outside Pakistan, in the West and especially in India, are also unable to place him in any reasonable schemata of political sensibility. The task falls to us then to clarify the matter. The place to start I believe is a particular discursive moment in late colonial India which has since been domesticated by the competing nationalist narratives of the postcolonial states of India and Pakistan. This moment was inhabited by the veritable giants of that period, household names even today in India and Pakistan: people like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, and important for our purposes Allama Muhammad Iqbal, perhaps the greatest Indian poet of the twentieth century. This moment was characterized by a deep suspicion of modern institutions but even more so of the secular logic of the modern self necessary to operate within the political architecture of a nation-state-based politics. Gandhi, for example, has been appropriated in the West (and even in India) as a defanged paragon of toleration and liberal values when his actual vision for India was deeply anti-modern and anti-secular. The radical and radically disorienting content of this moment, dormant for so long underneath competing modern discourses of secularism and religious nationalism, is now once again overflowing its literary and scholarly ghetto and making an appearance in the public sphere. To those in the know, Iqbal is a towering figure in the intellectual life of twentieth-century India, on par with Tagore and Gandhi. His poetry (in both Urdu and Persian), his philosophical treatises, his essays on religion, and other writings form a vast corpus of considerable influence. He is also, among these other achievements, credited with being the first to publicly advocate that “the Indian Muslim is entitled to full and free development on the lines of his own culture and tradition in his own Indian homeland.”11 In short, Pakistan’s creation was the fruition of a vision that Iqbal articulated decades earlier. Khan claims that even as Pakistan’s elites honor Iqbal as the ideological founder of Pakistan, they have had little use for his ideology itself.12 Khan’s political vision can only be properly accounted for by recognizing its genealogy in Iqbal’s philosophical reconstruction of Islamic thought. Iqbal’s philosophical reinterpretation of Islam could be read as a sustained meditation on a single, rather simple yet enigmatic Quranic verse: “Toward

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God is your limit” (53:42). Of course, Iqbal never was, nor has he been in the years since his death, a particular favorite of Islamic ulema. Their traditionalist methodology and conservative readings were as much an anathema to him as his creative, poetic engagement with the spirit of Islam was to them. As with any good poet, Iqbal excelled at conjuring symbolic representations that were brimful and overflowing with meaning rather than at the settled, legalistic truths of the ulema. But Iqbal was also critical of Sufi forms of Islamic mysticism for their “excessive lamentations and self-negating themes” and for their obsessive “rejection of the material world” that served as “narcotics which lured people away from the realities” attendant to being a Muslim in this world.13 Instead, Iqbal advocated for an active and engaged religiosity rooted in a conception of Islam as an ideological alternative not only to the ulema and the Sufis, but also to the twin temptations of Western liberalism and communism. This ideological reconstruction of Islam generated two iconic poetic symbols through which he sought to elucidate the essence of being Muslim to his readership: these were the twin concepts of khudi, literally self-ness, a soaring aspirational imperative for human potential unleashed in freedom, and be-khudi, self-less-ness, the assimilation of this freedom into structure, form, and community. Khudi has a family resemblance to both the Nietzschean notion of the Will to Power and to the Hegelian Geist.14 This is to be expected, since Iqbal studied Nietzsche, Hegel, and other European philosophers while enrolled at Cambridge and then for two years at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. What separates khudi from its European predecessors is, of course, its Islamic core. Khudi refers to a condition of being that correlates to the proper cultivation of taqwa, of righteousness, and to the relentless practice of freedom. Like Nietzsche, Iqbal believed that “the ultimate fate of a people does not depend so much on organization as on the worth and power of individual men. In an over organized society the individual is altogether crushed out of existence.”15 Khudi is therefore a kind of righteous antiauthoritarianism, a call for the Muslims of India to rid themselves of both internal shackles of obscurantism and the external bondage of colonialism. In the golden age of Islam, between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries, Iqbal identifies what he calls “the inner impulse of Islam” to dynamically harmonize and integrate political, epistemological, and even religious difference into an active movement that carried the society forward such that only toward God was its evolutionary limit.16 Self-ness here is more properly self-actualization. Iqbal decried the “hard crust that has immobilized an essentially dynamic outlook on life” and sought to “re-discover the original

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verities of freedom, equality and solidarity with a view to rebuild our moral, social and political ideals out of their original simplicity and universality.”17 Khudi is both poetically and politically prior to be-khudi, which is its dialectic negation. Be-khudi has a family resemblance here to a neo-Kantian position that identifies freedom with the willing submission to the law. But unlike the Kantian imperative, the movement of be-khudi is directed at the effulgence of an Islamic community. The poet refers for example to constraint or jabr as being a function of the self ’s own liberty or ikhtyar. For example, the “three stages in the movement of khudi towards uniqueness . . . discussed in the Asrar-i-Khudi (Secrets of the Self)—obedience to law, self-control and divine vice regency”— suggest that Iqbal was clearly after something very different from a Nietzschean superman who was a law unto himself beyond good and evil.18 It was only later, with the publication of Rumuz-i-Bekhudi (Mysteries of Selflessness), that Iqbal further elaborated on the idea that “only as a member of society [does] the individual [become] conscious” of its highest ideals.19 In their relationship, the individual and the community mirror each other. And it is only in fettering itself to a community that the self ’s freedom is dynamically constrained. But this fettering has no affinity with the social contract theory in either its Lockean or Hobbesian variety, nor even with Burkean traditionalism. Iqbal uses the poetic metaphor of a word which must have its place within the constraints of a rhyming couplet. In the poetic imagination, the word desires to be molded into its proper place and seeks its station out of love not fear. For Iqbal this desire suggests a lack which has to be overcome or fulfilled, and which therefore energizes the self into action, and even brings selfhood into being as an identity. A living death is the result of the amputation of this desire. It is the existential and political despair of the Muslim community in early twentieth-century India. The only means to overcome this despair for Iqbal lies in a pre-political construction of a desirous self that experiences the unity and perfection of God as a moving principle for the self ’s dynamic encounter with others. It is part of the process of linking together the singular experiences of individuals into the shared experiences of a community in which individuality is not effaced but is central to the construction of group identity. The ego is fortified by love and its highest form is the creation of values and ideals and the desire to realize them. And in this project the self is tied to others in reciprocal bonds of individuality. As Annemarie Schimmel puts it in her analysis of Iqbal’s Javid-Nama (1930): The complete development of the Ego does not lead to a cult of the “Ubermensch” or to exaggerated individualism and egotizm, but it is merely the initial stage; the

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final aim of life is the building up of something impersonal, i.e. the community of men, each of them loving, understanding, and tolerating the other—tolerance is respect for the Ego of the fellow-citizen, and it is better to go the way of God with the caravan.20

Iqbal’s politics of desire inverts the modern Western notion of selfdetermination. The determination of the self is prior to the self ’s determination of ideals of its collective organization just as khudi is prior to be-khudi. The colonial politics of self-determination, with its focus on the national state and its attendant institutional infrastructure, demands a self that is constrained into a supposedly free identity at its birth. This is the secular self for which the moral construction of itself is a second-order exercise of its freedom, not the first-order constitution of its freedom. For Iqbal, political freedom without an active pre-political moving principle other than the freedom itself is a monstrous tautology. It is for this reason that Iqbal rarely contrasts Islam with other religions in his poetry and philosophy but does contrast it repeatedly with liberalism and secularism. Islam understood as a religion in the Western sense can only conform to the constraints placed on it by the secular logic of the self. These constraints limit its possibilities as a vital social phenomenon to the narrowly understood political sphere, hence the ostensibly contrasting politics of liberal secularists and religious nationalists. In either case, the politicization of religion as an issue is only intelligible in a discursive regime that denies it any pre-political reality that is nonetheless essential to the proper practice of a liberatory politics. In an explicit critique of both strongly statist conceptions of Islam popular among some of his Muslim contemporaries like Maulana Abul A’la Maududi and the secularist proclivities of the Indian National Congress, Iqbal contends that it is a mistake to suppose that the idea of state is more dominant and rules all other ideas embodied in the system of Islam. In Islam the spiritual and the temporal are not two distinct domains . . . . In Islam it is the same reality which appears as church looked at from one point of view and state from another. It is not true to say that church and state are two sides or facets of the same thing, Islam is a single unanalysable reality which is one or the other as your point of view varies.21

Access to this reality is only available through the proper cultivation of the heart and the development of desire as a way of being in the world. Islam reduced to state or religion can provide no such access. And divested of a desirous self, the Muslim ceases to be Muslim in anything but name.

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Imran Khan’s politics, his rhetoric, and by all appearances his personality itself is a contemporary instantiation of Iqbal’s politics of desire. Khan’s rallies are musical events, where poetry competes with policy for the attention of the audience. Surahs from the Quran are sung together with Iqbal’s verses in rhythmic anticipation of euphoric states of action, movement, and change. As he whips the crowd into a frenzy, Khan continuously enfolds the banal ubiquity of greed and corruption into this meta narrative of an existential lack at the center of Pakistani society that can only be filled through the animating power of an Islamic Renaissance. This is neither the dry legalese of Shari’a deployed by Pakistan’s religious parties nor the incendiary anger of the Taliban and their ilk. But the language of Islam is everywhere. Khan’s exhortations for self-expression and individual excellence appeal to his young, educated, middle-class audiences, and endear him to certain sections of the progressive and feminist left. At the same time, the folding of this expressive individuality into what Khan calls Naya Pakistan (New Pakistan) offers his supporters a vision of collective unity in the aggregate reality of an Islamic nation. Khan’s constant invocation of Iqbal has widespread visceral appeal for a populace deeply disillusioned with Pakistan and its place in the world and looking for alternatives to the by now tired promises of Westernization as modernization or the rote Islamization of law and state. Now it is true that Khan’s visceral anti-Americanism strikes some liberals in Pakistan as odd considering his cosmopolitan background. Even more disturbing to the chattering classes is his political flirtation with the Taliban. But Khan’s own writings on the matter suggest that this flirtation and his valorization of Pathan culture has little to do with the content of their politics and everything to do with ideology. In their vociferous resistance to homogenizing state authority, to constant foreign incursions in their lands, and their commitment to Islam, they represent a latent possibility as a vanguard for Pakistan as such. Informed as it is by an obscurantist form of Wahhabi Islam, it is the content of their politics that is the problem. It is for this reason that Khan does not support pacifying them through military means, but integrating them into the Pakistan body politic with educational and cultural mechanisms in place to unleash their liberatory potential in the moribund settled parts of the country. The common refrain that one does not negotiate with terrorists is political double speak. A terrorist is an ideological deviant, much like a Gandhian pacifist is a political deviant that refuses to play by the rules of the game. This may strike liberal sensibilities as a corrupt analogy but Khan would disagree. Essential to the Iqbalian trope of self-determination

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is the image of a shaheen (falcon), “the dervish of the kingdom of birds.”22 The shaheen is a symbolic representation of personal and social evolution in the regime of khudi. A bird of prey that actively hunts for its own food, the falcon is contrasted in Iqbal’s poetry with the vulture which preys on the dead and consumes carrion. The carrion-eating elites who prostrate before their foreign enablers for bits and pieces of flesh torn of the Pakistani body politic itself are the very embodiment of Pakistan’s existential corruption. Deviance and desire are intertwined aspirations in the regime of such corruption. Khan’s anti-Western screed is of a very different variety than the Islamic fundamentalist rejection of the West. It is an acknowledgment of the fact that a prior refusal to be molded by Western hands is the necessary condition for the ensoulment of a desirous political self. Inasmuch as Khan and Iqbal both identify secularism not as mere separation of church and state but as an ideological project implicated in the corruption of the Muslim self, their political theologies echo the emerging critiques of secularism in the Western academy. But they go further in offering an Islamic alternative to secular settlements attendant to colonial and postcolonial states cooked up in the cauldron of Western hegemony. This proposed new settlement has affinities with what Robert Bellah called “civil religion” and with older notions of religious republicanism associated with Rousseau, but is not reducible to either.23 A postsecular perspective that situates Khan’s political rhetoric within a longer history of contest against the ideological projects of colonialism, and against renewed imperialist adventures in the post 9/11 world, is better suited to teasing out the intricate internal logic of this rhetoric than the older, deficient theories of modernization and secularism. As Nandini Deo points out in her introduction to this book, “the first step” in bringing a postsecular perspective to bear on contemporary debates is “to historicize secular settlements and show their contested nature in order to denaturalize existing divisions of the secular and the religious.” Once such historicization has been adequately accomplished, scholars are empowered to push “this conversation further by considering alternatives to secularism and public religion.” But Khan’s appropriation of Iqbal also suggests that the underlying unease latent in his rhetoric is not merely with a particular secular settlement but with the entirety of the liberal democratic order itself. Democracy as an aggregating principle of fairness and representation is seen at best as a second-order political procedure to secure a polity already constituted by the khudibe-khudi dialectic. At worst, democracy devolves into mob rule and works

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actively against the highest ideals of a community of selves. In this suspicion of democracy, Khan’s movement shares some common features with others that have cropped up around the world in recent years. Here in America, both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements worry that the moral basis of the nation is being threatened by the numerics of dollars or people. The rise of Donald Trump is at least in part a reflection of such anxieties. In Egypt, the first revolution was undone by an even bigger one to remove the democratically elected government of Mohammad Morsi. Populist movements are ascendant in various parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. In all of these cases, corruption is deployed rhetorically not merely as an economic matter but rather as a problem with the metaphysics of the political order. Something is wrong and rotten at the core. With the Cold War over, could it be that we are finally witnessing a longoverdue public reevaluation of the self-evident goodness of liberal conceptions of secularism and democracy. And is it time then to begin theorizing these ostensibly disparate social movements based not only on their political programs but also on their pre-political deviance? It is time then to revisit the metaphysics of politics some twenty-five years after it was pronounced settled by so many in the West and around the world.

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Beyond the Binaries of Islamic and the Secular: Muslim Women’s Voices in Contemporary India R. Santhosh

Introduction Indian encounter with European modernity necessitated emergence of secularism as a state project and there have been fascinating attempts to make sense of the checkered history of this term both as a discourse as well as a practice in the Indian context. The multireligious character and the entrenched religiosity of sociopolitical as well as civil spheres of this “traditional” society mandated unique and ingenious imagination of secularism in India as a political principle as well as institutional practice. The unique features of Indian secularism have been elaborately discussed to contradistinguish it from its European avatars and many times even put forward as a model worth emulating to address conflicts emerging from a multireligious society. These debates largely revolved around the unique ways through which the Indian state deals with different religious groups, their affiliations, religiosities, and competing claims. Gender as a theme prominently figures in these deliberations about Indian secularism as it provides an interesting perspective to look at questions related to gender equality across religious communities, relevance of customary laws, need for social reformism, the extent of state intervention in the internal matters of various religious communities, and so on. The very nature of the Indian legal system, which recognizes different personal laws for different religious communities to govern their family law, has only compounded these debates as it provides for the opportunity to assess and evaluate the role of state in terms of interfering and reformulating personal laws in the larger pursuit of ensuring gender justice and rights to women. In this context, the debates about the

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question of Muslim women1 assume significance as it simultaneously raises a number of other questions about the role of the state, the internal dynamics within the Muslim community, implications of Islamic reformism and counter reformism, the emerging trends of Muslim women articulating their voices through secular and religious languages, and so on. Islamic feminism is yet to gain large-scale popularity and acceptance among Muslim women in India in comparison with many other Muslim countries in the world. Yet, there are increasing mobilizations of Muslim women from different parts of the country espousing the Islamic feminist framework while demanding justice and equality in comparison with their male counterparts. The genesis and growth of Islamic feminism in India is intricately interconnected with the development of a secular state and constitutional provisions that protect the cultural rights of minorities. This secular constitution and a close interaction with secular women’s movement have specifically shaped the contours of Islamic women’s movement in the country. The organizational linkages and ideological influences with these movements have substantially shaped the articulation of Muslim women’s espousal of their demands and rights. Hence, an analysis of the growth and development of Islamic feminism also will provide insights into the complementary influences and exchanges between this strand of feminism and the mainstream liberal-secular strand. A parallel, but highly, significant process is the emergence of Islamic reformism that produced different strands of Islamic theology and a highly vibrant Muslim public sphere where questions of faith, rituals, politics, and women’s question are actively discussed and debated. Many of these theological as well as organizational strands within modern Islam in India have proved to be highly capable of remolding and reorienting themselves in accordance with the changing sociopolitical contexts. Several of these organizations, especially those that emerged within the Islamic modernist framework, such as Jamaat-eIslami and several Salfi organizations, have adopted a secular liberal framework and language to articulate their demands and sociopolitical positions as Muslim subjects in contemporary India. This is to be understood in the current political context of the country where Hindu nationalism has assumed state power and concerted attempts are being made to redefine Indian nationalism in accordance with an exclusivist Hindutva ideology. Such an adoption of a secular framework and an inescapable secularization of Muslim politics have resulted in the framing of the question of Muslim women within the framework of liberalism and the discourses of rights and justice.

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In this chapter, I examine the articulation of the question of Muslim women in the specific sociocultural context of Kerala, a South Indian state where Muslims constitute around 26 percent of the total population. Though Kerala is atypical of the Muslim condition in India in several aspects, it provides an excellent context to analyze the emerging Muslim women’s voices in the larger context of modernity and secularization process. I foreground the context of Kerala to address larger debates about the postsecular turn in feminism and suggest that the arguments that try to characterize postsecular as a space/phase beyond the secular is highly problematic. While the emergence of Islamic feminist voices do point to a definite shift in terms of highlighting epistemological and political limitations of secular liberalism, the attempts to portray them as beyond liberal frameworks and as something emerging from the “true traditions of religion” is highly problematic. I suggest that the articulations of Islamic feminism cannot be understood outside the larger logic of modernity and its unfolding manifestations in the period of late modernity. I present two interconnected factors to highlight this argument: first, the processes of reformism and secularization within Islam that engendered the process of making “women’s question and Islamic feminism” a discourse and a movement and, second, the wider secular processes, ideologies, and institutions that became an integral part of the articulations of the question of Muslim women.

The uniqueness of Indian secularism: Always already postsecular? Indian secularism has been subjected to fascinating scholarly debates owing to its unique historical constitution in the backdrop of colonialism and its continued salience in the postcolonial democratic processes. The early systematic critique of Indian secularism by three noted Indian scholars, namely T. N. Madan, Ashis Nandy, and Partha Chatterjee, emerged during the early 1990s in the backdrop of increasing communal tensions and the ascension of a vitriolic Hindu right (Chatterjee 1994; Madan 1998; Nandy 1995). These critiques and subsequent debates with other scholars played a very important role in delineating the specificities of Indian secularism. Refuting the charges of these scholars who argue against the compatibility and desirability of secularism as a state project in India, Rajeev Bhargava points out that quite distinct from its European counterparts, Indian secularism as a state project is less concerned about the

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reduction of religion into the private sphere and is more of a procedural one where the state strives to maintain a principled distance from competing religious communities and claims (1994). The history of Indian states in maintaining this principled distance has been quite checkered and accusations have been made from different corners that various political parties in power yielded to vote bank politics and resorted to minority appeasement. As Chatterjee points out, while the state has enthusiastically taken up the task of social reform by bringing in various legislations among Hindus, such intervention among Muslims and Christians have been far and few (1994). The main point of contention here is the legacy of personal laws in India as the country has a single criminal code but matters related to marriage, succession, divorce, and so on of different religious communities are governed by their respective personal laws, which are a combination of customary as well as modern laws. While formulation of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) has been enshrined in the Indian Constitution under the Directive Principles of State Policy, given the complexity of the task and the sensitivity of the matter involved, there has been hardly any attempt to materialize this provision, despite the shrill call by the Hindu right to enact such a provision to strengthen national integration and unity. The prevalence of personal laws in India is a reflection of an important component of Indian secularism: recognition of community-based rights rather than individual rights. Similarly, as Bhargava argues, Indian secularism does not erect a wall of separation between state and religion; instead, it maintains a “principled distance,” which is different from one-sided exclusion, mutual exclusion, strict neutrality, and equidistance (Bhargava 2013: 83). These features have played a significant role in keeping religion a highly vibrant force in Indian society in terms of providing a sense of collective identity and belonging as well as a potent force for public intervention. Similarly, the intricate relationship between religious affiliations and electoral democracy also provided significant legitimacy to religious mobilization for political gains and in the past couple of decades this tendency of politicization of religion has reached its pinnacle with a Bharatiya Janata party acquiring state power in the 2014 general elections. Hence, in comparison with the trajectory of secularism in the West, Indian secularism has been highly accommodative of religion in the public as well as private spheres of society. In that sense, the term “postsecular” may not have much salience in the Indian context where religion has been an integral part of the statecraft as well as the public sphere all through the history.

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Islamic reformism, secularization, and the emergence of the gender question The plethora of Islamic organizations that emerged in the Indian subcontinent in the last century espousing divergent theological and organizational strands have played a significant role in foregrounding the women’s question, albeit as an unintended consequence. The reformist traditions and organizations, such as Shah Wali Ullah, Ahle-Quran, Ahle-Sunnath, Jamaat-e-Islami, Deobandi School, and Tablighi Jamaat, brought in fundamental changes in which Muslims lived and understood their religion (Ahmad 2010; Madan 1997; Mayaram 1997; Metcalf 1982, 2004; Sanyal 1996; Reetz 2006, 2008). Most of these movements, though aimed at thwarting the advent of colonial modernity as epitomized through Christianity and colonial rule in India, were forced to incorporate a series of underlying features of modernity. The exhortations to go back to “the fundamentals of Islam,” as espoused by all these movements, cannot be assumed to be a reactionary response to colonial modernity and an attempt to return to the old and pristine Islamic past. Several scholars have pointed out that though these movements claim that they are returning to a pristine past and the tradition, in reality all these movements are specifically modern (Asad 1986; Madan 1997, 2006; Nandy 1990; Reetz 2006; Robinson 2008; Sanyal 1996; Turner 2001). Bryan Turner perceptively argues: The attempt to impose religion in civil society as an integrating principle in the name of fundamentalism often has unintended consequences of raising questions about the status and meanings of traditional values and thus their coherence and authenticity become a critical issue. Hence the unveiling by secular authorities and reveiling of women by religious authorities have ironically exposed “women” to public debate. (Turner 2001: 133)

The contingencies of modernity with which Islam was forced to negotiate resulted in the production of a series of ingenious practices that redefined Islamic religiosity in a radical manner. The response of Islam to modernity and the ways of negotiation was neither unitary nor singular. A complex series of highly differentiated and diverse responses was produced in different sociocultural contexts. It was neither Islamic theology nor the basic tenets of modernity that determined the nature of such responses. On the other hand, a complex set of factors and specific sociohistorical contexts played a pivotal role in deciding the nature of Islamic negotiations with modernity.

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Islamic knowledge and its transmission underwent a steady process of democratization with its encounter with colonial modernity. A number of structural elements of European modernity, such as higher education, print capitalism, urbanization, and expansion of technologies, have contributed to the objectification and democratization of religious knowledge. Such a process, Hefner notes, is not a reaction against but a response to the modern world; the most successful religious refigurations thrive by drawing themselves down into mass society and away from exclusive elites, if and when the latter lose their hold on popular allegiance (Hefner 1998: 98). Francis Robinson (2008, 2013) has extensively dwelt on these fundamental changes brought into the Islamic traditions as a result of its encounter with modernity. He points out that reformist movements, though aimed at opposing the Western cultural and political hegemony, at the same time made use of Western knowledge and technology to drive forward its purposes and came to be fashioned in part by its interaction with it (Robinson 2008: 261). He further lists out five changes that the encounter with modernity brought out in the Islamic subject-hood. (a) the ending of a total authority of the past as Muslims sought new ways of making revelation and tradition relevant to the present; (b) the new emphasis on human will as Muslims realised that in a world without political power it is only through their will that they could create an Islamic society on earth; (c) the transformation of the self, achieved through willed activity, leading to selfreflectiveness, self-affirmation and growing individualism; (d) the rationalisation of Islam from scripturalism through to its formation into an ideology; (e) and finally a process of secularisation involving a disenchantment of the world, which arguably has been followed by a re-enchantment. (Robinson 2008: 261)

Each of these points elaborated by Robinson has its own specific manifestation in varied sociohistoric contexts, thereby rendering an easy generalization regarding the exact nature of change happening within Muslim society impossible. The rejection of the chain of holy transmitters (isnad) of Islamic knowledge as the repository of religious authority is such a fundamental change brought about by the reformist movements within Islam. These changes materialized basically through two processes: first, by the jettisoning of the reformers of much of medieval scholarship of the Islamic world and, second, through the vigorous adoption of print. This process, as Eikelman and Piscatory (1996) elaborate, contributed to the objectification and the radical democratization of Islamic knowledge. Democratization also leads to the increasing awareness about the

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necessity and possibilities of the instrumentality of human will. Professing and practicing “true Islam” is seen as the only option of bringing back the golden era of Islamic past and the onus is laid squarely on the individual’s shoulders. Hence, it becomes the religious and moral obligation of Muslims irrespective of gender or other differences to understand religion personally and practice it properly. This aspect, as elaborated by Robinson, brought about possibilities of multiple and varied forms of religious expressions outside the boundaries of traditional Islamic schools. Yet another impact of modernity is the increasing tendency of self-reflexivity and self-consciousness whereby the ordinary things of daily life were subjected to increasing scrutiny and examination. Being a Muslim in every mundane aspect of daily life including dress, habits, and behavior is seen as a moral and religious obligation for becoming a true believer. The impact of rationalism as a contribution of Western modernity has had a tellingly different orientation and purpose in the discourse of Islamic reformism. Instead of the typical European rationality that questioned religious faith in favor of scientific reason, rationality within Islamic reformism developed a scriptural faith in the Qur‘an and Hadith, thereby condemning all local manifestations of Islamic faith as irrational. Instead of using rationality to question the basic tenets of Islamic religiosity and piety, it was used to distinguish between the “true” Islamic practices from the “irrational” and “corrupt” aberrations of Islam. This process followed the reification of Islam in which submitting to God became an act of will rather than the unquestioning following of the folkways of the faith (Eikelman and Piscatory 1996). Even while Islamic reformism and Islamism present itself as antithetical to secularism as an ideology, it can be argued that they have undergone an inescapable process of secularization as rationalization of religion. The very act of bringing religion into the public sphere and opening it up for discussions and public debate necessitates this process of rationalization. What are the implications of such processes of increased rationalization within Islam to the gender question? One of the most significant aspects, as Turner pointed out, is that of the women’s question emerging as a theme of discussion in the religious public sphere with varying theological positions and opinions on this question from diverse theological vantage points. The reformist and counter-reformist organizations were inescapably faced with the challenge of addressing the women’s question and provide theologically suited explanations for their respective positions. As can be surmised safely, these positions were never derived solely from the theology, rather were the results of intense negotiations of divergent theological

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positions with the compulsions of modernity. Hence, the story of debates on Muslim women is inextricably interlinked with the larger stories of reformism and the consequent secularization as a rationalization of religion. In Kerala as well, the early attempts of Islamic reformism, which emerged in the form of Kerala Aikya Sangham in early the 1920s and later formalized as the Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulema in 1924, was heavily influenced by the challenges of colonial modernity and strove to refashion Kerala Islam as a modern religion, capable of coexisting with and responding to the challenges of colonial modernity. This organization was later rechristened as Kerala Nadwatul Mujahideen, popularly known as the Mujahid movement in 1950, and emerged as an exemplification of Islamic modernism in the specific context of Kerala. The organization aggressively fought against the “blind beliefs and irrational practices” among traditional Muslims and established numerous institutions to impart secular education to the educationally backward Muslim community in Kerala. Following this orientation, it also established women’s colleges and encouraged education of Muslim women. In the religious sphere as well, the organization initiated debates and discussions among Kerala Muslims regarding the status of women in Islam and argued for their rights in the public domain and opened up facilities for them to pray in the mosques. Subsequently, the Mujahid movement also founded the Muslim Girls and Women’s Movement in 1988 as an independent organization for the mobilization of women in the community. Another influential reformist organization is Jamaat-e-Islami, founded by Abul-ala-Maududi; the organization opened its Kerala chapter in 1948 and vociferously espoused the cause of political Islam, within an overarching logic of reformism. Later, as has been demonstrated by several scholars, Jamaat-e-Islami transformed itself from the Maududian arguments into a discourse of secular liberalism, replete with the rhetoric of rights, especially minority rights (Ahmad 2008, 2010; Iqtidar 2011). One of the consequences of this transformation was the recasting of the Muslim women’s issue through the lens of rights. They also established the Girls Islamic Organization as an exclusive girls’ forum to enable them to effectively take up responsibilities in the family as well as in society based on Islamic values. On the other hand, the traditionalist sections, known popularly as the traditionalist Sunnis who had initiated a systematic counter-reformist propaganda during late 1920s, steadfastly refused to officially open up avenues for women’s causes and all of their public forums and platforms remained male bastions. The Sunni organization witnessed a split in late 1980s with

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Kanthapuram A.  P. Abubackar Musaliyar walking away from the parent organization and establishing a separate Sunni organization known after his name, thereby leaving two warring factions of Sunnis known as AP Sunnis and EK Sunnis in the state. The theological as well as ideological positioning of these Sunni sections is fascinating, given the fact that they claim to be the representatives of tradition, while the community is undergoing substantial transformation in the socioeconomic and political spheres. Hence, even while refusing to open up forums and avenues for women, these organizations come under increasing pressure to address the category of “Muslim women” in their discourses and have to respond to the challenges emerging from the reformist Muslim as well as secular women’s groups in the society. One of the direct implications of a highly vibrant Islamic public sphere in Kerala is the intense discussions and debates on any substantial theme of argument from divergent Islamic theological as well as organizational points of view. In contemporary Kerala, the question of Muslim women is currently being subjected to such a discursive analysis and each of these organizations projects and promotes its versions of these discourses, which many a time lead to bitter criticisms and confrontations. In a recent speech addressing the all-male student wing of his organization, Kanthapuram Musaliyar, leader of the orthodox Sunni sections, categorically stated that gender equality is against Islam, intelligence, and humanity, and advocates of such demands ultimately aim to destroy Islam as well as the cultural fabric of society. He argued that men and women are endowed with different capabilities and women are not able to perform complex activities like heart surgery because they simply do not have strong “will power.” He also pointed out that in Islam, there are no women prophets, Khalifas, or scholars. His comments attracted sharp criticism from different Muslim organizations and women’s groups; many of them criticized him for maligning the image of Islam through projecting a highly misogynistic impression of the religion and refusing to accept the gender-egalitarian tenets of Islam. What is really important is the multiple interpretations on the “Islamic position on women” forcefully argued by different Muslim religious groups that vouch by the sanctity and accuracy of their respective theological positions, thereby systematically challenging a singular hegemonic “Islamic position on the women question.” These positions range from stout refusal to engage with modern/liberal emancipatory frameworks regarding women to a conditional acceptance of the rights discourses within a modernist Islamic framework.

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Issues such as separate public forums for women, election of Muslim women candidates in general elections, employment and educational rights, questions of triple talaq, and polygamy are discussed and debated by these organizations through these multiple perspectives, thereby opening up a wide variety of interpretations that vie with each other for theological authenticity. Hence, it is explicitly clear that the religious position on the women’s question is not exclusively religious anymore and these positions have been inextricably linked with secular discourses, frameworks, and the larger process of secularization, thereby obliterating the dichotomy between the religious and the secular.

The question of Muslim women and the story of Kerala modernity One of the fundamental requirements to address the women’s question among Muslims of India is to foreground the larger context of a modernizing, secular, and multireligious society in which they inhabit. Hence, any discussion that is solely located within the discursive domains of Islamic theology would be insufficient to provide a comprehensive view on this subject. The Muslim community in India, like most of other communities across the world, has been an integral part of the larger stories of modernization, democratic political processes, and the larger cultural as well as structural imperatives of modernity and late modernity. Even the specific Islamic reformist movements need to be understood in the larger context as they are heavily influenced by mediation of the state and similar processes in other communities. This Islamic reformist language used by the early Muslim scholars were based on a series of modernist ideals which marked the nineteenth- and twentieth-century public domain of Kerala (Devika 2002; Kodoth 2001; Menon 2002) and several Hindu reformers like Sri Narayana Guru, Chattambi Swami, and Ayyankali also spoke in the identical language of abandoning blind beliefs, having correct religious understandings, the necessity to lead a more disciplined and moral life, and so on. These movements, with the active support of the colonial and the postcolonial state, had a larger project of creating modern human subjects as well as modern religious subjectivities. Similarly, as Osella and Osella describe, reform, with its universalist and progressive flavor, is then both a symptom of modernity and— like modernity—is necessarily worked out as a project, which is simultaneously local and transnational (Osella and Osella 2008: 333). Osella and Osella have

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also argued that the theological claims and organizational contestations among Kerala Muslim organizations regarding their claim of “true Islam” has to be understood within the overarching context of Kerala modernity and through the idiom of progress shaped by economic mobility achieved through migration to the Middle East and new entrepreneurial initiatives (Osella and Osella 2008). The Muslim community in Kerala, along with the women, experienced the larger changes and socioeconomic processes that influenced the state. Notwithstanding the initial opposition to modern education, the traditionalist organizations also were forced to follow their reformist counterparts in opening up secular educational institutions, especially for women. The enormous emphasis laid by the state in promoting primary education and opening up of schools even in the remote places of Muslim-majority areas significantly benefited the community, including the women. Lately, the organizational competition within the community in terms of reformist and traditionalist positions was reflected in the establishment of educational institutions by these organizations as each of them claimed to be providing a blend of secular and religious education per the tenets of Islam. The booming Gulf migration since the early 1980s has enormously benefited the economy of Kerala and one of the positive consequences was the investment in education, especially in higher education, by these migrants. The opening up of the higher education sector to private players also had a significant positive impact on Muslims as a number of wealthy entrepreneurs as well as organizations opened up institutions of higher education, especially professional colleges, and a large number of middle- and upper-middle-class women from the community made use of these possibilities. Another significant realm of influence is the electoral sphere and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) has played a fundamental role in the political mainstreaming of the community since the 1950s. The party emerged as the spokesperson for the minority Muslim communities and became an integral part of the coalition governments that have characterized Kerala politics since the 1980s. IUML, being a political party of the Muslims, treaded a cautious path in terms of their affiliation with the traditionalists and the reformers by trying to accommodate the demands of both sections. While the party is widely identified with the traditional Sunnis, a number of their leaders have strong affiliation with the reformist Mujahid groups, which influenced their outlook toward a number of issues including the political participation of women. Vanitha League, the women’s wing of IUML, was established in 1992 and this was an imperative arising out of the seventy-third constitutional amendment

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in India that mandated 33 percent reservation of seats for women candidates in local bodies of governance. Ever since, the IUML, as a registered political party, has been mandated to field women in these constituencies and hence Muslim women were forced to contest in the elections and thereby enter into the political sphere. But these changes have not been smooth, as the party finds it difficult to find appropriate candidates and field them. The local body elections that concluded in 2015 also highlighted the tensions around Muslim women, electoral participation, and Islamic norms regarding modesty and appearance in public places. In several places, finding suitable Muslim women candidates was not an easy task for political parties and yet a sizable number of Muslim women contested and were elected to the local bodies across the state. Images of election posters and flex boards that went viral on the social media depicted these tensions and dilemmas. The posters and banners had smiling pictures of the husbands of the candidates and the women themselves were simply missing from them.

Muslim/Islamic feminist initiatives in Kerala In the light of the above discussion on the specific secular-religious world that women in Kerala inhabit, it is important to look at the emerging movements that can be labeled as Muslim feminist initiatives. Despite the fact that such initiatives are at a nascent stage, especially in comparison with their counterparts in Muslim-majority countries, these movements suggest interesting dynamics taking place among Muslim women in India. Unlike these countries that have experienced waves of Islamization since the 1980s that undoubtedly engendered the emergence of Islamic feminism as a way of reclaiming women’s rights, (Mojab 2001; Bardan 2002, 2005; Mir-Hosseini 2011; Moghadam 2000), in India it was the secular state through an intervention in the personal laws of Muslims that paved the way for the emergence of Islamic feminist thinking among Muslim women (Patel 2009; Agnes 1994; Kirmani 2011; Schneider 2009). The Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act of 1986, brought in by the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, was widely seen by progressive women’s groups in India as an assault on the rights of Muslim women as it prevented Muslim women (who had been married under Muslim Personal Law and subsequently divorced) from resorting to the Criminal Procedure Code, as women of other religions can do, to secure minimum maintenance from their husband (Metcalf

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2006). The enactment of this law, the fallout of the highly controversial Shah Bano case, was a catalyst to foreground the injustice against women inherent in the various provisions of the Muslim Personal Law and the highly patriarchal character of Muslim Ulema, including the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. Indian women’s movements that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s were based on principles of secularism and mostly viewed religion as an obscurantist force. While Omvedt (1993) points out their Marxist ideological orientation, Agnes (1994) suggests their upper-class Hindu background, which was least self-reflective of their social positionalities as the reasons for this antireligious bias. But soon, a number of Muslim women’s organizations began to emerge during the 1980s as a part of the wider growth of NGOs in the country, mostly in the urban areas (Kirmani 2011). In one of the pioneering works on Islamic feminism in India, Sylvia Vatuk (2008) focuses on initiatives that are solely dependent on Islamic Scriptures to derive legitimacy for demanding women’s rights and she makes a distinction between such initiatives and those that appeal to the Indian Constitution and other liberal rights discourses. However, I find this distinction problematic and would rather agree with the arguments of Schneider, who refuses to make such distinctions and argues that instead of conceptualizing Islamic feminism as an ideology or category for a transnational social or political movement, it is considered here a discursive movement or strategy that is adapted by certain actors to specific and local contexts (2009: 58). Schneider, following Ahmad’s argument (2008), also points out how some Islamist organizations such as Jamaat-e-Islami also began to articulate women’s questions through the language of rights and this needs to be understood as a specific local manifestation in the Indian scenario. These studies on Islamic feminist initiatives have analyzed a number of organizations such as the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board and Muslim NGOs like Muslim Women’s Rights Network, Awaaz-e-Niswaan, Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, and STEPS (Vatuk 2008; Schneider 2009; Kirmani 2011). It would be pertinent in this context to look at the scenario in Kerala to understand the complicated relationship between Muslim women’s initiatives and questions of secularism and Islamic feminism. One of the pioneering attempts aimed at organizing Muslim women in Kerala was made by V. P. Suhara, who established NISA, a “progressive Muslim women’s association” during the late 1980s in Kozhikode, in the northern part of the state. The biography of Suhara and the history of NISA as an organization stand testimony to the

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checkered history of the Muslim women’s movement in the state. Suhara, who herself is a victim of early marriage and was later unilaterally divorced with a couple of young children, was drawn into social activism during the early 1970s. She was an active member of a secular women’s movement established in Kozhikode during the early 1980s and then established NISA on the realization that Muslim women’s issues are considerably different from others and a systematic campaign from within the community is necessary. Her organization and activities many a times came under severe attack—ranging from legal battles to physical assaults—from the orthodox sections of the community. She vociferously argues for the amendment of Muslim Personal Law so that several discriminatory practices like triple talaq, polygamy, and child marriage can be effectively prevented. She was in the forefront of agitations against the practice of rich Arabs from the Gulf visiting Kerala to marry young Muslim girls for a short duration and returning to the Gulf, never to come back again. Suhara and her organization have close links with women’s groups across the state and conduct various programs and agitations with their help. Suhara organized a seminar in Kozhikode in December 2015 on gender equality in Islam; the well-attended meeting ended with burning the effigy of Kanthapuram Musaliyar as a way of protest against his “anti-women” positions. The participants then took out a rally through the city shouting slogans against gender injustice in Islam. For Suhara, the framework of Islamic feminism, especially Amina Wadud and Fatima Mernissi, provide a strategic standpoint to revolt against the conservatives from within the community. Suhara tells me that “it is almost impossible to fight these patriarchal Ulemas outside the community. The moment you discard your Islamic identity, your legitimacy is lost and the community members never take you seriously and a dialogue becomes impossible” (pers. comm. December 2016). She points out that all mainstream Muslim organizations have very little interest in addressing women’s issues in India and unless women come forward, long-lasting changes will never occur. She highlighted a controversy where almost all major Muslim organizations in Kerala demanded a reduction of the marriageable age of Muslim girls from the existing limit of eighteen to sixteen on the grounds that being a backward community many girls tend to get married below the age of eighteen years and consequently have to face troubles as the marriage becomes legally invalid. Suhara, along with a number of Muslim as well as secular women’s organizations, conducted a series of protests across the state and put enormous pressure on the government not to accept the proposal. She was able to garner large-scale public support in her favor in this

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issue. Most recently, the Supreme Court of India accepted to hear a case filed by Suhara questioning the “anti-constitutional” provisions within the Muslim Personal Law. She argued that several provisions such as unilateral triple talaq, discriminatory succession and inheritance law, and provisions for polygamy are against the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution to its citizens. The Court hearings and subsequent developments are bound to have significant implications on these problematic practices within the community. Another initiative has come from the Kerala chapter of the Bharatiya Mahila Mukti Andolan, known as the Kerala Muslim Mahila Andolan (KMMA); most of these women’s groups are affiliated with reformist Muslim organizations like Jamaat-e-Islami and Mujahid movement. In a meeting with V.  P. Rajeena, a journalist-cum-office bearer of the KMMA, Rajeena highlighted the necessity to combine the emancipatory provisions within the Indian Constitution as well as in the Islamic Scriptures. She is vehement in her criticism against the patriarchal ulema and argues that they are consciously misinterpreting Islamic Scriptures and are steadfastly opposing any possibility of legal interventions. Similarly, the women’s wings and girl’s wings of reformist organizations like Mujahid and Jamaat-e-Islami have emerged as important platforms where the questions of Muslim women are articulated. These organizations, especially Jamaat-e-Islami, have adopted a secular liberal framework to fashion their Islamic activism and intervention in sociopolitical and environmental issues in Kerala. This has inevitably brought the gender question within the community to the fore and the organization argues for gender justice and representation for women in all public platforms. Jamaat-e-Islami and its girl students’ wing Girls Islamic Organization (GIO) find scholarly works of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood highly relevant in the Kerala context and works of Islamic scholars like Mernissi highly useful in critiquing the traditionalist Muslim leadership in Kerala. While the former provides them with theoretical grounds to defend various embodiments of Islamic faith against the secularist models on women agency and empowerment, Mernissi provides them the feminist arguments rooted within Islamic traditions to counter patriarchal structures. These women’s organizations are forced to tread a careful path, as they have to simultaneously uphold the cause of Muslim women as well as follow the policy dictates of parent organizations, which most of the times are highly discriminatory. There have been intense debates within GIO regarding the lack of autonomy for women leaders within the organization to decide matters as it is believed that the parent body Jamaat-e-Islami is forcing its agenda on GIO.

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Islamic feminism and the “iron cage of modernity” It is evident from the aforementioned account that the emergence of Muslim women raising issues related to their rights—whether secular or religiously granted—is something that cannot be understood outside the framework of modernity. Similar to the story of the emergence of secular feminism, the rise of Islamic feminism too is a direct consequence of the checkered encounter of Islam with processes of modernity in diverse sociopolitical contexts. These processes of modernity, while redefining external cultural as well as structural aspects of society, also irrevocably reshaped Islam and the reformist movements and the political avatar are a few among the various manifestations. Islamic feminism too is to be understood in that context, especially in the Indian scenario. Unlike many Muslim countries, secularism is a state practice and ideology and by virtue of being minorities, the ideology of secularism has been adopted in India by many—at least as a strategic weapon—to protect their interests in an increasingly hostile political atmosphere. The transformations brought in by modernization are assuming greater proportions and like any other community, Muslims too are struggling to negotiate between rapid social transformations and traditional religious life. There is an exponential growth in the number of Muslim students, especially girls, who enroll themselves into the higher educational institutions both within and outside the state. Though only a fraction of them end up in the workforce, the exposure provided by education is immense and leaves a lasting impression. Even those who are confined to the domestic sphere undergo significant transformations as the substantial male migration to the Gulf countries2 provides them with new challenges as well as opportunities to engage with the outside world. Along with these structural changes, late modernity, through the possibilities of cultural globalization, brings forth an entire spectrum of ideologies regarding women’s emancipation, gender rights, empowerment and agency, sexuality debates, and so on. Islamic feminism is highly influential in a growing section of young Muslim girls who find it fascinating to critically engage with the patriarchal forces within the community through Islamic idioms and language without being labeled as “westoxicated” feminists. Many of them are highly active in social media platforms such as Facebook and openly express their views with scant regard to the traditionalist leadership. There are a number of independent cultural groups and activist networks—both real and virtual—where Muslim girls’

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presence is very high and this is very much in consonance with the global trend of increasing Muslim women’s activism in the light of a perceived crisis of religious authority as well as the crisis of political representation (Schneider 2009; Gole 2002; Mahmood 2005). The rapid social transformation in a globalized era and the advent of late modernity pose significantly new challenges to the traditional ways through which religious organizations function and make themselves relevant in society. The advent of late modernity raises hitherto unheard-of demands in terms of identity articulations, individual rights, and gender politics. Proliferation of identity politics and sexuality discourses push the framework of liberal modernity to its limits and religious leaders, among others, find it really hard to engage with these changes. As a consumerist and a highly globalized society— thanks to its early episodes of migration—Kerala society, especially the youth, is undergoing tremendous transformations in its thinking in terms of culture, tradition, religion, rights and identities, and so on, and the gender question too is bound to get influenced by these changes. Religious identification and religiosity too are undergoing rapid transformations in a global world and Muslim youth are no exception to this. While globalization has made transnational religious networks and organizations more visible and stronger, there is a counter process through which an increasing number of youth express their engagement with the sacred through more personalized, spiritual articulations without the bindings of an organized religion and thereby joining the growing tribe of people who are “believing without belonging” (Davie 1990). There is emerging complex spectrum of spiritualties who many a time express themselves through theist, extra-theist, and ethical spirituality orientations and refuse to be bound by the rules and obligations of organized religion (Ammerman 2013). While religion is emerging as an important provider of identity and certainty in the contemporary cosmopolitan age marked by an increasing sense of ontological insecurity and pervasive sense of risk, these emerging trends that redefine conventional religiosity are of paramount importance; the Muslim community is not an exception to this trend. The explosion of divergent perspectives on religion and religious leaders expressed through social media has definitely taken away the aura of infallibility that surrounded these religious leaders earlier and every believer is acutely aware of the multitudes of criticisms that are targeted at their leaders; thus, following a leader with all accompanying organizational obligations becomes a highly deliberate, reflexive activity.

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Recent debates on postsecularism and its influence on feminism have opened up fascinating avenues to explore the empirical as well as theoretical aspects of Muslim women’s activism across the world. There has been a substantial shift in terms of understanding questions related to terms like “women’s agency” and “empowerment,” as the works of scholars like Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Hirschkind have been highly influential in redefining these debates. This approach, which argues for understanding women’s subjectivity through moral self-fashioning based on Islamic piety, tends to overlook a number of secular processes at work and close off prematurely the possibility of a materialist and historical understanding of the present in the Islamic world and a critical engagement with it (Mufti 2013). Mufti is emphatic in his argument that to recognize the overarching cultural as well as structural logic of Enlightenment as a defining characteristic of the contemporary, and any attempt to portray religion, especially political Islam masquerading as “Islamic tradition,” as uncontaminated by this logic, is an intellectual folly (Mufti 2013). Bardan, in the context of the experience of Middle Eastern countries, argues against treating secular feminism and Islamic feminism as two separate trajectories and points out that they flow in and out of each other and secular feminism is Islamic and Islamic is secular, the way Islam as din wa duniya (joins “religion and the world”) (Bardan 2005: 12). Similarly, Sindre Bangstad (2009) criticizes Asad for treating Western and non-Western societies as reified, essentialist categories to argue for the incommensurability of secularism with the latter and exhorts us to adopt a nuanced approach to the postcolonial societies to see the substantial cultural and political transformations brought into them in terms of ideologies and democratic practices that cannot be distinguished as Western or non-Western, especially in an increasingly interconnected global world. He calls for the “anthropology of secular as a vernacular practice to explore and understand the concepts and practices of secularism and the secular that Muslims bring to the table—whether these concepts are based on notions of convergence or incommensurability between what is defined as ‘Islamic,’ the secular and secularism” (Bangstad 2009: 201). A series of studies have specifically adopted this method, where the focus is not on the overarching conceptual questions related to the compatibility between Islam and secularism but on the everyday practices of specific Muslim communities, in particular sociopolitical contexts that necessitate their careful treading with principles and practices of secularization, often reflected as the art of surviving in a multireligious society. In my own work on the role of Salafi organizations in the remarkable success of the palliative care movement

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in Kerala, I have come across very specific secular modalities and sensibilities adopted by the Salafis while engaging in this activism in a multireligious society like Kerala (Santhosh 2016: forthcoming). Benjamin Soaras and Otayek have argued for the appreciation of Islam mondain referring to the “ways of being Muslims that exist in secular societies and spheres, without necessarily being secular” (Soaras and Otayek 2007: 17). Similarly, Thomas Blom Hansen, in his ethnographic work on the Muslims of Mumbai, has elaborated the mechanisms through which Muslims make use of secular democratic processes to ensure their citizenship rights (Hansen 2000).

Conclusion It is evident that the secular liberal feminist movements have made very little impact among Muslim women and every attempt to “emancipate” their Muslim sisters from the patriarchal and oppressive structures of Islam has faced with resistance and indifference. On the other hand, a cursory look into the major groups or organizations related to the question of Muslim women in India indicates that invariably they all resort to an internal criticism and struggle as gender-conscious Muslim women, many a times using the possibilities offered by Islamic feminism. It is important to note that these two narratives of secular liberalism and Islamic feminism in India are not unconnected parallels; rather, they significantly inform and interpenetrate each other, forcing an observer to go beyond the binaries of the secular and the religious. The possibilities offered by secular constitution, discourse of human rights, and individual freedom are constantly shaping the Islamic feminist discourses in the country. Islamic feminist interpretation provides them with the theoretical as well as the theological resources to challenge the entrenched patriarchal tendencies and leadership within the community. The debate between Islamic feminists and secular feminists regarding the larger questions of freedom and emancipation are yet to emerge in India as the former is at a nascent stage and the secular feminists realize the necessity of recognizing the significance of Islamic feminism among Muslim women in India. Similarly, the very use of Islamic feminist discourse by Muslim women should not prevent us from identifying a powerful process of secularization that is underlying in many of these movements and organizations. The impact of Islamic reformism as an application of rationality and insistence on scripturalism with possibilities of multiple interpretations on theological matters has resulted

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in the undeniable process of secularization where the Islamic and the secular are constantly renegotiated. In such a scenario, the question of women has been brought to the fore and the intense discussions among various groups regarding the “position of women in Islam” from diverse theological positions have finally resulted in the creation of a discourse on Muslim women. This discourse, despite its different theological and organizational differences, has ensured that the women’s question can no longer be ignored or made invisible by any major Muslim organizations. The reformist organizations have been trying to foreground the women’s issues—despite the feminist critique labeling these attempts as cosmetic and superficial—and traditionalists are forced to respond to these challenges. Even though they refuse to consider Islamic feminism as legitimate, they can no longer continue with the old rhetoric that Islam provides complete protection and security to women. These intra-community debates and dynamics are heavily influenced by the larger structural as well as cultural changes happening within India. As mentioned earlier, women’s reservation into local political bodies, rapid expansion of higher education among Muslim girls, increasing employment opportunities, exposure to larger debates and discussions on gender equality through social media, and so on have the capacity to significantly reformulate the question of Muslim women in India. If Islamic feminism had to contend with the powerful Islamic clergy and Islamist state in many Muslim-majority countries, in India, their situation is much more precarious, given the increasingly aggressive postures being adopted by the right-wing Hindutva parties and the state. The ascension of the Bharatiya Janata Party to the helm of state power following the 2014 general election and the stifling grip of Hindutva have further marginalized the Muslim community. This growing influence of Hindutva and shrinking spaces for minority politics have resulted in a siege mentality among the community and any attempt to talk about gender questions is immediately seen as untimely, destructive, and sabotaging the precarious unity of the community in difficult times. Especially, the current political scenario, where Hindutva leaders are raising the bogey of “oppressed Muslim women” and the necessity to abolish “evil practices like triple talaq” while carrying out with their insidious agenda against the minorities, has made the entire discourse on reforming Muslim Personal Law problematic. Therefore, the legitimate demand for modifying the Muslim Personal Law is vehemently opposed on the grounds that such demands would only cater to the growing clamor for a UCC, one of the long-lasting demands of Hindu right-

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wing organizations in India. While identitarian and assertive exclusivist Muslim politics gain momentum in different parts of the country, any attempts by these women’s organizations to be the internal critics are frowned upon, forcing them to tread a treacherous terrain. The future of Islamic feminism in India will crucially depend on how successfully Muslim women challenge this situation of having to confront opposition within and outside the community. As it is evident from several instances, the bogey of the Hindutva threat has not succeeded in dousing the spirit of rebellion among the activists of Muslim women and they have been highly successful in highlighting the structures of discrimination and oppression prevalent in the community legitimized by the patriarchal theology and clergy.

7

Dalit Feminism as Postsecular Feminism Timothy J. Loftus

The silencing of Dalit1 feminism takes multiple forms. First, there is the marginalization Dalit feminists have experienced in Dalit organizations. Second, there is the resistance they experience within ostensibly secular feminist communities. This chapter suggests that we can usefully explore the silences in Buddhist studies around Navayana Buddhism as a way of understanding how Dalit feminism is silenced within theoretical debates about secularism and religion. Dalit feminists have written extensively about the Dalit and feminist spaces which should have amplified their voices but instead have sought to mute them (Rao 2003; Pawar and Moon 2008; Rege 2013; Samantaray 2013). What has not been adequately explored is the way Dalit feminism has failed to be integrated into writing about Indian secularism. In this chapter, I suggest that Dalit feminism is a discourse which could greatly advance discussions about postsecular feminism. It has not been used to do so because of a larger problem in the academy in which Dalit intellectual production is ghettoized. I demonstrate this larger trend by discussing the treatment (or lack thereof) of Ambedkarite, or “Navayana,” Buddhism in Buddhist studies. The Buddhist studies community has placed Ambedkar’s writing about Buddhism into a secular camp that does not require much attention. This is a mistake. Ambedkar’s Buddhism is a form of engaged Buddhism, but it is not a-religious. The spiritual dimensions of Buddhist practice as a form of social justice organizing ought to be taken much more seriously.

Ambedkar and Ambedkarite Buddhism Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is a figure of monumental importance in the history of modern India. Apart from chairing the constitutional drafting committee and

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acting as India’s first law minister, he was only the second known Dalit, then “untouchable,” to graduate from high school; he completed a DSc in economics from the London School of Economics in 1923; he studied with John Dewey at Columbia University, where he earned a PhD in economics in 1927; he was called to the bar in London and practiced law in England and India; he was a prolific writer of both academic work and popular newsletters; and he organized and presided over one of the largest mass religious conversions in recorded human history, in 1956. Inside India he is perhaps the single most well-known and revered social justice figure for the oppressed classes with numerous universities, neighborhoods, roads, foundations, and so on named in his honor. It is quite difficult to overstate the influence of his life and work, and yet, curiously, his profile has remained hidden to the West. When those outside of India do recognize his name, it is often in terms of his role in drafting the Indian Constitution and have little, if any, awareness of his work as a major social justice actor and religious icon. When contrasted with Gandhi in the minds of Euro-Americans, Ambedkar, who was a fierce and fit contemporary rival to Gandhi, is completely obscured by the Mahatma’s shadow. Gandhi seems to occupy an exclusive position in Western minds as the spiritual model of social action in twentieth-century India. This conspicuous absence of Ambedkar in the Euro-American imagination of modern India is even more curious when viewed through the lens of religious studies. While the laundry list of Ambedkar’s accomplishments is beyond extensive, one of the most compelling and perhaps richest lenses through which to view Ambedkar’s life is that of religion. In many ways, it was Ambedkar’s total disdain and rejection of Hinduism that animated seemingly all his activity. In a speech given in 1935 in Yeola, some twenty years before his actual conversion to Buddhism, Ambedkar famously declared his intention to leave the Hindu religion before his death, having decided that “reforming Hinduism” for caste Hindus meant little more than public condemnations of untouchability, while leaving the pernicious structure of caste in place. In front of 10,000 untouchable leaders, he made a case for leaving Hinduism as a necessary condition for the advancement of the depressed classes in India and encouraged India’s then fortyfour million untouchables to join him in his rejection of Hinduism.2 With his characteristic impassioned rhetorical style building to a crescendo, Ambedkar exhorted the gathered untouchable leaders, “If you want to gain equality, change your religion. If you want independence, change your religion. If you want to make the world in which you live happy, change your religion.”3 In Ambedkar’s impassioned speech at Yeola, his admonition to untouchables to leave the Hindu fold was naturally met with stiff resistance from caste Hindus

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in India, including from Gandhi, who charged Ambedkar with attempting to change his religion like he was changing his clothing.4 It was clear then that Ambedkar’s chief opponents in his struggle for the annihilation of caste and the empowerment of untouchables were caste Hindus and, in particular, Gandhi himself.5 The road to conversion for Ambedkar originates in his direct experience of caste oppression and his sharp critique of caste Hindus’ unwillingness to do anything about that oppression. After stating his aspiration to leave the Hindu fold in 1935 and the publication of one of his seminal works, The Annihilation of Caste in 1936, Ambedkar spent two decades actively contemplating the shape that his conversion would take and to which religion he would eventually convert. It was his reading of Buddhism’s rational approach and built-in caste critique as well as its South Asian pedigree that finally convinced Ambedkar. It is clear that throughout his life as a political reformer, his personal preference and inclination was for Buddhist conversion.6 As Sallie King notes in Socially Engaged Buddhism, “Buddhism, he felt, was best because it also was an Indian religion and therefore not culturally alien; it was rational and pragmatic and avoided dogmatism; most important, it rejected the Hindu institution of caste and taught human equality.”7 Ambedkar sensed, I think rightly, that a strictly secular movement would lack the moral and normative weight that religious critique could offer in South Asia. Ambedkar died shortly after his public conversion. In the decades since, the Dalit movement in India has taken many forms. Some of those forms are explicitly religious in their orientation, such as the Buddhist Triratna Buddhist Mahasangha (formerly Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayaka Gana, or TBMSG) community and Christian Dalit movements, and others are not, such as the political activity of the Bahu Samaj Party. Whether Dalit activism takes the form of religious conversion and practice or secular engagement, the themes of Ambedkar’s anti-caste program and anti-Gandhism still form a deep undercurrent informing Dalit activism. Ambedkarite Buddhism, for its part, can be seen as a religious critique of religious oppression. As such, Ambedkarite Buddhism is meeting Hindu caste oppression on its own religious terms and drawing on the moral weight offered by the Buddhist tradition to both step out of the Hindu fold and its oppressive caste system and offering an alternative moral grounding to critique the practice of caste. In stepping out of the Hindu caste system and providing ground to critique caste, Ambedkarite Buddhism can allow for the recovery of dignity for those who formerly were defined by their polluting nature.

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The Euro-American imagination of Buddhism There is no denying that Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism was directed toward the social empowerment of the “depressed classes” and that his conversion was as much a reaction against Hinduism as it was an act of embracing the Buddhist tradition. Ambedkar’s social justice agenda colored his understanding and presentation of the core teachings of the Buddha. But does this unique interpretation necessarily make Ambedkar’s reading of Buddhism off the mark? To answer that question, it seems that determining how one measures authenticity is of critical importance. Buddhism entered the Anglophone world initially through the work of the American Transcendentalists, who themselves leaned heavily on the translation work of Sir William Jones, Charles Wilkins, and other British East India Trading Company figures who did the labor of actually traveling to Asia and learning Sanskrit, Pāli, Persian, and other literary languages required for accessing the religious histories of their research subjects. The first major Buddhist work translated into English was the Lotus Sūtra, which first entered the Englishspeaking world in 1844 through an article written by Henry David Thoreau titled “The Preaching of the Buddha.” The article appeared in the journal Dial, founded and edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and included a section of the Lotus Sūtra or, as Thoreau translated the title, the “White Lotus of the Good Law.”8 It was translated by Thoreau himself from Eugene Burnouf ’s then newly completed, and now famous, French translation. Inspired chiefly by Sir William Jones’s translation of the Laws of Manu and the essays in Jones’s Asiatick Research, the Dial’s vision of Buddhism of the “White Lotus of the Good Law,” as well as its presentations of the sayings of Confucius and other assorted wisdom from India, reflected the orientalist project characteristic of Transcendentalist thought in general. This vision of Buddhism, using only textual sources, emphasized the contemplative, rational, individualistic qualities of the tradition to the exclusion of those magical or folk religious aspects of the tradition emphasized by Buddhists actually living in Asia. The interest in oriental wisdom was for Emerson and Thoreau a perennialist concern for the correction of what they perceived as empty Christian religiosity. They sought to re-spiritualize the Euro-American mind through the appropriation and application of Eastern wisdom. As Rick Fields notes of Thoreau, “he felt no need to struggle like Jones or Wilkins to master another language. ‘In every man’s brain is the Sanskrit,’ was the way he put it. ‘The Vedas

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and their Agamas are not so ancient as serene contemplation. Why will we be imposed on by antiquity? . . . And do we but live in the present?’” One can hear in Thoreau’s words the bias toward a contemplative, meditationbased reading of the texts he is consuming in translation as well as, first, an example of the blinders that may come with approaching a text without a hermeneutic that allows for simultaneous awareness of one’s own agenda and, second, how that potential agenda colors one’s reading of a text as well as, third, the way we think about the motivations, intentions, and religious commitments of those who wrote the text. Because Thoreau wanted to read the “White Lotus of the Good Law” as supporting his larger project of infusing contemplative, meditation-based orientalist wisdom into the Euro-American religious mind, he finds those elements in the Lotus Sūtra and imprints those motivations onto its authors. He very much views the sūtra as, in his words, “the excellent way which conducts to the state of Buddha” and as Fields points out, “the way, that is, of contemplation and practice.”9 In another major effort toward this end, Edwin Arnold’s poem Light of Asia, published in 1878, perhaps did more to solidify the image of the renunciate, contemplative Buddhist mystic than any other Transcendentalist work with its eighty editions and more than half a million copies sold.10 Drawing on the work of Max Müller and other early Buddhologists, it told the story of the life of the rational, self-made mystic Buddha in colorful and engaging verse.11 He states, The Buddha died, the great Tathāgato, Even as a man ‘mongst men, fulfilling all: And how a thousand thousand lakhs12 since then Have trod the Path which leads whither he went Unto Nirvāna where the silence lives.13

This Transcendentalist perennialism colored the way Buddhism has been received in America and allowed for the further elaboration of a contemplative reading of Buddhist texts. Madame Blavatsky, Colonel Alcott, and the theosophists picked up on this coloring of the Buddha and carried it forward in their development and subscription to their own occultist versions of “esoteric Buddhism.” This marks the beginning of the white convert community seeking to rebrand its own version of Buddhism based on the rationalist and perennialist ideals that motivated them. It also marks the beginning of the return, or correction, of Buddhism in Asia by white, Western proponents of Buddhism. As Fields states, “if the Theosophists balked at accepting Buddhism . . . as ‘a creed,’ they

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nevertheless accepted it as ‘philosophy,’ albeit with certain eccentricity.” And in reference to Colonel Alcott’s missionizing in Sri Lanka he states, He and HPB [Madame Blavatsky] proceeded overland to Colombo in triumph, the Colonel lecturing to thousands in temples, halls and impromptu outdoor meetings. Though government agents and missionaries did their best to obstruct them, the two-month tour was a huge success, resulting in the formation of seven branches of the Buddhist Theosophical Society of Ceylon.14

So certain were they of the superiority of their reading of the texts in question, they felt no sense of self-consciousness in traveling to Sri Lanka to correct the views of those Buddhists who they felt had misunderstood the actual teachings of the Buddha. In some ways, Burnouf ’s French translation of the Lotus Sūtra itself marks the very beginning of this reading. Incredibly, his introduction to his translation of the Lotus Sūtra goes to great length to identify the Buddha as a human being and to characterize Buddhism as a rational, human-oriented philosophy. He states, I speak here in particular of the Buddhism that appears to me to be the most ancient, the human Buddhism, if I dare to call it so, which consists almost entirely in very simple rules of morality, and where it is enough to believe that the Buddha was a man who reached a degree of intelligence and of virtue that each must take as the exemplar for his life.15

To anyone who has read the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha described above is certainly not recognizable as the Shakyamuni Buddha of the sūtra. For example, in the chapter “Supernatural Powers,” the sūtra states, At that time the World-Honored One, in the presence of Manjushri and the other immeasurable hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, millions of bodhisattvas and mahasattvas who from of old had dwelled in the saha world, as well as the monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen, heavenly beings, dragons, yakshas, gandharvas, asuras, garudas, kimnaras, mahoragas, human and nonhuman beings—before all these he displayed his great supernatural powers. He extended his long broad tongue upward till it reached the Brahma heaven, and from all his pores he emitted immeasurable, countless beams of light that illuminated all the worlds in the ten directions.16

If anything, the Buddha in the Lotus Sūtra could not possibly be presented in a more superhuman, deified style yet, incredibly perhaps, the Transcendentalists managed to find a rational, human Buddha in, of all the unlikely places, the Lotus Sūtra. Indeed, if one can make the Lotus Sūtra’s Śakyamuni Buddha

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into a rational, scientific actor, one can make any Śakyamuni into a rational, scientific actor. As Donald Lopez states of Burnouf ’s introduction, the Buddha had been transformed from an idol into a man, indeed, a philosopher, a philosopher who rejected the rituals and myths of the Brahmin priests, a philosopher who sets forth an ethical system, open to all, regardless of class and caste, a system based on reason.

The study of Buddhism in Anglophone scholarship in the twentieth century has been inflected with this Transcendentalist agenda and has had to grapple with its legacy, attempting to undo much of what was assumed to be true based on the superiority of rationalist, Enlightenment-based thought. While the study of Buddhism in the Euro-American academy has certainly moved past the overly reductionist presentations of Buddhism displayed above, there still remains the tension between a bias toward the Enlightenment-based, positivist thinking that privileges the methods of comparative philology over the application of hermeneutics that take seriously the complex and multifaceted dynamics of human experience and allows for many Buddhisms as expressed in different times and cultural contexts. It seems that in an effort to find the Buddhism that they wanted to find, early Euro-American receivers of the Buddhist tradition privileged those aspects of the tradition that supported their efforts to find a scientifically compatible, rational religion that could re-spiritualize the West. In so doing, the picture of Buddhism that became dominant, and continues to haunt the academy, has been largely one-dimensional; emphasizing the contemplative and meditative aspects of Buddhist traditions to the exclusion of “religious” aspects that complicate that picture. In this reading, those “religious” aspects of the Buddhist traditions were written off as later, degraded forms that arose after the golden period of pure early Buddhism, where the Buddha was seen as a human, rational actor who prescribed a very clear, gradual path of meditative self-cultivation that leads to the tradition’s soteriological end.17 We can see a remarkably similar project in Ambedkar’s efforts to find the Buddhism that he wanted to find in his seminal work The Buddha and His Dhamma, where his presentation of the well-known and foundational Buddhist teachings known as the Four Truths differs from many traditional, Western presentations in some key ways. After a presentation of a “middle way” between the extremes

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of “a life of pleasure and a life of self-mortification” that is consistent with most traditional readings, his translation of the sermon concerning the Four Truths is as follows: He began by saying that his path which is his Dhamma (religion) had nothing to do with God and soul. His Dhamma had nothing to do with life after death. Nor has his Dhamma any concern with rituals and ceremonies. The centre of his Dhamma is man, and the relation of man to man in his life on earth. This, he said was his first postulate. His second postulate was that men are living in sorrow, in misery and poverty. The world is full of suffering and that how to remove this suffering from the world is the only purpose of Dhamma. Nothing else is Dhamma . . . . A religion which fails to recognize this is no religion at all. The Buddha then told them that according to his Dhamma if every person followed (1) the Path of Purity; (2) the Path of Righteousness; and (3) the Path of Virtue, it would bring about the end of all suffering. And he added that he had discovered such a Dhamma.18,19

Any reader even a little bit familiar with most English language translations of the Four Noble Truths will no doubt recognize a difference in the above presentation. Here, Ambedkar has chosen to remove all reference to the psychospiritually oriented liberation of the individual through contemplative practice. In its place, Ambedkar reorients the Buddhist teaching on suffering toward the social liberation of the oppressed classes. Missing is the familiar emphasis, to the Western Anglophone reader, on contemplative engagement with mental events. It is worth noting that an explicit treatment of the cause of suffering, which is often presented as an individual’s misapprehension of reality and his or her subsequent clinging to a self, is absent. Instead, Ambedkar provides a more ethically grounded reading where the first and fourth truths are presented in terms of social empowerment: “The centre of his Dhamma is man, and the relation of man to man in his life on earth.”20 Elsewhere in the text of The Buddha and His Dhamma, Ambedkar presents the goal of the Buddhist path, nirvana, as the creation of a social order where oppression and injustice are absent. As Christopher Queen points out, “As for Nirvana, the Buddhist goal of liberation, Ambedkar writes of a ‘kingdom of righteousness on earth’ and describes the Buddha’s enlightenment not as the ripening of an individual’s cosmic potential but as a simple realization of the plight of others.”21 As Tara Doyle presents in her essay “Liberate the Mahabodhi Temple! Socially Engaged Buddhism Dalit Style,”

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The Buddhism that Ambedkar bequeathed his community was a liberation theology par excellence . . . . Gone is the emphasis on psychological bondage, meditative techniques, monasticism, and enlightenment. For, like most Third World liberation theologies, and the beliefs of many militant Socially Engaged Buddhists, Ambedkar’s Buddhism addresses the economic, social and political vicissitudes of his community, with scant reference to spiritual practice and release.22

Ambedkar was certainly aware of the divergence of his reading from “orthodox” Buddhist views on the shared tradition teachings. In fact, he was explicit about it. In The Buddha and His Dhamma, he states: What are the teachings of the Buddha? This is a question on which no two followers agree. To some Samadhi is his principal teaching. To some it is Vipassana (a kind of Pranayam). To some Buddhism is esoteric. To others it is exoteric. To some it is a system of barren metaphysics. To some it is sheer mysticism. To some it is a selfish abstraction from the world. To some it is a systematic repression of every impulse and emotion of the heart. Many other views regarding Buddhism could be collected. This divergence of views is astonishing . . . The question that arises is “Did the Buddha have no social message?” When pressed for an answer, students of Buddhism refer to the two points. They say— “The Buddha taught ahimsa. The Buddha taught peace.” Asked did the Buddha have any other social message? . . . My answer is that the Buddha has a social message. He answers all these questions. But they have been buried by modern authors.23

Here Ambedkar can be seen acknowledging that his view of the Buddhist teachings differs from those interpretations that present Buddhism only through the lens of individual spiritual liberation through contemplative practice. While not rejecting that contemplative reading, he is clear in his intention to approach the teachings of the Buddha from the perspective of their social message. He also states that the reason for the absence of the social message in most readings of the shared tradition is that modern authors have “buried” it. For Ambedkar, who was very much a man of modernity, the problem of presenting the teachings of the Buddha, which, like Hinduism, includes the teaching of karma and rebirth, to people for whom karma and rebirth had been used as a justification for their oppression for millennia loomed large. As Queen highlights, Ambedkar knew that the traditional presentation of the Four Truths—which blame the victims for their own suffering—would be offensive and unacceptable to people whose sufferings were caused by other’s cruelty and a heartless social

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system. He recognized that the metaphysics of karma and rebirth intensified self-blame by alleging the sufferers’ misconduct in former lives. Furthermore he knew that the voluntary poverty and contemplative pursuits of the traditional bhikkhu could not offer a viable ideal for people locked in structural poverty.24

In order to explain how the socially oriented Buddhist teachings that he presents in The Buddha and His Dhamma are not simply novel innovation, Ambedkar makes the claim that the tradition has been reinterpreted and distorted through centuries of explanation by monastics and elites who ignored the social justice message of the Buddha. He views the orthodox presentation as having been overly influenced by Hindu views and consequently defanged in its ability to critique caste. Consequently, his Buddha is a radical egalitarian who rejected caste distinction, not a contemplative mystic concerned with inner realization. Ambedkar rooted his reading of these core Buddhist teachings in Pāli sources. In their work The Use of Buddhist Scriptures in Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma, Adele Fiske and Christoph Emmrich trace many of Ambedkar’s claims to Pāli sources with note to the degree of his innovation, or lack thereof.25 Additionally, as Queen notes, Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan, “the respected scholar who translated The Buddha and His Dhamma from the original English to Hindi and checked all the Pāli references in the process, concluded that Ambekdar’s presentation is a ‘new orientation, but not a distortion’ of Buddhism, and that all the central doctrines of the tradition are present.”26 His Buddhist critique of caste is solidly grounded in the Vāseṭṭha Sutta of the Majjhima Nikāya.27 So, shocking as it may be to Western readers, Ambedkar did not simply invent his socially engaged Buddhism from whole cloth. He grounds it extensively in Pāli sources. The charge of finding the Buddhism that one wishes to find can clearly be made against both English language modernist readers of Buddhism who are predisposed to replicating the scientific compatibility project of their earlier Transcendentalist interpreters as well as against Ambedkar and his proponents who desire to empower and liberate dominated classes in India. These agendas color their reading of those very same foundational texts. If Ambedkar can be charged with distorting Buddhism to fit his program of Dalit liberation, then modernist Anglophone readers are open to similar charges of distortion to fit the program of re-spiritualizing a rationality-heavy, post-Enlightenment secular materialist culture. Instead of engaging in the project of attempting to find the “real” or “authentic” Buddhist tradition, perhaps the deployment of a hermeneutic that can, first, allow for multiple “Buddhisms” to exist simultaneously and,

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second, reveal the normative and philosophical commitments that an interpreter is bringing to bear on an understanding of just what any “real” Buddhism is may be called for here. The reading of the Buddhist tradition as a contemplative and rational psycho-spiritual non-religion is very much inflected by the way the tradition was received and mined by its Transcendentalist receivers. Similarly, having to rely on the Brahminical gatekeepers of access to knowledge in the Sanskritic tradition has also deeply inflected Western thought and understanding of South Asian religions in general. Euro-American knowledge of “Hinduism” has been filtered and inflected with caste privilege form the South Asian side and the meaning of religious texts has been made through the filter of the priest class and, more recently, through the largely upper-caste Hindu diaspora. This reality has necessarily painted a picture of Hinduism, and dharmic South Asian religious traditions in general, with a one-dimensional lens that fails to account for the myriad religious perspectives and normative stances of the vast number of South Asian people throughout history. It has also allowed for a reading of the tradition that is heavily modulated by the voice of the priest/Brahmin, rendering its contours particularly “spiritually” concentrated while the religio-normative world of the Euro-American reader appears diluted by the realities of the social, political, and quotidian aspects of life in contrast. While in some sense it can be argued that the one-dimensional picture of dharmic South Asian religious tradition presented is “positive” in the sense that it praises an oriental spiritual profundity, it is of course no less one-dimensional than tropes that seek to paint Islam as violent and prone to terrorism or Indigenous religions as animistic, simple, or unsophisticated. As demonstrated above, Ambedkar’s reading and presentation of the Buddhist tradition does not line up nicely with the Euro-American orientalist intention to use the Buddhist tradition for its own normative, dominant ends. It also appears threatening to established power structures in South Asia who seek to marginalize religio-normative voices that challenge existing caste-based power structures while benefiting from commodifying and exporting an in-demand brand. In short, one of the reasons we cannot see Ambedkar in the West is because dominant white, Euro-American readings of dharmic religion in South Asia have consciously or unconsciously inherited and replicated the structural caste privileges of South Asia. Christophe Jaffrelot highlights this effort by the dominate castes in India to ignore or forget Ambedkar in his book Analysing and Fighting Caste: Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability where he states,

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In fact, the very impact of Ambedkar explains the efforts of the upper castes and, more generally, of the wider Indian establishment to maginalise him. Official speeches ignored him for decades and he was only awarded India’s highest honour, the “Bharat Ratna”, in 1990, while V.P. Singh was Prime Minister. Even though he had been the architect of the Indian Constitution, it also took till 1990 before his portrait appeared in Parliament alongside India’s other “Great Men,” who had long received lavish praise.28

Ambedkar and his legacy continue to be contested in India, with current Hindu nationalist efforts to return Ambedkarite Buddhists to the Hindu fold, both through overt re-conversion pressure such as seen in the current ghar wapsi movements29 and through structural pressure such as is seen through the denial of reserved seats for Dalits who convert to Buddhism. The dominant castes in India attempt to reframe and rebrand Ambedkar into a figure that can be used to support the dominate normative Hindu narrative, as demonstrated recently with the RSS–supported prime minister Narendra Modi laying claim to the legacy of Ambedkar in public speeches.30

Ambedkarite Buddhism and postsecular feminism The tension between the larger women’s movement in India and Dalit feminist activists is long standing. From the start of the women’s movement in India, Dalit feminist actors have harbored and expressed reservations about the ability or willingness of a largely upper caste–driven women’s movement to address and work for the needs of Dalit women. Indeed, as Ruth Manorama has pointed out, Dalit women are the “downtrodden among the downtrodden.”31 They must contend not only with the pernicious structural reality of casteism and patriarchy in Indian society at large, but they must also struggle with internal patriarchal structures in Dalit communities. Ambedkar himself was explicit about the need for the mobilization of Dalit women in union with Dalit men in the larger movement. In their recent work, We Also Made History, Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon chronicle the ways in which Dalit women were instrumental in the early Ambedkarite movement and how they were central in the Hindu temple satyagraha and water tank direct actions, how Dalit women’s councils were formed in the early movement, and how Ambedkar’s frustrated attempts to pass the Hindu Reform Bill and grant equal rights to the newly independent India ultimately led to his resignation as law minister. As Wandana Sonalkar points out in her introduction, “Ambedkar,

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like Jyotiba Phule before him, was very clear about the fact that the subjugation of women, especially the women at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, is crucial to any struggle against caste and untouchability.”32 What is of particular note in Pawar and Moon’s history is the way in which even from the start of the Ambedkarite movement, Dalit women’s mobilization reflects a distinctiveness from the larger women’s movement in India. The Dalit women’s movement, then and currently, has sought to speak directly to those aspects of the women’s movement that are missed by upper-caste women in their deployment of a feminism that fails to account for caste intersectionality. As Hardtmann points out, Dalit women see the larger “new women’s movement” of the 1970s as a continuation of the Hindu caste reform tradition associated with Gandhi and the Congress Party.33 In the 1980s the need for a separate stage became more clearly articulated. Dalit women held the first national Dalit women’s meeting, the Dalit Women’s Struggles and Aspirations in Bangalore in 1987, which provided the groundwork for the formation of the National Foundation of Dalit Women in 1995. As Hardtmann notes, in 1994, during the fifth annual women’s conference, Dalit women separated and created a Dalit women’s session to specifically address the needs of Dalit women at the conference. The Dalit women at the conference gave voice to the ways in which their bodies are controlled both by the state and by upper castes, their untouchability renders their bodies property of upper castes (particularly men), their labor in the fields is exploited by upper castes while they starve, and the ways in which their votes elect members of upper castes. As explored above, Ambedkar’s decision to tie his Dalit movement to Buddhist conversion was aimed at harnessing the power of religious identity, community, and practice to foster a sense of dignity in people who had had that dignity crushed through the deployment of Hindu casteism. In this sense, one of the central, defining features and locus of power of the Ambedkarite movement is in its act of religious conversion. As explored above, the Buddhism to which Dalit converts go to for refuge is a liberation theology aimed directly at a “re-dignification” and reclamation of basic humanness. For Dalit feminists then, in addition to the suspicion of the larger Indian women’s movements (in)ability to clearly see their intersectional position, there is a clear tension with secular feminism’s mistrust of religion. As Pawar and Moon demonstrate, Dalit feminist actors do not simply view Ambedkar, the Buddha, or their Buddhism as merely instrumental. Their first hand accounts of forty-four Ambedkarite women who were involved in the early movement exhibit the degree to which Dalit feminist

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actors’ Buddhism forms a deep level of moral meaning-making that echoes that of other liberation theologies, such as those in Latin America. As Parbatabai Meshram states, “[on] 14th October 1956 we accepted the Buddhist faith. We removed the old gods and goddesses from our homes. Now I have devoted my life to spreading the Buddhist religion . . . . I have unshakable faith in Bhagwan Buddha and Babasaheb” and “We must live by the Four Truths and the Eightfold Path. Buddhism shows us the path of progress. I went to Igatpuri three times for Vipashyana camps. We have a Mahila Mandal .  .  . . We observe Buddhist festivals .  .  . .We sing Baba’s Buddhist religious songs.”34 And as Damayanti Deshbhratar reports, “I retired in 1956. I still go to Mahila Mandals and so on. We observe the festivals of the Buddhist faith. I feel that the women of the next generation should also spare time for social work and religious duties after looking after their households. Only then will we be able to help in the progress of our community.”35 These accounts as presented by Pawar and Moon are not the accounts of women who regard their religious commitments lightly. A central core commitment to their activist work is characterized by their personal religious faith in the Ambedkarite Buddhist tradition. This is not and should not be viewed as secular feminist activism. To frame Ambedkarite Buddhist women activists as secular activists because their Buddhism fails to fit into the frame of contemplative, Western readings of the Buddhist tradition is to reinscribe the deep-rooted patterns of oppression where self-determination is denied in favor of a dominant reading of what counts as religious and what counts as authentically Buddhist. The existence of Dalit feminism serves as a reminder for, and indictment of, the caste blindness of the secular women’s movement in India. Dalit feminists who embrace Navayana Buddhism and use its language to make sense of their activism and identity are easily recognized as engaged with religion. But, here I argue that all Dalit feminism is postsecular. As Deo suggests in the Introduction, we can think of postsecular feminism as a variety of feminism that is conscious of and alert to the ways in which secularist feminism has obscured the role of religion in shaping women lives. Dalit feminism is always calling out the caste discrimination that is at the heart of Hindu society. This is a reality that secular feminism does not grapple with adequately because it is not enough to be egalitarian in the present moment. Equality requires an accounting of the historical patterns of discrimination and oppression that have left Dalit and non-Dalit women with very different levels of education, income, and security.

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Dalit feminism, even when it is not speaking in a recognizably religious register, is always pointing to the absence of this historical reckoning of the injustices of caste over the centuries. Dalit feminism is feminism that foregrounds caste oppression. Caste oppression is the legacy of Hindu religiosity. Thus, Dalit feminism is postsecular feminism. It may or may not advance a spiritual or religious politics. But, it will not allow the world to forget the history of caste oppression. In this refusal to be forgotten, to be silenced, Dalit feminism reclaims the space that secularist feminism polices. Dalit interpretations of Buddhism in the form of Navayana Buddhism are at least as real and authentic as any other tradition. The denial of this is a reflection of the ways in which caste oppression, Orientalism, and colonialism continue to structure our epistemologies of South Asia. Dalit feminisms can be read in a Buddhist register or not. Either way, they offer a way of understanding feminism that is postsecular and intersectional. Dalit feminism is a powerful and necessary discourse that should not be silenced any longer.

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(Not So) Well-Behaved Women: Piety and Practice among Twenty-First-Century Mainstream Mormon Feminists Christine L. Cusack

Introduction The feminist project of mainstream Mormon women is a fraught endeavor, subject to scorn from within the tradition and ridicule from outside observers. Mormon feminists are admonished by fellow religionists for not supporting what is understood to be the divine order of patriarchy and derided by secular feminists for choosing to contribute time, talents, and resources to a malecentric institution (Ross, Finnigan, and Waters 2015). The very expression “Mormon feminist” has been deemed by some etic observers to be an “oxymoron,”1 a critique which Mormon studies scholars contend is based “on a false binary between liberal feminism and conservative religion” (Finnegan and Ross 2013: 3; Ulrich 1994: 5). Thus, Mormon feminists find themselves in a “double-bind” of commitments to both faith and feminism, not unlike women from other conservative religious traditions (Ulrich 2010: 56; Mahmood 2005, 2012). This “feminist dilemma of religion” as Avishai has argued, is grounded in “assumptions about religion’s inherent incompatibility with the interests of women and gender and sexual minorities that results in ambivalence and hostility toward studying religion and learning from religion cases” (2016: 262). The purpose of this chapter, then, is to consider the case of mainstream Mormon feminism and how the diverse movement’s grassroots initiatives, operating beyond the purview of the institutional church, are advancing feminist agendas both inside and outside the tradition.

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National and international headlines in recent years attest to a renewed interest in Mormon women as religious actors in the public sphere, placing them in a nexus of broader conversations about female ordination, LGBTQIA equality, sexual violence, gender, and agency (Goodstein 2014; Dicou 2014; Saberi and Tom 2015; La Ganga and Hernandez 2016). Given that the public engagement of Mormon women from previous eras was equally remarkable— from nineteenth-century American suffragism to Equal Rights Amendment advocacy in the 1970s—these new stories reflect a cyclical reemergence of Mormon women’s involvement in civic dialogue (Cornwall 1992; Brooks, Steenblick, and Wheelwright 2015). Setting aside the myriad contestations around the term “postsecular” (Habermas 2008; Beckford 2012; Mufti 2013; Vasilaki 2016), a salient question emerges: in these “encounter[s]” between the nonreligious and the religious, can Mormon feminists be “taken seriously as modern contemporaries” given the prevailing thinking about their subjugation? (Habermas 2008). Herein lies the potential of a postsecular2 feminist approach— one which both challenges etic assumptions about religious women’s agency and potentially constructs a discursive space for those who engage in “other” feminism(s) (Vasilaki 2016: 103). In this chapter, I begin with a brief history of Mormonism followed by an explanation of the unique doctrines and beliefs pertinent to the status of women within the tradition. In highlighting a selection of historical and contemporary milestones of Mormon feminism and parallel movements, I hope to dispel notions of Mormon women as passive observers of the feminist project, broadly speaking (Ulrich 2010). Next, I elaborate how the material culture of Mormon women’s art and handicraft offers a nuanced view of lived Mormonism, meaning-making, and negotiation within the tradition. Finally, I consider the spectrum of Mormon feminism(s), its internal tensions and its forward-facing challenges.

Background Mormonism is a nineteenth-century religious movement founded by Joseph Smith Jr. in upstate New York during the historical period of the Second Great Awakening. In the years following Smith’s account of heavenly visitations, he officially organized the church in 1830 and in the same year published the faith’s central sacred text, The Book of Mormon.3 Adherents are sometimes referred to as Mormons, Latter-day Saints, or simply by the acronym “LDS.” Differentiated from

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other Christian traditions through their unique beliefs about the nature of divinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as three separate beings), an open scriptural canon, eternal marriage, and family bonds continuing into the afterlife, many Mormons are also known for wearing symbolic underclothing4 and for lifestyle practices such as abstinence from alcohol, coffee, tea, and tobacco. As the LDS movement evolved, doctrinal schisms resulted in the formation of numerous discrete groups. Amid growing persecution for the practice of plural marriage, a large number of members migrated west and settled what would eventually become the State of Utah. Continued doctrinal rifts and institutional renunciation of plural marriage in the late 1800s further splintered the movement, although some present-day fundamentalist groups continue to practise polygyny (polygamy) in various forms. It is important to note that media coverage often fails to make essential distinctions between various fundamentalist alliances (Bennion 2012; Bennion and Fishbayn Joffe 2016) and mainstream Mormons who no longer practice plural marriage. Today, the mainstream5 Mormon Church (the largest group) is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, and lays claim to over 15 million members in more than 30,000 congregations worldwide.6,7 The “lived religion”8 of mainstream Mormonism is typified by collective weekly worship, community service, personal spiritual development, robust social bonds, and an emphasis on strong family relationships.

Church organization, doctrine, and theology Mainstream Mormonism operates with an exclusively male priesthood at all local, regional, national, and international echelons. From twelve-year-old boys who pass the “sacrament” (bread and water) during local Sunday services all the way to the president of the worldwide church, Mormonism is a patriarchal organization. Women cannot serve as bishops nor stake presidents (lay, unpaid leaders of individual congregations or groups of congregations), they do not perform ceremonies such as baby blessings, baptisms, or marriages nor are they permitted decisive oversight in the financial matters of the church.9 Women are likewise excluded from disciplinary councils where cases of excommunication are deliberated; hence, all decisions regarding membership status are made entirely by men.10 However, women do serve in numerous “auxiliary” leadership roles throughout the organization.11 Leadership responsibilities can include teaching, missionary service, genealogical work, musical and cultural events, scouting,

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organization of the activities for children, youth and women, humanitarian aid, and public affairs outreach, among others. They consider these “callings” (volunteer positions) opportunities to manifest a deeply internalized ethic of service as well as a vehicle for increasing one’s personal piety. While these auxiliary roles are essential to the functioning of the church, they remain under the umbrella of male governance. Not surprisingly, the word “patriarchy” in all of its uniquely Mormon variations has largely positive connotations among conservative members: from terms such as “patriarch” to “patriarchal blessing” to “patriarchal order,” the lexicon of male centricity is, for the most part, uncontested within the tradition.12 Obedience to ecclesiastical authority lies at the center of the faith for both women and men. On the local level, for example, members meet annually with their bishop (male congregational leader) for an assessment of “worthiness,” which includes questions about church activity, belief, adherence to lifestyle rules, charitable donations, and sexuality (understood as fidelity within heterosexual marriage and celibacy for single members). These interviews, in turn, determine whether a member will be able to enter an LDS temple to participate in the faith’s most sacred rituals. Women who publicly articulate reticence about this traditional male-led interview or who push back against the language of patriarchy are considered anathema to the Mormon social order. Exclusion and stigmatization for expressing feminist leanings are among the highest costs exacted of Mormon feminists and removal from voluntary leadership and teaching positions are common outcomes for those who vocalize disagreement with church policies or gendered cultural traditions. In that male headship is foundational to the ideology of Mormonism, family life is likewise structured on a patriarchal model: “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families . . . [and] mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners” (The Family 1995). Mormons believe that when a woman and a man are married in an LDS temple, they are “sealed” together in the afterlife as a family unit. It follows that this doctrinal emphasis on the nuclear family structure leads to a strictly binary interpretation of gender. “Modern Mormon gender ideology, rooted in assertion of binary gender difference,” according to Vance, “asserts the necessity of heterosexual marriage and concomitant gender roles, and discourages gender ambiguity” (2016: 37). Gender identity is not only imagined as stable and unchanging in this life, but is understood to be a fundamental aspect of

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one’s “premortal, mortal and eternal identity and purpose” (The Family 1995). Cragun and Sumerau note that a mainstream Mormon interpretation of gender entails “a divinely ordained essence within individuals that carries specific responsibilities, capabilities, and characteristics” (2015: 5).13 This collective understanding of gender also determines how the faithful experience the divine: Mormon doctrine, Scripture, and everyday practice are entirely focused on the masculine. From institutional iconography to personal and public prayer, the divine is experienced uniquely through Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (also interpreted to be a male spirit). Curiously, Mormon doctrine includes a belief in a divine feminine, referred to in the vernacular of the tradition as “Heavenly Mother.” Theological considerations of the divine feminine14 reach back to the faith’s founding, when Eliza R. Snow, a plural wife of Joseph Smith, composed the poem “Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother” (Wilcox 1992: 5). Subsequently put to music and renamed “O My Father,” the congregational hymn is a popular devotion sung by Mormons in congregations worldwide.15 These three lines: “In the heav’ns are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare! Truth is reason; truth eternal, Tells me I’ve a mother there” represent a singular reference point for many conservative members on this distinguishing theological point which sets Mormonism apart from other Christian traditions (Snow 1845). There is little mention of the divine feminine in institutional settings for several reasons—among them an intentional dearth of information in official church publications, directives from male leaders not to pray to Heavenly Mother, and a pattern of excommunication for speaking openly of or publishing on the topic. For Mormon feminists, the belief in a divine feminine has inspired various forms of activism in nearly every generation since the faith’s founding—from scholarly and popular writing, poetry, and children’s literature to drama and art installations—nevertheless, this activism has rankled many in Mormon circles. Even in the face of recent increased institutional transparency and debunking of a presumed “sacred silence” surrounding the “Heavenly Mother,” cultural taboos on open discussion remain (Paulsen and Pulido 2011: 3). Discord over how to leverage the unique belief in order to improve women’s status in the tradition has likewise caused rifts. Petrey (2016) argues that the question of the divine feminine divides Mormon feminists into “oppositional” and “apologetic” corners, demonstrating how “this internal division of Mormon feminist politic mimes the broader theoretical concerns of American feminism, having foundered on the problem of sameness and difference between women and men and between women” (323). This gender essentialization of the “divine

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couple,” according to Petrey, further buttresses “heteronormative narratives” thus undermining many of core objectives of the progressive Mormon feminist endeavor (2016: 323, 330). This analysis comes at critical juncture for many Mormon feminists outraged by a 2015 church policy which targeted same-sex couples for excommunication and restricted their children from rituals like baby blessings and baptisms (Goodstein 2015). The long-standing hope that increased theological consideration of the Heavenly Mother would catalyze female ordination is now a thornier proposition for Mormon feminists—as current collective understandings around “Her” undercuts their efforts on behalf of marriage equality and institutional acceptance of LGBTQ Mormons. Herein lies the crux: heterosexual Mormon marriages are patterned after the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve (understood as the first earthly couple) and on a higher level the divine Father and Mother, thus Mormon cosmology makes no place for same-gender unions in this life, nor in the next. Petrey’s point about rigid gender interpretations of “divine bodies” is significant, as “the critical theoretical task of a new Mormon feminism is rethinking the oppositional binary categories of male/female, masculine/feminine, and gay/straight” (2016: 331).

Mormon feminism: Then and now Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich could have never predicted the immense popularity of her 1976 phrase “well-behaved women seldom make history,”16 observed nearly two decades later emblazoned on all manner of popular feminist paraphernalia (1976; 2007). It forms the basis for the title of this chapter and has been adopted as a maxim by a rising generation of Mormon feminists. A retrospective look at the nineteenth century demonstrates how Mormon women living in the Utah territory did indeed make history during feminism’s first wave by organizing for the right to vote. They attended national conventions and following a series of political wins and losses (tied to issues of religious freedom and polygamy), gained the right to vote in 1895, well before national woman suffrage was achieved in 1920 (Madsen 1992). Fast forward to Mormon women’s participation in second-wave feminism: according to Ulrich, “Mormon women weren’t passive recipients of the new feminism. We helped to create it” (2010: 45). In a timeline highlighting the defining moments of the movement, accounts of Mormon women responding to Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), the publication of books on feminist topics by

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Mormon authors17 and Sonia Johnson’s leadership of the group “Mormons for ERA”18 are but a few examples of critical junctures in the history of Mormon feminism (2010: 46–47). Parallel to these milestones, Mormon feminists (particularly in the Boston area)19 organized meetings, wrote books, and gave university lectures. The serendipitous find (in the Harvard library) of a Utah periodical called The Women’s Exponent, printed from 1872 to 1912, inspired a contemporary iteration titled Exponent II (Ulrich 2010). First published in 1974, “on the twin platforms of feminism and Mormonism,” the magazine and its community of contributors continues to advance the cause of religious feminism through essays, poetry, visual art, and an annual women’s retreat (Ulrich 2010: 54–55). The gains of 1970s-era feminists were significant, though the decade also bore witness to a period of institutional retrenchment and acrimonious excommunications of prominent members who voiced support for the ERA (White 1985). Anxious about potential church disciplinary action, “Mormon feminists endeavored to create safe spaces where they could take shelter from the intense judgment they sometimes encountered in their home congregations” (Brooks 2015: 14). Although they returned to the style of smaller, private consciousness raising groups and retreats, Mormon feminists continued to publish throughout the 1980s. As discrete groups scattered throughout North America, they were nevertheless “energized by mainstream feminism’s ‘third wave,’ Mormon feminism rebuilt momentum and critical mass as it entered the 1990s” (Brooks 2015: 15). Sadly, the expulsion of numerous vocal feminists continued into the 1990s when a handful of prominent LDS women were excommunicated and several female professors from the church’s flagship school, Brigham Young University, were fired for publicly advocating women’s ordination or for insisting upon open theological discussions of Mormon doctrines pertaining to the divine feminine (Brooks, Steenblik, and Wheelwright 2015).20 These public instances of church discipline effectively drove Mormon feminism underground, once again repeating an arduous cycle of resurgence, retrenchment, and reemergence (Brooks 2015). The year 2000, however, marked the beginning of a surging level of online feminism, with a notable uptick of activity among religious women. This time frame likewise paralleled an unprecedented growth of websites and blogs devoted to Mormonism in general and to Mormon feminism, specifically. With no institutional place for even modest dissension, Mormon women turned to these virtual spaces to exchange ideas and to strategize ways to navigate patriarchal norms and to foster change within the tradition (Brooks 2015; Kline 2015). These sites revolutionized the way Mormon feminists engaged with issues of gender,

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agency, and authority, and the convergence of a well-organized, media-savvy network of agitators pressing for varying levels of change within the tradition set the stage for a new public presence (Brooks 2015). Despite its early history of feminist activity, many conservative Mormons only became aware of this revitalization when intrepid organizers orchestrated a “Wear Pants to Church day” in 2012.21 As a matter of custom, girls and women wear dresses or skirts to Sunday services. Though the church has no official sartorial restrictions for female participation in worship services, the event was a subversion of Sabbath-day gender norms, publicly enacted on the faithful’s most important day of the week. It received international media attention, rose to a level of a moral panic within some Mormon circles and elicited a rash of in-person and online hostility (Pratt 2012). Much of the backlash was internal, coming from both women and men opposed to such a public act of resistance. In their landmark study of online Mormon feminism, Finnigan and Ross (2013) examined this event and others of the renewed movement. Using a mixed-methods approach to explore this reemergence of feminist activity, the researchers noted fear as “the most common emotion” appearing in qualitative responses from Mormon feminists. Among more than 1,800 participants, over half indicated they had suffered “negative consequences as a result of expressing feminist views” (2013: 9). Despite this fear, the movement’s momentum fostered further activism. In a subsequent event—the “Let Women Pray” letter writing campaign—an organized effort generated 1,600 written messages sent to the church’s highest-level leaders in Salt Lake City (Finnigan and Ross 2013: 15). Although a church spokesman later downplayed any causal links, a woman did indeed offer a historic public prayer at the following worldwide conference, held in Salt Lake City in April 2013, the first since the church’s founding in 1830 (Stack 2013, March 22). In October 2013, Mormon human rights attorney Kate Kelly orchestrated another historic first when she founded an organization called Ordain Women. Borrowing from the theoretical language of environmental science where the term “peak oil” is used to decry dependency on fossil fuel as an unsustainable practice, Kelly used the expression “peak patriarchy” to describe the current status of institutional Mormon governance (Kelly 2013). The group’s website OrdainWomen.org became a gathering place for an international contingent of feminists, with many using the virtual venue to go public for the first time about their advocacy of women’s ordination. In 2013, the group organized an event encouraging women to request entry into the historically all-male priesthood meeting held biannually in Utah. Widely publicized in international media, nearly 400 women were turned away one

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by one at the door of the historic Salt Lake City Tabernacle (Dicou 2014). Despite the setback, Ordain Women supporters continued their efforts to create awareness and to promote initiatives at local levels. Kelly was excommunicated in 2014 by leaders of her local congregation on the charge of “apostasy”; her case was deliberated and consequence imposed by an all-male disciplinary council (Goodstein 2014, June 23).22 On her formal ousting from the church, Kelly stated “all of your ordinances are reversed—your baptism, your marriage, your sealing to your family. So those three men who decided to excommunicate me literally thought that they were kicking me out of heaven” (Hynes 2017). The outcome scandalized Mormon feminists, reignited fear of institutional sanctions, and once again pushed many conversations back into the safer, private peripheries of small gatherings. Nevertheless, the conversation continued to manifest in the public sphere for those undaunted by potential institutional censure. Anthropologist Chelsea Shields, for example, delivered a 2015 TED talk entitled “How I am Working for Change inside my Church,” seen by over a million viewers (Shields 2015; Robinson 2015). In her presentation, Shields recounts her Mormon upbringing as a period of unquestioned obedience to gendered rules of conduct governing diet, dress, and courtship, juxtaposed with the recompenses of a beloved collective identity and community support. Even though her feminist journey emerged as a complicated narrative of loss—of friendships, employment, and legitimacy within the church—her contributions strengthened those of a growing international coalition of voices using social media and the power of blogging to advance the cause of Mormon feminism (Finnigan and Ross 2013). The consideration of movements evolving in tandem with contemporary Mormon feminism brings further nuance to the ongoing narrative. Whether enacted from a declared feminist standpoint or other peripheral motivation, they demonstrate the interweavement of social relations and religious doctrine in “lived” Mormonism. The story of the Mama Dragons, for example, began with a few women in a closed online group discussing how to support LGBTQIA children and how to mitigate exclusion and harmful antigay rhetoric coming from the institutional church (Our Origins, n.d.). According to Stack “for these Mormon moms [it was] their ‘coming out’ as activists” (2015). From organizing in-person support groups, conferences, education initiatives, and suicide prevention programs, the Mama Dragons’ public efforts opened up critical conversations about high suicide and homelessness rates among LGBTQ youth in Mormon communities (Stern 2016). In another story illustrating the intersection of religion, sexual violence, and female empowerment, Madi Barney,

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a student at Brigham Young University, was named Utahn of the year in 2016 for challenging rape culture at the church-owned school (Napier-Pearce 2016). After reporting her assault, she was punished for “possible violations of the Mormon School’s Honor Code”; a common occurrence as later investigations revealed (Napier-Pearce 2016). Barney went public with her plight, gathered over 100,000 petition signatures, and paved the way for numerous other victims to come forward. Her actions motivated far-reaching policy modifications impacting how the university’s Title IX and the Honor Code agents interact (Napier-Pearce 2016). In exposing how embedded religious beliefs about sexuality, virginity, purity, modesty, and women’s bodies conspired to keep discussions of sexual assault shrouded in shame and perpetrators at large, Barney’s denunciation also catalyzed a paradigm shift around discussions of sexual assault among Mormons in Utah and beyond (Napier-Pearce 2016). These examples add to the expanding profile of Mormon women in public life and demonstrate the diversity of their endeavors. The inclusion of Mormon women “as conversation partners” in differing spheres of feminist thought is both a promising extension of the proverbial olive branch and an apt acknowledgment of the plurality of “feminisms” for which this volume is named (Hoyt 2007: 91).23 To this end, the 2015 publication of the landmark volume Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings by Brooks, Steenblik, and Wheelwright is the culmination of an immense scholarly effort to merge more than fifty years of feminist thought. At this juncture, it is the most comprehensive collection of writings from the second, third, and current waves of Mormon feminism. Its publication marks both an optimistic turn toward increased recognition of Mormon studies as a scholarly discipline and a bid for self-reflection on the internal divisions and flashpoints of the movement (Brooks 2015). Mormon feminism as a microcosm of larger feminist movements has also been a space of “privilege [for] white middle class North American women” and this latest volume is a collective call to action to redirect collective attention toward an “intersectionality of race, class, gender and sexuality” (Brooks 2015: 22–23).

Art as meaning-making and negotiation Of significance to the distinctive (and well over a century-old) story of Mormon feminism is how it has unfolded in conversation with artistic responses to questions of gender and equality. Mormon feminists and their non-Mormon

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allies are prolific creators, chronicling the evolution of the movement and continually constructing the literary, material culture, and visual narrative of its history. In 1989, for example, Mormon poet, author, and playwright Carol Lynn Pearson performed her widely acclaimed one-woman play Mother Wove the Morning, exploring the taboo topic of the divine feminine throughout history and in Mormon theology (Pearson 1992). In 2013, Idaho blogger Nikki Hunter used the pants women around the world wore to church on the first “Wear Pants to Church Day” and sewed a quilt she titled “Sunday Morning” (Brooks, Steenblik, and Wheelwright 2015: ix). Pictured on the cover of Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings, Hunter’s work “honors the legacy of handcraft in Mormon women’s culture and captures a sense of momentum and optimism about the future of Mormon feminism” (Brooks, Steenblik, and Wheelwright 2015: ix). Photographer Katrina Barker Anderson confronted the tradition’s oppressive modesty rhetoric in a bold online portrait gallery of nudes and stories and situated her 2013 Mormon Women Bare Project as an act of “reclaiming our bodies from a culture that teaches us that we belong to men, to God” (Anderson n.d.; Welker 2013). In 2015, non-Mormon documentary filmmaker Kristine Stolakis released her film Where We Stand, detailing the struggle of a young feminist in Utah. The poignant film interweaves commentary from well-known voices in the movement with one woman’s story of perseverance despite being marginalized from community and congregation.24 Responding to the erasure of women’s stories in the church’s founding narrative, Utah artist Leslie O. Peterson “picked up her brush” to make sense of the church’s polygamous past, rendering visible for the first time the “forgotten wives” of the religion’s founder (Dobner 2015, August 17). In Katie West Payne’s artistic rendering of the Mormonism’s Heavenly Mother observers see a labyrinth of fabric (inspired by female deities in Greek mythology) in her art installation entitled “A Space for the Contemplation of a Sacred Silence” (McDonald 2015, May 7). Writer and poet Rachel Hunt Steenblik adds to the literature about the divine feminine in her volume of poetry Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother (2017). This book is yet another contribution to a well-established and growing body of work from a range of artists—all challenging the erasure of women’s experience in church history and negotiating embedded tensions around gender in Mormon culture, doctrine, and practice. Cultural production was and remains a core strand woven into the past and present narrative of Mormon feminism. For Mormon women who may not otherwise identify with feminism or for social and familial reasons cannot or choose to not participate in direct actions, artistic expression,

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then, becomes a strategic method to document alternative ways of belonging, remembering, and (re)shaping religious life. The consideration of art activism offers another way to conceptualize women’s agency beyond simple narratives of resistance and offers a glimpse into the lived religion of Mormon women.

Mormon feminism(s) This chapter has offered a very condensed account of women’s activism and cultural production in Mormonism. A multitude of scholars have traced this varied history in much greater depth and detail, including Beecher and Anderson (1992), Hanks (1992), Bushman (1997), Bradley (2005), Brooks et al. (2015), Shepherd, Anderson and Shepherd (2015), and Holbrook and Bowman (2016), to name but a few. Nevertheless, it is essential to emphasize that Mormon feminists make up an extremely small and highly marginalized segment of their worldwide religious community. As cautious negotiators or as open agitators25 they can be subject to both unofficial and official sanctions from male leadership such as suspension from volunteer work within congregations and/or loss of certain worship privileges. Given that a hallmark of Mormon congregational life is evident in the strong social bonds forged through weekly communal worship and service activities, this stigmatization and exclusion are some of the highest personal costs exacted from vocal Mormon feminists. As a consequence, those who choose to remain active in their congregations tend to operate discretely on the margins. Other Mormon women, as it turns out, are often the most vehement critics of those who advocate for increased opportunities for females or who press (even politely) against the patriarchy. Survey data supports this claim. Based on responses from a national survey of Mormons in 2012, Campbell (2016) demonstrates that “roughly four out of five Mormon women are untroubled by the roles of women in the church, and thus presumably not restless for change” (209). In their 2014 Mormon Gender Issues Survey,26 Cragun and Nielson surveyed over 60,000 Mormons, asking whether they “were concerned about gender roles” (2015: 300, 307). In their purposive sample, 75.8 percent of Mormons surveyed responded in the negative when asked if they were concerned about gender roles, and 71.3 percent answered no to the question of women’s ordination. Not only do these studies show troubling statistical realities for Mormon feminisms going forward, they confirm how deeply entrenched beliefs continue to fuel animosity toward those who press even for moderate change. Belief, for many Mormon women (and practicing

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Mormons in general), “likely includes an affirmation that women’s role in the church is as God intends, and so to suggest change would be to defy God’s will” (Campbell 2016: 200). It follows, then, that the term “patriarchy,” used positively and without critique in lived Mormonism, leads to the word “feminist” as generally misconstrued and employed with disdain. It is Hoyt’s contention that (2007) “many Mormon women, particularly in the US, tend to conceptualize feminism as a monolithic movement . . . . Because early feminist writings tended to question the validity of rigid roles prescribed for women, including the role of mother and wife, Mormon women developed distrust for feminist inquiries and agendas” (91). Claiming the label “feminist” in mainstream Mormonism can be a fraught undertaking. However, to claim that taking such a stance occurs in a space of tension between conservative and progressive members is to oversimplify a complex and nuanced network of relational dynamics. Many Mormon feminists are generational members, which is to say that they can trace their lineage back to the earliest foundations of the faith. Thus kinship ties and family histories factor significantly into a strong sense of Mormon identity. This, together with the fact that practicing Mormons also tend to marry within the tradition, makes the question of membership and participation much more than a simple proposition of affiliation or disaffiliation. As Campbell points out, women unhappy with their place within the church, but who nonetheless wish to participate in Mormonism, have no other choices available. Unlike Judaism, there is no “Reform” wing of the LDS church. Women and men, unhappy with gender roles in the church can either stay and try to effect change through the exercise of voice—difficult in a hierarchical organization—or they can exit, a painful decision for many who find much to love within Mormonism. (2016: 199, 200)

Mormon feminists who remain connected to their congregations, and to the broader life of the faith tradition, have not categorically “voted with their feet by leaving the church and seeking alternative feminist communities,” but have found ways to circumnavigate patriarchal expectations and constraints in ways which honor personal understandings of self-actualization (Reuther 1989: 47). On this point, Basquiat affirms that these women are “not challenging the totality of Mormonism; [because] they are, after all, Mormon feminists” (2001: 6). Those who chose to stay often do so with a hopeful vision of mainstream Mormonism’s potential to evolve—choosing instead to see “the larger Mormon hegemonic order as a process rather than a product” (Basquiat, 2001: 6). In thinking about how participants in Mahmood’s study considered “subordination to a transcendent will (and thus, in

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many instances, to a male authority) as its coveted goal,” it is clear that a common set of elements between Mormon feminism and the women’s mosque movement is perhaps more extensive than what some feminist scholars might imagine (2005: 2–3). Mormon women see themselves engaged in both a process of “spiritual becoming” (which includes accepting divine will) and of striving to improve the conditions of gender equality within the structural organization and the quotidian of Mormon social life.

(Re)Defining agency The term “postsecular” rarely appears (if at all) in the academic literature on Mormon feminism. This absence is perhaps due to at least two overriding factors: first, the evolution of meanings ascribed to the term itself are both ongoing and contested (Beckford 2012) and, second, the inward-looking tendencies of Mormon feminists in the last two decades may have diminished wider engagement with this particular terminological debate in feminist scholarship. On the first point, Beckford argues that no consensus exists even among feminist scholars as to the precise meaning(s) of the term (2012). On the second point, Brooks (2015) emphasizes that forward-looking Mormon feminism must necessarily turn toward a more robust, interdisciplinary effort to “join the broader conversations in feminism and religion” and to critically engage with studies of religious women from other traditions (Brooks et al. 2015: 23). A number of scholars in the last several decades have specifically examined the issue of women’s agency in Mormonism, including Bell (1976), Beecher and Anderson (1992), Toscano and Toscano (1990), Hanks (1992), Basquiat (2001), Beaman (2001), and Bradley (2005) among others. Adding to this foundation is an expanding academic literature on contemporary Mormon feminism and the question of agency, due in part to a notable broadening of the field of Mormon studies. Hoyt (2007, 2009), in particular, has brought her ethnographic work with Mormon women into conversation with Mahmood’s exploration of the women’s mosque movement as a “framework to discuss the consequence of feminist theory’s tendency to name any act that diverges from religions norms as acts of subversion and resistance” (2007: 92). Thus situated, the primary impasse for etic analyses of Mormon women’s agency lie in oversimplification of pitting those who “are upholders of patriarchal norms” against “those who fight these norms in the name of liberty

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and freedom” (Mahmood 2012: x). Hoyt (2009) builds upon Mahmood’s conceptualization of agency to include the notion of “simultaneous nature of agency,” wherein agency can be observed in actions that both push against and sustain religious customs (75). Scholars who seek to understand and explore the varied experiences of contemporary Mormon feminists, must attend to “new definition[s] of agency” which “should recognize that agency includes the reproduction of social structures as well as the transformation of them. .  .  . Most of the time, people use their agency to uphold the structures that bring meaning and stability to their lives” (Berkus 2016: 28). On the ground, Mormon feminism manifests across a spectrum of “boundary negotiation” of which resistance is only a singular point on a continuum of religious life (Beaman 2001: 65).27 “Middle-way” Mormon feminists who choose moderation over more radical approaches sit in Sunday pews, sing in church choirs, and serve alongside those who seek female ordination and the full transformation of patriarchal structures (Stack 2014). In the midst of these diverse ways of approaching gender equality, a belief in the interconnectedness of the human family will find these same Mormon women calling each other “sister” in the corridors of Mormon chapels on a weekly basis. While the foregoing example is not intended to minimize the internal schisms that pervade contemporary Mormon feminism, it is perhaps a useful illustration for formulating broader questions about the future of “other” feminisms. How, then, might a postsecular turn in feminism unfold to include the diversity of religious women’s experience?

Conclusion The varied currents of Mormon feminism emerge as promising cases for the scholarly examination of agency, activism, and gender. As Avishai (2016) argues “religion cases can provide gender theorists with both a conceptual framework and empirical examples to articulate a yardstick for what ‘counts’ as feminist social change” (270). Such a yardstick employed to measure the multilayered lives of women who profess both faith and feminism must necessarily “dispense with universal ideas about feminism . . . and do away with normative assumptions about religion” (Avishai 2016). Mormon women voice questions about gender equality in their local congregations and fill feminist blogs and Facebook groups with innovative ideas for advancing the status of females in the tradition.

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They challenge damaging cultural and doctrinal beliefs about modesty, purity, virginity, and sexual orientation, and advocate for changes to discriminatory sexual assault laws. They replace the words “He” and “Heavenly Father” and with “They” and “Heavenly Parents” when singing congregational hymns or offering public prayers. They redirect their personal charitable contributions away from congregations and toward local food banks where women are permitted oversight in financial matters.28 They likewise make their voices heard in the public sphere—marching in Pride parades and organizing LGBTQIA support groups. Are their tangible achievements any less monumental because their activism is born of religious conviction? At the same time, theirs is a faithful activism that does not always entail resistance, confrontation, or opposition (nor even a feminist label) but rather negotiation and circumnavigation. They are “doing religion” and “doing feminism,” postsecular or otherwise—ostensibly it is what Braidotti has described as “affirmative feminism” which may offer the most promise for “constructing affinities” between secular feminists and religious activists (Avishai 2008: 409; Jusová 2011: 66–67). One final example to consider: much like the storied activism of their firstand second-wave foremothers, Mormon women recently donned their knitted pink hats and joined millions of protesters worldwide—some holding posters, some pushing strollers or carrying babies—as they participated in the historic Women’s March on January 21, 2017 (Dallas 2017, January 25). Photos of Mormon women marching from Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Washington, D.C., Montreal, and Ottawa, and a smattering of smaller cities across North America filled Facebook pages and blogs as they claimed their place in the recent history of women’s rights activism. To one of these women, I leave the concluding commentary: Since I marched in Salt Lake City, it’s no surprise that many of the women I marched alongside were Mormons.  .  . . But there were many from other backgrounds, other faiths, and it was inspiring to join together, all of us, motivated by our shared desires for justice, freedom, safety, and fair representation. And greater still, we were part of a larger network of marches, a network that stretched from Washington DC to Nairobi, from Serbia to Peru, from London to Antarctica . . . . Personally, I’m not content to stay within the confines of my own ward or my own church in trying to make the world a better place. I want the personal, neighborly acts of service, and I want the large-scale movements, too. I want sisterhood with my LDS sisters and my Muslim sisters and my atheist sisters and my Evangelical sisters and my not-religious-but-spiritual sisters .  .  . . When I

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MARCH, it isn’t a one-day event. It’s a daily routine, played out week after week, month after month. And now, at my age, I can say year after year. I am free to choose because the Lord gave me my agency, and I choose to work because I want to use that agency to show my love for all God’s children, all God’s creations. So I MARCH on. (Hanks 2017)

Part Three

Postsecular Feminism and Materialism

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The Intersection of Feminism, Religion, and Development in the Discourses of “Gender Workers” in Ghana Nana Akua Anyidoho

Introduction While the postsecular turn has been hailed as a relatively new development by some feminist theorists, others point to “the long history of coexistence and contestations between religious and secular feminist approaches” (Smiet 2015: 7), arguing effectively that the postsecular moment does not signal a sudden discovery or acceptance of religiosity in feminist ideology but rather a reconsideration of the relationship between religion and feminist ideology in its varied forms and beyond Western contexts. The silencing of the tradition of coexistence of feminism and religion can be seen as part of a broader history of marginalization of alternative feminisms by “mainstream” (read: Western, liberal) feminism, which has been indicted for a lack of understanding of the historical, geopolitical, and cultural contexts in which other feminist struggles are forged. In Ghana, as in many African countries, the context in which feminism is interpreted includes a preoccupation with religion and development in popular and policy discourse and in private and public practice. The postsecular perspective provides discursive space for an examination of the ways in which feminisms, religion, and development ideologies are negotiated in such contexts. In this chapter I ask the question, “How do feminists with religious convictions approach development work in Ghana?” The empirical basis of the chapter is a set of interviews conducted in March 2016 with three female “gender workers” in Ghana who self-identify as both feminists and practicing Christians. The three respondents were selected through

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convenient and availability sampling; they were women who had previously been interviewed in a research project and who were willing and able to reflect on their work and identities for this study. Each of the women—Ama, Amelia, and Ruby1—is a professing Christian and heads a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that works for women’s increased well-being, empowerment, and representation as part of the project of development. Secondly, each NGO employs, to varying degrees, a rights perspective to seek changes to institutional structures and social practices that hinder women’s social and economic wellbeing and political participation. Moreover, all three women, as representatives of their organizations and in their individual capacities, have been active in the women’s movement in Ghana for many years, advocating for the passage of the Domestic Violence Act in 2007 and developing the Women’s Manifesto (a political statement of the situation and needs of women in Ghana), among other endeavors. I use these women’s perspectives and practices as illustrative of the ways in which feminism, religion, and development interact not only in Ghana but in the many non-Western countries where—as a matter of culture and history—religion is an integral part of personal, social, and political life, and development is a collective aspiration. The chapter begins with theorizing on African feminisms, highlighting contestations about the cultural grounding and relevance of such feminisms. I then situate these debates about the authenticity and utility of African women’s feminisms within a sociopolitical context pervaded by religion and religiosity. Finally, I analyze how, in these settings, feminists with religious convictions approach “gender work”.

African feminism(s)? To understand feminism in a Ghanaian context, we must first turn to the wellrehearsed contestations between mainstream and black feminist thought, the latter of which has drawn attention to the neglect of race in feminist theorizing (hooks 1989; Crenshaw 1989, cited in Smiet 2015). Feminists on the African continent have added on another layer of critique by arguing that colonialism, neocolonialism, and global inequalities are an overlooked source of African women’s subordination (Steady 1981) and that, indeed, these geopolitical realities may be more important obstacles to women’s liberation than social relations of gender. Cheryl Johnson-Odim (1991), for instance, locates the problem of African (or broadly, Third World) countries less in the unequal power between

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men and women than in the structural and global forces that disempower African women and men. In her book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse, Oyeronke Oyeawumi (1997) goes so far as to question the very pillars of feminist thought: the assumption of the centrality of gender to the organization of all societies and the universality of women’s subordination within gender relations.2 In effect, black feminists in both the global North and South censure mainstream feminism for “its inability to address the cultural specificities out of which ‘other’ feminisms are theorised” (Mekgwe 2010: 189). Specifically, African feminists have questioned the elevation of autonomy as the ultimate aspiration of feminists (Okome 2003; Steady 1981). This position makes it hard to recognize, for instance, how religious faith and fellowship might empower women as a collective and provide them with a secure base from which to engage in social change (see Anderson 2015). The inadequate acknowledgment of cultural relativism within mainstream feminist theorizing—which is the predominant strand of feminism in the literature and in popular conceptions about feminism/feminists—opens up African feminists to charges of being Westernized and therefore coopted into a foreign agenda.3 Uma Narayan (1990) offers a masterly deconstruction of how and why the label “Westernized” is employed to delegitimize Third World feminists. She notes that, historically, colonial discourse and practice relied on a dichotomous construction of “Western” and “Indigenous” cultures, one axis of which was women’s appearances, behaviors, and roles. Thus, “womanhood” is contested ground and one in which is located anxiety about rapid social change and acculturalization (see Allman 1996). In that light, the valorization of the “traditional” way of life requires the return of contemporary women to their “proper place.” Self-identified African feminists—who are “non-traditional” in their lifestyles and choices—are perceived as the antithesis of the traditional woman and therefore aberrant and threatening. Chimamanda Adichie, the critically acclaimed author, reflected in a 2012 TEDx talk on the different ways she had come across the word feminist in her life in Nigeria. She recounted, I wrote a novel about a man who, among other things, beats his wife and whose story doesn’t end very well. When I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me . . . . He told me that people were saying that my novel was feminist and his advice to me—and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke—was that I should never call myself a feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.4

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Ama, one of my interviewees, offers a similar anecdote of a board member of her NGO questioning the use of “feminist” to describe their work. Feminists, she said, were women who hated men and did not want to get married, and why would they want to associate themselves with that? It is not clear that the interlocutors in Adichie’s or Ama’s accounts fully appreciated feminist ideology writ large or understood the particular feminist beliefs of either woman. They seemed certain, however, that “feminism,” whatever it meant, was incompatible with being a good (African) woman. One approach to this problem of the “branding” of feminism is for African women to rename their struggles. Various suggestions have been made for such a renaming: womanism, Afrikana womanism, Stiwanism5 (Mekgwe 2010). Those who subscribe to this approach would appreciate Madhu Kishwar’s (1990) wry observation that members of the movement for peace and disarmament in the West are not assumed to be “Gandhians” because they espouse nonviolence. In her essay “Why I Do Not Call Myself a Feminist,” she argues that a rejecting of labels is not only empowering but encourages critical thinking rather than an indiscriminate appropriation of already-made solutions to specific and contextualized problems. By contrast, the African Feminist Forum in its Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists affirms the label “feminist”: “Our feminist identity is not qualified with ‘Ifs,’ ‘Buts,’ or ‘However.’ We are Feminists. Full stop” (African Feminist Forum: 4) and feminists, furthermore, who are “part of a global feminist movement” (African Feminist Forum: 8).6 On the other hand, they affirm their right to be both feminist and African, and explain that this means that their “current struggles . . . are inextricably linked to [their] past as a continent” (African Feminist Forum: 7) and “draw(s) inspiration from [their] feminist ancestors who blazed the trail and made it possible to affirm the rights of African women” (African Feminist Forum: 8). By these two statements, the authors of the charter make it clear that they recognize that their feminism has different histories and content than “Western” feminism and for this reason “claim the right to theorize for [themselves], write for [themselves], strategise for [themselves] and speak for [themselves] as African feminists” (African Feminist Forum: 9). My three respondents lie on different parts of the spectrum when it comes to the use of the identifier “feminist.” Ama states, “I don’t qualify it, I don’t reject. I embrace it.” Ruby similarly adopts the marker while giving a nod to the specificities to which the charter refers: I don’t have any problem with [the term feminist], because I think it’s a body of knowledge and there are people who actually initiated discussions on

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feminisms and looked at the world and realized that there are some issues that needed more discussions, articulation and theorizing. And so I do embrace feminists theories because they have meaning for me, because wherever I look, I see inequalities. However, there are dimensions, different strands. If you’re African, you have to take elements from different strands.

Amelia is more ambivalent: I can’t say how I feel about it. I’m not fond of it, generally speaking. I don’t like labels, but I am fine with saying I’m a Christian; that’s something I am clear and intentional about . . . (So) it depends on who is asking and what their motives are . . . . I know many people who call me a feminist, and I’m okay with that. But if you asked me, I would identify myself as an evangelical feminist.

In contrast to Ama and Ruby, Amelia prefers to qualify her feminism, and to do so with “Christian” or “evangelical.” In effect, her feminist ideology must conform to her religious beliefs and identity. This then brings us to a discussion of the interaction of feminism and religion in Ghana.

African feminism(s) and religion In 2012, Gallup named Ghana the most religious country in the world, having the highest percentage of self-declared religious people of all countries surveyed. In the last national census in 2010 only 5 percent of the population claimed no religion; 71 percent self-reported as Christian, about 18 percent were Muslim, and the remaining 6 percent were “traditionalists” or of other religious persuasions (Ghana Statistical Service 2012). Musimbi Kanyoro (2001: 36–37) states, “In the African indigenous thought system, culture and religion are not distinct from each other (and) (t)here is no sphere of existence that is excluded from the double grip of culture and religion . . . . The presence or absence of rain, the well-being of the community, sexuality, marriage, birthing, naming children, success or failure, the place and form of one’s burial . . . .” And indeed, in Ghana religion is woven into the fabric of everyday life, as indicated by the adage, Obiara nkyere akodaa Nyame (“You don’t need to teach a child that there is a God”). It is not unusual for Ghanaians to pray at the beginning of business meetings and state functions often begin with Christian, Muslim, and traditional prayers, a practice instituted by Ghana’s first and most influential president, Kwame Nkrumah, who, far from attempting to create a secular state, embraced religious expression and practice as part of building a Ghanaian nation (Addo 1997). In sum, religion

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and religiosity is very much a part of “Ghanaian culture” and Christianity, being the predominant religion, is appropriated as part of that culture, never mind its legacy as a “Western” import. The context I have described has two implications for feminist work: One, it is very likely that feminists will be religious individuals themselves. Second, it is likely that the majority of their constituents will also be religious; however, they are less likely to embrace feminist principles because of the perception of feminism as a Western invention that is antithetical to Ghanaian culture and to the Christian religion, the two of which are often conflated (Addo 1997). In effect, Christianity and a generally patriarchal culture reinforce each other in opposing feminism, a stance which often requires a reinvention of culture and a specific interpretation of Christian Scripture and traditions. The verse in the Bible that exhorts wives to be submissive to their own husbands—who are in turn exhorted to love their wives sacrificially (Eph. 5:22)—is a popular religious justification for patriarchal cultural ideas, although such an interpretation ignores other parts of the Bible that speaks to the unity and equality of male and female (e.g., Jn 13:34, Gal. 3:28). Ruby refers to the (mis)use of the Bible when she says, Sometimes they say the domination of women by men is sanctioned by the Bible and by God . . . . They interpret submissiveness in terms of male domination and control of women. But if you’ve looked at the Bible, even when the Bible presents women as weak, there are elements in the story that elevates women, and gives them opportunities [to be more].

In the face of this assumption of the incompatibility of feminism and the Christian faith, how do subscribers to both ideologies articulate their interaction? On her part, Ama describes holding all-night prayer meetings with staff of her organization but nonetheless admits that she has not tried to form a personal philosophy rooted in both her feminist and Christian beliefs: Maybe I haven’t been confronted with it [the question of how my faith and my feminist activism interact], so I haven’t made a conscious effort to separate it but I haven’t tried to integrate it either.

When pressed, she says she does not believe her faith and feminism are contradictory, citing Jesus’s progressive treatment of women,7 and God’s plan for an inclusive and better world where every individual can use their God-given talents for their own good and that of others. Ruby presents a similar theology that supports her feminism. Asked whether she experiences any tension between being Christian and feminist, she answers,

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Absolutely not. Because I think Christianity is about making the world better for us. And the Bible presents a way of living that is about being there for others, for those who are marginalized, and making sure that both men and women live in a way that promotes equity and equality . . . . Some of the stories in the Bible are extremely patriarchal . . . but there is nowhere in the life of Jesus that women were not elevated . . . . So when people are being orthodox and being Pharisees, it really hurts me because it goes contrary to the Word.

Amelia, who of the three has perhaps had the most opportunity to think through these questions in her graduate studies in theology, is better able to clarify how her faith is not only not in tension with her activism, but its very basis. She does this through her articulation of an “evangelical feminism”: I believe in the Word of God, and that men and women are created by God and they are partners, in everything . . . . The reason I wouldn’t describe myself as a feminist is that my understanding of patriarchy is a bit different; I believe there is an underlying root cause, which is sinfulness.

In effect, Amelia believes patriarchy to be a perversion of God’s intent and purpose. Her opposition to patriarchy—or, more positively stated, her fight for gender equality—is therefore a fight for restoration of what should be. In this wise, Amelia could also reference the “natural” order of things in defense of more equal gender relations. The Christian faith of all three women is fostered in churches that are either part of the charismatic movement or that incorporate charismatic traditions in their practices and doctrines. The charismatic (or neo-Pentecostal) church is the fastest growing subset of the Christian church in Ghana and other countries on the continent (see Gifford 2004; Maxwell 2006) and is a reaction to conservative Christian doctrine and practices in its emphasis on spiritual power and on prosperity as signified by material wealth and physical health (Lauterbach 2010). The 2010 census indicated that 28 percent of the Ghanaian population (and 40 percent of all Christians) was Pentecostal/Charismatic8 (Ghana Statistical Service 2012). The literature suggests that the charismatic movement empowers women by emphasizing “spiritual equality” and personal empowerment (Soothill 2010, also Asamoah-Gyadu 2005; Soothill 2007). However, the general membership and even some leaders of the movement may not hold to these normative ideas. Jane Soothill (2010: 84), who studies charismatic churches in Ghana, cautions: It should not be assumed . . . that the spiritual and material equality of believers undermines inherent biological and psychological differences between women

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and men, or that it fundamentally disrupts the rules governing social relations between them.

Soothill (2010) also suggests that women’s leadership in charismatic churches often mimics and serves male leadership in ways that are not necessarily empowering to women. Overall, she argues that while personal fulfillment through spiritual empowerment is certainly a goal of women in Ghanaian charismatic churches, there is much less commitment to social change, especially in terms of women and gender, a critique that theologian Mercy Oduyoye (1998) also levels against the charismatic movement—that it privileges the spiritual to the detriment of the social and political constraints on women’s lives. Thus, the optimism in the potential of charismatic Christian theology to support feminism is not fulfilled in the organization, doctrines, and practices of the church, which still revolve around male leaders and the notion of difference in inherent attributes and roles of men and women. Furthermore, the emphasis on individual transformation and success (Lauterbach 2010; Soothill 2010) pushes questions of social justice to the periphery. Despite doubts about the extent to which charismatic Christian theology can be transformative, Christians in this tradition may still perceive in it an opportunity to interpret faith and feminism as non-oppositional. Ama and Ruby in this way reject the suggestion that they cannot be feminist and Christian while Amelia goes further to explicitly anchor her feminism within her religious tradition.

African feminism(s) and development Ghanaian sociologist Kwesi Prah (2001) states that development has been a “preoccupation” of African countries from the days of independence from colonial rule; it is the basis on which governments are assessed and the goal of almost all policy making. “Gender work” can be seen as a variant of development work that encompasses women’s material needs as well as their social, economic, and sexual rights (see Anyidoho and Manuh 2010). The difference between the discourse of feminist and nonfeminist gender workers is attribution; that is, whether gender inequality is seen as a systematic, political problem or an individual challenge and whether the operative word is “rights” or “welfare.” Beckwith (2000) suggests that the feminist and the women’s movements (the latter of which subsumes individuals and organizations with a focus on either

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rights or welfare) are conflated in developing country contexts where they are relatively new forms of organizing around women’s demands. On the one hand, this conflation demonstrates that the goals of feminism and development are not necessarily in opposition. African feminists believe that the fight for gender inequality can occur in tandem with the struggle against other forms of social injustices, including poverty and income inequalities. In the introduction to the Feminist Africa special issue on “Pan-Africanism and Feminism,” Hakima Abbas and Amina Mama (an architect of the African Feminist Charter) situate gender inequalities within a web of “social justices and inequalities.” They pose the question, How should feminist movements challenge the yawning gap between the pan-African vision for Africa in the millennium, and grim material, social and political realities? How does this gap relate to the contradictions between rhetoric and reality with regard to the liberation of African women? (Mama and Abbas 2014: 1)9

Abbas and Mama suggest that women’s liberation must occur in all forms— sociopolitical and material. Ama puts it succinctly, “Once you’re empowering women, it’s development—you are developing them, the society, the country.” On the other hand, the conflation of feminism with a development focus on “women’s issues” means that the balance is often hard to strike between addressing women’s rights and meeting their more concrete needs. In the past, women’s organizations doing “gender work” in Ghana were generally apolitical and included self-help groups, saving associations, religious and professional women’s associations (Tsikata 1989). The few that were political were often partisan and not so much invested in advancing women’s rights as the interest of their party. As the democratic space has opened up, there has been a growth in political women’s groups that are not under the patronage of the state (Tsikata 1989). Global discourses and agreements have also influenced the local environment for gender work. Ghana, for instance, signed on to the Platform for Action from UN Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 that affirmed women’s rights as human rights. One result of this was the creation of a Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs. This was both a response to pressure from the local women’s movement and in keeping with development discourse that encouraged gender mainstreaming within governance institutions (Manuh, Anyidoho, and Pobee-Hayford 2010; Tsikata 2009). The uptake by development practitioners and policy makers worldwide of concepts such as “gender equality,” “women’s empowerment,” and “gender

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mainstreaming” is evidence of the influence of feminism on development. However, feminists complain that these concepts, now incorporated or coopted into the development agenda, have lost their feminist “moorings and become depoliticized” (Smyth 2007: 582, also Batliwala 2007; Cornwall and Brock 2005). Thus, despite the ubiquity of “gender” and “women’s empowerment” in both policy and popular discourse in Ghana (see Anyidoho and Manuh 2010; Manuh and Anyidoho 2015), much of gender work even now is focused on economic access and social welfare rather than on unpacking the structural factors that lead to economic and other hardships. As Dzodzi Tsikata observes, gender activists are accepted as long as they focus on programmes such as credit for women, income-generation projects and girls’ education, and couch their struggles in terms of welfare or national development. Once they broach questions of power relations or injustices, they are accused of being elitist and influenced by foreign ideas that are alien to African culture. (In Conversation 2005: 130)

Asked whether she has ever had to camouflage her feminism with “development talk” to avoid resistance from funders or constituents, Ama says she has never felt the need to do so. On the other hand, Amelia and Ruby admit to grappling with doing gender work as feminists. Ruby says, I don’t do that consciously, but I think it comes with the terrain. You know much of the work we do is supported by donors, and there are times when the implementation of the program means you’re looking at certain things on the ground, different behaviours and attitudes, so you have to find a way of engaging with people who think differently . . . . I don’t need to put a stamp on my forehead to say I’m a feminist, but by my action people will see.

She adds, Feminism is not about taking over people’s lives. That’s not to say that [I don’t address] oppression, but I am not disrespectful.

Amelia, in response to the same question about whether she ever finds the need to downplay her feminism, gives a slightly different response: I did some time ago, but it didn’t stop me from articulating my concerns about women’s rights and women’s issues . . . . The development language is necessary when talking about some women’s issues but I never shied away from dealing with rights.

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Both Ruby and Amelia are conscious about the ways in which their identities as feminists might impede the work of social change they are engaged in. Ruby avoids explicit discussion of feminist ideas while still effectively carrying out a feminist agenda while Amelia, and Ama more so, speak the language of women’s rights regardless of the pushback they may receive. None of the women hesitate to say that they are doing development work because, as the earlier quote by Prah (2001) suggests, development has its own self-evident imperative; development permeates the activities of the state and of civil society so that it does not need to be further legitimated. Rather it is feminism that needs to be rationalized within the context of a zealous pursuit of development. Against this backdrop, feminist ideas have nominally influenced development, although not to the extent and with the effect that feminists would hope. However, as Molyneux and Razavi (2006: 3) argue, what counts as positive social change or development is a “disputed and politicized question in the face of the visions of ‘the good society,’ and of women place within it,” giving space and impetus for feminists to continue to contest the content and goals of development.

African feminism(s), religion, and development As has been discussed, Christianity, the dominant religion in Ghana, does not live up to its potential for transformation of gender relations within the church, much less in the larger society. The furthest it goes in this direction is in its support of “state feminism” (Soothill 2010), which is the form of the gender agenda that concerns itself with women’s practical needs, rather than their strategic needs. It does not seem then that the church engages in a real way with a feminist version of gender work which focuses on women’s political situation as well as their material realities. How then do individual gender workers integrate feminism and religion into their work and identities? In our interviewees’ work and lives, we see three different formulations of feminism, religion, and development. Ruby’s religious beliefs do not explicitly influence her gender work. And although she is cautious about speaking feminist language in her gender work, she does use a rights-based approach which presents women’s empowerment as a matter of rights and not of charity. Ama, on the other hand, mentions holding prayer meetings with her staff and adds,

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I don’t apologize for that. At times, we’d even have all-nights and I’d bring in a pastor . . . . Because we are encountering things that have been set up for ages [that might have spiritual roots].

She made the analogy of her work of empowering or liberating women as “untying sacrificial lambs.” Ama’s faith thus underpins her development work. However, her faith is not as strong a buttress for her feminism; she argues that they are not opposed but has not consciously tried to link the two. Amelia has a more seamless integration of all three ideologies; her feminism is grounded in her theology and is then demonstrated in concrete ways in her work where, among other things, she has enlisted a priest on the board of her organization and gives talks on gender-based violence (an important women’s rights issue) in churches. Thus, there is nothing obvious or uncomplicated in the ways that religion and feminism interact in a postsecular moment, particularly in an environment where development is as much an article of faith as religion and as contested an ideology as feminism. To conclude, I revisit my argument that the postsecular moment in feminist theorizing encourages an analysis of the ideas and debates about the interaction— in theory and practice—of feminism with religion and development. I began the chapter by presenting arguments for alternative feminisms that are located in cultural specificities. Using the example of feminist “gender workers” in Ghana, I have suggested that both religion and development are included in the “cultural specificities” to which feminism must adjust. The example of Ghana allows us to investigate how feminists in these settings interpret their feminist ideologies within a context in which religion and development hold such ideological sway that feminists have no choice but to engage with both. We discover from the example of just these three women, and with specific reference to contemporary Christianity, that different alchemies of feminism, religion, and development can be produced. This suggests a need to continue to explore both the forms and the implications of the confluence of feminism, religion, and development.

10

Why I Am Not a Postsecular Feminist: Pakistan, Polio, and the Postsecular1 Afiya Shehrbano Zia2

Pakistan is one of three remaining countries3 where the preventable poliomyelitis disease is still endemic. Some 306 cases of polio were registered in 20144 and the World Health Organization has imposed travel and visa restrictions and warned of sanctions—if polio continues to spread. In 2012, over a dozen women health workers and twice the number of security personnel assigned to them were assassinated while they were administering polio vaccines to children in poorer communities. They continue to be the target of religious militants who consider polio vaccination as anti-Islamic and a conspiracy to sterilize Muslims and that women should not be involved in public health services. An unprecedented amount of influential scholarship on Islam and secularism has been produced in the post-9/11 decade.5 Apart from critiquing Enlightenment ideals, modernity, and secularism, nearly all of this body of work scorns “Western feminism” and human rights and the racial underpinnings considered inherent to them. This chapter challenges this postsecularist theoretical turn and argues that the disproportionate academic and policy attention awarded to Muslim women’s piety, docile agency, postfeminist alterity, wardrobe, and performativity has come at the cost of their secular, working-class politics and identities and has become a convenient tool to depoliticize feminist politics and undermine the socialist bias that has tended to define secular feminism in Muslim contexts, such as Pakistan.

Situating the challenges In 2013, violence against humanitarian aid workers (especially polio workers) peaked globally, with 155 workers killed, 171 seriously wounded, and 134

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kidnapped in 30 countries (Humanitarian Outcomes 2014; Khan et al. 2017). Three-quarters of such attacks took place in just Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sudan.6 Globally, health specialists agree that vaccination is the best protection and the only way to stop the polio disease from spreading but vaccination has been opposed for a variety of reasons, including mistrust, misconceptions, and religious reasons about the vaccine. Khan et al. (2017) argue that religious opposition by Muslim fundamentalists is a major factor in the failure of immunization programs against polio in Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (636). The authors cite examples, such as the boycott of the immunization program by Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Shari’a because they suspected the polio vaccine was contaminated with antifertility drugs and HIV that causes AIDS. They also reference the passing of fatwas (religious edicts) by the Taliban in Afghanistan, denouncing vaccination as against the will of Allah and an American ploy to sterilize Muslim populations (637). For Pakistan, the authors cite Thomsen’s (2014) findings that similar rumors have surfaced in addition to some claims that the vaccines contain pig fat (which, for the country’s large Muslim population, is forbidden or considered non-halal). Pakistan is one of the last three countries where the preventable but incurable poliomyelitis disease is still endemic. The majority of cases are found to originate in Pakistan’s northern tribal areas, which are less populated but where religious militants have actively resisted the vaccination program, terming it an un-Islamic practice and believing it to be an international conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. In 2012, over a dozen health workers, many of them women, were assassinated across the country while they were administering polio vaccines to children in poorer communities. Almost twice the number of security personnel designated to protect the vaccinators have been killed subsequently. Some polio vaccinators have been attacked with improvised explosive devices while some women health workers have been kidnapped and killed for their role in administering door-to-door vaccines. Following the assassinations of their colleagues in Pakistan in 2012, and as part of their protest campaign demanding protection in the future, several members of the Lady Health Workers’7 Association were seen burning government posters that carried images of prominent male clerics and born-again sportsmen who endorsed the vaccine. When I asked some of these lady health workers (LHW) why they had objected so indignantly to such rare support from the religious community on progressive programs such as vaccinations against diseases, they replied, This is a mockery and false pretense. Why should we allow these clergymen to become the false faces of such an important job? They are simply doing so for

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political mileage. They are men. Which women will let these men into their houses for vaccinating their children? These clerics have been the cause of suspicion and refusals of such vaccinations and contraception, spreading false ideas that these are dangerous for Muslims. If they repent their earlier ways, they should do so in the mosques. Leave us to do our practical job, which has nothing to do with religion or faith. It’s a medical requirement and it’s shameful that we are behind all other countries when it is entirely preventable. We know. We have the blood of our sisters to show who has paid for such misinformation and deliberate falsity. (Bushra Arain 2013)8

Are secular politics, aims, and sensibilities impossible, undesirable, and impracticable for Muslims and Islamic states? Should Muslim women be exempted from feminist attempts at liberation from patriarchy and its various expressions, which include Islamic laws and customs as practiced in the present time? Considerable literature on the entanglements of Islam and secularism has been produced in the post-9/11 decade and a large proportion of it deals with the “woman question.” Nearly all of it offers targeted critiques of “the secular” and “Western feminism,” as well as an unpacking of the racializing backlash that informed the occupation of Afghanistan and policies in other Muslim countries, under the shield of the War on Terror (WoT). Implicit in much of the critical works on Islam and secularism is the suggestion that it is Western secular feminism that is the motivating driver and permanent collaborator—in partnership with other feminists, secularists, and human rights activists in Muslim countries—which solely sustains the West’s actual and metaphorical “war” on Islam and Muslims. My activist-based research over the last decade has focused on Pakistani women’s empowerment and highlighted the contradictions and contrasts between secular, material-based autonomy, and abstract religious agency (Zia 2013). The work and activism of the LHWs of Pakistan has been a crucial signifier of the contrast between charitable work and paid social work as undertaken by women. Charity is often linked to proselytization and self-realization as the ends of those women who imbibe religious agency, while a sense of autonomy, decision-making, and status are seen to be side-products of paid social (secular) work taken up by working women. These need not be always mutually exclusive but more often than not, the image and experiences of working women or those who transgress into the public sphere have been viewed with suspicion and cast as liabilities to Islam (Grünenfelder 2013). This patriarchal vision played itself out in the systematic targeted murders of LHWs by religious militants for their work as state representatives in carrying out polio vaccination campaigns across Pakistan during the WoT.

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This chapter first introduces the postsecularist turn in Western academia since 2001 that has endorsed religious agency as a viable theoretical alternative to explain “Muslim gender norms” and which categorically refutes following any “liberal-secular script” (Amir-Moazami, Jacobsen, and Malik 2011: 4). With reference to Pakistan, this postsecular scholarship has looked to recuperate the cultural relevance of religion by arguing that universal human rights are redundant, imperialist, and unworkable in Muslim contexts. These proposals attempt to clear the political space to make a case for faith-based approaches to rights and development. This new paradigm does not situate itself as either Islamic feminist or postsecularist but in effect captures a combination of both. This chapter goes on to demonstrate the political, pragmatic implications of secular autonomies for Muslim women, by upholding the example of the LHW’s movement of Pakistan as targets of religious militancy. The chapter concludes with some reasoning on why I do not count myself as a postsecular feminist, using Aamir Mufti’s (2013) essay “Why I Am Not a Postsecularist” as a useful template and critical cautioning on the concept and its manifestations.

The postsecular turn in Pakistan The new, postsecularist9 scholarly interest in Islamist politics in Pakistan arose in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and may be broadly categorized into two schools. The first school produces what I term, a body of post-9/11 retroIslamist scholarship, making a case for contemporary Pakistan (like other Muslim-majority countries) as both postfeminist and postsecular (Aziz 2005, 2011; Cheema and Abdul-Rahman 2008–09; Bano 2010; Cheema and Akbar 2010; Iqtidar 2011; Quraishi 2011). The second source of critical scholarship is launched by a group of scholars and students who call themselves “scholaractivists” and are mostly located in North America where they teach or study (Manchanda 2012; Akbar and Oza 2013; Toor 2012). Given that their own lifestyle and choices are secular, liberal, and, sometimes, purportedly leftoriented, they do not advocate for Islamist alternatives but target feminist and human rights activists in Pakistan for their perceived Islamophobic and liberal-secular politics which they consider “elitist” (Akhtar 2016). The consciousness, politics, and activism of this set of (predominantly diasporic) postsecularists tends to be polemical and is almost exclusively web-based and their politics are preeminently shaped and informed by and take cues from post-9/11 debates.

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Both sets of postsecularists have a common base point; they are dismissive or critical of the project of those modernist feminists who have historically campaigned to cleanse Islam of patriarchal interpretation and locate women’s rights within a broader, universalist, and liberal framework. Similarly, they are critical of socialist and/or secular feminists, who had been involved in the struggle to restructure and challenge a theocratic state and who call for women’s rights to be located outside of the Islamic framework or discourse.10 Both sets reveal a new ethnographic interest in Islamist men’s politics and Muslim women’s “subjectivities” and the works of Talal Asad, Lila Abu Lughod and Pakistani émigré, Saba Mahmood, have been influential on this cohort of Pakistani post9/11, postsecularist scholars. Diasporic theory attempts to study how diasporic communities create or attempt to recreate coherent or collective memories for their fractured or displaced experiences and subjectivities which may have been denied or erased or appropriated in their foreign contexts. In the case of Pakistani diaspora, their production of post-9/11 scholarship, literature, and art clearly stresses on the leitmotif of Islam, or nostalgia for some radical left politics that may never have existed or indeed, some other sanitized cultural memories (Zaidi 2012). Apart from the postsecular scholarship mentioned above, the two recent genres that have purported to represent Pakistan to international audicnces and are taken as markers of ‘Pakistani culture’ include the Hollywoodized novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by a Pakistani author, Moshin Hamid, and the ‘exotic’ cultural talent exemplified through truck art (colorful artistic renditions on trucks). There is also the fashion of Pakistani American women émigrés who write autobiographical voyeuristic pieces for Anglo-American media which detail the trials and tribulations of being brave divorced Muslim women who have survived the cultural—and apparently, not the religious—repression of sexuality and patriarchy in Pakistan. These serve as the moderate counterexamples to those who are considered “Islamophobic” Muslim women, such as Ayaan Ali Hirsi and Irshad Manji. The point here is that in this post-9/11 body of work, the line between fiction and realism, particularly on the issue of religion and its relationship with feminism, human rights, and secular activist resistance, has been thin and misrepresented, and a corrective is critical for the academic and political records. Pakistani lawyer and rights activist, Shahla Zia, had no hesitation calling out Pakistani diaspora especially, “women scholars, many of whom live outside of the country away from the conflicts and tumults which confront the movement, who criticise its ‘conceptual’ framework, without any real perception of the situation on the ground” (1988: 373). Political economist Akbar Zaidi

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(2013) has no patience for the role of Pakistani diaspora located in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, or in think tanks and who influence development policy for Pakistan and even become prime ministers of Pakistan during their sabbaticals. While it is not necessary that the diaspora is some cohesive homogenous group, on the issue of peddling Islamic identity and challenging local “native” feminist strategies, criticism of women’s activism in Pakistan is often ill-informed and lacking nuance. There are other complications—Islamophobia is now recognized by the United Nations as a form of discrimination but as Bronwyn Winter (2013) has pointed out, the troubling aspect of this is that “the UN thus conflates Muslim people with Islam as belief system and religious practice” and “turns racism, which is structural, systemic, and translates through acts of hatred, discrimination, and violence, into, literally, a ‘fear of religion,’” and focuses “on religions rather than racialized people” (154). Moreover, in my interest within my Muslim context, I question why the definition of Islamophobia does not include the intense hatred and rejection among and between the wide variety of Muslim sects who deny, campaign, vilify, and denigrate each other’s Islam and sometimes rationalize murder of other Muslims under the compulsions of Islamic competitiveness. Can only white people and secular feminists be Islamophobic? The generous assistance of diaspora who analyze Pakistani activism long distance, in order to “muddy the waters” and who offer postsecular and post-Islamist possibilities as viable options—while themselves securely located within their secular and multicultural, sexually free, upwardly mobile academic careers—is mostly just counterintuitive and counterproductive. In some of the above scholarship and tracts, religious “agency” rather than secular autonomy has become a substitutive and almost exclusive tool of analysis for “understanding” Muslim women at the cost of their working-class identities. A few examples of recent Pakistani postsecular proposals emerging from Western academia and shaping the contemporary women and Islam discourse include the work of Humeira Iqtidar (2011), who argues that it is Islamists of Pakistan—not the secularists—who can act as authentic agents of appropriate secularization for such Muslim contexts. There is the works of Masooda Bano (2010, 2012) who has multiple publications advocating that Islamists are rational believers who can benignly instrumentalize Islam toward social development. Bano (2009) has developed dozens of policy papers for the British government, which include the proposal that female Islamic leadership—even if it conforms with male Islamist orthodoxy—is a preferable competitive alternative to Western

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feminism. Another Pakistani scholar, Sadaf Aziz (2005), has argued that Islamic legal regimes are viable alternatives to the unworkable “occidental” or Western “secularization” and human rights. Interestingly, her arguments were with reference to the Zina (adultery) Law (1979) and the Child Marriages Restraint Act (1929), and have been refuted by recent fairly radical legislative reform of both laws in Pakistan according to non-theocratic reasoning and processes. Male scholars, such as Cheema and Akbar (2010), have argued that moral rewards can emerge from Islamic readings of all financial and political legal cases, especially for the “poor and disenfranchized people of Pakistan.” Most influential has been the work of a Pakistan émigré and US-based professor Saba Mahmood (2005) on Muslim women’s piety. Mahmood’s work has challenged liberal and secular feminisms as impositions on believing women who may wish to embrace docility, submission, conservatism, patriarchy, and even, Islamism. She redefines agency by displacing it from the goals of liberal and feminist emancipatory politics. All these academic positionings and projects require a clearing of space first—this is achieved by discrediting secularists and feminists as complicit with imperialism, as pro-drone operations and anti-Islam. Such a service has been enabled by the writings and polemics offered by the second set of scholars mentioned above, including Toor (2012), Akbar and Oza (2013), Ahmed and Tahir (2016), and several men who claim a left identity (mostly online and in cyberspace). In their eyes, and strangely as late as in 2016, the Pakistani state is targeting “working class and lower-middle-class religious-minded Pakistanis who are harassed and sometimes forcibly disappeared simply for being poor, practising Muslims and therefore suspect” (Ahmed and Tahir 2016, emphasis added). One is not sure what the motivating impulse of the Pakistani State used to be before the WoT when it persecuted these same “Muslim men”—practicing or not—but the post-9/11 compounding of class and “practicing Muslims” is purposeful, sweeping, and inaccurate. The point here is that the postsecular haste has resulted in a replacement of analytical categories where the earlier social scientific analysis that tended to focus on class identities has been replaced by an overwhelming anthropological interest and emphasis on the more abstract subjectivities and beliefs of male Islamists. In many cases, the emphasis has shifted from the harmful impact of religious politics on Muslim women to one that is preoccupied with shielding all Muslim men from imperialist violence, even if the price should be strategic silence on gendered violence in Muslim contexts.

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Postsecular fallacies Humeira Iqtidar (2011) in her work Secularizing Islamists argues that by bringing religious belief into the public sphere and recognizing it as a motivating factor, this trend is “secularizing” Muslim societies such as in Pakistan, and that Islamist political parties are true harbingers of an authentic secularization. Proposing a theory is fine in principle but the trouble is that Iqtidar developed her thesis at exactly the same time as the five-year rule of the six-party religious alliance of the Mutahida Majlis e Amal (MMA) in the province of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (2002–08) during the period of the WoT. So her exclusive focus on ethnographic subjectivities of Islamist women but total silence and aversion to using the living examples of Islamists and their “secularization” of the province (including, by women members of the Parliament and in the provincial government) and its Islamizing consequences for women and minorities is strange. The performances of the Islamists in the provincial and national assemblies during this peak of the WoT would have provided for rich evidence of the consequences of “Islamist secularization” (see Brohi 2006, for some examples of the gender apartheid and regression in women and minority rights during the rule of the MMA). Iqtidar also compounds the inadequately defined category “liberal-secular” as a hybrid and fixed category to define any collective that opposes Islamist politics in Pakistan. According to such theses, anyone who challenges Islamist politics is “liberal-secular.” The problem is that in fact, religio-nationalist issues—whether they are about drone warfare, or polygamy, or unequal inheritance for Muslim women—have supporters and opponents that cut across all classes, genders, provinces, and beliefs. So first, liberal thought is not the privilege nor political aspiration of the bourgeoisie or the “NGO11 sector” only (as many postsecularists insist). Second, liberals are not (unfortunately) necessarily secularists in Pakistan. The postsecularist critique that secularism is purely derived from within the immanent frame of Western liberalism is a myth. In Pakistan, one can be comfortably be “liberal” and “modern” without advocating secularism. More worryingly, due to such a shift in analytical frameworks, acts of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam can no longer be reviewed as a crime. Nor can the impunity extended to such crimes through certain Islamic laws be challenged, since faith-inspired violence is analyzed as simply motivated by and as reactionary to something called “imperialism.” Religious actors have been rendered as empty or neutral vessels and religion voided of political resource as some neutral ideology. In 2012, when the Taliban attacked a defiant school girl, Malala, many postsecularists and self-acclaimed

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anti-imperialists kept arguing that this was in revenge for drone attacks.12 Eventually, the Taliban had to issue press releases clarifying that they attacked Malala for her pursuit of secular education and her “secularizing agenda”—not drones (The Express Tribune (2012), “The TTP’s ‘Defence’ of the Attack on Malala.” October 17. http://tribune.com.pk/story/452910/the-ttps-defence-ofthe-attack-on-malala/). Such proposals are not just theoretical fantasies or academic indulgences. In fact, the surplus of studies and research emerging from Western academia have marketed Islam as a logical entry point for social development. This has translated into tangible, obscenely funded development policies and projects across Pakistan—a process I call donor-driven Islam (Zia 2011). They have prescribed an exclusive focus on enabling religious interlopers and strengthening faith-based institutions while deliberately ignoring their nexus with jihadist or conservative intent or identity. The blurring of boundaries between the secular and religious is not unique to Pakistan and may be found in non-Muslim societies too. However, it is in the instrumentalization of religion where things become slippery and complicated. In the post-9/11 period, the very relevance of any Enlightenment-based ideals (liberalism13 and secularism, in particular) and indeed, any form of feminism— both of which used to be the primary target of conservatives and Islamists— have since been challenged as commissioners of anti-Muslim orientalism (Mufti 2004). Feminism in particular has become a suspect handmaiden in the post9/11 era that is dominated by the analytical framing of all Muslim-related matters through the lens of Islamophobia, and especially when it challenges Islamic laws, patriarchy, or male norms in Muslim contexts.

Seeking secular autonomy The Lady Health Workers Programme (LHWP) of Pakistan has been termed a successful government program in large part because it has succeeded in increasing reversible and modern contraceptive use, particularly in many inaccessible rural areas. What interests most researchers is that the LHWP has proven to be an instrument of social change in the communities to which they belong. Not only have these women successfully broken the private-public dichotomy quite literally, they also provide an essential service to women in their childbearing years which would otherwise be absolutely denied to them. Ayesha Khan’s (2008) research on the LHWP argues that

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if empowerment is to be understood through changes wrought in the areas of body, voice and paid work, this project in effect touches all these themes. The nature of the [Lady Health Workers Programme] is directly meant to increase women’s control and decision-making with regard to their health, well-being, and reproductive decision-making; it is a community-based project that strives to empower men and women to make their needs heard through health committees and increased interaction. (3)

One LHW serves a population of 1,000–1,500 persons, which is approximately 100 households, and she regularly visits them to maintain her health records. Her monthly salary, until recently, was equivalent to approximately $25. For a negligible stipend, the LHWs are also routinely recruited for administering polio vaccines because they are such an expansive and effective labor force. In 2010, intermittent protests over unfair termination, salary increase, or harassment that had been brewing for the past decade grew into a countrywide boycott of the polio vaccination drive scheduled for February of that year. The LHWs in Sindh province were especially active and there was even a deeply symbolic protest demonstration at the mausoleum of the assassinated prime minister and founder of the LHWP, Benazir Bhutto. The daily Dawn reported that at this protest the LHWs demanded that the promise to regularize their work, made by the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto should be fulfilled (“Anti-polio campaign faces threats of boycott,” Dawn 2010, February 9). This may be read as a political and alternative rendering of a “performance of gendered secular virtues,” when compared to Mahmood’s readings of pietist women’s “performance of gendered Islamic virtues” (Mahmood 2001: 203). In September 2010, after protracted nation-wide strikes and protests and a legal battle, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered that the LHWs should be paid the minimum wage of a skilled (full-time) worker (at the time, Rs 7,000, or roughly US$70, per month). The president of the All Pakistan Lady Health Workers Employees Association, and leader of these protests, Bushra Arain, told the press that “whatever success Pakistan has achieved towards bringing down infant and maternal mortality rates, or in meeting the targets for the Millennium Development Goals four and five14 would not have been possible had the LHWs not been going door to door” (Ebrahim 2011). In early 2011, the Sindh provincial government was forced to delay the launch of its three-day polio campaign because the LHWs now staged further citybased protests against the government’s non-implementation of the Supreme Court’s legal orders. This was followed by nation-wide protests, which included

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direct action by the LHWs in blocking of major highways, courting arrests, and following up their legal case at the Supreme Court which adjudicated in favor of the LHWs. Apart from framing their own rights in a liberal, universalist light, the Supreme Court of Pakistan chose to interpret the case of the LHWs in the frame of Pakistan’s agreement with ILO terms rather than any Islamic provision or indeed, culture-specific code or ethos. The matter did not end for the LHWs, who had registered another case demanding regularization of their jobs, which was adjudicated in their favor (2012–13).

Silencing secular resistance In the backdrop of these developments, the proceeding wave of attacks on health and aid workers in Pakistan in the same year of their struggle for wage rights signified the tense and entangled relationship between women and religion. Of the fifteen aid workers targeted by militants across Pakistan in 2012, nine of the victims were health workers associated with the national polio campaign. At the time, Pakistan was one of three countries where polio still persisted. Some fiftyeight cases were registered in 2012 and the World Health Organization warned of travel/visa restrictions and sanctions to be imposed, if polio continued to spread (NEAP 2017). The majority of cases are found in the tribal areas, which are less populated but where militants have actively resisted the vaccination program terming it, an un-Islamic practice and believing it to be a conspiracy against Muslims (Khan et al. 2017). The LHWs are also contracted to administer polio drops in recognition of their successful access to communities and involvement with postnatal services. In so far as they represent modernist ideas and transgress the patriarchal division between private and public roles for women, as well as the fact that they are officials of the Pakistani state, the LHWs were specifically targeted by the militants in the Taliban-controlled areas (which reach beyond the tribal areas and in several metropolitan centers). Between 2006 and 2009, the Taliban’s invasion of Swat in the Himalayan region of Pakistan was followed by their systematic and violent pogrom to enforce its version of Shari’a on the already Islamic, Republic of Pakistan. The Taliban destroyed Swat’s famed tourist industry through a series of public beheadings and hangings (of prostitutes, barbers, and entertainers) in town squares. Once they controlled Swat, over their three-year siege, the Taliban prohibited polio vaccination campaigns, destroyed

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122 girls’ schools and 22 barber shops, and banned all music, cinema, and most NGOs in the area. According to regular news reports, the Taliban also killed those health workers who attempted to save people wounded in suicide blasts. In a British Medical Journal (BMJ) study “How the Taliban Undermined Community Healthcare in Swat, Pakistan” (Ud din, Mumtaz, and Ataullahjan 2012), the authors conducted in-depth interviews with Swat-residing, Pushtoon-ethnic LHWs, to gauge the effects of the Taliban’s threats and violence against them. According to the study, not only did the overall infrastructure of community health suffer drastically, but maternal mortality increased and individual LHWs were socially ostracized through a vilification campaign, while many left or stopped working due to direct threats to their lives. Some of the strategies adopted by the Taliban are quoted in the BMJ study, based on the direct experiences of the affected LHWs (although, the authors make the proviso that the worst affected could not be interviewed due to the high risk this entailed for those women’s lives). The most effective strategy employed by the Taliban was to “name and shame” the LHWs on FM radio and the issuing of three fatwas (religious edicts) against them. The LHWs interviewed in the BMJ study (online 2012) cite specific examples of beheadings, as well as public beatings and firing on their houses and murders of their colleagues’ family members. The study notes that the LHW program to provide family planning services made it “an ideological target.” This is very similar to the campaigns and political positions taken by some mainstream Islamists who argue that family planning, contraception, and sex education promote vulgarity, obscenity, and encourage extramarital sex. The BMJ study cites allegations by the leader of the Taliban, Maulana Fazlullah, that “LHWs want to promote prostitution and sin in our society.” According to the BMJ study, about 15 percent of the LHWs of Swat resigned, others simply stopped working while several left the city. The Taliban’s persecution of the health workers resulted in an increase in maternal mortality, at least seven forced marriages (according to the sample interviewed), and abortions have been on the rise. The most effective strategy employed by the Taliban was to “name and shame” the female health workers on FM radio and to issue three fatwas (religious edicts) against them. The BMJ study notes that these religious pronouncements had a more serious impact than even the threats of kidnapping, execution of forced marriages, and in some cases, death. The reason is that these fatwas were not directed at health services per se but against the very notion of women in public spaces, which was declared a form of public

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indecency. The fatwa (as cited in the BMJ study) also declared that “it was a Muslim man’s duty to kidnap the women health workers when they paid home visits, to marry them forcibly (even if they were already married women), or to use them as sexual slaves.” Specifically, Maulana Fazlullah, the Taliban chief of Swat even went so far as to declare the LHWs as wajibul qatl (fit for murder). The second fatwa declared that it was illegal for Muslim women to work for wages and the third that LHWs were subverting the gendered social order because they traveled unaccompanied, door to door, “acting like men.” The BMJ study notes that these “divine” rulings were instrumental in discrediting the primary care work because the health workers were now cast as “prostitutes” and “servants of America.” The Taliban’s (now famed) use of the FM radio for religious propaganda rationalized that since these women health workers carry condoms, it was obvious that they were house-calling prostitutes. In varying degrees, the substance or rationalization of all three fatwas overlap, and can be found in the rhetoric employed by several hardline and mainstream Islamists. When the Taliban occupied Swat, the Islamist alliance of the MMA was ruling the northern province of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (2002–08). The sociopolitical environment created by the MMA policies had instituted a form of gender apartheid in the province, which made it conducive for the militants to further their radical agenda there. The suggestion that violence perpetrated in the name of Islam can no longer be viewed as a crime—committed by individuals, aided and sanctioned by local Islamist clerics and groups—is dangerous. Such a defensive stance defuses the criminal act as an imperative of a “broader discourse” (Manchanda 2012) and depicts feminists and human rights activists as alarmists who focus exclusively on faith-based violence. The targeted killings of the polio workers that spread terror in the country in 2012 may or may not have always been the work of the Taliban, but their narrative of anti-polio campaigns is consistent with that of religious fundamentalists in Pakistan. The main religious political parties support polio vaccination (since they proclaim to be anti-fundamentalist) but never condemn the Taliban for their atrocities in this regard. However, postsecularists are reluctant to identify all those crimes perpetrated against women that are directly connected to religious fundamentalism. The implicit suggestion is that violence cannot be inspired by religious fundamentalism and should only be seen as motivated by and reactive to imperialism or the “context” created by external causes. The argument is that, while religion may afford political agency yet religious actors void themselves of the patriarchal reservoir available in Islam when they exercise such agency.

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On the other hand, if, as it is explicitly argued that such violent crimes must be viewed as stemming exclusively from “a broader discourse .  .  . of heteronormativity . . . and neoliberal development” (Manchanda 2012) then these critics should be making the case that polio vaccination and girls’ education/ political empowerment are in fact very much part of the neoliberal development agenda. Would it be logical then to review anti-polio, anti-education drives as part of a rational rejection by those who oppose health and education programs particularly for and by women, because these are part of the trope of liberal universalism? This form of rationalization allows any person who claims to act in the defense or promotion of Islam to be absolved of “criminal intent” or from being called “violent,” and to be viewed, as Manchanda suggests, as permanent victims of external (historical) conditions and a “global political climate.” Soon after the spree of killings of the polio vaccinators across Pakistan, UNICEF (Pakistan) shifted the strategy of commissioning religious endorsement from its peripheral position to a central one. In March 2013, UNICEF hastily published a booklet of multiple fatwas or religious decrees that endorsed polio vaccination and clarified that this was not against the Shari’a (Bhatti 2013). The fatwas were sourced from a wide range of international scholars, mosques, Islamic centers, collectives, and councils, and even spanned the different multiple schools of Islamic jurisprudence, religious sects, and thought, within the country too. Some of these folders were found blood-drenched, next to the bodies of those polio workers who were assassinated in the largest city of Pakistan, Karachi, in 2012. It read as a tragically ironic comment on the futility of the attempt to synthesize religious scholarship with modern developmental progress. The LHWs of Pakistan have a different view regarding this proposal for some external neutral interface for delivering such health services. At their protest demonstrations against the killings of their colleagues in the assassination spree of polio workers in 2012, the LHWs were seen burning and defacing some of the official posters that carried images of and endorsements by Islamic male scholars and prominent “born-again” male cricketers and celebrities, who they considered to be imposters. These (male) personalities are engaged by the government and donor agencies to popularize the vaccines. Such advertisements and posters are ostensibly meant to promote the subliminal message that polio vaccines are sanctioned by the clergy and are therefore, suitable (halal or legitimate) for Muslims. In this vein, several multinational health corporations have introduced what are advertised as “Halal Vaccines,” suggesting (falsely) that the polio drops have

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been prepared differently or by some “kosher” method to legitimize their use in Muslim contexts. Peddling Islamic products has become a false alternative and lucrative mainly for its proprietors only, and the defenders of such reinventions justify such market strategies as creative adaptations. However, as the LHWs clearly realize, such circumambulations simply diminish the worth of their own worldly contributions and deflects the attention from how these women are in fact, the primary and practical “neutral interface” for such services.

The politics of secular autonomy The secular methodologies of the LHWs for delivering essential basic health services for women may be prosaic and understated but are effective and successful and dependent only on state support, rather than on competing fatwas, distortions, deception, or performativity as a method of delivering basic services to all members of a community, regardless of religious affiliation. Autonomy has become synonymous with these women in terms of mobility (physical and class) and an empowerment that is not limited to or dependent on income only. Status and a pragmatic and purposeful social calling defines this program in contrast to those who may be involved in charity or social welfare work that is motivated by divinity or piety. Clearly, the religious militants in Swat realized the seriousness of such a secular autonomy that motivated them to murderously prevent these women from transgressing public norms and defying the expectations of women’s roles under their Shari’a. The passivity of religious agency is not a threat to the patriarchal male order—secular autonomy is. However, clearly, if states keep abdicating more and more of public services and spaces to clerical intervention, then the likelihood of framing a rights-based discourse in anything other than a faith-based proposal is going to be fully implausible and its success, equally contestable. There is no quantifiable way to measure the success of faith-based strategies and certainly health experts continue to stress (almost self-defeatedly) that it is important to educate and convince clergymen in order to assist entry into communities for the purpose of delivering civic and medical services (Khan and Kanwal 2015; Khan et al. 2017). However, pragmatic policies and practices (such as the work of the LHWs) that are indifferent and even defiant to a dependence on religious endorsements are clearly visible and can be documented. One example of the latter is of those women who belonged to the same polio vaccination team

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as their assassinated colleagues. Just a few weeks after the killings, undeterred by the continuing threats, the women of the attacked team resumed their work and participated in the next round of vaccinations. This resilience and determination could be seen in the fifteen-year-old sister of one of the victims who took her place on the vaccination team for the next round. It is not simply a matter of contrasting the effectiveness of pragmatic strategies against appeals to mystical persuasion. The emphasis given to the latter by a failing governance structure, ineffective and opportunist international donor agencies, and anthropological inquiry that places extraordinary stress on the “effectiveness” of Islamist welfare work and their grassroots linkages, deflects our attention from the possibilities, successes, and value of nonreligious, even impious, approaches and methods.

Donor-driven Islam This tension regarding the role of religion as a vehicle for empowerment is not new. In the 1990s, the main debate within liberal women’s rights groups such as Women’s Action Forum (WAF)15 had to do with the wisdom over deploying a strategic use of religion as resistance against the politics of Islamization, as well as its worth as a tool of gender empowerment. Based on the limitations of their experiences of working within the progressive Islamic framework, WAF decided and made a conscious decision to then take on the identity of a secular organization to mark their resistance to General Muhammad Zia ul Haq’s Islamization campaign (1977–88). In other words, Zia ul Haq set up the Pakistani state as a “Church” and the struggle of the women’s movement was pitted against this theocratic, state-driven attempt to reverse women’s achievements and rights in order to showcase the state’s Islamic credentials. Toward this, the women’s movement turned its direction from a liberal, equalrights framing to a quintessentially and additionally, secular resistance project. Usually, the touchstone reference for “Pakistani laïcité” has been the 1973 Constitution, which many believe upheld the principles of a secular state (albeit compromised/negotiated in subsequent amendments). The concept of managing religions was not a matter of discussion at the time, and the notion of separation of church and state is not technically viable in the absence of a state church. But, nondemocratic theocratic institutions such as the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), as well as the introduction of Islamic laws (Hudood Ordinances 1979) and the empowerment of a handpicked state clergy, were consistently challenged.16

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However, in the post-9/11 window of opportunity, postsecularists have argued for “religion in development” rather than “religion and development” (Deneulin and Bano 2009). Donors who finance social development have jumped all over this revisitation while NGOs have actively reengineered their projects in the post-9/11 era to include faith-based strategies in their programs, in order to avail of the pool of funds reserved for such an approach to development in Pakistan (Zia 2011). As Cassandra Balchin pointed out in 2011, the term “Muslim fundamentalism” is now deliberately avoided in the donor community and weighing in culture has become a factor in policy decisions. The example she cites is, whether a polygamous Muslim employee should be considered to be in violation of Oxfam’s policy of gender equality or overlooked as a form of respect for religious/cultural specificity of Muslim contexts. She and others note how the impact of this strategy of embedding “progressive Islam” has never been seriously assessed or evaluated. But it has successfully narrowed down available choices for women by limiting empowerment strategies exclusively within a faith-based framework and excluded other secular tools or strategic positioning that may be more effective in order to challenge patriarchal politics. Postsecularist studies focus on the performativity associated rather than structural class issues that are intrinsically tied to religious politics. Even the respected religious scholar and the former chairperson of Pakistan’s CII Dr. Khalid Masud admits that such faith-based approaches have merely legitimized conservatism and “strengthened the ulema’s authority at the cost of development targets” and “politicized both religion and development” (Masud 2012: 192). According to postsecular logic, apparently Muslim women have no material or secular desires—apparently they all reject something called “Western Liberal Freedoms” and are most content pursuing “alternative leadership” in mosques and madrassas and finding refuge in religious agency and in their hejab and veil. In the post-9/11 period, the very relevance of liberalism and secularism and indeed, feminism—all of which used to be the primary target of conservatives and Islamists—has since been challenged quite directly from these new sources of postsecular thought. Most of the founders of feminist movements in Pakistan affiliate themselves with, or have been part of a leftist political leaning. To suggest that they are not aware of the history or imperialist trappings that have produced forces such as the Taliban is a deliberate oversight. The accusation that feminists cunningly set up binaries by propping up all Islamists as evil and themselves (women/ victims) as secular innocents, serves only to assist a new generation of academics to position themselves as authentic postcolonial commentators on Islamic

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politics in Pakistan. However, this is a politically and historically truncated project. By focusing only on the post-9/11 era, the politics of religion and its instrumentalization by organized groups and the state is cast in the dustbin of history. It is this kind of commentary that imagines that the resistance to polio vaccination has peaked because a fake vaccination campaign was staged as part of a CIA dragnet operation to hunt and kill Osama Bin Laden in 2011 (Shah 2011). The Bin Laden raid and capture in northern Pakistan has definitely contributed to a different kind of political mistrust of the routine health campaign and is unconscionable. But it does not explain or condone the historic and simultaneous oppositional strategies and violence meted out against women community workers by religious clergy and/or militants. The collusion of patriarchal partnerships as expressed through the narrative of religious fundamentalism and sustained through conservatism is historic and continuous. It is an unfair expectation to think feminists are likely to apply the prescription for silence or tempered activism when violent acts are urged, sanctioned, and supported by mainstream clerics or indeed, the state. This chapter argues the following: First, secular resistance is crucial in the Islamic Republic and in fact, working women’s struggles are predominantly invested in and advance secular autonomy. Second, ultimately no matter how much is invested into excavating the worth of reinvented, faith-based identities as a postcolonial and post-9/11 alterity, ultimately the losers are still the women of Pakistan. This is reason enough to be wary of postsecular feminist imaginings in Pakistan since it is more likely to become rationalized and subsumed within radical Islamic discourse, even as the former looks to legitimize itself as a viable political alternative to Western rights and justice for Pakistan. Women’s own experiences of such radicalization suggest that under such circumstances hope for equal rights or even reform is near impossible.

Why I am not a postsecular feminist In his timely essay “Why I Am Not a Postsecularist,” Aamir Mufti (2013) opens with a candid concern over how “self-described postsecular ways of thinking are fast acquiring a sort of orthodox status across the humanistic disciplines in the United States” (7). Mufti explains: “I am not a postsecularist because the concept is an internally incoherent one, evasive about the transition it supposedly marks

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and confusing different levels of analysis” (9). Mufti questions the underlying assumption in the humanistic disciplines which appears to be that, “as a spiritual, intellectual, and political culture, Islamism marks a ‘return’ of Islam, either uncontaminated by, or having shaken itself free of, the liberal thought and practice of the modern West” (10), while secularism is viewed “simply as an ideological impulse of the ongoing projects of Western imperialism” (11). This “new anthropology of Islam” may be a product that emerged from post-9/11 Western academia but its influences are not limited to either the ivory tower or the spatial and political entity of the Western world. Mufti (2013) suggests that “the secular imagination has developed in much of the postcolonial world, and in modern Muslim societies in particular, with a very different kind of relation of proximity to the religious and theological than has been the norm in the West” (18). With reference to the women’s movements in Pakistan, this can be extended to include the manner in which secular imagination has been deployed as a form of resistance and, to expand the social and public so as to accommodate secular and even liberal aspirations and expressions in the Islamic Republic. Pakistani secularism is not Western, Indian, or Islamist in imagination—it is peculiarly, a form of resistance against Muslim majoritarianism. Mufti (2013) argues that he is not a postsecularist “because postsecularism is inherently majoritarian in nature, seeking to normalize certain religious and social practices and forms of authority and social imagination as representative of ‘the people’” (18). This is key, especially for Muslim-majority contexts such as Pakistan that align themselves with Islamic laws and politics. Who does postsecular politics represent and what does a postsecular state look like? More than any organizational definition, such as a separation of church and state or the autonomy of governance and religious institutions, secularism for the section of the Pakistani women’s movement that is committed to it, has come to mean an expectation of public institutions to maintain a minimal neutrality or reference to religion, particularly in matters relating to women’s and minorities’ equal rights. At the very least, secularism for them pivots around the concept of advocating a pluralism of beliefs and for resisting a hegemonic, majoritarian Islamism from driving laws, social relations, or state policies. It also means resisting religious justifications that reinforce class, gender, and sectarian discrimination, as well as those that target minorities. It is for these reasons that I remain a secular, and not a postsecular feminist.

Notes Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Kymlika (1996). Okin (1999) and Benhabib (2000). Wald and Wilcox (2006). Bhargava (2010). Verma (2013). Agnes (2016). A discussion of recent incidents and their causes are available at Communalism Watch https://communalism.blogspot.com Agnes (2016). All India Muslim Personal Law Board press release, October 13, 2016. Available at http://www.aimplboard.in/images/media/Press13-10-2016%20ENGLISH.pdf See, for example, this debate: http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/triple-talaq-vs-divorceamong-other-religions-1710918; http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/mani-shankaraiyar-is-wrong-on-triple-talaq-1714525 Scott (2008). Bacchetta (2004). Aiyar (2016). http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/triple-talaq-case-live-updatessupreme-court-on-muslim-divorce-practice/story-QcNCsaZDkvkgTcWJ02GPcK. html Basu (2016). https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Is-a-common-civil-code-a-good-idea/ articleshow/49623419.cms Bebaak Collective https://thewire.in/192909/muslim-womens-rights-activistscondemn-bjps-appropriation-historic-triple-talaq-judgment/ Agnes (2016). Agnihotri (2017). Zakaria (2016). Young (2017). Jayawardena (1995) and Mantena (2010). Shapiro (2012).

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Notes hooks (1984). Jaggar (1983). Lewis (2016). Phillips (2006). Roces and Edwards (2010). Reilly and Scriver (2014: 280–85). Scott (2009). Modernization theory argues that economic development is a linear process that brings with it a set of positive shifts in social and political life. For an introduction, see Berman (2009, March 12). For an example, see Ingelhart and Norriss (2004). Armstrong (2009). Kuhn (1962 (2012)). Asad (2003). Casanova (2009). Charles (2007). Casanova (1994). Foucault (1969 (2002)). Asad (2003). Habermas (2008). Deo (2016). Hurd (2008); a recent example is discussed by Scott (2014). Hussain (2010). Gorski and Altinordu (2008), Beckford (2012) and Wilson and Steger (2013). Smith and Whistler (2010). Habermas (2008). Asad (2003). Levitt (2008). Calhoun, Jurgensmeyer and VanAntwerpen (2011). Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2008). Mendieta and VanAntwerpen (2011) and Habermas and Ratzinger. Sullivan et al. (2015) and Hurd (2008). Saeed (2016). Cady and Fessenden (2013). Fessenden (2008). Scott (2007) and Asad et al. (2013). Badran (2011). Braidotti (2008). McLennan (2010). Varma, Dhaliwal and Nagarajan (2016).

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Chapter 2 1 Some of the basic framing of this chapter grew out of earlier collaborative writing with Nandini Deo in preparation for the postsecular feminisms conference at Lehigh University. I am grateful to her for encouragement and guidance then and since. 2 See, for example, Sandel (1994), Audi (2011), Wingenbach (1999), Murphy (2001) Brown (2006), Fortier (2010), de Roover and Balagangadhara (2008), Carter (1993), Manent (1995), Fish (1997), Rorty (1989), MacIntyre (1988), Žižek (2008), Hauerwas (1983), Milbank (2006) and Gorski (2017). 3 Reil (1986) and Bossy (1982). 4 Rubiés (2006) and Sheehan (2006). 5 Asad (1990), Harrison (1990), Bulman (2015), and Bulman and Ingram (2016). 6 Casanova (1994). 7 See, for example, Clark (2012). 8 For an example of the centrality of old-fashioned understandings of the Enlightenment to contemporary antisecularist, anti-liberal movements in academia, see Smith (2004), esp. 31–33, 40, 50, 89–90, 128. For a strident defense of much the same Enlightenment by a left-leaning secularist, see Bronner (2004). 9 Hazard (2013). 10 See, for example, Sorkin (2008) and Bulman and Ingram ( 2016). 11 Gay (1966–69). Recent articulations include Israel (2006) and Pagden (2013). 12 Israel (2006: 870). 13 Kors (1976) and Andrew (2006). 14 See, for example, McMahon (2001), Chartier (1991), and Van Kley (2016: 282–84). 15 On the American culture wars and the Enlightenment, see Hollinger (2001). Wokler (1997) and Schmidt (2000). Both imply that only critics of the Enlightenment have gotten the Enlightenment wrong. 16 Important forerunners in the study of Christian Enlightenment included TrevorRoper (1967) and Plongeron (1969). 17 Young (1998) and Sorkin (2008), esp. 23–66. For an alternative view, see Bulman (2015). 18 Recent works Rosenblatt (2006), Lehner and Printy (2010), Printy (2009), Lehner (2011), Van Kley (2014), and Burson and Lehner (2014). 19 This concept approximates a merger of the phenomenological and discursive models found, respectively, in Taylor (2007: 3–4, 12–14, 19–20, 192–94), and Stout (2004: 92–117). It nevertheless discards Taylor’s narrative and anthropology. See Bulman (2015), esp. preface and introduction. It is unclear, however, if even these frameworks are profitably or appropriately applied to non-western and postcolonial contexts, which Taylor and Stout of course ignore. See Mahmood (2010).

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20 Here I am using the term “immanent critique” to refer to either the criticism of an argument, ideology, or other position in accordance with its own foundational premises, or the attempt to draw an interlocutor to one’s side in debate by showing that one’s own position is consistent with the interlocutor’s fundamental metaphysical commitments or other basic argumentative premises. 21 See also Rubiés (2012: 323) and Edelstein (2010: 34). 22 Koselleck (1988), Hunter (2007), Bates (2011) and Malcolm (2002). 23 Accounts of this sort, which overlap considerably the theologically informed and often confessionally driven critiques of modernity discussed above, include Buckley (1987), Dupré (2004), and Gillespie (2008). 24 Historians have tended to see this as the entirety of the relationship between feminism and the Enlightenment. See, for example, Israel (2001: 82–96, 2006: 572–89). 25 Scott (1996) and Cole (2011). 26 Astell’s most important writings include (1986, 1996, 1997, 2013). 27 See, for example, Pateman (1988). 28 Springborg (2005), esp. 114, 138, 210; Apetrei (2010), esp. 31–32, 138. 29 Apetrei (2010: 11, 17, 19, 29, 91, 92, 101, 105–07, 109, 112–13, 125, 130, 134, 147, 152) (for this and the preceding two paragraphs). On links between Astell and more radical forms of Enlightenment, see Ellenzweig (2003).

Chapter 3 1 This example, and some of the arguments in this chapter, is from my dissertation (Arora 2008). 2 Mani (2017: 2). 3 Although science—or the systematic investigation of reality—does not necessarily require a materialist worldview, “science” and “materialism” have become conflated in modern Western thought. 4 Alexander (2005: 15–16). 5 Mani (2017: 5). 6 Schaefer (2006). 7 O’Dell and Heyward (2014). 8 Currently, the Women’s Spirituality program at the California Institute of Integral Studies is the only doctoral program that offers a degree in philosophy and religion with a concentration in women’s spirituality. 9 Nelson (2008). 10 The use of the term “feminist” by Native women is contested, some of whom see the term as inextricably tied to Western imperialism; others find the term useful, provided it is qualified. For a discussion of this issue, see Smith (2005).

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11 See, for example, Allen (1986), Brant (1984), Mihesuah (2003), and Suzack et al. (2010). 12 See, for example, Plaskow and Christ (1989), Charlene Sprenak (1982). 13 Christ (1979: 74). 14 For an overview of this debate, see Gross (2009: 156–70). 15 Gross (2009: 158). 16 Lerner (1986: 9). 17 Lerner (1986: 9–10). 18 Lerner (1986: 10). 19 Lerner (1986: 142). 20 See, for example, Gatwood (1985). 21 Wadley (1977: 116). 22 Fernandes (2003: 105). 23 Gross (1993: 210). 24 Sponberg (1992: 4). 25 Ruether (2002: 197). 26 Plaskow (1989: 40). 27 Talamantez (1991: 131). 28 Berman (1981: 23). 29 Wilson (1986: i). 30 Dussel (2002: 180). 31 Dussel (2002: 180). 32 Dussel (2002: 181). 33 Berman (1981: 16). 34 Berman (1981: 126). 35 Berman (1981: 135). 36 Merchant (1980: 3). 37 Merchant (1980: 169). 38 For a brief overview of animal ethics in world religions, see Arora (2016: 30–35); for an in-depth exploration, see Kemmerer (2012). 39 Nibert (2002). 40 While recent scientific advancements have challenged the earlier materialist view of nonhuman animals, “the fact that [Descartes’] ideas are disproved scientifically does not keep them from being carried on and lived as a cultural artifact that has been handed down to us in a process of its own,” according to Benvenuti (2014: 71). 41 Grof (1998: 250). 42 Grof (1998: 252). 43 See, for example, McCaslin and University of Saskatchewan Native Law Centre (2005). 44 Braidotti (2008: 11).

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Notes Grossman (2002: 118). hooks (1993: 101). Moody (2001: 164). See also Hunt (2017). Hunt coins a similar term in her discussion of the “lost radical history” of early American feminists. Hunt’s term refers especially to the faith-based and intersectional activism of abolitionist feminists in the United States whereas mine refers more broadly to the spiritual roots of feminist resistance across cultures and time periods. Lerner (1993: 65). Lerner (1993: 77). Braude (2001: 57). Braude (2001: 201). Moody (2001: xii). Mack (2003: 162). Hunt (2004: 9). Schmidt (2005: 91). Hunt (2004: 57–59). hooks (1993: 100). hooks (1993: 101). For a multicultural example, see Harris and Ott (2011). See, for example, Townes (1995); for a pan-religious collection, see Wade-Gayles (1995). Binford (1982: 559). See, for example, Tong (2009). In her overview of the feminist theory, Tong notes that “critics on the left fault spiritual ecofeminists for substituting religion for politics and for spending too much time dancing in the moonlight, casting ‘magic’ spells, chanting mantras, doing yoga, ‘mindfully’ meditating, and giving each other massages,” 273. Ricœur (1981: 248). Fiorenza (2002: 223). Wadud (1999). Gross (1993). Fiorenza (2002: 222).

Chapter 4 1 Matilal’s illustration is drawn from the Mahabharata. A hermit, Kausika, had vowed always to tell the truth because he desired above all to go to heaven and thus break the endless cycle of rebirth. One day as he was sitting near a crossroad, he saw a

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group of travelers rush by in order to escape bandits pursuing them. While passing the hermit the travelers pleaded that he should not tell their pursuers the direction they had taken. But asked the direction by the bandits, who seemed to know that Kausika never ever lied, Kausika, bound by his vow, told them the way the benighted travelers had fled. He did not ascend to heaven. This duty to tell the truth had violated his duty to save innocent lives (1989: 9).

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Misra (2012). Ahmed (2011). Cf: Zahidim (2014) and Merium (2012). Raza (2011). Osborne (2017). Khan (2012). Khan (2011: 303). Saif (2012). “PTI Manifesto Election 2013: Inshallah Naya Pakistan.” http://www.insaf.pk/ about-us/know-pti/manifesto Osborne (2017). Vahid (1964: 169). Khan (2011: 360). Sevea (2011: 107–08). Cf: Nazir (2001). Iqbal (2012: 120). Iqbal (2012). Iqbal (1966: 138). Sevea (2011: 141). Sevea (2011: 141). Schimmel (2011: 155–56). Iqbal (2012: 122). Iqbal (2000: 111). Bellah (1967: 1–21).

Chapter 6 1 The status of Muslim women has been widely debated in the background of the Muslim Personal Laws—that many consider as discriminatory. The Shah Bano case

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of 1985, controversies over triple talaq, and tolerance of polygamy have contributed to these debates. 2 Large-scale migration to the Gulf countries began in the early 1980s in Kerala and currently there are approximately 2.3 million Keralites in these countries with a proportion of 43.6, 20, and 36.4 percent of Muslims, Christians, and Hindus, respectively (Zacharia and Rajan 2012).

Chapter 7 1 Rooted in Hindu textual sources, caste is a religious-based system of social stratification that divides Hindu society into four main groups: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras. Meaning “broken” or “scattered” in Hindi, “Dalit” refers to those who have been historically at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, without caste and subject to the practice of untouchability. According to the 2011 census figures, there are at least 200 million Dalits living in India currently. 2 Roy (2014: 54). 3 Queen (1996: 51). 4 Queen (1996: 51). 5 See Hardtmann (2011) for a more detailed presentation of the tension between Gandhi and Ambedkar. 6 Zelliot (2004: 166–68). 7 King (2009: 145–46). 8 Fields (1992: 61). 9 Fields (1992: 61–62). 10 Fields (1992: 68). 11 Fields (1992). 12 Lakh is a unit in the Indian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand. 13 Arnold (1879: 237). 14 Fields (1992: 98). 15 Burnouf (2010: 328). 16 Watson (1993: 273). 17 For a detailed treatment of this topic, see McMahan (2008). 18 Ambedkar (2010: 118–19). 19 For more commentary, see Queen (1996: 60). 20 Ambedkar (2010: 118–19). 21 Queen (1996: 57). 22 Doyle (2003: 260). 23 Rodrigues (2002: 218). 24 Queen (1996: 59).

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25 Fiske and Emmrich (2004: 97–119). 26 Queen (1996: 56). 27 Sallie King anticipates the response that some scholars do not accept that the Buddha rejected caste. See King (2009: 146). 28 Jaffrelot (2005: 143). 29 Ghar wapsi, literally “return home,” is the practice of encouraging non-Hindu Indians to convert “back” to Hinduism based on a logic that sees all Indians as originally Hindu. This practice is targeted at all non-Hindu religious traditions, with particular focus on South Asian Christians and Muslims. 30 For full text of Narendra Modi’s Ambedkar Jayanti speech, see “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Ambedkar Jayanti message: Committed to building an inclusive India,” India Today, April 14, 2017, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/prime-ministernarendra-modi-ambedkar-jayanti-bhimrao-ramji-ambedkar/1/928921.html 31 Manorama (2008: 445). 32 Moon and Pawar (2008: 4). 33 Hardtmann (2011: 215). 34 Moon and Pawar (2008: 275). 35 Moon and Pawar (2008: 280).

Chapter 8 1 Basquiat (2001: 5) quoting Stack (1991: 30). 2 It is important to note the ongoing academic debates about the use of the term “postsecular.” See, for example, Habermas (2008), Mufti (2013), and Vasilaki (2016). On the usefulness of the term, Beckford (2012) urges caution: “There is therefore a danger that talking about the postsecular will be like waving a magic wand over all the intricacies, contradictions, and problems of what counts as religion to reduce them to a single, bland category . . . . It would leave us with the question ‘What could possibly not be postsecular?’” (17). 3 For a comprehensive history of Mormonism’s founder, see Bushman (2007). 4 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, future studies exploring the intersections of Mormon feminism and other feminist movements might address the topic of religious vestments. Mormon women are spared the public disdain endured by some women in other religious traditions because the physical emblems of their belief are worn under everyday clothing. Mormon “garments,” worn by both women and men, are markers of religious identity, belief, belonging, and commitment and are worn by devout adult members throughout their lives. 5 This chapter is an overview of the contemporary feminist movement within the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), headquartered in

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Notes Salt Lake City, Utah. Other extant religious traditions found under the umbrella category “Mormonism” may also use the “Mormon.” The mainstream LDS Church encourages authors to consult this style guide for clarification: http://www. mormonnewsroom.ca /style-guide These statistics obtained from the official public relations arm of the LDS Church, available at http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/ facts-and-statistics Mason and Mauss (2013). Much of the academic literature on “lived religion” in North America is attributed to Ammerman (2007), Hall (1997), Orsi (2005), and Mcguire (2008). Near-complete exclusion from church finances is a significant obstacle for Mormon feminists. However, the restriction on women’s involvement in church finances proceeds largely uncontested. See, for example, “Can Mormon Women Count Money?” available at http://www.the-exponent.com/can-mormon-women-count-money/ The Church’s official website offers an explanation of the three types of discipline which affect membership, they are “probation, disfellowshipment, and excommunication” as indicated in the essay “A Chance to Start Over: Church Disciplinary Councils and the Restoration of Blessings” (1990). Retrieved from https://www.lds.org/ensign/1990/09/a-chance-to-start-over-church-disciplinarycouncils-and-the-restoration-of-blessings?lang=eng The word “auxiliary” is employed in mainstream Mormonism to denote an internal learning or service organization, secondary to the governing priesthood authority. Women occupy positions of leadership in the women’s “Relief Society,” the children’s “Primary” and the “Young Women” organizations (General Auxiliaries, n.d.); Holbrook and Bowman note that “women are participating on internal church committees and boards in increasing numbers, and a number of women now oversee public affairs efforts on the regional and state levels” (2016: 9). For definitions of how these terms are used in mainstream Mormonism, see Ballif (1992), Mortimer (1992), and Mckinley (1992). Cragun and Sumerau’s (2015) study of Mormon archival documents provides a compelling exploration of the construction and reproduction of gender roles within the tradition. Their large-scale research project analyzed over 11,000 articles published by the church between 1971 and 2012. “The Mormon religion had begun to develop a doctrine of a heavenly mother—a glorified goddess, spouse to an actual Heavenly Father, and therefore the literal mother of our spirits. While the need for a Divine feminine element in religion is perhaps universal, the form it took in Mormonism was particularly well suited to other aspects of Mormon theology. The Mother in Heaven concept was a logical and natural extension of a theology which posited both an anthropomorphic

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god, who had once been a man, and the possibility of eternal procreation of spirit children” (Wilcox 1992: 4). From the LDS hymn “O My Father: In the heav’ns are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare! Truth is reason; truth eternal, Tells me I’ve a mother there” (Snow 1845). Ulrich originally wrote this sentence in an article entitled “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735.” Ulrich expounds on the popularity of her phrase in the Harvard Gazette, available at http://news.harvard. edu/gazette/story/2007/09/ulrich-explains-that-well-behaved-women-shouldmake-history/ The year 1971 marked an important milestone in Mormon feminism with the publication of the Pink Issue of Dialogue Magazine. See http://blogs.ssrc.org/ tif/2010/08/03/reflections-on-mormon-feminism/ Acrimonious excommunications of female members who voiced support for the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States tested the movement’s temerity (White 1985). Boston emerged as an epicenter of the contemporary Mormon feminist movement where women gathered in homes to discuss gender inequality in the church. Notable feminists of this early group include Claudia Bushman and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Vance 2016: 35). In an ironic shift from the custom of excommunicating feminists who spoke publicly and wrote about Mormonism’s doctrine of the divine feminine, professors from Mormon-owned Brigham Young University published this detailed article about the topic in 2011: Paulsen and Pulido (2011). Acting on a proposal to donate her pants to the Smithsonian Museum, the event organizer instead invited all who participated (including Mormon men who wore purple shirts and ties in show of support) to contribute their clothing to the creation of a quilt. Befitting Mormon women’s historical reputation as adept quilters, the result was a stunning work titled “Sunday Morning” stitched by Nikki Hunter (Brooks, Hunt and Wheelwright, 2015: xi). “Latter-day Saints believe that apostasy occurs whenever an individual or community rejects the revelations and ordinances of God, changes the gospel of Jesus Christ, or rebels against the commandments of God, thereby losing the blessings of the Holy Ghost and of divine authority” (Compton 1992: 56). From Gen. 8:1, in the Hebrew Bible, the symbol of the olive branch represents “an offer of reconciliation” (Oxford Dictionary) https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ definition/us/olive_branch Designated as an Editor’s Pick in January 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly, the documentary is available online at this link https://www.theatlantic.com/video/ index/511433/female-priesthood-mormon-church/

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25 The term “agitator” is sometimes employed sardonically among Mormon Feminists, in reference to a well-known 1997 television interview. When asked why women were not allowed to be ordained, Church leader Gordon B. Hinckley stated, “There’s no agitation for that . . . . Our women are happy. They’re satisfied” (Hinckley 1997). Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/compass/intervs/hinckley.htm 26 According to Cragun and Nielsen (2016), the total of 61,066 respondents made this data set likely the “largest single Mormon sample ever surveyed” (300). 27 Beaman’s (2001) article was the first to focus specifically on Mormon women living in contemporary Canada. In it, she dispels the idea that Mormon women show “monolithic” responses to the constraints of patriarchy and her triadic typology of “Molly Mormons, Mormon feminists and moderates” opens a view to a more nuanced understanding of in-group negotiation, resistance, and self-conceived agency. 28 Mormon feminists rallied large numbers of participants in several countries for “Wear Pants to Church Day,” but no such large-scale mobilization has occurred around the issue of women and their exclusion from church finances.

Chapter 9 1 I have used pseudonyms to preserve the privacy of my respondents. 2 Her text has been critiqued in turn for extending the specifics of Yoruba culture to the whole African continent, which is ironic, given that her goal was to question the universalization of Western feminist ideas (see Bakare-Yusuf 2003). 3 In 2015, a Twitter trend, #FeministWhilstAfrican, included tweets such as “‘Feminism is un-African! It says so in the Bible’—said with neither a jot nor a tittle of irony” and “Having my African experiences negated by western feminists and having my experiences as a woman negated by African men.” 4 “We Should All be Feminists,” TEDxEuston, Nigeria. Available on youtube.com 5 The acronym for Social Transformation Including Women in Africa. 6 And by claiming that identity, they are forwarding an ideology: “we politicise the struggle for women’s rights, we question the legitimacy of the structures that keep women subjugated, and we develop tools for transformatory analysis and action” (African Feminist Forum: 4). 7 The Bible records, for instance, that Jesus contravened social norms by engaging in theological discussions with women (see John 4 and Luke 10), was humane in his treatment of women who contravened social norms (see Matthew 26, John 4, and John 8), and spoke out against religious laws on divorce that were abused by men to the detriment of women (see Mt. 19:1-9). 8 The census does not make a differentiation between Pentecostal and charismatic (or neo-Pentecostal) variants of Christianity.

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9 Again, in recounting the achievements of feminists on the continent, Josephine Ahikire, in addition to research and theorizing, mentions “governance, health, education and domestic relations” (2014: 9).

Chapter 10 1 Sections of this chapter are based on a material first published in openDemocracy, and subsequently revised and expanded in Faith and Feminism: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy; published by Sussex Academic Press, 2017; reproduced with permission. 2 Afiya S. Zia is a feminist researcher with a doctoral degree in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto. She is the author of Sex Crime in the Islamic Context (1994, ASR) and Faith and Feminism in Pakistan: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy? (2018 SAP). Afiya has contributed essays to several edited volumes including Contesting Feminisms: Gender and Islam in Asia (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015) and Voicing Demands (London: Zed Books, 2014). Her peer-reviewed essays have been carried in Feminist Review and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She teaches at the University of Toronto and Habib University, Karachi, and is an active member of the Women’s Action Forum. 3 Afghanistan and Nigeria are the other two. 4 After military operations from 2014 against militants, and a concerted new (“no children missed”) vaccination campaign directed by the government, polio cases have dropped to just thirteen registered in 2016. Source: National Emergency Action Plan for Polio Eradication (NEAP) 2016–17, Government of Pakistan. 5 I use the term “post 9/11” to date the turn in scholarship on religion and women but Bronwyn Winter coins the term, “post-9/11ism” as a “shortcut to describe the political context in which women generally and feminists in particular are operating” (2013: 149). 6 Aid Worker Security Report 2014, Humanitarian Outcomes. https:// aidworkersecurity.org/sites/default/files/Aid%20Worker%20Security%20 Report%202014.pdf 7 The Lady Health Workers Programme (LHWP) is a government-run project that employs over 110,000 trained female community workers involved in delivering basic health services at doorsteps in communities. The program was initiated by the government of the (late) Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1994. LHWs cater to prenatal and postnatal healthcare requirements and are often inducted into the government’s polio vaccination programs. 8 Conversation with the President of the LHW Association, Bushra Arain, and colleagues, Karachi, 2013, at a Women’s Action Forum meeting. Arain has led the

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Notes nation-wide movement for minimum wage and regularization of the LHWs. The LHWs have sustained protest campaigns for four years now in this regard and more recently, for security against the threats of murders of their colleagues who are involved in administering polio vaccinations. For a more historic discussion of the introduction of the term “postsecular” in philosophy, particularly its association with Jurgen Habermas and within a post9/11 context, see Winter (2013). For another recent discussion, see Mufti (2013). This included rewriting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from a feminist perspective and streamlining CEDAW, not to make it more culturally specific but to make it more feminist (by the Lahore chapter of a nonfunded, secular lobby and pressure group, the Women’s Action Forum, in 1993). Nongovernmental organizations. See Manchanda and Zia in openDemocracy (2012). I use the term broadly to refer to social liberalism or progressive liberalism—one that seeks to balance individual liberty and social justice. Most liberal feminists in Pakistan would subscribe to this definition, whereas Marxist feminists usually depart from this view by way of their resistance to capitalist modes of economies. My own bias is toward a Marxist feminist politics. I have no idea what goals number four and five of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are but Arain, a lower-middle-class woman from a small city in Sindh, is clearly well-versed in such “liberal” developmental terms and has no compunctions referring to them for fear of cultural impropriety. Women’s Action Forum was founded in 1981 and has a presence in several cities in Pakistan. It is a nonpartisan, nonhierarchical, nonfunded, secular organization. It lobbies on all aspects of women’s rights and related issues, irrespective of political affiliations, belief system, or ethnicity. It was the lead organization that during the military dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq took to the streets in protest against the promulgation of discriminatory Islamic laws. WAF refused to recognize or legitimize the Council, although this constitutional body continues to advise the government on the unsuitability of those laws that may potentially contravene Islamic provisions.

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Index Abbas, Hakima 151 Abul-ala-Maududi, Maulana 83, 94 Adichie, Chimamanda 145 Afghanistan 157 African American women case of Sondra 32–3, 35, 46 feminists 49 holy women 47–8 African feminism(s) 144–54 development and 150–4 religion and 147–50 African Feminist Forum 146 After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World Religions 40 agency, Mormon feminists 136–7 Agnes, Flavia 3, 4–5 Ahle-Quran 91 Ahle-Sunnath 91 Ahmed, Mahvish 161 Akbar, Amna 161 Akbar, Shahzad 161 Alexander, Jacqui 34, 47 Allahabad High Court 67–8 All India Muslim Personal Law Board 3 All Pakistan Lady Health Workers Employees Association 164 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 14, 64, 108–10 Annihilation of Caste, The 110 Buddha and His Dhamma, The 114–17 conversion to Buddhism 110, 111 Dalit women movement/ mobilization 119–22 Euro-Americans and 109 Gandhi and 109, 110 rejection of Hinduism 109–10 as social justice figure 109 Ambedkarite Buddhism 110 postsecular feminism and 119–22 American Transcendentalists 111

American women 47 Analysing and Fighting Caste: Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability (Jaffrelot) 118–19 Anderson, Katrina Barker 133 Anderson, Lavina Fielding 134, 136 androcentrism. See also patriarchy in Judaism 39 animals. See also secular materialism Abrahamic traditions 44 Eastern and Indigenous traditions on 44 human use/abuse of 44 Anne, Queen (1702-14) 29–30 Annihilation of Caste, The (Ambedkar) 110 anti-secularism 75–86 Anyidoho, Nana 7 Anzaldua, Gloria 49 Apetrei, Sarah 29 AP Sunnis 95 Arain, Bushra 164 Arnold, Edwin 112 Arora, Alka 7 artistic activism of Mormon feminists 132–4 Asad, Talal 10, 101, 104, 159 Asian feminists 49 Asiatick Research 111 Asrar-i-Khudi (Iqbal) 82 Astell, Mary 28–30 Ayyankali 96 Aziz, Sadaf 161 Babar 67 Bacon, Francis 43–4 Balchin, Cassandra 171 Bangstad, Sindre 104 Bano, Masooda 160–1, 171 Bano, Shayara 3 Barney, Madi 131–2

218

Index

Basquiat, Jennifer Huss 135, 136 Beaman, Lori G. 136 Beckford, James A. 136 Beckwith, K. 150–1 Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach 134, 136 be-khudi (self-less-ness) 82 Bellah, Robert 85 Bell, Eloise 136 Berman, Morris 40, 43 Bharatiya Mahila Mukti Andolan 101. See also Kerala Muslim Mahila Andolan (KMMA) Bhargava, Rajeev 89–90 Bhutto, Benazir 164 Bible 39, 148 Binford, Susan 49–50 Bin Laden, Osama 172 Black church 48–9 Blavatsky, Helena 112 Bommai case 66 Book of Mormon, The 124 Bowman, Matthew 134 Bradley, Martha S. 134, 136 Braidotti, Rosa Rosi 45 Braude, Ann 47 Brigham Young University 129 British East India Trading Company 111 British Medical Journal (BMJ) 166–7 Buddha and His Dhamma, The (Ambedkar) 114–17 Buddhism 14, 39, 108 Ambedkarite (see Ambedkarite Buddhism) Euro-American imagination of 111–19 Lotus Sutra 111 nirvana 115 Bulman, William J. 6, 13 Burnouf, Eugene 111, 113–14 Bushman, Claudia 134 Campbell, David 134, 135 capitalism Cartesian worldview and 43 secular/sescientific materialism and 41, 43–4 Cartesian worldview 43 Casanova, José 8, 20 caste discrimination 14, 121–2

castes, Hindus 109–10, 117–20, 182 n.1. See also Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji; Dalit feminism/women Chandhoke, Neera 11 charismatic churches, Ghana 149–50 Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists (African Feminist Forum) 146 Chatterjee, Partha 89, 90 Cheema, Moeen H. 161 Chicana feminists 49 Child Marriages Restraint Act (1929) 161 Christ, Carol 37 Christian dogmas 59 Christianity 10, 59, 62 Ghana 148–50, 153–4 on women 43 Christian missionaries 62 Christ’s kingdom 29–30 church. See also Mormonism hegemony 42 separation of state and 42 Western scientists and 42 civil coexistence of communities 54 Civil Constitution of the Clergy 24 civil religion 85 civil society 20 colonialism 10, 18, 19, 21, 37 secular materialism and 41, 42 colonial religion 37 conflict 2 Confucius 111 Constituent Assembly of India 64, 67 constitutional draft, India 64 Constitution of 1973 (Pakistan) 170 Constitution of India 99 Ambedkar and 64, 109 polygamy 101 religion in 64 secularism 64, 66 UCC 4, 90 corruption, in Pakistan 75, 77–8, 84, 85, 86 Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) 170, 171 Cragun, Ryan 127, 134 The Creation of Patriarchy (Lerner) 38 criminal code in India 90

Index critical thinking 36 Cusack, Christine 7, 14 Dalit feminism/women. See also Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkarite Buddhism and 119–22 caste discrimination/oppression 121, 122 Hardtmann on 120 mobilization of 119–20 overview 108 Dalit Women’s Struggles and Aspirations, Bangalore (1987) 120 Dawn 164 The Death of Nature (Merchant) 43 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (de Gouges) 28 de Gouges, Olympe 28 democracy 85–6 democratic state, secularism and 57, 65–6 democratization 92–3 Deobandi School 91 Deo, Nandini 85 Deshbhratar, Damayanti 121 Dewey, John 109 Dharam Nirpeksh Raj (Singh) 65 dharma 52–3 Dial 111 difference feminism 6 dilemmas of coexistence 69–70 within dharma-ethics 52–3 irresolvable 52 Directive Principles of State Policy, India 90 discrimination 70 divorce 3 Domestic Violence Act (2007), Ghana 144 donor-driven Islam 170–2 Doyle, Tara 115–16 Dussel, Enrique 42 duty to act 53 Eikelman, Dale Eickelman EK Sunnis 95 elite secularity 26–7

219

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 111 Emmrich, Christoph 117 Enlightenment 13, 18, 19, 21–31, 56 conceptualization of reason 42 Dussel on 42 narrative of 42 proto-liberal secularism 28–9 Episcopalian Church 35 Epistola de Tolerentia (Locke) 58 equality feminists 6 ethics Indian systems of 53 Kantian 53 Euro-American imagination of Buddhism 111–19 Euro-American women, spirituality movement of 49 Europe Enlightenment (see Enlightenment) secularization and secularism 56, 57–61 Wars of Religion 8, 21, 27 Exponent II (Ulrich) 129 “Faith and Knowledge” (Habermas) 59 faith-inspired violence 162–3 falcon. See shaheen (falcon) fatwas (religious edicts) 166–7 Fazlullah, Maulana 167 female mystics 47 feminism 6–7. See also specific feminism difference 6 dominant narrative of 6 liberal 6, 7 socialist 6 Feminist Africa 151 Feminist Dissent 11 Fernandes, Leela 39 Fields, Rick 111–13 Finnigan, Jessica 130 Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schussler 50 Fiske, Adele 117 French Revolution 24 fundamentalist materialism. See secular materialism

92–3 Gajendragadkar, P. B. 67 Gandhi, Mahatma 80

220

Index

Gay, Peter 23 gender, as theme 87 gender workers in Ghana. See also African feminism(s) development and 150–4 overview 143–4 religion 147–50, 153–4 Ghana 14 charismatic churches 149–50 development in 150–4 feminism 146–54 religion in 147–50 ghar wapsi movements 119 Girls Islamic Organization (GIO) 94, 101 Glorious Revolution (1688-89) 25, 28–9 Goddess-centered societies 37 goddesses 37 Hindu patriarchy and 38 Mesopotamian societies and 38 Western patriarchy and 38 godly magistrate 19 Goldsmith, Jemima 80 good, conceptions of 54 Grof, Stanislav 44 Gross, Rita 38, 39 Grossman, Neal 46 Guru, Sri Narayana 96 Habermas, Jurgen 8–9, 10, 60–1 “Halal Vaccines” 168–9 Hamid, Moshin 159 Hanks, Maxine 134, 136 Hansen, Thomas Blom 105 Hardtmann, Eva-Maria 120 Hazard, Paul 21–2 Heavenly Mother 127, 128, 184 n.14 Hefner, Robert W. 92 Hildegard of Bingen 47 Hindu 36. See also India castes 109–10, 117–20, 182 n.1 goddesses in 38 patriarchy 38 Hindu fundamentalists 36, 63 Hinduism 36, 62 feminist scholars of 38 Indologists and 62 reform of 63 women in 38

Hindu Reform Bill 119–20 Hindutva ideology 88 Hirschkind, Charlse 104 Hirsi, Ayaan Ali 159 Hobbes, Thomas 19 Holbrook, Kate 134 Holyoake, George Jacob 56 hooks, bell 46, 48–9 “How I am Working for Change inside my Church” 131 “How the Taliban Undermined Community Healthcare in Swat, Pakistan” (BMJ) 166–7 Hoyt, Amy 135, 136, 137 humanitarian aid workers, violence against 155–6 Hunter, Nikki 133 Hunt, Helen LaKelly 48 Hussain, Khurram 11, 13 identity politics 103 India colonialism and 62 Constitution (see Constitution of India) modernity in 62 Muslim women (see Muslim women, in India) partition of 63 political dilemma 69–70 political secularism (see Indian secularism) religion in (see religion in India) secularization 66–9 social reformers 62 transformation of 62 Indian Constitution 90 Indian National Congress 63, 64 Indian Penal Code 68 Indian secularism 55–6, 63–6 Bhargava on 89–90 Constituent Assembly and 64 gender in 87 Nehru on 64–5 personal laws and 90 polygamy 101 Preamble of Constitution 64, 66 principled distance 90 religion and 66–9 uniqueness of 89–90

Index Indian systems of ethics 53 Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) 97–8 Indigenous feminists 37, 40 Indologists 62 injustice 70 Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse, The (Oyeawumi) 145 “Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother” (Snow) 127 Iqbal, Allama Muhammad 80–3 Asrar-i-Khudi (Secrets of the Self) 82 creation of Pakistan and 80 on Islam 80–1 Javid-Nama 82–3 Khan’s politics and 84–6 Rumuz-i-Bekhudi (Mysteries of Selflessness) 82 on Sufism/Sufis 81 Iqtidar, Humeira 160, 162 Iranian Revolution of 1979 17 Islam. See also Muslims; Muslim women, in India; polio vaccines/ vaccination; Taliban as din wa duniya 104 donor-driven 170–2 Iqbal on 80–1 Khan on 75, 76–8 secularism and 157 social transformations and 102–3 violence in the name of 162–3 Islamic feminism in India 88 iron cage of modernity 102–5 Islamic feminist initiatives 98–101 Islamic knowledge, democratization of 92–3 Islamic reformism 88 Islamic reformist movements, in India 88, 91–6 Islamization campaign (1977-88) 170 Islam mondain 105 Islamophobia 10, 160, 163 IUML. See Indian Union Muslim League Jacobson, Gary 66 Jaffrelot, Christophe 118–19 Jain practice of Santhara 68 Jamaat-e-Islami 88, 91, 94, 99, 101

221

Javid-Nama (Iqbal) 82–3 Johnson-Odim, Cheryl 144–5 Jones, Sir William 111 Jones, William, Sir 62 Judaism, androcentrism in 39 Judeo-Christian cosmology, secular materialism and 41, 45 Julian of Norwich 47 Kant, I. 53 Kantian ethics 53 Kanyoro, Musimbi 147 Karachi Resolution on Fundamental Rights 64 karma 70 Kausika 53, 180 n.1 Kelly, Kate 130–1 Kerala 13 Islamic reformists and organizations 91–6 Muslim women in (see Muslim women, in India) palliative care movement in 104–5 Kerala Aikya Sangham 94 Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulema 94 Kerala Muslim Mahila Andolan (KMMA) 101 Kerala Nadwatul Mujahideen 94 Kesavananda Bharati vs. State of Kerala 66 Khan, Ayesha 163–4 Khan, Imran 13, 75–80 cancer hospital and research center 79 on corruption 75 cricketing career 78–9 as critic of the West 75 Iqbal and 84–6 Islam/Islamism 75, 76–8 Naya Pakistan (New Pakistan) 84 Osborne on 79 Pakistan: A Personal History 76 political program of 75 support/backing to 76 Khan, Muhammad Umair 156 khudi (self-ness) 81–2 Khyber Pukhtunkhwa 79, 162 Kishwar, Madhu 146 KMMA. See Kerala Muslim Mahila Andolan

222

Index

KPK. See Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Kumar, Priya 55 La Crise de la conscience europé enne (Hazard) 21 lady health workers (LHW). See also polio vaccines/vaccination BMJ study on 166–7 fatwas on 166–7 as instrument of social change 163 profile 164 protest campaign of 156–7, 164 Supreme Court on 164–5 Taliban-controlled areas and 165–7 targeted killing of 157, 167–8 work and activism 157 Lady Health Workers Programme (LHWP) 163–5 laï cité 19, 25 laissez faire capitalism 43 Latin Christendom 8 Latter-day Saints (LDS) 124, 125 Laws of Manu 111 legal system, in India 87 Lerner, Gerda 38 Letter Concerning Toleration (Locke) 58 “Let Women Pray” letter writing campaign 130 Leviathan (Hobbes) 19 Levitt, Laura 10 LGBTQ Mormons 128 LHW. See lady health workers LHWP. See Lady Health Workers Programme liberal feminisms 6 liberal imperialism 6 liberalism 6 contractarian political theory 29 proto-liberalism 28–9 public freedom and 29 liberals, secularist 18 “Liberate the Mahabodhi Temple! Socially Engaged Buddhism Dalit Style” (Doyle) 115–16 liberation theology 120 Light of Asia (Arnold) 112 Locke, John 30, 57–9 Epistola de Tolerentia 58 Letter Concerning Toleration 58

on religious strife 58 theory of toleration 58–9 Loftus, Timothy J. 11, 14 London School of Economics 109 Lopez, Donald 114 Lotus Sutra 111 Burnouf ’s French translation of 111, 113–14 Thoreau’s translation 111, 112 Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich 81 Lughod, Lila Abu 159 Madan, T. N. 89 Mahabharata 52 Mahmood, Saba 101, 104, 135–7, 159, 161, 164 majoritarianism 55 Malala 162–3 male dominance 36 Mama, Amina 151 Mama Dragons 131 Manji, Irshad 159 Manorama, Ruth 119 Marxist feminists 6 Masud, Khalid 171 materialism/materialist worldview 40–6. See also secular materialism Matilal, Bimal 52–3 mechanistic worldview 43–4 Merchant, Carolyn 43–4 Mernissi, Fatima 100, 101 Meshram, Parbatabai 121 mestiza consciousness 49 Millennium Development Goals 164 Mill, John Stuart 6 minority groups discrimination against 70 in India 69–70 rights of 64 modernity Islamic feminism and 102–5 Muslim women and 96–8 modernization theory 7 modern states, and secularism 59 Modi, Narendra 119 Molyneux, M. 153 monocultural society 54–5 Moody, Joycelyn 46–7

Index Moon, Meenakshi 119, 120–1 moral conflicts 53 moral dilemmas 52–3. See also dilemmas moral obligations 53 Mormon Church 125 Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings (Brooks, Steenblik, and Wheelwright) 132, 133, 134, 136 Mormon feminism/feminists 7, 14, 128–32 agency 136–7 artistic activism/responses 132–4 belief for 134–5 church disciplinary action 129 church policy of 2015 128 divine feminine and 127–8 gender roles and 134–5 as generational members 135 online/virtual space 129–30 overview 123–4 second-wave feminism 128–9 Mormon Gender Issues Survey (Cragun and Nielson) 134 Mormonism 124–8 background 124–5 divine feminine 127 male priesthood 125 as patriarchal organization 125, 126 worthiness assessment 126 Mormons 124, 125 conservative 130 family life 126 gender identity 126–7 plural marriage 125 Mormon Women Bare Project 133 Morsi, Mohammad 86 mosque built by Babar (1528), demolition of 67–8 Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother (Steenblik) 133 mothers, pre-patriarchal societies 37 Mother Wove the Morning (Pearson) 133 Motilal Nehru Constitutional Draft 61, 66 Mufti, Aamir 104, 158, 172–3 Mujahid groups 97 Mukherjee, S. N. 62 Mü ller, Max 112 multiculturalism 2

223

multireligious society, secularism in 69–70 Musaliyar, Kanthapuram A. P. Abubackar 95 Musharraf, Pervez 79 Muslim feminist initiatives 98–101 Muslim fundamentalism 156, 171. See also Taliban Muslim girls and social media platforms 102–3 Muslim League 64 Muslim NGOs 99 Muslim Personal Law 98, 99, 100, 101 Muslims 13. See also Islam gender norms 158–61 Hindus and 64, 88 social transformations and 102–3 Muslim Ulema 99 Muslim women, in India 13–14, 87–107 Islamic feminism and 88, 102–5 Islamic feminist initiatives 98–101 Islamic reformism and 91–6 mobilizations of 88 modernity and 96–8 Muslim women’s organizations 99–101 Mutahida Majlis e Amal (MMA) 162 mystical experiences 44 Nandy, Ashis 89 Narayan, Uma 145 nationalism, religion and 63 Navayana Buddhism 108 Naya Pakistan (New Pakistan) 84 Needam, Anuradha 55 Nehru, Jawaharlal 64–5 Nelson, Melissa K. 37 Nielsen, Michael 134 Nigeria 145 polio immunization program 156 9/11 attacks 158 nirvana 115 NISA 99–100 Nkrumah, Kwame 147 nonhuman animals. See animals non-ordinary experiences, pathologization of 44–5 Obiara nkyere akodaa Nyame 147 Occidental rationalism 8–9

224

Index

Occupy Wall Street movement 86 Oduyoye, Mercy 150 Olcott, Colonel Henry Steel 112, 113 “O My Father” 127 oppositional consciousness 33 Ordain Women 130–1 Orientalism 19 Osborne, Peter 79 Osella, Caroline 96–7 Osella, Filppo 96–7 Otayek, René 105 Oyeawumi, Oyeronke 145 Oza, Rupal 161 Pakistan 13, 155–73. See also lady health workers (LHW) Constitution of 1973 170 corruption in 75, 77–8, 84, 85, 86 donor-driven Islam 170–2 formation of 63 gender norms 158–61 Islamist politics in 158, 162 Khan’s movement in (see Khan, Imran) liberals in 162 polio disease in 155, 156 (see also polio vaccines/vaccination) post-9/11 scholarship 158–61 postsecular fallacies 162–3 Supreme Court 79, 164–5 Pakistan: A Personal History (Khan) 76 Pakistani American women 159 Pakistani diaspora 159 Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf (PTI) 78, 79 palliative care movement 104–5 Panama Papers 79 paradoxes 52. See also dilemmas participating consciousness 43 partition of India 63 pathologization, of spiritual/non-ordinary experiences 44–5 patriarchy 37–40 Buddhism 39 Gross on 38 Hindu 38 Indigenous feminists on 37, 40 Lerner on 38 spiritual impulse 38–9 Western 38

Pawar, Urmila 119, 120–1 Payne, Katie West 133 Pearson, Carol Lynn 133 personal laws in India 3, 4, 87, 90 Peterson, Leslie O. 133 Petrey, Taylor G. 127–8 Piscatory, James 92–3 Plaskow, Judith 39–40 pluralism/plural society 54. See also India life in 55 monocultural society vs. 54–5 plural marriage 125 poliomyelitis (polio) disease, in Pakistan 155, 156 northern tribal areas 156 polio vaccines/vaccination as “Halal Vaccines” 168–9 killings of vaccinators 167–8 religious opposition to 156 rumors related to 156 UNICEF on 168 political dilemma 69–70 political process 9 The Politics of Piety (Mahmoud) 11 populist movements 86 postsecular feminism future of 11–12 stakes and context 1–2 theoretical lens 5 postsecularism 9–11 postsecular society 10 Prah, Kwesi 150, 153 “Preaching of the Buddha, The” (Thoreau) 111 Preamble of the Indian Constitution 66 proto-liberal secularism 28–9 psychosis 44 psychotic experiences 44 PTI. See Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf public interest litigation (PIL) 3 public sphere, religion in 59–61 Habermas on 60–1 in India 61–3 Quaker women 48 Queen, Christopher 116–17 Quran 80–1, 84

Index Radical Spirits (Braude) 47 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder 55 Rajasthan High Court Bench 168 Rajeena, V. P. 101 rape culture, at church-owned school 132 Razavi, S. 153 The Re-enchantment of the World (Berman) 40 religion. See also Christianity; Hinduism; Islam in Ghana 147–50, 153–4 in India (see religion in India) modernization theory 7 patriarchal 37–40 in politics 2 privatization of 8, 9 resurgence of 17 secular state and 70 religion in India 3 Constituent Assembly on 67 Constitution and 64 nationalism and 63 public sphere and 61–3 secularism and, coexistence of 66–9 Supreme Court on 66–8 religious conflict 2 religious conversions 109 religious fundamentalisms 33 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid) 159 righteous antiauthoritarianism. See khudi (self-ness) rights of minorities 64 right-wing Hindu organizations 63 Robinson, Francis 92, 93 Rohatgi, Mukul 4 Roman Catholic Church 59 Ross, Nancy 130 Rousseau 85 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 39 Rumuz-i-Bekhudi (Iqbal) 82 Salt Lake City, Utah 125 same-sex couples, excommunication of 128 Sanskrit 62 Santhara, Jain practice of 68 satya-rakhsa (protection of the truth) Schimmel, Annemarie 82–3

53

225

Schmidt, Leigh 48 scientific materialism 33. See also secular materialism capitalist interests 43 Scott, Joan 7 Scripture 30 secular autonomy politics of 169–70 seeking 163–5 secular, description of 56, 57 secular feminism 33–4 “anti-spiritual” 34 secularism 7–9 democratic state 57, 65–6 European experience 57–61 government and 70 in India (see Indian secularism) Iqbal and (see Iqbal, Allama Muhammad) Khan and (see Khan, Imran) marginalization of 55 misplaced faith in 33 modern states and 59 in multireligious society 69–70 near disappearance of 55 as normative concept 57 postcolonial society and 55 precondition for 70 principle of 59 secularist language 10 secularization 8 European experience 57–61 Habermas on 60 Secularizing Islamists (Iqtidar) 162 secular materialism 33, 40–6 adherents of 33 capitalist interests 41, 43–4 colonialism and 41, 42 Enlightenment and 41–3 Judeo-Christian cosmology and 41, 45 nonhuman animals and 41, 44 parties of 35 pathologization of spiritual experiences 44–5 religious fundamentalisms and 35 secret histories and 46–50 shortcomings 41 secular state 70 Nehru's concept of 65

226 self-actualization 81 Seneca Falls Convention 48 sexual contract 29. See also social contract sexual equality 30 sexuality discourses 103 shaheen (falcon) 85 Shah Wali Ullah 91 Shakyamuni Buddha 113–14 Shari’a 168 Sharif, Nawaz 79 Shepherd, Gary 134 Shepherd, Gordon 134 Shields, Chelsea 131 Singh, Raghunath 65 Smith, Joseph, Jr. 124–5 Snow, Eliza R. 127 Soares, Benjamin 105 social contract 29. See also sexual contract socialist feminism 6 social media platforms, Muslim girls and 102–3 social movement, in Pakistan 75 Sonalkar, Wandana 119–20 Sondra 32–3, 35, 46 Soothill, Jane 149–50 South Asian religious traditions 118–19 spiritual consciousness 40 spirituality 35 Sri Lanka 113 Stack, Peggy Fletcher 131 state, separation of church and 42 Steenblik, Rachel Hunt 132, 133 Stolakis, Kristine 133 Suhara, V. P. 99–100 Sumerau, J. Edward 127 Sunnis/Sunni organization 94–5 Supreme Court of India Bommai case 66 “essential” and “inessential” practices of a religion 66–7 Kesavananda Bharati vs. State of Kerala 66 on secularism 66 on triple talaq 3, 4 Supreme Court of Pakistan on LHWs 164–5 on Nawaz Sharif 79

Index Swami, Chattambi 96 Swat, Taliban invasion of 165–6 system of true beliefs 53 Tablighi Jamaat 91 Tagore, Rabindranath 80 Tahir, Madiha 161 Talamantez, Ines 40 Taliban attack on Malala 162–3 BMJ study on 166–7 fatwas issued by 166–7 invasion of Swat 165–6 persecution of health workers 166–7 taqwa 81 Taylor, Charles 8 Tea Party 86 terrorist 84 theocracy 55 Third World feminists 145 Thoreau, Henry David 111 Fields on 111–12 “Preaching of the Buddha, The” 111 “White Lotus of the Good Law” 111, 112 toleration, Locke’s theory of 58–9 Toor, Saadia 161 Toscano, Margaret 136 Toscano, Paul 136 triple talaq 3–5 All India Muslim Personal Law Board on 3 PIL on 3 Supreme Court of India on 3, 4 Trump, Donald 86 Truth, Sojourner 48 truth telling 53 Tsikata, Dzodzi 152 Turner, Bryan 91, 93 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher 128 UNICEF 168 Uniform Civil Code (UCC) 4, 90 United Nations 160 Use of Buddhist Scriptures in Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma, The (Fiske and Emmrich) 117 Utah 125

Index Vanitha League 97–8 Vasettha Sutta 117 violence faith-inspired 162–3 against humanitarian aid workers 155–6 against LHW (see lady health workers (LHW)) Wadley, Susan 38 Wahhabi Islam 84 Walker, Alice 6, 49 War on Terror (WoT) 75, 157 Wars of Religion 8, 21, 27 We Also Made History (Pawar and Moon) 119 “Wear Pants to Church Day” 130, 133 Western feminism 6 “Western Liberal Freedoms” 171 Western patriarchy 38 Wheelwright, Hannah 132 Where We Stand 133 Whig political theory 29 white feminism. See Western feminism “White Lotus of the Good Law” (Thoreau) 111, 112 “Why I am Not a Postsecularist” (Mufti) 172–3

227

“Why I Do Not Call Myself a Feminist” (Kishwar) 146 Wilkins, Charles 111 Wilson, Robert 41 Winter, Bronwyn 160 women. See also Dalit feminism/women; feminism; gender workers in Ghana; lady health workers (LHW); Mormon feminism/ feminists; Muslim women, in India Astell on 29–30 pre-patriarchal societies 37 spiritual beliefs for 33 Women’s Action Forum (WAF) 170 Women’s Exponent, The 129 Women’s Manifesto, Ghana 144 women’s movement in India 119. See also Dalit feminism/women; Muslim feminist initiatives; Muslim women, in India women’s spirituality 37 World Health Organization 155 Zaidi, Akbar 159–60 Zia, Afiya 11 Zia, Shahla 159 Zia ul Haq, Muhammad 170 Zina (adultery) Law 161